Living with a Host Family/Life with Argentines

It is pretty much assumed that if you study abroad, you live with a host family. It's a given. You decide to study abroad and you're asked, "You're living with a host family, right? Good. It's better that way." I'm not even sure if it was a choice for me, although I think it was. I just went along with it, and I've been living with an Argentine host family since mid-June.

My host family is very nice. They only consist of my host mom, about the same age as my real mom, and my host sister, who's 22, the same age as my real sister. Coincidence? Who knows. It is nice though, as I have the freedom to come and go as I please and do whatever I want.

However, living with a host family, not to mention in a foreign country, is somewhat of a lifestyle shock after being in college for two years. When I was a freshman, I lived in Roskie, and when I was a sophomore, I lived in a house with 3 other roommates. After having such freedom for two years, and friends around me at all times, it is weird living with an Argentine family. I can't really invite people over to my house to hang out because it's not my house. I can't go to other people's houses to hang out because they live with host families too. This makes having a social life ridiculously difficult, or ridiculously expensive. Hanging out with people takes a lot of effort here. First you must come up with an idea of something people want to do. Then make sure people can come. Then make sure whatever it is doesn't involve spending too much money, because we're all broke college kids. But if you can't hang out at somebody's house, you basically have to spend money, whether it be at the bar or at a restaurant or in transit or doing any activity, everything has a price.

Along with the social life difficulties are the difficulties of adhering to your host family's schedule. In a host family, you get breakfast and dinner included. You pay for it, so you want to take advantage of it. Unfortunately, Argentines aren't big on breakfast, and they think that Americans love corn flakes. My "included breakfast" consists of corn flakes and coffee. I do not like corn flakes, so I stopped eating those a while ago and just buy my own breakfast food. Also, Argentines eat dinner extremely late. I mean ridiculously late. On Thursday I ate dinner with my host mom at 10:00 pm. Honestly, I hate that schedule. It's extremely unhealthy. I like to eat a big breakfast, a smaller lunch, and a smaller dinner, and I don't like eating anything past 7 or 8 at night. Argentines are the opposite. They eat their entire calorie intake for the day at dinner, which happens between 8:30 and 10:00 depending on the night, and then they go to sleep. I can't sleep immediately after eating. I don't even want to eat at that point. In order to be hungry at dinner time, I basically have to starve all day, which makes me incapable of doing anything productive, which I don't like either. But, I paid for dinner, I should eat it. It's a vicious cycle. I am very glad it's almost over.

This is just one more reason it's easy to gain weight while studying abroad. If you live with a host family, you can't make your own dietary choices. If you're like me and are usually hungry for dinner around 6 or 7, and you have to eat a snack to tide you over for dinner, you end up eating an entire meal you could probably do without.

But, there are pros and cons to everything. My host family is really nice, and I'm glad I live with them. They are good to practice my Spanish with and through them I have definitely been able to experience Argentine culture firsthand.

Of course, if you live with anybody for a long enough period of time, they are going to get on your nerves. It's been over 4 months, so clearly some things have started to bother me, like the late dinner time. But, as all things come to an end, I think I'll survive my last week with my host family, and I'll miss them when I leave.

Keeping Busy in a Foreign Country

Living in a foreign country for an extended period of time is quite an interesting experience. Obviously.

It starts out as a big mystery. You have to figure out everything, from where to go and how to get there to how to speak the language well enough that if you get lost or confused, you can ask somebody for help. It is at first like an extended vacation. Everything is new and exciting, there is so much to explore!

Then, you start to figure all of that out. You visit all of the main attractions, you figure out how to speak and understand the language, you eat all of the new and "exotic" foods. It is no longer vacation, it is your life. At this point, walking around like a tourist is no longer appealing. At least, not for me. At this point, I am not a tourist in this city. I live here. So I want to spend my time doing more meaningful things than walking around with a camera.

Then there is the nightlife. For many Americans who come to this city, the nightlife is the main attraction. In Argentina, as in every country in the world except for the United States, the drinking age is 18. Buenos Aires is full of nightclubs, they get a lot of big name musicians and DJs here, and it is easy to get sucked into the vicious cycle of going out every night, staying at the club until it closes around 5 or 6 am, sleeping all day, then going back and doing it all over again. I am not going to lie, I have gone to my fair share of clubs while I have been here. Ever since I was a freshman in college and went to my first Pretty Lights concert, I have loved dancing to electronic music, and the electronic scene is huge here. Although, unfortunately, the music is not nearly as good as Pretty Lights most of the time. But after a while, like walking around with a camera, going to clubs gets old too. It's the worst feeling when you wake up and the sun is setting and you realize you slept through all of the daylight. I like to be outside in the sun, so I decided the nightlife here is not for me. The clubs don't start getting good here until around 2 or 3 am, and then you are compelled to stay until 5 or 6 am (or even 7, depending on the club), and as I said, it's a vicious cycle.

