First weekend of CIEE

Ok, SO MUCH HAS HAPPENED!!! Quick list of the biggest events, then I'll try and get through as much as possible.

-Arrival at the hotel for Orientation and the first day of meeting people.

-Meeting host "family"

-Spanish placement tests

-Fiesta

-Getting around (SUBE, Colectivo, Guia"t")

-Host Meet and Greet

I guess I'll start at the beginning. I got up around 9:30 thursday to leave and head out to the orientation at a hotel downtown. After the long wait for the bus, I waited a longtime on the bus, and finally I arrived. I was the second one to arrive from my room, and within an hour or two groups started arriving from the airport. Soon we had a group of about 10 guys and we started working on the massive amount of names we would soon learn in the coming days/weeks. The rest of that day was full of new names and faces all eager to be arriving in Buenos Aires and starting the program. That night all of the students -around 70 or 80 of us- went out to eat for the welcome dinner at a fancy restaurant. 

Returning  to the hotel many people went to bed, and some stayed up to socialize. With so many people floating  around between the hotel rooms, meeting new people and telling stories, the room I was staying in eventually held nearly 25 people in the living room area. We all fit, but we were still quite packed in. Eventually we divided up went, to bed, or went out to look for bars. The group I was with walked a decent distance and found an "American" bar called El Alamo. After the long walk there most of us decided to just walk back and call it a night, because most of us were quite tired already at that point, and not ready for the Argentine schedule for parties. A note about that here in Buenos Aires people eat dinner between 9 and 1am, many eating around 10 or 11, only after this dinner and socializing do the parties start. So typically parties don't start until after 12:30am and don't get really going until 1am. Some local bands and clubs don't even open their doors until 2 or 3 for a show starting at possibly even 4 in the morning. So on the first night, we called it quits by around 1:15, and headed back to the hotel.

The next morning we started our first day of orientation a few blocks from the hotel in the FLACSO building. The FLACSO building is the home base of the whole CIEE program and is basically a local institution that even offers some classes or programs for locals, that I do not yet understand fully. During the first day of topics we got general run down of everything from transportation, to living situations, to cultural things that stick out and need to be noted. The day was quite slow and full of careful explanations of all of the various topics, but I was never quite bored through the whole thing, though it wasn't exactly useful information to me, seeing as I learned much of the mentioned topics already from the similar culture I learned in Bolivia or my first week of public transportation before arriving.

After the talks ended around 5pm we all headed back to the hotel and pack up to head out and meet our host family. This initially surprised a lot of us because we got the impression from emails and the such that orientation would be a time living in the hotel, but on the contrary, we would be living with our host families the second night of the program. So with so many hosts to match to students, there were several times set for different groups to meet up, I headed down to the lobby 15 minutes early before my host was supposed to arrive to wait. Sitting and people watching from the adjacent room, some of the guys from my room that were waiting with me started guessing at personality types of the hosts, and chatting. Most of the hosts appeared to be from the upper class many of which live in a very nice party of the city. After a few minutes of people watching I spotted a host that had dreadlocks, I turn back to the group of guys and mention it, and they all turn to look at him. Only a few seconds later they call my name and tell me that sure enough, they placed me with the guy with dreads. 

Well, after a long day and some recovery from the fiesta last night (yes, it was a party that followed the traditional hours I mentioned before) I am tired and think I'll try to blog again tomorrow and hit the points I missed in the over view and try to skype my family. Yes, mom, that means you.

Peace,

-JD (Joel [Daniel {Dani } ] ) 

- here is a book that is currently sitting on my coffee table.