The plane flight from Houston was not fun not enough leg room, lousy food, uncomfortable seats, the usual stuff. I'd much rather spend 20 hours on an Argentine bus than 10 hours in coach on a US airline. The Argentine long-distance buses are really nice: tons of leg room, the seats lay completely flat or very close to it (depending on how fancy your bus is), food and drink service, movies, blankets and pillows, etc…

I spent my first 4 days in Buenos Aires. Aside from 1 kinda lousy, rainy day, the weather was wonderful. Weather in Mar del Plata has been generally great as well. Lots of sun, not too cold; it does get a bit windy, though, especially in town with the buildings channeling the wind. Everyone here wears about 3 layers, scarves, and a heavy coat. I don´t really understand it. You´d think they were in Siberia based on how they dress and how much they gripe about the cold. A few of the locals tell me it's just how they are, not used to much cold and fans of complaining about the weather. Plus, they have all these winter clothes that they feel the need to wear; kind of like in Houston I guess.

Here's a story to illustrate the Argentine attitude toward weather. One sunny afternoon as we were on our way to class we heard the following exchange between two elderly people:”The sun is so nice warming my back.”
“Oh, but the mornings are SOOO cold."

I'm still in an adjustment phase with the language down here: different verbiage, different terminology, different accent from the Spanish I'm used to. Argentine Spanish is essentially Spanish with an Italian accent. Example: there's no "yuh" sound. The double-ll and y that in every other Spanish-speaking country in the world is pronounced "yuh" is here pronounced "zhuh" like the 'j' in Jacques. I've had a couple of moments of confusion: "Ca-zhe", what the hell is a "ca-zhe"? Oh, you mean "ca-yay"… (calle = street). Plus they talk faster than Mexican Spanish, so that's an additional problem. I'll get used to it soon enough.

Buenos Aires (BA) was very nice to visit for a few days, but I'm not sure I could stay there much longer. I feel that way about all the large cities I've visited, though: very noisy, crowded, polluted (car exhaust is pretty bad on the streets, lots of very old cars spewing stuff), but I pretty much expected all that. The only really negative things that I didn't expect were the graffiti and, well, the dog mess on the sidewalks. I'm told there are 12 million people in BA, and about 1 million dogs. Many are strays, you see them everywhere. You also see people hired to walk dogs, walking about 10 at a time (8 is the legal limit, but the locals say that laws in Argentina exist to be broken). Too bad, it's really odd to see in a cosmopolitan city like BA. The people were generally very nice, though Porteños (literally: "people from the port", the nickname for citizens of BA) have a very poor reputation throughout Argentina for being snobbish, rude, and generally overly proud of being Porteños. (It reminds me a bit of New Yorkers).

Mar del Plata (MdP) is a really great place, big enough to have just about everything you'd want, but much, much more laid back than BA. The people have all been great; Nat had a bunch of people excited to meet me (they don't get to spend much time with native English speakers, plus there's the whole novelty factor). Outside of her classes, which I've been helping with, she's involved in a really neat group called Popurri de Idiomas, a local group of about 100 people who meet weekly to practice speaking different languages (Argentina was basically built on immigrants from Europe in the late 19th, early 20th centuries, with another large wave of immigrants coming before and during WWII). They meet at a café 3 times a week, with different tables for different countries: Portuguese, French, English, Catalan (from the Barcelona region of Spain), German, Polish, Italian, Hungarian and even sign language.

The food here is ridiculously good. Grocery shopping is an experience, very different from what we're used to in most of the US: you hit the butcher shop for all your fresh meat, a different stand for fresh eggs (huevos del campo), the deli for your meats/cheeses, panadería for bread, wine store for wine, produce stand (verdulería) for fruits/veggies, fish market by the port for seafood (about a 3 mile walk, which we did my first day in MdP, or a 15 minute bus ride), dietética for bulk dried goods like beans, rice, herbs, spices, etc…. and there's the supermarket for everything else. Weird thing is: seafood is not really popular here ("We're a beef country", I was told by Lorenzo, one of the guys from Popurri). We´re right on the coast, you can watch the boats fishing off the shore, there are great little seafood markets by the port with all kinds of stuff: shrimp, mussels, squid, about 15 kinds of fresh fish and nobody really eats it. There are a few seafood restaurants near the port, one of them was recommended, so we´ll have to try it out. I´m looking forward to eating lots of fresh seafood; I can´t eat beef every day (well, apparently the locals can).

This is just the beginning. I'm excited to explore other regions of the country and learn more about various aspects of the culture.

Brett Heffington, native of Houston, Texas, USA, has been in Argentina for almost a month. He will be living in Mar del Plata until November with his girlfriend, Natalia Ksiezyk (Fulbright Scholar), who is teaching English at the National University.