dana's blog

 As much as I feel like I am an extranjero here (an outsider) I don’t know how I feel about the word ‘tourist’.  Over my time here I have encountered a lot of viajeros, real travellers. My cousin and his friends, who are from Israel and have been travelling in South America for about four months, passed by Buenos Aires and I went to their hostel a few times to say hi. In their common room I started talking to about twenty different young travelers, all making their way either up north or down south. They all asked me questions like, “Where did you come from and where are you going? We are heading to Ushuaia do you want to come?” and that’s when I got the gripping realization…I am stuck here in Buenos Aires..after all I am still a student, not a traveler.
            When I got my week of liberty during Spring Break I encountered even more of these viajeros and for a short week I got to feel like one of them, lugging my large backpack around, buying groceries and cooking at the hostel to save money, travelling by bus, being in the sun for hours, re-wearing the same clothes, and changing places by the day in order to be able to see as many colorful mountains, waterfalls, and small pueblos as I can. I remember talking to the 25 year old owner of the hostel I was staying at in Tilcara, a small village in the province of Jujuy. He had invited his guests in the hostel to take a night walk with him to his friend’s small house in the mountains in celebration of the full moon. On the walk back to the village, I asked him about the type of people he receives at his hostel in general and if older people ever came to stay there. He contested that when older people come, they are usually older people with younger spirits, and that sometimes when older people come that he can tell would not fit the vibe he tells them there is nor more room. “All I do is give people soap, a bed, and breakfast, that’s all. And sometimes I can tell that some people who come expect a certain service that I do not provide, and I would rather not host them, because I know that they would only have complaints.” Additionally he told me, “I prefer to host travelers (viajeros) rather than tourists. Travelers never complain. I have travelled to Bolivia, Peru, Guatamala, Venezuela, Brazil, and I have stayed in some hostels where there is not even hot water. I know the place that I have here is very nice,” he told me. I have to agree that it was one of the nicest hostels I had stayed in during that trip.
It made me think about what he was trying to tell me. As I met more people, I realized he was right. The traveler needs a place to sleep and shower that is just another one of his transitory homes. The tourist is looking for a ‘hotel experience’, the tourist wants to feel like a guest.
            There is something very interesting in this distinction between the viajero, the tourist, and then…the student? The temporary resident? The extranjero like me? I don’t know how I would really be classified in Buenos Aires.
            What is it that the viajero is in search for and how does it differ from the others? What is it that he wants to see or accomplish in his travelers? For the traveler, travelling becomes his occupation, not a vacation. He knows that he is now a vagabond. He is travelling in order to feel homeless, and to fully enter a state of constant unfamiliarity that is as far as you can get from the cotidiano. 
McCannel says that that “sightseers are motivated by a desire to see life as it is really lived, even to get in with the natives, and, at the same time, they are deprecated for always failing to achieve these goals. The term “tourist is increasingly used as a derisive label for someone who seems content with his obviously inauthentic experiences” (592). In my opinion, it really all depends on what kind of ‘sightseer’ you are.  We students came here to speak and befriend Portenos, study their history and language, and live amongst them in their city, with intentions to really seek the “authentic experience”. Travelers however, viajeros like my cousin know all too well that as tourists who migrate by the day they will not gain any sense of real life in the places they travel. They are happy with obviously inauthentic experiences because they know that is all they can get as outsiders. They are not in search of knowing the “real Buenos Aires” or the real Argentine, but rather they want see beautiful landscapes, and walk through foreign villages in which everything is different. I think that McCannel’s “back-front ditchonomy” holds true in life in general as well as in tourism, however not every type of tourist is in search of seeking a view from the back. It is true that all tourists want to see things that are foreign to them, however the way that they look at these things and what they think of them completely varies from one type of tourist to another.  
 

Although I love traveling, and therefore feel as if I should have been as dazzled and intrigued by Bruce Chatwin’s famous travel tale In Patagonia as so many other people seem to be, I just couldn’t get into the book. I tried to give it time, hoping that I would become more engaged as the story went on, however the story continued in its fragmented un-orienting way of talking about different unrelated people throughout his Chatwin’s travels. Both my professor praised the book in class, and I read many good reviews, but for some reason I could not maintain interest.

