How to Get to Know Your Neighborhood Abroad

In my first four weeks in Buenos Aires, I was given an assignment by my study abroad program: Take a photo montage of your neighborhood. I did just that. Here is what I came up with (See above).

In your first month of studying abroad:
1. Decide to take five pictures you feel represent your neighborhood. (In the process of taking these pictures, you will get to know your neighborhood so much better!)
2. Explore your neighborhood with two new friends.
3. Choose to talk to two or three new people who live in your neighborhood who are non-Americans. This way you can practice a new language or if they speak the same language as your native tongue, you will have made a couple new friends!
4. Choose to walk a different path every day for a week.
5. Visit five different stores in your neighborhood in a week.

What have you been doing in your first month studying abroad??

Next time: How to Meet Locals Abroad

How to Go Out in Buenos Aires

I remember my first night out in Buenos Aires as one of the most uncomfortable situations I have ever been in. It was two days after I arrived in Buenos Aires. I had met a group of four nice and out-going girls. They invited me to get a drink with them in a bar in Palermo Soho.

In the time I waited for them, I kept thinking that they would not show. In the beginning of friendships, I always fear that things would not work out or that a proposed meeting was just a trick. Luckily, this meeting was not a trick. It worked out. They all showed up.

We talked about our first reactions to the city and how we all wanted to become good friends over the course of our time there. I liked all these girls. They were fun, sweet, and eager to become good friends with me (who isn't when you are abroad in a foreign place where you know no one?).

I left that evening certain that I would become good friends with those girls even though we had just met.