Midnight in Buenos Aires

mood: very lost
music: something in Spanish
random word: alfajor (yummy chocolate and dulce de leche candy that it took me forever to remember the name of until I realized it was alpha+whore or ¨the biggest whore¨kind of like the alpha male but Dan isn´t really a whore)

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So I´m in Buenos Aires. It´s ridiculous. I´ve spent the last 4 days of my life being more lost, confused, terrified and overcome by adrenaline all at once than I would´ve previously thought humanly possible. It all started Sunday night when Ximena (goes to Harvard but studying in Montevideo on the Midd program because we´re way better than Harvard) and I were like, ¨we don´t have class all next week. What the hell are we going to do with our week?¨ Then, randomly, we were like ¨Wouldn´t it be funny if we went to Buenos Aires?¨ I still am not entirely sure how we actually made it here but somehow we did. The first in a line of probably-not-the-most-intelligent decisions ever made was to make absolutely no plan. Clearly, that´s also the best part because it´s way more fun that way. But it also has the potential to dump you into some seriously sketchy situations where you may or may have had to contmeplate curling up with a homeless man on the street corner because you had no place to spend the night. Did this not occur to you ahead of time?, one may ask. Well, the simple answer is...no. Ximena´s grandmother lives in Buenos Aires, so we were like, ahh, we´ll just crash at her place. Right. If by crash we mean send her poor grandmother (who I did not realize was ill) into such a fit of panic over our lack of intelligence that she couldn´t get out of bed (seriously, I was actually worried that we were going to kill the poor women, I´ve never felt so guilty in my life), then yes, we did ¨crash¨ at her grandmother´s. Or better yet, Ximena stayed at her grandmother´s but since she wasn´t well, Ximena thought that it would be too much for me to stay there too. Which I understand. But shit. That leaves me spending the night...um...at let´s just say and undisclosed location. So there was a lot of time spent in locutorios (like a phone booth) because naturally Uruguayan cell phones don´t work in Argentina so I wasn´t able to call anyone or receive calls which makes it quite difficult when you´re wandering around an enormous city trying to find people. I found Joachim´s phone number on facebook and called him. Since he is amazing and a true lifesaver he let me stay at his place. But his host family warned him that they didn´t want their house to become a hotel for his friends. So I was going to be on my own again the next night. This was Monday night. Really exciting detail #2: finding Joachim´s house. On my own. If you think back to about a month ago how I realized on my 15-minute walk through Hartford that it was the first time I´d ever been alone in a city, then you´ll understand that this was the second time. And it was no longer Hartford. No, this was Buenos Aires. And Buenos Aires is fucking enourmous. I actually managed to find the subway (also a new experience on my own) and even got off at the right stop. Then I found another locutorio and called Joachim to come meet me. I was pretty proud of myself at having survived so far. Little did I know that was to be the first of a myriad of tests I would be forced to take in the art of street smarts during the next couple of days. The next day, I got up and was supposed to call Ximena to meet up with her at noon. That was difficult since I couldn´t use my cell phone, since Joachim had left for class and since his family didn´t want me to use their phone because it´s really expensive. So I had no choice but to venture out into the streets once again with no idea where I was going, how to get there or how, when or where the in the F I was going to meet up with the one other person in the city of Buenos Aires that was trying to meet up with me. I found a locutorio and called her Ximena´s grandmother´s house. Her grandmother responded in not-so-easy-to-understand Spanish that Ximena had left but that she had taken the grandmother´s cell phone so I could call that. She left? And went WHERE? Shit. So I called the cell phone. Which of course didn´t work. No explanation of why. It just didn´t. So I wandered about until I found the subway, which I then boarded and got off at the only stop that sounded even remotely familiar, which I prayed meant that it was the stop I had gotten on at yesterday. Lucky ducky it was. But did I know where Ximena´s grandmother lived? Wild guess...no. And even if I did, would Ximena be there? Only Allah would know. So I found another locutorio and called the grandmother´s house again. Ximena answered the phone! By the powers that be, there is a God! Side-note: I´ve been discovering that a lot lately. That there is a god. Not sure which one but I´m pretty much convinced that I´m not entirely alone out there because if I were I don´t know that I would have made it this far. So Ximena´s grandmother tells me how to get to her house. I hang up the phone having understood approximately 30% of what she told me. Let´s just hope that in that remaining 70% there was nothing crucial. Like the name of the street, for example. Or the number of the apartment. Not that I would know I´d missed that information because I thought I had heard it but apparently there is more than one street in Buenos Aires that has a name and there are two streets at every corner and sometimes when people are giving you directions they tell you more than one street name. And if you only hear one street name out of three, it is likely that the person you are looking for does not actually live on that street. Let is also be know that unless the person giving you directions is as dyslexic as you, there is actually a difference between the numbers 740 and 470. And I may never know which one of those the grandmother actually lives at.

I´m gonna post here for now in case so I don´t lose anything if something happens to the connection. Stay tuned for Part II.