My official entry into technology

Hello readers! Happy welcome to my travel blog. This is the second blog post I have ever made, and I only even started reading blogs in the past few months, so please bear with me as I do my best to forge ahead.


I'm spending my spring semester this year in Buenos Aires, Argentina (hence the blog title; "gaucho" is the word used specifically for Argentine ranchers) and arrived at the Ezeiza Airport last Thursday. I haven't written yet because, since then, internet access has been somewhat hard to come by. I'm participating in a program for students from the United States and there's a computer lab that we can use at the headquarters for the program, but it's not open on weekends and I don't have reliable internet connection at the house where I'm living. So, I think I've figured out that I can write my blog posts in a Word document, save it on a USB drive, and then bring it with me to the lab and just copy and paste it into the blog. It seems somewhat low-tech but hopefully it will work out.


I'll apologize in advance for the length of the post. I have lots to talk about since I haven't been able to write yet, but I promise future ones won't be as long.


I feel like I should start everything out with some useful terms so that people can reference them if necessary. There are acronyms and other things that might be useful...


• CIEE: A huge study abroad program (I think it only serves students from American universities) with sites all over the world. They have staff in each location that find students housing and make sure they have everything set up to enroll in classes at the destination of their choosing.
• FLACSO: Facultad Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales: For the intents and purposes of this blog, FLACSO is the CIEE branch in Buenos Aires. It has other functions but the only one I'm really concerned with is its role as CIEE coordinator here.
• Sara: One of my good friends from Georgetown who happens to be participating in the same program that I am.
• Barrio: An area or neighborhood within the city of Buenos Aires. There are many and each has its own personality.
• Subte: Buenos Aires's subway system. All rides are $1.10, one-way.


Sara and I got to Buenos Aires on the hottest day of the summer so far (yes, it's summer! hooray for the southern hemisphere!). The high was 40.5 degrees Celsius or 104 degrees Farenheit and everyone in our group was having a panic attack thinking that we hadn't brought the right clothes for the trip. What kind of clothes would actually make one feel comfortable in that kind of heat I'm not sure, but we were all concerned. Two FLACSO people, Roche (who immediately complimented me on my Ratatat t-shirt - go figure!) and Uke, met us at the airport, and we waited around with our luggage until all of the others scheduled to arrive within the same four-hour time period got there. Then we all piled into a bus to the hotel in which we would be staying for a couple of days.

I'll spare you all the details of the hotel stay, but essentially we had a little while to meet other people in the program and find our way around the area. It was somewhat first-year orientation-like, which was annoying, but it was also nice not to be alone in our first days here. I was delighted to find out upon arrival that the exchange rate, dollar to peso, is 3.5 to 1, not just 3 to 1 as I had read in my Lonely Planet book, and I got to drink my first beer of this semester with my friends Emmett and Sara.

Living and Roommates

Saturday morning, after our second night in the hotel, we met our host families. In this case, the term "family" can be interpreted somewhat loosely. CIEE has separated them into four categories which are 1) Single woman with kids, 2) Two parents and kids, 3) A single older woman or 4) Young professionals. My family falls into the last category. I'm living with Carla and Luciano, 20-something roommates who live in a barrio right in the geographical middle of the city (though downtown is actually on the coast). Carla is a personal trainer, does translations from/to Spanish from/to Portuguese, takes literature classes at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and is learning to play the clarinet. Luciano works in movie production, teaches literature at the arts school for young kids where he and Carla (and many of their friends, they've said) met, and plays in a Latin American folk music band for which he's learning to play the acordeon (typical of Argentine tango music). They're very eclectic in their interests and extremely kind and welcoming. They also love to watch the Simpsons and Futurama in Spanish, which amuses me to no end. I'm still figuring out how to navigate certain things, like how to be an interactive roommate but not be in their space all the time and how to figure out what the dinner plans are. Asking would clearly be the best but honestly waiting until 11:00 or 12:00 for dinner is really hard if that's what the plan is...so my goal at this point is to try and figure out how to navigate that. Let me know if you have suggestions, por favor!

The house is set up more or less like a town house. They each have individual rooms and there's a patio on the first floor, with kitchen, bathroom, den, and dining room. There are stairs from the dining area to the roof, which is actually a patio as well, with my room and TINY bathroom inside a door on the roof/patio. It's nice and very private, and while I shower in the bathroom downstairs, it's really great having my own sink and toilet. I just realized that that's never happened to me before. Ha. Anyway, Carla and Luciano have been fantastic. They are definitely more like roommates than parents, which concerned me at first, but which I think is really going to be fine and even an advantage. Saturday night they took me to their friend's house where I learned how to make delicious empanadas, and then to someone's birthday party. Sunday Carla took me with a couple of her friends to see an outdoor movie and have pizza, and last night we went to Puerto Madero, a barrio right by the edge of the city (where the Rio de Plata used to be but is no longer) to have a picnic of these great pork sandwiches with a friend of theirs. I think I'm (to a definitely limited extent, but still) getting more socially out of my family situations than I might if I had a different type of family.

Food and Money

Eating out has really been an experience. First of all, people should know that in Buenos Aires, people call a menu "una carta" rather than "un menu." I've found that nothing makes me doubt my Spanish skills more than not being able to understand the first sentence out of the server's mouth. Adapting to price differences food-wise is funny; I feel like every time I go out to eat I either think I'm spending way more than I am because the numbers look so high or I think I'm practically eating for free and forgetting that pesos are, in fact, real money. The lunches I have eaten so far have ranged from $9 for a ham and cheese panini (they eat SO MUCH ham here) to $30 for a three-course meal + drink. I'm still working on trying to find the cheap but good places near me, but even an accidental $30 in pesos comes out to $8.50 in American dollars. Not great, but it's also not as terrible as it looks, especially for what I got.