I am presuming that the book’s style is supposed to mimic the disorienting and transitive traits of traveling, however I could not manage to value the tails of different random characters because they always seemed like unrelated digressions. Each mini biography and each character listed appeared in a manner which made me feel as if they would not be relevant in the grand story and therefore easily ignorable, however to my disappointment there never ended up being a grand narrative plot. Furthermore I felt like the novel focused too much on people and not enough one other aspects that would root me to the different geographies he was travelling through. His book could not bring me on the journey along with him nor capture the sentiments of travel that I love.  

Contemplating the value of this book made me think about what I would have do differently if I decided to write a book about my big trip I dream to take in the future. When thinking about the kinds of thoughts I had about the people I met and the places I went when I travelled to Northern Argentina during Spring Break I certainly can not relate to Chatwin’s impression of travel he creates through his style of writing. First of all, I feel that all of my descriptions and my stories would always be inevitably connected to me, in that I would not be able to just describe the lives of the people I meet as if I was a third person narrator writing a fiction piece as Chatwin often does. I feel that if I were to write a travel piece I would be obliged to capture what I think is the essence of traveling—the ways in which all the new things you see are foreign to you, and compare to all the things you already know. What I like about travelling is how every new landscape you come across, culture you are introduced to, and strange person you meet, makes you rethink your previous perception of life in general. When I think back about my memories of my travels I know that  my opinions and my point of view would inevitably have a much larger role in the narrative.

The biggest problem I faced with this course was most definitely remembering to keep posting. However what I really liked about this course was reading about the experiences that all the other people studying abroad were having both at my site and different sites. I liked that through the course we drew connections between our experiences although we are all spread out across the world. The fact that we are all students with different backgrounds who came from studying and living in New York to studying in different countries and that we come together to share thoughts over the website is almost like a very interesting social experiment in which the experimental variables are culture, nationhood, and travel.

I think the most rewarding aspects of the experience was improving my Spanish and learning to be comfortable expressing myself in another language. I feel like studying in Spanish has improved my communication skills as a whole and expanded my understanding about communication theory in general.  In my courses, not only have I had to do the same type of critical thinking that I normally do in school, I also had to read and understand the reading in Spanish, listen to lectures in Spanish, and express my thoughts in class in Spanish. When writing or speaking in English, I often want to mix Spanish words in my sentences that express my ideas more precisely than any word I can immediately think of in English. However more generally I feel that by studying another language I have been forced to think much more about words, sentences, and grammar as tools of communication because I suddenly am using a whole new set of rules to communicate that are not built into me from youth. 

I haven’t yet thought about what I think will be different in me when I return home. I will definitely know much more about Argentina and the Spanish Language, that’s for sure. However I wonder if I will rethink about my own country, our language, our politics, and our cultural norms. I am so used to studying these things here that perhaps the comparison will make me understand the “United States” in a different way, or at least all the different United States I know: New York, California, and the rest through literature.

After my experience here I know that I want to come back someday to travel through South America and see the other Latin American countries and people. I can’ help but imagine what it wil be like to be back in Buenos Aires when I return in a few years… 

Hmmm. This is a hard question. To start off, I would most definitely recommend for everyone to study abroad. I think that living for such an extended time in a different country in which the people have different ways of doing everything is most definitely an experience necessary to understand culture, humanity, and the way the world functions in general. Additionally I would recommend that if you are studying another language you study abroad at a site where you can put that language into practice, because being here I really have come to realize the power of language barriers, and how much speaking the language of another culture can allow you to tap into that culture and understand them. I know that if I didn’t speak Spanish my experience here would have been a completely different one.

With this in mind, I would recommend that a student coming to study here who speaks Spanish well should go study at the University of Buenos Aires rather than NYU Global Site. I say this because I think that if a student desires to really be integrated in the circles here of both academia and social life he/she needs to be circling in the Argentine institutions rather than a New York institution located in Argentina. Although it is possible to break out of the American “bubble” of the NYU academic center by going out and participating in outside activities or by meeting people at bars, I can imagine that attending classes with Argentine people at the University of Buenos Aires campuses would be a cultural experience on a whole other level. Although the academic center is nice because it is small, homey, and friendly, if you have adequate Spanish I think that studying outside of NYU would give you a much more radical experience!

