The first week

Hola a todos! Well, it's been a busy first week here in B.A. but a really great one, too! We left the hotel Monday morning and went to Expanish. This is where we are taking classes until the last weekend in July and then we start our actual classes for the semester at UCA. The six of us from Richmond were separated into two groups and we each have a teacher and a class for 4 hours a day, 9-1. My teacher, Juan, is about 25 and recently graduated from UBA, Universidad de Buenos Aires. Class is a lot of fun with him and I'm learning a lot. I'm used to Spain spanish and they have a completely different accent here and another form for tu, which is vos. They basically just put a stronger accent on the end of verbs when in the tu  form. Also, when saying words like yo or calle, the 'y' and 'll' sounds like 'sh' which has been interetsing trying to pick up on. 

We moved into our apartment Monday afternoon and finally got settle in! Our landlord is a really nice woman from Sweden who has been living here for some time now and this is her friend's apartment who moved back to Sweden. The apartments decor is very IKEA like, which is nice and simplistic. There is a decent sized kitchen, a living/dining room, three bedrooms, two full bathrooms, a small utility/laundry room, and a long balcony. Our neighborhood is really cute. There are lots of families in the area. The main grocery store, Disco, is four blocks away but there is a smaller one right around the corner in case we need to pick anything up, such as chocolate :)! I bought a nice towel and a pillow the other day. I put up my picture collage on my closet door and now it really does feel like a new home in a new place. The picture above is me with the vino and our first dinner in the apartment. There are several cafes and authentic restaurants on our street, too where many of the locals go. The subte stop is two blocks away on a busy avenida (avenues are the large streets in BA) with banks and the police station is a block away, just in case! Yesterday for lunch, we decided to stop on our way home from school at a cafe on the corner, we had delicious salads and empanadas, they are filled with either beef, chicken, corn & potatoes, spinach, or cheese & ham and they have sort of a phyllo dough outside and then they are baked. Not a bad lunch! 

The grocery stores here are pretty nice. They don't do a whole ton of refrigeration here, the eggs aren't kept refrigerated, but we do in the apartment. If you need to go to the bigger grocery stores, make sure you don't need to rush anywhere. Usually the lines are halfway down the aisles. They have a line designated for pregnant women and the elderly. Even though this is the capital of the country and it is very big and well-developed, life is still slower paced here. At restaurants, you only tip 10% which is really nice and you don't tip anyone else for anything. 

On Tuesday, Expanish reserved tables a restaurant called 'La club de la milanesa' which is a small and delicious chain in BA. Milanesa is the meal with breaded chicken or veal and then typically ham and cheese on top. At the restaurant there were other toppings as well, other types of cheese, meats, and vegetables. We've been able to find lots of good veggies and fruit at local markets and at smaller cafes. After dinner we went with some others from Expanish to 'Shamrock' a local bar which we were imagining to have an Irish vibe to it, but actually it was rather dark and not that great, so we probably won't be back anytime soon. 

Well, tomorrow is their Independence Day and their bicentennial. Most portenos, what people in BA call themselves, leave the city so in true form, we are headed to Mendoza with a few others from Expanish tonight until Monday morning. We are taking one of Argentina's famous bus lines that has seats similar to business class on an airplane, we leave tonight at 9 p.m. and get in around 10:30 in Mendoza. I'll blog about that early next week! Love!!