Saturday, October 6, 2007

Homeless in Buenos Aires

After a 10.5 hr flight from Dallas after previously visiting New York,
Chicago, Ireland and Spain.....I have finally made it.
Well, sort of.......

When I signed up for the program, I put down Oct 8th, the first day of
class, as the start day when I should have listed my arrival date, Oct
6th. So yesterday, I checked me email and realized no one would be
there to pick me up and housing would not be ready. So a few frantic
emails later, within hours of my departure from New York, all was set.
And even better, I had previously been assigned to a shared apartment
and now a host family was available to take me in.

The Latin Immersion program has a VIPcar (a taxi really) pick you up
from the airport and takes you to your home. Before I left, I
confirmed with the language program that this car company would have
the address as I only had the old shared apartment address.

Turns out they had the address of the shared apartment and as it is
such a lovely day, no one was at the apartment. The driver, who
speaks no English, and I in my broken Spanish, started coming up with
different plans. I could stay at a hostel till Monday, we could call
the school, but the nearby phone was broken. He stayed with me for 30
minutes radio'ing the transportation company who was trying to get in
touch with the language program. In the end he drove me to the
school. I have confirmed with them that they did know I was coming
today, and well.....I think they are trying to get in touch with
someone, maybe the host family or the housing coordinator. I think
things are being taken care of, but such is the life of not speaking
the language. I am not completely sure of what is going on.

The school is great. It is in a very nice neighborhood and there are
beautiful tiled floors, tall french doors opening to the street, an
inner courtyard, and obviously a computer lab from where I am writing
this. The flight itself was good as I slept through most of it. I am
looking forward to getting to know the rest of this beautiful country!

1 comment:

Stephanie said...

Oh Nicola! Some how, things always have a way of working themselves out. Seems like this is one of them. Hope you don't end up sleeping at the school, although I guess there would be worse places! Hang in there.