Regarding housing I would definitely recommend living in a homestay! First off it is a little cheaper than living in the dorms, and second off it forces you to practice your Spanish and be surrounded by Spanish speaking people while at home. No matter what level of Spanish you are at, homestays always force you to improve and be more culturally integrated. Don’t be afraid of getting a bad homestay, because if you do you can always switch!

The third thing I would say is to balance travelling and staying in the city. Don’t freak out if you find yourself not travelling very much and remember that you came to study in a different country, not to travel the country. Enjoy the city, and try to really find yourself a life here.

I look out my balcony and watch the cars and the people go by, they never look up, oblivious that they are being watched. When it is evening these same people march on through the darkness, nothing has changed except the larger power above us all, out of our control, which makes the world go dark and lighten up on its organized schedule. Perhaps these people are coming back from a long day at work in the evening, starving, tired. We are human beings all on the same clock. I look out my balcony and I see rooftops and buildings and balconies and windows and laundry lines, and I know that it can be any city.

Everything is a twenty hour bus ride away in Argentina. It surprised us too...The map is so misleading.

On Continental 63 From Los Angeles to Buenos Aires I looked at the little drawing of our airplane on the little map on the the little tv screen and saw that we were almost there, excited that we had entered the continent of South America. The screen changed to blue and then I read Time to destination: 6 hours.
This world is enormous, and look at me, a little tiny human being crossing it. But in this city I see just a city. Cities are projects of human beings, and human beings live in every city. There are buildings and cars and stores and rooftops and buses and TV and Shampoo and Conditioner and hungry people and lonely people and books. There are museums and advertisements and electrical lines and ballet teachers and people studying the meaning of justice.
Is it globalization? Or is it just humanity?

I took a twenty hour bus ride to Northern Argentina this ‘spring’ break and realized how many mountains, how much empty land, how many tiny pueblos there are outside of this city. I realized how much the earth expands and imagined the amount it probably encompasses. I wonder how much of it is actually the same and how much it can actually differ. The problem is that there is too much to actually know, or to even imagine. That’s when I realized that after I graduate I have to come back to travel. From the southern tip of South America to the Northern and then all the way to East Asia. It is too interesting to ignore… 

This Spring Break my friend and I got a small taste of a traveller’s life as we made our way up through the small villages and beautiful mountains of Northern Argentina. Throughout our trip I had realized that for the traveller the hostel is like a small commune in which they create a home and form a family during their trip. The places constantly change day by day but in each new place you return to your home, the hostel, and to your family, the other travellers with whom you share your room, your bathroom, your kitchen, your food, your time, and your stories.  In reality these people are strangers, but as fellow travellers they are your family.
 
In our hostel in Cafayate, a small village in the province of Salta, my friend and I took a long and intensive hike to see the waterfalls. We set off with some people from our hostal: the Spanish man who had shared his mosquito repellent with me in the middle of the night and a hippie Argentine guy with dreds he was travelling with who he had met a month prior in Patagonia, another adventurous Argentine woman making her way up South America, and a young French couple who had just come from Chile and who departed the next day to the Iguazú Falls. Being the not so experienced hikers that my friend and I are, our new friends had lent us a hand in climbing the steep cliffs and crossing the rapid streams. On our way another Argentinian couple hiking next to us joined our team. We not only trusted these strangers with our lives as they kept us from slipping to our deaths, but we grew close to them as all of us became each other’s community in a place we had absolutely no ties too. We were inherently connected because of our migrant status.
 
I think that in a way Cesare Pavese is right in his quote, “It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance.” However at the same time with fellow travellers, who are all looking for those familiar comforts of home and friends, it is easy to be on balance because we all need the same things. 

This prompt really got me thinking. What embodies the Genius loci of Buenos Aires for me?

Maybe its Tel Aviv. The narrow streets of Recoleta, the dripping air conditioners, the not so shiny Sudans, and the white stucco apartment buildings that sit on concrete posts remind me of Tel Aviv. But I am not in Tel Aviv. People here eat bad cheese and empanadas not hummus and pita. A fast erotic Spanish flies from their mouths, not the familiar Hebrew that reminds me of home. The supermarkets have a strange smell and are lined with white and brown cartons of dulce de leche instead of Bamba and Bisli snacks.

