...And we begin

The two of us in the progam are both here now, so yesterday afternoon we met up in Recoleta to do more wandering. I hadn't seen Recoleta or Palermo except from the car, and he had only been here for a day and hadn't wandered much yet, so we walked around the craft market outside of the Recoleta cultural center/design center (which apparently has free tango classes Wednesday nights!) and then headed northwest.

Recoleta is a lot greener than Retiro. There are lots of parks and tree-lined streets, and nearly all the balconies have plants.

The Floralis Generica sculpture opens and closes its petals according to the time of day.

We wandered through an area of fancy houses, including this old one hidden behind a wall of plants.

And saw the national library. Sorry Porteños, I know you're proud of your library, but there are some things that just shouldn´t be done with concrete. I blame the 1960s. (And thanks to Wikipedia, I now know to blame Brutalism as well...apparently the "era of ugly buildings" actually has a name!)

But there are more than enough nice buildings to counteract the tree of raw concrete, like this one back in Retiro:

This morning, we had to be at the program offices on Calle Paraná at 9:30 for orientation, so I got to take the colectivo for the first time. It was pretty straightforward, but I got off about 2 blocks too early because I didn´t realize that when you press the button for a stop, it stops right there. There are so many different lines that even the locals carry a guide with maps and descriptions of all the routes.

We finally have our schedules and syllabi and everything. Language placement testing and classes start this week, and the rest of the classes start next week.

I tried to buy a prepaid cell phone today, but so far it isn´t working--it says the SIM card failed. I guess I´ll have to go back tomorrow and try to explain that to the guy who sold it to me. I´m hoping that since I bought it at one of the official stores of the cell phone company, they won´t give me too much trouble about it.

It rained this afternoon: