The Importance of a Sense of Humor

Now that classes have begun and I’m settling into structured routine, here is a glimpse into a standard Wednesday as an American studying in Buenos Aires with a few key occurrences that illustrate how important it is to maintain a sense of humor:

After eating breakfast provided by my host family (Argentines eat very small breakfasts like a piece of fruit or a piece of toast with dulce de leche), my flat mate, Natalie, and I leave home for our 25-minute walk to IES for a 9:30 creative writing class. Because it's pouring rain, we decide to take the bus down Santa Fe Ave to school in order to minimize the amount of time spent outside. After what seemed like an infinitely long wait in a queue of soggy commuters at the stop, the bus came barreling down the road, approached us, and continued racing ahead, sin stopping.

“Okay, no big deal,” we thought, “We’ll just take the next one.” Wrong. This tease—the bus arriving but subsequently failing to stop—happened two more times. Apparently Natalie and I weren’t the only people who wanted to take the public bus at rush hour during the wet season!

We then agreed to splurge on a $6 taxi ride to school, but unfortunately no available taxi on Santa Fe was to be seen that morning…

Our squishy and squeaky feet tiptoed into class that morning 20 minutes late.

After my last class finished, the sun had managed to poke through the layer of clouds, and I decided to stop at the market on the way home for some standard groceries—fruit, nuts, raisins, goat cheese, and wine (I coughed up $4 for a relatively nice bottle). This typical outing proved to be a humbling experience for me, as I could not for the life of me remember how to say “goat” in Spanish.

 After creeping back and fourth among the cheeses for roughly nine minutes, a market employee decided to approach the sketchy foreigner:

“¿Dónde está el queso de…de…goato?” I inquired.

“¿Qué?”

I repeated my question one or two more times to no avail so the next logical step ensued: In the crowded super market, I began to act out a goat. Thanks to my uncanny ability to impersonate goats, this charade didn’t take long for the employee to inform me that they don’t sell goat cheese.

Included in this blog post are photographs taken from various barrios of the city that I’ve explored in the past two weeks- Recoleta, Palermo, San Telmo, etc…