It’s the people I meet then, it’s the Latin men that embody the genius loci for me. They truly have a culture completely foreign to me. Streets, buildings, cars, I have all seen before, but the culture and breed of these latin men I have not. The cat calls and stares from grungy men on the streets blow through the city and fill it with an aura that settles into everything. It is a macho country. In contrast with the hippie cool blue from San Diego, and the tall slender fashion fem of New York, Buenos Aires is machismo, valiant, proud. I hear it in the quiet of the street during a soccer game and the cheers ringing throughout the cityscape when Boca scores a goal. I feel it in the Latin rhythms of the men and woman at the clubs, and I reed it in the history books about the military dictatorship and the Malvinas War.

Argentina has a rhythm; it has a beat that its people take share in as a 21st century effect of nationalism. In the book Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson that I had to read for one of my classes, he says that “Nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artifacts of a particular kind,” (4). The entire idea of Argentina as a country, the imagined community within the clean lines on the map that separate it from Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, and Uruguay, is made up of the black and white films of Carlos Gardel, the particular use of “vos” instead of “tú”, the Italian song in their Spanish accents, the cup of maté they drink in class, the coffee shops where old people gossip and order a plate of small toasts with marmalade, the long light brown hair and the buckled platform shoes the young woman fashion, and of course the machismo in the air.

I guess these are the things that most embody the Genius Loci of Buenos Aires and Argentina as a whole for me.

                When I first visited the neighborhood La Boca, which I wrote about in my last post, I instantaneously fell in love. Not because it is “the birthplace of the tango” but because it was the hub of the artists. The subject of all the art in this tourist-attraction of a neighborhood was of course, the cultural icons of Buenos Aires such as the colorful tenements of “el caminito” and couples embraced in a fiery Tango. Of course there is an economical explanation for this reoccurring subject—in a way, artists need to “sell Buenos Aires” to tourists, to provide them with souvenirs, to create for them a way of imagining Argentinia . However as my studies here are focused on the history of Argentinean culture, the origins of the Tango, and the ways in which it has been adopted as a national icon pertaining to Argentinean identity, the visual representations of this in the art in La Boca is extremely fascinating to me. I have a certain perception of the culture here from the literary texts that I have read and the people I confront here on a daily basis, but in the street art of La Boca I get to see the perceptions that these artists have of their own culture. Collectively, I see all that I have studied manifesting itself in these artists works.

Personally, this chapter of Art of Travel was my favorite. It put into words so eloquently the power of artwork. What I liked the most was the ways in which it explained the relationship between the style of a piece of art and what it conveys. “The world is complex enough for two realistic pictures of the same place, at the same moment, to look very different, as a consequence of differences in artistic styles and temperaments” says de Button. A piece of art is not meant to be a reflection of the real world, it is supposed to be an expression of it. The artist chooses what to include in a piece, and how to portray his subject based off of us his own personal perception. I saw many interesting pieces of art and styles in La Boca, but there was one artist, Roberto Jofre, who particularly stood out to me. The picture for this post is one of his pieces but really does not do it justice. I was instantaneously captivated by his work for two reasons: his stupendous use of colors, and his very distinct brush strokes that lend his subjects a special type of character and movement. His paintings of tango dancers and the Buenos Aires nightlife embodies everything I have learned about the history of the immigrant culture of Buenos Aires, the “bordelos”, or neighborhoods, where the Tango became popular in prostitution houses and cabarets, and the “compadritos” which were very macho men of the lower classes who dressed in suites and top hats and were central to the culture and attitude of the Tango.  His painting style creates a very specific “mood” descriptive of this Argentine culture.  Just like Van Gogh’s paintings from Provence helped de Button appreciate specific characteristics of provence, Jofre’s painting expressed to me a certain beauty, mood, and life that to the artist defined Argentina.

One of my favorite places in this city is parque de las heras. I guess you can say its because it gave me my first “inside” experience. it was the first place that made me feel like a local. It is right next to my house and one of my first days here I went there to sit with my friend and discovered how beautiful, young, and hip it was. It has a really interesting history as well, as apparently it used to be a jail before they tore down and made into a park. I have yet to take a good picture of it, and when I google imaged it the photos so poorly represented it, until I came across this image that was posted on someone's blog and titled "butterfly in las heras park". The image was the only one I saw that captured the essence of the park... It’s a place that really inspired me for some reason, and I wrote a sort of creative piece about it that I wanted to share...

