I’ve been back in the States about a week and a half now, and it has been sort of a strange adjustment. I have been trying to keep busy. I read To Kill a Mockingbird, partly because I was genuinely interested in it and partly because I was tired of pretending like I had read it. I am learning how to drive a manual car (harder than it looks), how to use LinkedIn (leave a comment if you can explain it to me, I would be most appreciative), and how to use banking infrastructure again (forgot ATM pin, had to think for a few minutes while someone impatiently waited behind me in the drive-thru line).
While I have been experiencing some culture shock, I sort of know what to expect. I came back to the states after being in Israel for five months when I was in high school, and I was home for a couple weeks in February. I’ve had occasional slip-ups when I use Spanish instead of English or use a phrase that doesn’t quite translate the same in English. (I’ve also been saying queue instead of line—unclear why that’s happening.) It’s not so much a shock as a transition for me. There’s nothing new here, and I know what is cultural appropriate. I just had gotten used to the Argentine way of some things, like the aloof servers at restaurants or the friendlier people waiting in line. It’s been a change adjusting back to small town Indiana, where I rarely leave the house without seeing someone I know.
Brownie, dulce de leche, whipped cream. Delicious.
I’m most in shock by the fact that a year of my life has passed. My birthday is tomorrow, and I cannot help but think back to my last birthday for comparison. I had been in Buenos Aires for a week, and I still didn’t have many friends nor a sense of the city. My birthday was on a Thursday, and we had to go to the Catholic University for orientation. I went with a group of other girls who lived nearby, but it felt as though we were on the bus forever and I felt so lost and uncomfortable. The orientation was overwhelming, and by the time I had figured out where to sign up, the few people I did know from my study abroad program had left. I wasn’t sure what to do, it was raining, and I went home in tears. As I sat in the dark in the apartment, my host, Delfi, came home and couldn’t figure out why I was so upset. She went out and came back with a small brownie cake—brownie, dulce de leche, whipped cream—and sang happy birthday to me in English, which is one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me. I then went back to the study abroad office to sign up for classes, and I wasn’t sure what anything was or what I was picking. I returned home, and my (developing) friend Haley wanted to know what we were doing for my birthday. I didn’t want to do anything because I was so down, and she insisted that we go out.
The gang at Sugar.
After researching bars online, we picked one, and gathered a few other girls we thought seemed friendly to go. I left the house and got lost, which was the norm, and ended up taking two taxis to get there. In both cabs, I seriously contemplated just going home and going to bed. The bar we wanted to go to was closed, so we talked around until we found another bar, Sugar. We sat, we drank a little, we chatted with some strange Germans, and I went home.
None of this was remarkable on my birthday, and for the longest time, I said that August 1, 2013, was one of the worst days of my entire study abroad trip. However, looking back one year later, it is all incredibly significant – Delfi came to be my strongest support system, the Catholic University came to be a source of great learning and great frustration, the girls I went to the that bar with are some of my best friends to this day, and one month later, on September 1, I met my boyfriend at the same bar. In the moment, it is hard to recognize all of the progress and positives, but looking back, I see that my twenty-first birthday was important in many ways.
The other day, I was at the gym. I couldn’t help but notice the differences between the YMCA and my gym in Argentina: there were more than 2 elliptical machines, the TV wasn’t showing creepy CSI re-runs, no one was drinking mate, and everyone kept to themselves and didn’t chat with their neighbors. After an excruciating 33 minutes on the elliptical, I decided to walk a few laps to cool off. The track at this gym is elevated and goes around two basketball courts and the area with the machines. As I walked, I looked down on the basketball courts to see some young children at camp playing. There were two kids in Colts Jerseys (#12 and #87) and another kid in a Pacers t-shirt. There was one other kid, a little taller than the rest of them, wearing a full Argentine National Football team Messi outfit. He had the jersey, the official #10 shorts, the socks, everything.
This little reminder of Argentina, thousands of miles away in Northeast Indiana, brought a smile to my face. I know that Indiana will always be important to me and that Argentina has a special place in my heart too. I’m looking forward to seeing my friends, both old and new, in North America this fall and getting back to mi Buenos Aires querido (my beloved Buenos Aires) when I can.