baby´s first...*

...bus ride!
I took my first colectivo successfully on Tuesday morning. Now, it´s probably impossible for someone who has not been to Buenos Aires or tried to navigate using a Guia T (little book with maps of parts of the city) to fully comprehend what a difficult task it is. There are literally hundreds of different buses, with different colors and numbers and routes and ways to screw you over. I am not even going to try to explain the process one must go through to decide which bus to take, let alone how to find where the bus will stop. Or should stop - since, you know, sometimes they decide to change their routes, seemingly for no good reason except to confuse angry Guia-T-clutching extranjeras who just want to get to a stupid class. Anyway, I can do colectivos now, more or less.

...class!
My first colectivo ride deposited me right in front of the building I needed to be in for my first class here. Perfect, right? And I was early, too. That is, until I tried to find the classroom. Eventually I found myself in a group of four confused Americans shuffling up and down the stairs until someone cleared things up for us ("Yeah I know it says Aula 152, but that´s just Mondays! See how it also says Sala D? Claro...") and we bumbled in ten minutes late. The class itself was interesting (psicología de la adolescencia), and I´d say I followed about 60, maybe 65 percent of it.

...day trip!
Having a friend in this city who´s been here for a semester and knows what she´s doing (and also is awesome and fun to hang out with) is really great. Eliza finished up her semester a few weeks ago and came back to Bs As at the beginning of this week after some traveling around the country. Yesterday, Liana and I went with Eliza on an adventure to La Plata, a city about an hour south of here. It´s the capital of the province of Buenos Aires (don´t ask me why Bs As is not the capital of Bs As), and it´s much more tranquilo than here. We wandered a bit, checked out the cathedral, and went to the bosque, which was basically a big park with a pretty lake. It was nice to be somewhere else for a day, and it was both weird and nice when I was exhausted at the end of the day and glad to be "going home" to my resi in Buenos Aires.

*I gotta credit Liana here; this "baby´s first" business is completely due to her influence.