The park is a shore circled by a restless city. It is one expanse of color in the midst of gray and faded hues. Behind it we can see a fancy dock with its tall, proud, liners hovering in the blue sky. The buildings grow out from the rest of the Recoleta/Palermo architecture below them of which they do not belong, into the horizon. Shiny, brand new, curved like the sails of a boat their blue radiation complements the healthy green of the park. On the weekends rich yellow is added to the scene as umbrellas and sun chairs fill the open spaces untouched by the cool green shade of the trees.

Groups of young people sit on the sloping hill as if gracefully placed there by an artist constructing his composition. I become a figure in the scene as I lie in the deep grass—a sort of Porteño.

The circumference of the park is a barrier between work and leisure, between bustle and relaxation, between smog and air, and between young and aged. People flee to be in the presence of colors that are alive, to deep saturated green vegetation and pure rich blues of the ocean. The colors stream into our bodies through the painted air filling us up with its refreshing qualities.

We become earthy in the park. Some people bring their guitars, a group of acrobats with dreads, artsy tattoos, and ripped shorts are taking turns in the air suspended in a long, lavender cloth, tied to a sturdy branch of a tree. Young people sit together on the slope drinking matte, a breeze dances on by and I can smell a slight sent of marijuana in the air.

The city outside of the park’s borders is hushed, transformed into the water of a vast ocean, and we are sitting on its shore.
 

Before coming here, when I looked over the booklist for Buenos Aires I couldn’t wait for my experience to begin. Kiss and Tango, In Patagonia, The Ministry of Special Cases, The History of Tango—wow! I was going to be learning about a whole different History, Culture, and Language.

The first book I went for was clearly Kiss and Tango by Marina Palmer. What more could a girl want? I must say, it wasn’t the most brilliant writing, however I found it so easy to relate to as the main character was an American girl from Manhattan who decided to leave her life there and live in Buenos Aires. I started reading the book only after I had arrived here and I as I read about her first expressions of the city I couldn’t help but smile in agreement with many things she said.  She talks about the friendly people on the streets when asking directions, her experience visiting Plaza de Mayo (the presidential square) for the first time, seeing the banners of the “Mothers of the Disappeared”, the surprise she had at the large café culture here, her experience at her first tango class, and the beautiful Argentine men. I knew exactly what she was talking about. On the other hand for me she left many other things out, what about the strange mix of architecture, what about the smog, what about the dog poo, the fashion, the food, the cat calls?

However more than anything else, this book concentrates on the Tango and the character’s experience in that world. For me this was especially interesting  because within the context of my class “Tango and Mass Culture”  it spoke a lot to the way tango exists and is represented in the modern world inside and outside Argentina. I am now learning about the beginning stages of the Tango and how it started in the very low class neighborhoods of Buenos Aires as well as in prostitution houses more than 100 years ago. In fact it wasn’t until the higher classes of Paris had begun dancing the Tango that it was accepted by the high class of Argentina. It is thus interesting for me to see where the tango has evolved to and how she represents the modern world of Tango here in Buenos Aires. Her world seems to be comprised of mostly upper middle class people, but I wonder if in reality it is still a dance of the people. It is really interesting to think about how this dance has evolved in popular culture over the years. The picture above is of  an African-Argentine couple dancing what they called "el tango" that appeared in an Argentine magazine in 1882. These Africans mixed with european immigrants had improvised this dance which eventually developed into the modern tango.

I attached a link to a scene from an american movie that I love with Antonio Banderas in which they dance Tango if anyone would like to check it out.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBp243Ub5wA

Lets be honest, a big part of study abroad is going out at night, especially here in Argentina. We go out here as much as possible because we are eager to get outside of the world of the University and socialize with Argentine people. Everything starts later here. We eat dinner around 9:30, and go out around twelve. Buenos Aires seems to be the real city that never sleeps. On the weekends I wake up late and try to explore the city. This weekend I went to two beautiful and famous neighborhoods in Buenos Aires: San Telmo and La Boca.

