BUENOS AIRES

Its been four years since I´ve been back to Argentina. For two days its been a flood of old memories, good feelings, and familiar places. It started at the airport. Funny how airports are really just portals that give us a little time for reflection, who we are when we arrive and who we are when we leave. I can remember those airport moments when I was 15... getting there and not having any idea who to talk to, what to do, or what the heck I was doing in Argentina. Then after two months, leaving Buenos Aires armed with tissues, knick nacks for my friends, little presents I had been given, and my journal filled with what I had done and thought with these new people in this new place.
And there I was again. The same me in the same airport standing at the same baggage claim. But with a different suitcase this time, with a different group around me... with my new friends and with a much better grasp of the Spanish language. Yet if experience has told me anything, in two weeks when I leave Buenos Aires, through that same aiport portal I will not have the same feelings, thoughts, and memories. If being in a foreign country does anything for you at all... it gives you the opportunity to reinvent yourself.

We had one night in the hotel in the center of the city. In the morning the families came to claim their student. The first woman who entered the room was a beautiful woman with gray hair, a long coat, and she enthuiasticaly hugged and kissed each of us. She busted in that room and paved the way for the other families to come in. There was somethign about her that you couldnt help but like. And wouldnt you know, I ended up going home with her!
She is a 63 year old Argentinean woman with a funky apartment, a relaxed style, two cats, a love for NYC and Starbucks, and a political edge about her. She is fun, enthusiastic and very much alive. One of those people you like immediately... when they tell you within an hour of meeting you that its okay if you want to sleep in the nude if thats what youre most comfortable with (haha, i assured her I wear pajamas)...
I only wish her first impression of me could have been the same... but unfortunately all the Argentinean meat, asado, food, pasta, pizza, dulce de leche and everything else I had scarfed down in the last day had got the better of me. We went to the park with her cousin and Debra to walk her big German Shepard, Minnie when my stomach decided to deceive me. Within hours of knowing this student, I was throwing up in a park in the middle of Argentineans picniking and walking their dogs in the middle of Buenos Aires while being eaten alive by mosquitos.
Awesome.
So my first day was a little rough as I continued getting sick and my fever continued to rise. Nothing like this to make someone completely nervous on their first day of being host mom. Marta told me stories of her sicknesses, shes great for telling stories... and ended up using a trick that a aborignal man from the Amazon had used on her when she was sick in the selva. Lemon. Squeeze a lemon and drink it to rid your body of anything that would be making you feel sick. It worked.