Looking Up

Unsurprisingly, quite a bit has happened since you last heard from me. A busy week of midterms saw me with my nose finally (frantically?) in my books, and I was generally happy with how my exams came out. The following week of spring break I stayed in Buenos Aires while all of my classmates travelled around the continent. After the first few days of feeling lonely and jealous, I started to make the best of my break and get out into the city. I spent time with my roomie Pawan and the kids from his program and ended up getting pretty close to a lot of them. A crazy night with some local friends tested my record of longest night out (9:30 am ... yeah) and helped me realize the dangers of excessive energy drink consumption. I spent a lot of time walking around the city, through new streets and neighborhoods, newly blooming parks and green areas, getting to know places and people I wouldn't have if I didn't stay over break. Those few weeks in Buenos Aires held some of the best experiences I've had so far in this confusing city. 

Thursday, my friends and I left for Mendoza, and I said a bittersweet goodbye to Pawan and the others in his program as they left to continue their studies in Santiago. Aside from Pawan, I hadn't really gotten to know the rest of them before their final week in the city, but I'm beyond glad that I made the best of those last few days. I can safely say that dinners with Francis and late nights at the Alamo will never be quite the same now. I learned that it's easy to find new friends if you stay open, and to forever think twice about judging Texans, sorority girls and Packers fans before getting to know them. 

These last few weeks, I've been looking at the city a different way, figuratively and literally. I'm getting more and more comfortable and starting to appreciate new things every day, from conversations with store clerks to the way a kite flies on a breezy spring afternoon. Walking through the streets, I've started to allow my eyes to wander from their usual ground-level glare towards the sky. While there aren't many traditional sky-scrapers here, Buenos Aires is a vertical city, and you miss a lot of its beauty if you don't take the time to look up here and there. I started doing this with my camera, becoming interested in shape and pattern and disorder. I started to notice how nature and manmade structures interact, at times framing each other in the perfect way and at others clashing together in a jumbled mess. The pictures in this post are some of the images I grabbed with these things in mind, serving (to me) as a reminder to try a different perspective if you find yourself at a dead end.