During the weekdays I wake up early for school— no matter how late I stayed up the night before. My options for breakfast are weird non whole wheat frozen toast with a very strange cheese spread, very bad cereal, and some kind of fruit. I always go for the fruit and sometimes eat nothing else which I later profoundly regret.  I go downstairs in a very old fashion, slightly scary elevator, usually forget my keys and can’t get out of the building because doors here locks from the inside and outside, go back upstairs, then back down, then walk twenty minutes to the Academic Center with my backpack on my side and arm cradling the small pocket, paranoid that someone will rob me. Every morning I walk by a line of about 40 people on the sidewalk and realize incredulously that they are waiting to enter a bank, or perhaps use the ATM? I walk and walk and walk passing at least three men a day who probably should model and then I pray I didn’t already pass Anchorena, the street of the academic center. I soon discovered that grabbing coffee here five minutes before class like I usually do in New York will not work out because the waiters are very friendly and very slow. Twice a week I go to ballet class with my friend at a dance studio next door to the academic center and in between we get lunch or study in the Academic center or in one of the restaurants nearby which are always filled with us NYUers.

I come home around 9:00 before dinner and eat with my homestay mom and my roommate. She sets the table formally every night: tablecloth, dishes, salt and pepper, olive oil and balsamic, one sliced tomato, a very small bowl of lettuce we are supposed to share, and a main dish. Then I help her clean up and talk to her awkwardly for about five minutes until I escape back to room.

On the weekends I like to go to Parque de lash eras, right next door to me. It is a grass park that extends at least 8 blocks and is slightly elevated from street level. There are tons of young Argentines in this park sitting in groups drinking Mate (an argentine tea which you drink in a special cup…photo above is a picture I took of two ladys on the street in San Telmo drinking Mate). It also seems to be the hang out place for all the acrobats of Buenos Aires since I always see them practicing their tumbling, walking on a tight rope tied between two trees, and suspended in the air within a long cloth that they tie to a tree.

So far for me the hardest adjustment is the heavy on carbs and light on vegetable diet (I don’t eat meat) and…..maybe the dog poo on the streets? 

So this is where my five years of flashcards and conjugation tables becomes real life. Yes! Finally! But let me tell you, it is quite different and most definitely exotic. When Argentines speak sometimes I can barely understand them. They don’t pronounce the words in full and on top of that they speak rapidly with intonations I have never heard before. However speaking is even harder than understanding. Some phrases come out smoothly but most of the time I find myself stumbling for a word or needing to visualize my conjugation table in my head mid sentence. I have just come to realize how language is an incredible barrier between people.  
First of all, the moment I open my mouth it is clear that I am a foreigner, already giving me a certain identity in interpersonal relationships.  Second of all there is absolutely no way of understanding someone like you understand someone of your own culture, because even if you are able to speak their language you do not speak the same cultural language. There is significance in different intonations, word choice, body language, interpersonal norms etc. In our own country we are all used to just being humans, but here we are something else—we are a different type of human because there is a clear and obvious barrier between us. We are not from here.
When moving to a different place I would say that language is most definitely what marks the ultimate barrier. When I moved from San Diego to New York the consistency of the American English made the difference far less drastic between the suburban San Diegan that I was and the upbeat, jaded, coffee drinking New Yorkers.  In addition, as a daughter of Israeli parents who has fluent conversational Hebrew, when I go to Israel, which is wildly different than the US, there is less of a barrier between me and Israelis just because of the consistency of the language. I think this is the reason why people want to learn new languages. It gives us access that we can otherwise not get to a whole other type of population.
Right now I am a strange mix of tourist, student, and inhabitant of the city. I am able to speak and understand them about 60% to 70% but never able to communicate truly. However the truth is that through my broken but improving Spanish I feel as if I am slowly but surely beginning to access this foreign place. 

I am sitting in orientation with the rest of the 100 BA students and we are listening to an Argentinean man lecture us about safety in Buenos Aires. “Don’t look like a tourist when you are on the streets. This means don’t walk around staring at a map, and don’t wear your camera on your neck or you will be a target for robbers.” My friend and I look at each other from across the room and crack up because just before we had been standing on the corner of a huge street with our noses in our maps, oblivious to everyone around us, for half an hour trying to figure out how to get back home. What I have come to learn is that we can’t really help but looks like tourists in this country. Map or no map we will always be outsiders.

