New Beginings.....

When I arrived in Buenos Aires, I stayed in a hostel located in an area called Palermo. I thought that by staying at a hostel I would meet people aand spend the first few days exploring the city with them. That was not the case. The hostel was very small and often times, there were only couples staying there, so I was doing a lot of exploring solo.

I was only paying $15 a night for my room and I did have my own bathroom, a tv and wireless. At the same time, my bed was a squealy cot and the walls were so thin that I could hear everything that was going on at the hostel. The room did come with a wide array of cock-roaches. I think I saw five different types of roaches in my room, and who knows, there might have been more.... Along with the cock-roaches, I was under suspicion that my room/bed had bed-bugs! Yes! Bedbugs! Every morning I would wake up with tons of mysterious and very itchy bites all over my body. When I tried talking to the hostel manager about it, he laughed and told me it was mosquitoes.... but my bits were on parts of my body that weren't easily accessed by mosquitoes.... I was so paranoid that I had trouble sleeping and conducted sneak-up attacks on my bed a million times during the night. Since I had my laptop with me, I did a lot of research about bed-bugs and I realized that they lived in a mattress (how convenient for them) and they come out at night to feast on delicious people while they were sleeping. So in the middle of the night, I would jump, turn on the light and flip my mattress to try to find a trace of bed bugs....

Rather than loose sleep, I decided that I would put all my energy into finding a room to rent in an apt. I used Craigslist because that was all I knew at the time and majority of the posting were in English. Some of the places that I saw scared me but there were a few nice ones as well. Whenever I contacted/emailed people about their ad, their first response was about my last name and how strange it was....

I finally saw a place that I liked and moved in 2 days later. I now live in an area of Buenos Aires called Barrio Norte which is located between Palermo and Recoleta. The area is really convenient and has everything I need--transportation, banks, grocery stores, fruit stands, etc--within 2 blocks.

I live with 2 other people and a sinister cat. One of my roommates is Mike who's' from Australia. He came to BA for a wedding (about 4 weeks before me) and decided to stay and teach English. My other roommate's name is Diana, she's Argentinian and owns the apartment. Her cat, Shibu, should be called El Diablo. Coinsedentaly, Shibu is an name of an Indian God that's known as a God of Destruction... Accident? I think not! I've never encountered such an annoying and malicious cat!

I spent my first few weeks sight seeing and exploring the city, but not being able to speak Spanish and understand what's going on around me made me frustrated so I decided to find a language school. I did my research, narrowed it down to 4 schools, met with all of them and picked the school that I liked the best.

Let the learning begin!