Saying Goodbye.

This week I filmed 5 scenes for a English-learning film series called "Ingles Para Todos!"(it should be on Amazon by April). Memorizing lines and trying not to eat all the cookies/fruit/medialunas/etc. put out for the actors, was tough, but the scenes went well, and the director and producer seemed happy. In one scene I was a college girl at a session with her psychologist, in another I was a young woman out on a double date, and the third... i was a... fortune teller. 

In the process of saying goodbye to Buenos Aires I went out to lunch and dinner with my old students, went to a cast party for the film, and did some of my favorite things here that I might not get a chance to do again. 

It's hard to believe, but after six months, my adventure in Argentina is over. There are too many memories (good and bad) to summarize, so i've condensed the most pleasurable and the poignant into lists.  In an effort to make the transition back to New York easier, I'll start with the top five things I will miss the LEAST about Buenos Aires. 

1) The heat. It's a perpetual 95 degrees here during the summer months--hot air, hot skin, everyday. 

2) How hard it is to break a 100 peso bill anywhere but a bank (less than 30 dollars US). Cabs, restaurants, pharmacies.. apparently it can't be done. 

3) The inability to touch things in stores. In BA permission is necessary in some stores to look at anything closer, and only the sales people can handle the objects/food. Cleaner hands I guess. 

4) The overwhelming majority of smokers here. Dodging cigarettes while walking down the sidewalk is like a twisted game of frogger--not to mention the flailing arms of girls at clubs; you would think my fingers were their personal ashtrays. 

5) The abundance of homeless dogs. That's just not right. 

On the other side, the top five things I will miss most about this city include:

1) The fact that its perfectly acceptable to have coffee, cake and cookies at any time of day. 

2) That a 30 minute cab ride costs less than 15 US dollars. 

3) How ordering just a water at a restaurant gets you a little sandwich or sugary kick-knack.

4) How bars and clubs don't start filling up until 3am or 4. 

5) That couples ages 15 to 60 kiss and hug passionately on the street, the subway, park benches, etc., 

Although it will be a hard transition from 95 degrees fahrenheit to -12, from feeling like a complete idiot for not knowing the native language to feeling rather articulate, and from living amongst 13,000,000 (literally) strange faces to living in a town full of 2,000 familiar ones,  I feel ready to head back to New York. 

See you all soon! 

 

Chile and Argentina

Leaving Chile proved to be a bit harder than I anticipated. I absent-mindedly tossed out my deportation slip, which turned out to be not so great for crossing the boarder, and I got a pretty raw deal on my bus ticket back Argentina--silly me, I thought a bus ticket meant I would get to ride on a  bus, but no,  a crazy man in a 4-door sedan drove me 8 and a half hours through the desert. After almost hitting two sheep and a one llama, and actually hitting a gigantic metal pipe, we arrived in Salta, Argentina. The city itself was very intimate, and very European, and surprisingly, after a month a half of sleeping in a tent or a hostel in the middle of the desert, I was happy to be in a city once again. I went to the Museum of Archaeology in Salta, and saw one of the three famous "mountain children"-- kids selected in the 15th century for sacrifice because of their beauty, whose bodies were discovered perfectly preserved in the 1900's. Before Leaving Salta for Buenos Aires, I went to the community orchestra and saw an incredible blend of South American and Western music--it was fantastic. 

Christmas with my family was so much fun. We ate delicious meals in Buenos Aires, laughed and lounged for a week on the beaches of Pinamar (6 hours south of the city), and generally talked our faces off day and night. A week after my parents left, my friend Felicia arrived in BA for 8 days of more fun. We spent a night in Uruguay, tanning on the beach, and two at the Iguazu waterfalls on the border of Brazil and Argentina, 18 hours outside the city. Felicia had her first hostel experience, and everything went well--no passports stolen, no creepy guys lurking around the room at night, and sugar-infused breakfasts were included. 

Tomorrow I go back to work on the film project I participated in late last year. I have five scenes that I need to film in a two-day span, which will be fun, but exhausting. My friend Pittelli is also arriving tonight, so I have lots to look forward to in my last two weeks here in Argentina. In anticipation of graduate school interview offers, I am flying back to the United States the 27th of January, and if I get accepted to school, I won't come back to Buenos Aires. I'm having trouble grasping the fact that my adventure is coming to close, so i'm going to pack in as much as I can for the next 9 days.