So, I stopped going to clubs. I stopped walking around like a tourist. And I was faced with the problem: what do I do now?

Of course, this entire time I have had to go to class. They don't call it "Study Abroad" for nothing. But, I am taking 4 classes which are each 2 days a week for an hour and a half. So, 4 days out of the week I have class for 3 hours a day. That leaves 3 whole days of nothing and a lot of free time on the days I do have class.

Basically, I had to get a hobby. I started going swimming at the pool by my university, I started going running in the park. Even doing that I was left with a lot of free time. So finally, I worked up my nerve and went to a climbing gym.

I brought my climbing shoes here thinking it was a good idea, but I had just bought them before I left for Argentina and I have never really been a climber, so the idea of starting to climb in a foreign country was, to say the least, intimidating. I checked out 2 different gyms in July-ish, but I wasn't motivated to return. But this Thursday, I decided to go for it again. I went to the gym close to my university and realized that despite running and swimming, I am not in good shape. I think the immense amount of free time in which I don't do much at all has something to do with this. So, I went climbing again yesterday and I realized it is a really good way to utilize my free time while being active. It's too easy to get lazy, become inactive, and gain weight while studying abroad. Climbing doesn't seem like an extremely active sport, but it definitely is. I have so little upper body muscle that I can't even climb the bouldering walls at the gym (which are all slanted inwards, making it more difficult), I have just been trying to build muscle traversing from one end of the wall to the other.

I wish I would have started doing this three months ago, but you live and learn. This isn't an extended vacation, this is my life! Now I only have 9 days left in Buenos Aires and I'm just figuring out how to live a healthy life here.

You live and learn.

Only 2 more weeks of class?!

The time has been flying by here in Argentina. My mom came to visit me two weeks ago and we went on a 10-day trip to the Patagonia area, including Parque Nacional Torres del Paine in Chile and Parque Nacional Los Glaciares in Argentina, and we managed to get five good days of hiking in. It was definitely rejuvenating to get away from the city for a while.

We got back Sunday and my mom left Monday and after not studying or having class for a week, I realized I have a lot of work to do! There are only two weeks left in the semester. One week of normal class, and another week of mainly test-taking, although with a normal class schedule. Not exactly like "Dead Week" and "Finals Week" at MSU but I am feeling just as much pressure!

First of all, I have to do a final project for my Argentine Culture class that is due this Tuesday. It can be in any form and about anything, but I am choosing to do mine in paper format, so it has to be 10 pages long. In Spanish. Sounds terrible, I know, why did I choose to write a paper? My saving grace is that I'm including pictures. I'm already four pages in, so I'm feeling pretty good about it. But as with any project, I'm a little nervous about it because I didn't get a chance to talk to my professor about it, and I chose to write it about the impact on Argentina's culture of the Argentine desaparecidos (disappeared people) during the military dictatorship of 1976-1982, but with repercussions starting in 1969 until 1983. My idea was inspired by the Parque de la Memoria, if you're interested you should read into it.

Secondly, I have to write a 5-7 page paper for my Latin American Literature class. It's not due until the last week of class, two Mondays from now, and frankly I have no idea what I am going to write it about. It, too, can be about anything I want, basically anything we've read in class or another work (or other works) by the same authors we've read, or something by another Latin American author we haven't read anything by, with the teacher's approval. It's basically your standard literature class term paper, and it needs to be supplemented by two articles of literary criticism about the book/short story/poem/whatever the paper is about. Which I can't tell you, because I don't know. I haven't finished reading the last book we were assigned for that class yet, but I plan on finishing it this weekend and if I'm really ambitious I might decide to write my final paper on that. It's called "Nocturno de Chile" by Roberto Bolaño. It's a pretty confusing book to read; it has no chapters or even paragraphs, it's basically one big monologue narrated by an old man with a fever laying in bed reflecting on his life and feeling guilty about something. It supposedly has to do with the conflict in Chile during the dictatorship of Pinochet, who was Chile's dictator between 1973-1990 and was supported by the United States for either our own selfish reasons or our ignorance of what was going on while no other country in the world supported him.

The more I am here, the more I realize how little I know about the history of other countries in the world.

I am happy that now my reading comprehension in Spanish is good enough that I can read such a complex book, even though it's definitely slow reading and I have to re-read pretty much every page. But I think that is more due to the complex nature of the book than my reading comprehension.

So if I don't update for a couple of weeks, you know what I'm doing.

Happy semester!