I don’t want to get mugged so I start walking down the street as if I know where I am, and am completely accustomed to the dog shit everywhere on the ground and the cat calls from the Porteno men. I am now extremely wary of everyone taking advantage of me because they know I have no idea where I am. I am sure every Taxi driver is taking us in circles, and every merchant is ripping us off. But really what can I do?

There are only two locations in this whole city I know and that is 1314 Anchorena, and Billinghurst and Las Heras, my homestay and the academic center. Everything else on the map revolves around these two points. Everyday I piece together a little bit more with random “aha” moments of how one location connects to another. Its like when I first came to New York and would walk around aimlessly with no understanding of where I was, and later it all came together in fragments. Once the connection is made between the drawings of the map and the real world a little piece of my mind is put at rest triumphantly. 

After reading theory on anticipation by Alain de Botton  before travelling I can completely relate. However I think that there are so many things he is over looking. Of course seeing a picture or painting of a certain place is different than actually being there. Botton thinks that the “human factor” in which we overlook the role of the body and mind as “temperamental accomplices in the mission of appreciating [my] destination” that makes the real experience differ.  However what he doesn’t realize is this very same “human factor” gives us an understanding of a place that we simply cannot get from pieces of art. Our senses give us our own interpretation of a place. We finally do not see someone else’s representation of it. Botton seems to think that works of art are the ultimate truth, and that when we travel we somehow need to find or experience this truth. The following paragraph I found the most exemplary of this notion:

“The problem was not the the painting themselves lied—the place did offer some simplicity and joviality, some nice brick courtyards and a few serving women pouring milk—but rather that the promised gems were blended in a stew of ordinary images (restaurants, offices, uniform houses and feature fields) that the Dutch artists had never painted, and that made the experience of travelling in the country seem strangely diluted compared with an afternoon spent in the Dutch galleries of the Louvre, where the essence of Dutch beauty found itself collected in just a few rooms,” (18).

However the real thing is our own interpretation of it, not somebody else’s. We need this “human factor” of ourselves, our hunger, our fatigue, our sense of smell, our state of mind, and our past experiences to be able to really see a place. Works of art show only what the artist wants to show.  If Des Esseintes wanted to see the Holland of his imagination he shouldn’t have gone at all. But he wanted to go because he knew that experiencing it in reality would different than looking at a painting, especially one painted many years ago. Therefore in my opinion this “strange dilusion” that he experienced is what made Holland special because it was the true representation of that foreign country.

I chose the above picture because in Buenos Aires I am surprised by the amount of TGI Fridays there are here. How random is that?! However it does not feel like I am in has become part of the Argentinian culture

Hello from San Diego! I am Dana, a Junior in Gallatin studying Visual Communications. I am going to Buenos Aires next semester but won’t be arriving there until February 6th. I must say I am super excited for my journey, as well as nervous. I feels like I first did as a freshman before leaving from California across the country to an unfamiliar NYC.  
This winter break I have been debating a lot if I should go abroad, and furthermore if I chose the right site. I always knew I wanted to study abroad, and especially with the ease that NYU allows me to make this happen I knew I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. Since I studied Spanish all of high school, I also always knew I wanted to go to a Spanish speaking country to do so. However choosing what to study in college was hard for me and took a long time, and after I had just recently chosen an academic path I felt that going abroad would be a deviation from that path. So I started thinking, why not go to a site that offered more visual communication and studio art courses? Berlin? Florence? Or maybe Paris instead? In the end I stuck to Buenos Aires.
This was where I truly wanted to go from the beginning. I wanted to have the experience of living in a country in which they speak a language I had spent so many years studying in books, and in which the culture is completely different from my own. I hope I made the right choice! I know that no matter where I go the experience will be once in a lifetime, and this will be the true education. Just as when I came to NYU for the first time I am scared, excited, and unsure of my decision. However  unlike then I have more life experience now, and I know  that whatever decisions I make in my life I can’t go wrong because there just doesn’t exist a “best” decision.
I leave on Sunday and am now busy getting ready! Hasta luego. I am excited for this class and for hearing about everyone else’s experiences abroad!Hell