Buenos Aires

Hola! I have completed three full weeks in Buenos Aires, and sometimes it feels like the only thing I know how to say in Spanish is hola and hasta luego. Apart from beefing up my Spanish skills (an expected challenge), I have been overwhelmed both physically and emotionally in ways that I didn’t quite expect. Check out my tips below on getting over those first month's hurdles. 

Make time to rest! 

I should preface this by saying I am not a morning person. However, even if you are, this advice still applies! When I thought about my first few weeks abroad, I imagined relaxing in cafes for hours on end with a few tours of the city mixed in. I never imagined waking up for orientation events at 8 a.m. every day and crashing back onto my bed every night. 

Studying abroad is exhausting. And it’s not just me—during one of our few cafe rendezvouses, I and some of my cohort testified to just how incredibly tired we were getting off the plane on day one. For the rest of orientation and on into the start of classes, there’s always someone who wants to go out at night, but this is where you have to put your foot down. Personally, I have a terrible case of FOMO (fear of missing out), but these past three weeks have taught me that not every experience abroad is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I say all of this to say: don’t underestimate how taxing it is to have to learn a new city, speak a second language, and meet new people in your first few weeks. Being picky about which optional outings you partake in is an essential part of maintaining mental and physical health while abroad. 

Plan personal trips in advance! 

A semester abroad can sound like an eternity, but trust me, it definitely is not. The hardest part to planning your trips is finding a travel group, but once you’ve done that, you should get your mini-vacations on the calendar. Once you start looking at how many weekends you actually have to travel, the semester becomes a lot shorter. So, if you want to travel, enter your semester with a list of places you want to go and find people with similar lists. I can go on and on with reasons for planning ahead, but the most persuasive is that flights get more expensive every day you procrastinate. If you think I'm exagerating about the daily price increases, I'm not. I once saw plane ticket prices increase within an hour and it caused my group to change our getaway location for the weekend. 

Don’t blow all your money on food!

Just because the exchange rate may be favorable to the dollar and everything seems so cheap in the beginning, it all adds up. When I’m at my home college, I eat most of my meals on campus and really only spend money on food for the weekends. In Buenos Aires, I have to buy all of my lunches throughout the week and my dinners on the weekend. This means making a big adjustment to my typical food budget. Don’t get me wrong, I am a huge foodie, and what I look forward to most about a new place is the food I’ll get to try. Even though you’re probably eager to try all the local food like I am, you have four months to eat your way through the city, so pace yourself. Here’s my top advice for cutting down that food budget:

1. Bring a reusable water bottle and travel mug so you don’t have to buy water or coffee every time you go out. 
2. Track every single food purchase you make during your first week of classes, and then see how you can cut some of that down in the future. There are a lots of free apps to track your spending—my favorite is everydollar.
3. Spend time finding the best grocery store for your needs. Most grocery stores abroad will not have a lot of the comforts of home, so this is a worthy venture. Once you find food you like, think creatively about how you can make your non-restaurant meals stretch. 

Hopefully these tips will cut down the amount of times you feel overwhelmed by your study abroad experience, but as always, don’t forget to have fun! This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and despite the hiccups I’ve had along the way I wouldn’t trade my first few weeks of experience for the world. Hasta Luego!

After two weeks, my trip to Buenos Aires feels so far away. Without daily use, my Spanish language is still struggling. Without the familiar setting of the city, the memories can easily fade. It is up to me to hold tight to my accomplishments and my adventures. As people ask me about my study abroad experience, they ask about my favorite part, or just the general, “How was it?” It is a surprisingly difficult answer to find. I don’t know whether my trips around or outside the city were my favorite; or if it was the immersion into culture and language, through mate and everyday conversations. How can I pick one? There are so many aspects that go into my experience that I cannot separate them; they are all interconnected.

When people ask about my trip, I also do not want to tell them how truly disappointed I am about my language advancement. I am trying not to let this disappointment color my whole experience. Before the trip, I had too many expectations concerning my language development. I did not expect to use English as much as I did; speaking with my host parents, with the other program participants, with the program directors, during city tours, and even with my Argentinian friends. I expected a little bit of English to be used, especially during the first week or so, but that English use of the first week or so continued until the program was over. If you desire to study abroad for the immersive language, six weeks is not enough time. A summer program did not give me the fluency that I desired. This is not to say that my Spanish did not improve, because it did. I just held too high of expectations. One area that greatly helped my conversational skills was talking with my wonderful language partner. I met with her about four times throughout the course of the program. It was an opportunity for both of us to practice our foreign languages. We would switch from English to Spanish fluidly; it was amazing to experience being bilingual. Switching languages makes your brain go into overdrive, as you balance what you say in one language or the other. While in Argentina, I began to think in Spanish a little. I would run through imaginary conversations in my head, sometimes just to practice, but sometimes because that is what I normally do in English. I am on my way to developing instinctive language skills in Spanish.

But it is up to me to continue to pursue my dreams in the United States. At the very least, I plan to audit a Spanish class and attend mass in Spanish. Attending mass in Spanish is one thing that I miss from Argentina. Attending mass in English was one of the first things I did once I returned to the United States. I experienced culture shock during mass, as I realized that I really was no longer in Buenos Aires. It seems silly, but by hearing the prayers in my native language I felt a tug on my heart because I was not hearing them in Spanish. Evening mass, the night I came back, was the first time I knew that my study abroad experience was over, and I may never return to Argentina. As the school year begins, I will keep my experience close to my heart. Although disappointed in my language outcome, due to my high expectations, this adventure was a key turning point in my life. There is nothing else like immersing into a culture. A part of me will always be Argentinian.