Hola a todos!
This is a blog about my exchange year in Buenos Aires, Argentina. At home I study systems analysis at Aalto University, and here I will be attending ITBA university and taking classes mostly from the faculty of Administración y Sistemas. I arrived on Saturday June 27th (2015) and will stay until July 2016. I'm writing in English now, but sometimes I might write in Swedish or Finnish instead.
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| Last evening at home: dinner with my family |
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| Finnish berries for dessert, delicious |
I arrived in Buenos Aires yesterday after about 24h of traveling, which was quite exhausting. The trip started with packing and leaving home in a hurry (stressful), being nervous about the size and weight of my luggage at the check-in and of course saying goodbye to my family, which was difficult. Then I flew to Madrid (just over 4h), had a layover there of about 5h (not too bad, nice not to have to hurry) and then there was the 12h flight to Buenos Aires. I managed to sleep for around 7h, so it could have been worse. When I got to the airport in BA, it still took me quite a while to actually get out: I had to wait in line for immigration, wait probably 20-30 min for my luggage and then wait in line for one more scanning of the luggage.
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| On the plane to Madrid: reading a book about Finland with a Marimekko napkin as a bookmark |
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| Madrid Airport: spent about 5h here |
After all of this, I took a taxi to the place where I would be staying for the next few days: the home of my relatives (well, almost) that my grandmother had managed to find through her cousin in the US. I had been in contact beforehand with their daughter who is 18, and she had kindly offered me to stay with them for the first days of my exchange year. Their whole family is extremely nice and welcoming (and they all speak good English btw), and I think they will be a great support for me during this whole time.
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| View from the family's weekend house |
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| The baby of the family, Zeus |
I spent these first 2 days with the family at their weekend house (kind of like a country club) outside of town where the weather was nice yesterday, around 17°C and we were able to eat outside, but today there was a massive thunderstorm that lasted the whole day. But it was okay, I spent the day playing the Argentine version of Monopoly with the family's parents and 13-year-old son.
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| Estanciero, suspiciously (exactly) similar to Monopoly |
Now, we're back in BA, and we just had sushi for dinner and ice cream for dessert (same as yesterday, they seem to like it here and I'm definitely not complaining). Right now I'm messaging with my "buddy" (tutor) from ITBA, my university here, about meeting before my intensive Spanish course starts on Wednesday.
Everything is going well here so far! I'll try to update this blog regularly, and I'm sure that I will fail at that, but feel free to remind me if it's been too long since the last update :D
Hasta pronto!
[written in the evening of June 28th]
