Todo se va bien...

Day 4 in Buenos Aires! I'm here, my apartment is all set up (although still lacking in foodstuffs), and the whole re-immersion into porteno culture has begun. The past few days have been a rush of finding various little things I need, avoiding getting hit by cars, and meeting back up with friends and professors. I've obviously been a little slow getting the blogging thing going, but the weather has been so nice (generally hovering around a sunny 80 degrees farenheight, not bad in this town) that I have a hard time commiting myself to my computer for more than the more obligatory study-related email stuff. But I'm excited to dump some info on everyone!

I'm living in an 8th-floor studio apartment in a nice neighborhood called Palermo ("es muy fashion", my friend told me the other day) and I could not love the place more. Many thanks go out to Laura and Juan, the Massachussetts couple from whom I'm renting. The apartment faces West, so that in the mornings it's very well shaded, and by afternoon it just lights up. Everything is furnished very nicely, and there's something about the coloring in here that just gives it a nice ambience. I even have a little balcony (these are much more common in BA than in the U.S., I think) where I can sit and check out the skyline. And the skyline is nice, too: the way the building is positioned, facing inward instead of towards the street, I can see a whole slew of buildings around me. Somehow that helps me feel like I'm part of the community, even as I live alone.

The cultural adjustment has been swift and good, as far as I can tell so far. (One of the tricks of culture shock, at least for me, is that it tends to sneak up after you think you're done learning your new digs.) But I've already lived here at some length (5 months, last time), and it's really a different experience coming back. First of all, if traveling abroad seems like a surreal experience the first time you do it, then traveling back to the same place two years later seems like a HYPER surreal experience. Every time I wander into a place that I used to see regularly (on my first day, for example, I went looking for empanadas and ended up wandering through Rodriguez Pena Park, where I used to sit and read a lot) there's like this whole, "Whoa, it's STILL here!" monologue that runs through my head. Then I invariably spend 5 or 10 minutes feeling giddy that, yes, the park does indeed still exist and, yes, you are walking through it again. I know this sounds really inane, but a good chunk of the last several days have been spent doing this all over the city. It's just a very rewarding experience to be back.

As far as other adjustments go, a lot of it just returns so quickly. For some reason, when I was boarding my flights out of the U.S., I felt like I hadn't mentally prepared myself to be back in a Spanish-immersed environment. I suddenly worried that I would be overwhelmed by the experience of coming back, but the exact opposite has happened. The plane landed, I started speaking Spanish, and I never really looked back. I'm certainly still speaking more sluggishly than I was when I left in July '07, but I'm waaay ahead of where I was when I originally started here. The more I speak, the more the random nuggets of vocab just appear in my brain right when I need them. The little interactions (with cab drivers, vendors, people in the street) are smooth and completely unproblematic; the longer conversations with friends are tougher, but I can already see an improvement between Tuesday and Wednesday. Yesterday I met with my two professor-advisors to discuss the nuts and bolts of my study and go over the preliminary questionnaire I'd prepared, and although I missed things here and there, the 2-hour conversation went noticeably better than the one I'd had with some friends (who work at the study abroad agency I came through in '07) the day before. Occasionally I missed things, but...everyone I know here is so nice, and they constantly brushed off the miscommunications, telling me to just wait a few weeks and I would be fine.

I also went to dinner with my friend Rafa (Rafael) last night, ironically at a Mexican restaurant (this is ironic because many of you like to ask me things like "do you eat tacos all the time?" or "how extremely spicy is the food?", and in fact there are probably more Mexican restaurants and spicy food outlets in Ashburn, VA than in Buenos Aires, Argentina; thus it seems ironic that the first restaurant I tell you about is Mexican, when I'm constantly telling you I don't eat Mexican food here). Rafa works about 20 blocks from where I live, in Palermo Soho, one of the main chic restaurant areas of the city. We went to La Taco Fabrica (The Taco Factory) and chilled in this little walled-in outdoor area in the back; it was very zen-like, with pebbles covering the floor and vines on the walls, very nice atmosphere. Although my brain was tired from already processing a lot of Spanish during the day, we hung out for a couple hours and I had a couple Coronas, something that always helps loosen up the ol' linguistic gears. Conversation went well, and I went home feeling very good about myself for the day.

I have yet to really begin my study, but meeting my professors yesterday was a productive first step. They actually ripped a pretty good "new one" in my questionnaire, but I felt good about the meeting anyway because I already knew that the thing had significant problems. At my stage of academic development, I guess there's still something reassuring in having somebody tell you specifically what's wrong with what you're doing. I need to better focus my project and my questions, but I'm well-equipped to do that and went into the meeting knowing this. This is my first major, long-term academic endeavor, but I suddenly realize the utility of all those semster-long class projects you do in undergrad. (You know, those ones where you have to pick some kind of thesis-like topic, and then sort of formally propose it, then meet with the professor one-on-one, at which point you quickly surmise that you're in way over your head and oh-my-god-what-am-I-doing-with-my-life-I'll-never-pass-this-class-maybe-I-should-just-quit sets in, but in the end you do the project and it comes out imperfect but strong enough and you feel proud that you took on something big). Well, those experiences really prepare you for something, and that is handling the stress that can so easily accompany a project like mine. People have put time, faith, and money into me so that I can execute this thing, and now it's important to me that I follow through meaningfully. I know I will, and luckily my life experiences have taught me that I'm supposed to f' up the first few steps in situations like this, so I have to just keep trying. I don't mean that the project is a train wreck or anything, just that my questions need to be re-crafted to sort of . . . well it's a lot of methodological mumbo jumbo, but I need to focus the questions around fewer topics, and at the same time better design them to elicit drawn-out responses from respondents. (You never want yes-no answers in a study like this.) And this is a lot trickier than it sounds, but my professors were extremely supportive and told me I could use their workspace (basically just this floor full of professors and vacant desks in some university-related building) whenever I felt like it. So, things are starting as expected, starting well.

So that's Buenos Aires, today! Today I'm going to be doing some mundane research stuff and hopefully getting some errands done. On Saturday I have plans to hang out with another (American) Fulbright student who's been here for a year, and outside of that hopefully I'll catch Rafa again, and maybe find myself some food that I can actually figure out how to cook. This is probably just as good a time as any to learn that skill... I miss everybody a ton already, and I love hearing from you, so comments or emails or facebook or whatever, I love getting stuff from you all. Talk to you soon!