The types of food are interesting. While I knew that Argentina has a huge descendents -of- Italian- immigrant population, I don't think it translated for me how much this heritage would influence their cuisine. All I had really heard about prior to visiting was the beef and the wine, but what I think I should have heard more about was the pizza and pasta. The pizza is all AMAZING, no matter where you get it, and the first day I was here Luciano and Carla bought fresh pasta for us to eat, which was filled with mozzarella and ham, and it was absolutely delicious. There are multiple pizza places on every corner and almost ever restaurant I've been to has sold pizza even if it didn't specialize in it.

Yesterday I tried a dish that I'd seen everywhere but hadn't had yet because I didn't know whata it was for the first time. I finally decided to take the plunge. It's called Milanesa and it's some kind of steak-type thing that's cut very very thinly and then breaded and fried. It was really good but I don't know that I would make a habit out of eating it too often. Just as there is pizza everywhere, so too are empanadas seemingly ever-present. Usually at the same place as the pizza. They have ones of beef, vegetables, and Rockefort (or Roquefort or something) which is apparently a kind of cheese. Anyway it's everyone's favorite and I also will say that they are really fantastic. The food, to be honest, has all been wonderful. The only thing I've had that I didn't like was an omelette that came with really gross vegetables on the side. There is fresh fruit everywhere, but vegetables are hard to come by or when I've found them I've been disappointed.

As far as beverages go, you have to pay for water always. Even in restaurants, there's no suchc thing as water from the tap. You get either agua gaseosa (sparkling water) or agua sin gas (without bubbles) from a glass bottle if you ask for it, and pay usually $2 (which comes out to less than a dollar, so I'm not too concerned at this point). People also drink coke pretty frequently. Quilmes is the beer of Argentina. It comes in several varieties, such as Cristal, Red, and Black, as well as some others, and people drink it all the time. It only really comes in 650 mL bottles (similar in size to a 40 but I don't know what the actual conversion is) for about $15 each, so people share them. One guy in the program has a host brother who works for Quilmes, as a side note. Sadly for my friend, there doesn't seem to be any free beer that comes along with that position... And then, of course, there's coffee, which you can find literally anywhere in a million varieties. Mostly they make espresso and then add cream or milk and sugar, but any real restaurant will have an extensive list of coffee and tea options. That I've seen so far, breakfast nearly always consists of medialunas (croissants) and coffee for around $6. Or Mate. But I'll have to write about mate at a later date because this is getting long. But one thing about money...

The Coin Crisis

Within the first few hours of our visit we were warned about a coin shortage that has already become a nearly all-consuming reality. The CIEE staff kept insisting that it would be extremely important that we hold on to our change and to try to always have small bills on hand. At first it all seemed somewhat silly, but after a few days of trying to navigate making purchases of all kinds, getting subway cards, and trying to come up with bus fares (which are only accepted in coin form...) it's become clear that it's actually a pretty significant problem. As someone whose fastest route to where I need to get every day is a bus, it's really annoying and inconvenient that nobody EVER wants to give me change. It doesn't matter if I'm in a convenience store, an electronics store, or trying to get my visa, cashiers want the smallest bills I have and throw a fit if they have to give me coins in return. I, on the other hand, am completely unwilling to give up ANY of my coins because every one can get me five cents or more closer to a bus ride home, rather than a subte one with a long walk attached. I've found so far that the best ways to get coins are to take the subte, where if I give them a $2 bill they have to give me 90 centavos back, or to go to a big store in an upper class neighborhood where people are less likely to take the bus (and thus more likely to give up their change to cashiers, who can then give it to me when I make a carefully calculated purchase). I actually even find myself tempted sometimes to pay the $1.10 subte fare and not use the ticket, just so I can get coins. That's right - I'm tempted to PAY $1.10 for someone to give me 90centavos THAT I ALREADY HAD in a different form so I can have it on hand at some point if I should happen to need it later on. Buses are so much more useful than the subte that I can almost make it make sense in my mind. A guarantee of a bus ride later is worth it to me, should I find myself needing to get home and unable to get easily to a subte stop. But it shouldn't be that way.

Sara had mentioned that she read an article about the coin shortage before we came. I wonder at this point if it may have started out as a small problem that was then worsened by the hype which makes crazy people like me feel like I have to do everything in my power to hoard my coins, just like everybody else. This article talks about the problems it's causing in a little more detail and conveys the absurdity of the situation a little more clearly. Something else supposedly adding to the problem is that the Mafia is collecting all of the coins and then selling them on the black market at a higher price. I need to do some more researching because it's crazy. Sorry if this was a lot about coins but I think it's really interesting (though not as interesting as it is inconvenient).

Oh yeah - and style

Nose, lip, and eyebrow piercings are EVERYWHERE. Even older women have nose piercings.
The clothes are very similar to the US from what I´ve seen, except that women never wear tshirts or shorts, unless they´re longer.

Mulletts and rattails are way too common for my personal comfort


DISCLAIMER: Everything I've written is based on my experiences in one week and so what I've seen or perceive as trends is clearly subject to change pending further life education :)