Before writing this article, I sat down at my laptop and opened up the blog I began a few days into being on my year-abroad in Buenos Aires. As the months have passed, the time between each entry has become increasingly longer, the cultural observations more half-hearted, as the thing I was so scared wouldn’t happen has actually happened after all: I have settled in.
I am one of the very few Spanish students in my year who put Buenos Aires first on my list. This baffles me now that I am here and having the most enriching experience. Hopefully, this article can convince anyone considering their year-abroad options to give South America a chance!
Getting on the plane to come to Buenos Aires was probably the most nerve-wracking thing I have ever done, but it was undoubtedly worth stepping out of the Withington comfort zone. Argentina has welcomed me with open arms, though the cultural differences are aplenty.
One of the things I found most difficult at the start was the shift in schedule. I am used to a very British, sensible ordering of the day that reveres the three-meal system (with none of them after 8 pm). Argentina, much like Spain, is more leisurely about meal timings; the merienda only happens at about 7pm, and people will often have a coffee at this time which seems completely loco to me (even if I am a fan of a cheeky Dragon Soop before a night out).
Speaking of food, long gone are my days of shuffling into the Fallowfield Sainsbury’s to do my shopping in silence on the way home from a lecture, saved from speaking to a single other soul by the invention of self-service machines. In Argentina, you do your grocery shopping at a host of shops: the butcher, the veg store, the bakery, and the supermarket, all visited separately. I found it slowed me down at first, but I began to enjoy the fact it means that I have to speak more Spanish. The Spanish they speak here is a bit different to what is spoken in Spain but it is easy to get used to when it’s everywhere around you.
It took a while for me to work out systems like not touching the vegetables in certain shops as they have to do it for you, or the cash-based system which means cashiers often ask for a smaller note to make the change easier. Everyday things like this were hard at first but now make me feel like I really do live here and like I am no longer just a tourist. I now eat salad tomatoes instead of baby plum because they are so juicy here, and I have learnt to embrace Argentinian alfajores instead of trying to recreate my UK sweet treat staple of a chocolate bar (do not buy Cadbury’s here — I learnt the hard way).
Moreover, I was never the biggest fan of steak or red wine — the drink my parents always said I would graduate to after first-year immaturity — but I now love a glass of Malbec and have been converted to a red meat enthusiast. I make chimichurri about once a week.
One of the main things people warned me about was the economic situation in Argentina. It has been a new experience, watching prices increase almost weekly and making trips to Western Union to get wads of cash big enough to fill an entire handbag to pay my rent. Yet I have also noticed that many people in Buenos Aires enjoy things like going out to dinner, perhaps because there is not always much point in saving lots of money that will depreciate in value so rapidly.
Looking back to my second year, the process of choosing Argentina for my year abroad is a bit of a blur; people here always ask me why I chose Argentina and I can’t quite remember, apart from a phone call with an older girl from UoM who had raved about Buenos Aires. I do distinctly remember sitting with some friends on my bed in October of my second year, having decided I was putting Buenos Aires first, and just bursting into tears because, paradoxically, even though it was something I had chosen, I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving them. Ultimately, the knowledge that I was leaving pervaded my entire experience of second year, and this made every moment so much more special.
All of that bonding time with my friends perhaps made it even harder to rip myself away from them before third year. As the academic year rolled around, I experienced familiar old FOMO when seeing pictures of my friends’ house Christmas dinner, and even felt nostalgic for bus trips to uni together on the stuffy 143. However, the wonder of social media makes it incredibly easy to talk to people regularly, and six months into not seeing my friends, it doesn’t feel like our relationships have changed much.
Another unique feature of being in South America is, of course, the distance. If I were in Spain, I would definitely have visited home at least once, maybe even going back to Manchester for a weekend as well as home to my family. The prices and length of flights from Argentina to the UK have completely disabused me of this notion which, at first, made the trip all the more scary, but I have come to see it as a gift. My location in Buenos Aires has given me proximity to the rest of South America and I have been able to travel to some of the most awe-inspiring places, such as the Atacama Desert in Chile and the very south of the continent to see glaciers.
An Argentinian student told me about a volunteering opportunity called TECHO to build houses for people in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. Four of us got on a school bus on a Friday evening, unsure about what the weekend would be like and equipped only with bedsheets and towels to sleep on because we refused to buy sleeping bags and add to our already-overweight luggage, but it ended up being such an eye-opening experience. Being almost the only non-Argentinians on the trip, we had the privilege of being uniquely immersed in the project and being welcomed into people’s homes, which was in notable contrast to the somewhat anonymous context of our university classes.
Being ‘forced’ to stay here for an entire 11-month period has made me jump into the deep end more, led me to experience the first hot Christmas of my life, and has shown me that little bit more about Argentinian culture — for instance, cold food on Christmas Day and the prevalence of Christmas trees even in the sun.
It has also meant that I am tested that bit more, in not being able to treat this like a normal uni year where I visit home three times like clockwork (and more if it all gets a bit too much). When my lease here ended in mid-December, I could not just hop on a train at Manchester Piccadilly and be in London in a couple of hours. Instead, I had to hop on Airbnb and find somewhere to stay until my new lease began. This led me to another new experience of staying somewhere alone, something else I had never done before. These things, while ordinary, have both made me appreciate the comfort of home and the UK, while also pushing me to be an adult in ways I haven’t been pushed before, and I am so grateful for that opportunity.
I hope I can encourage even one person reading this article to do a year abroad or, even better, to push themselves through the fear and go further from home than Europe. It has scared me more than anything I have ever done and yet led me (physically and mentally) to places I never expected.
