first night and first day in BA

I arrived at the B.A. airport at about 7 pm local time, it was a 14 hours flight so you can imagine that I was pretty exhausted! On my left sat a nice woman from Argentina who gave me her contacts within minutes when she heard that I was staying in B.A. to study and she gave me some good advice. On my right was a man from Uruguay but with German ancestors. Thanks to these nice neighbors I had the time in the plane went by pretty fast. But after about 8 hours of flying I got such a bad headache. Anyway - at 7 pm local time (midnight in Germany) I arrived, another 45 minutes later I received my luggage. Then the adventure began: I don't know how many people told me that I had to take an official cab within the airport rather than a cab outside. It's said to be more dangerous to take a cab outside because there have been a lot of kidnapping in the past with cabs that weren't real cabs... So I went down, took an official cab and the cab driver took me into the center of the city within 25 minutes and I arrived safely in San Telmo, which belongs to the historic part of B.A. Ruben, the owner of this shared apartment, was happy to see me and showed me my room and the whole house. Its hard to describe, later on I will take some pics and put them on this blog. Three other people are living with me in this apartment, its a girl from Germany (she studies at the same college, has already been here for 5 months) who's moving out at the end of this month, a girl from San Fransisco who's teaching English here and a guy from Italy whom I haven't had the chance to talk to yet. All of them seemed to be pretty nice and I think and I hope I will have a lot of fun with them. My room is devided into two parts. It has a small ledder to the top where my bed stands. On the ground I have a small table, some furniture where I can store my stuff and a big sofa which I already fell in love with because it's very cosy :-) I also have a small balcony but at the moment its too cold to sit outside (its winter here, about 5-10 degrees Celsius). We share the bathroom, kitchen and living room. Almost everything is a little shabby but the living room is very nice! It's very big as well, has a TV and big tables and it's just very nice to spend some time there. After checking out the apartment (don't forget - I have been up for 24 hours!), I was so tired that I just went to bed.

This morning I talked to the German and the American girl who explained me a lot and gave some good advice. Also Ruben (the owner) is very helpful and it's just good to know people especially at the beginning when everything is a caos anyway. Yesterday when I arrived it was dark already so I took the chance to start to discover B.A. this morning.
My first impression was that B.A. seems to be a mixure of all kinds of cities I've been to so far. It's shabby like Dublin or bad areas of New York, from the architecture it looks very European, but also a little American, its pretty dirty, a lot of waste is on the ground and the whole city smells like gas. But I also found some very nice houses and cafés so not everything looks bad here. It's only my first impression, let's see, maybe I'll change my mind when I've seen a little more of the city. This morning I took the subway to my college (here it's called la "SUBTE") which costs 90 centavos each way (!) that means it costs about 20 Euro Cents! That's really cheap! The university I'm going to is la UBA - Universidad de Buenos Aires. It has about 300 000 students and its faculties are all over the city center. My faculty is called "Facultad de Ciencias Sociales" and it's very close to the city center and about 20 minutes by subway from my house. When I saw the shabby building from the outside and inside and its bad condition I wasn't really suprised after having read a experience report from another student that studied some time at the same buidling. I gotta have to take some pics of that otherwise you won't believe me how dirty it is! The funny thing is - if you leave the bad looking aside - that the UBA seems to be a very taugh, recommended and honored university with a very good reputation not only in Argentina but also in whole Latin America. We will see. I went to the International Office and luckily there was a very nice woman who explained to me what steps I need to take to get my study visa. I came into this country by a tourism visa and I have to change it into a study visa. It's very complicated and I'm lucky that I'm already here to arrange all those things before my courses will start. They will begin in about 10 days and I'm very excited.
Next time I put some more pictures on this blog, this time I didn't take my camera with me after many people told me not to in order not to be robbed (I'm not kidding), it's better not to show how rich you are. I first want to get used to the city and to get to know how to get around here before I'll take the time to take some pics. Just be patient, they will follow soon.
There's a lot more to tell I don't wanna overwhelm or bore you with to much information. It's to be continued!
Hasta la próxima vez!

Here you see my first breakfast I had in Argentina!