The beginning

The first 24 hours of my trip were fairly uneventful- get in the car, get out of the car, get on the plane, get off the plane...repeated with varying forms of transportation. At the airport, we met up with Alejandro (assistant to our program director, Silvana) and three other BC kids. Alejandro dropped the first few kids off at their respective homestays, but when we got to mine, no one answered the door or the intercom. Steve (one of my roommates and I) passed the time watching a stray dog steal food, look both ways before crossing the street, and urinate in the middle of the sidewalk. After about twenty minutes of Alejandro trying to get in touch with someone who knew what was going on, Steve and I snuck in the building when another resident came out. Once we got in, one of our other roommates, Joe, found us and brought us up to the room via a very small elevator (approximately a two person capacity). Once we got there, we met my third BC roommate Ben, but my host family and the other two foreign exchange students were nowhere to be found.

After hanging out for a while and unpacking, my host parents (Patricia and Luigi) showed up and went over the rules with us:
1. No drugs inside the building- if we feel the need to do drugs, they reccommended a nice park down the street.
2. No alcohol inside the building. See above.
3. No one can have sex inside the building except for them. Yes, they really made that clarification.
4. We have to use the back door and the sketchy elevator, never the front door, because this is a high-class building and neighborhood and apparently we don't meet the correct high-class requirement.
5. Breakfast is cornflakes or toast, or occasionally yogurt if we're feeling really adventurous.
6. Wherever you put your napkin holder on the first day of dinner is where you are required to sit for the rest of the semester. Change seats, and bad things will happen.
7. Rent is due immediately, in cash, in spite of the fact that none of us had changed money or had any idea of where to go to do it. (Most of the places we checked were closed).

They then told us that they were leaving the next day to go to a golf resort for a month and would not be home except to pick up our rent money. The maid comes in six days a week to cook dinner for us and clean, but actual interaction with my host family appears to be limited to yesterday. However, they are both very nice in spite of being a little odd about some things.

For the rest of the day, Ben, Steve, Joe and I met up with Lauren (another girl from the program) and spent the rest of the day wandering around the city. We got dinner at 830 because it's impossible to find a restaurant that will serve you any earlier than that. We all got varying cuts of steak, which ranged from not very good to excellent, traditional Argentinian appetizers (filet mignon pate (which has an accent but will not let me write it with one)with bread, fried cheese) and red wine, and then caught the waitress trying to pocket 50 pesos for herself by giving us the wrong change. We called her on it, got our money, and came back home to collapse. Altogether a good day, even though it was 48 hours long instead of the usual 24.