Ok, so a little change in plans since last time we spoke. I arrived in Bariloche, a little town situated at the northern end of the Patagonia region and fell in love with it. It reminded me hugely of Queenstown and was beautiful. I had a great time couchsurfing with Inaki, but after another experience where an argentinian, an American and a Frenchman all who would have been speaking Spanish to each other if not for me, I decided that I would put down roots for 2 weeks, and go to a language school. This place doesn´t scare me like the sheer scale of Buenos Aires did. It is small enough that you know where everything is, people are friendly enough and so I decided to do a course.
And I´m glad that I did. I had my first lesson today through the school La Montana (www.lamontana.com), and there is another Australian guy in my class and it is fun (much better than the brief lessons I had in Buenos Aires). We learnt stuff and then played games to reinforce it. It was great. Our teacher is a lovely woman named Sol, and she´s just great.
I´m staying in a hostel called 1004 http://www.lamoradahostel.com/1004_english.html). It´s called that because it is on the 10th floor (of the ugliest building ever invented) and coming up to the door of the hostel feels like you have been reincarnated as a character in ¨The Shining¨. You reach the door and then (luckily) everything changes. It is like a haven inside and the view is spectacular! (in fact probably the best place to be in the city to not have the view of the building is inside the building itself! )So it is lovely. It doesn´t quite have the charm of some of the other buildings around this town (being a swiss style town and a lot of Swiss and germans settled here after the war it has lots of chalet style buildings and lots of wood.) but inside it is lovely.
The things that gets me about this hostel though are the rules! There is a rule that tels you to turn off the light in the bathroom, another to tell you to keep your showers short, another to tell you to dry the floor, another to tell you not to lean on the banisters and another rule in each room telling you to read and adhere to all the rules. I´m half expecting there to be a rule explaining how to sleep correctly or eat Argentian style! It does have the effect of making you feel watched and a little on edge a lot of the time, but the staff are nice (if not very cliquey) and the people here are really nice that I´ve met so far.
So I´ll stay here for another week, and then I will stay in a homestay to hopefully really start to improve with my Spanish. It feels like the right decision to be here.
