I spent today finishing packing and running some last minute errands in preparation of my trip to Argentina, which I leave for on Saturday! Dan was able to get tomorrow off from work so I wanted to make sure that I didn’t have to spend it packing.
So far I’m actually not feeling very anxious, although once in awhile the realization that I’m going to have to speak Spanish, like, I will really have to speak Spanish makes me feel like this:
I’ll be having imaginary conversations in my head in Spanish and think “Oh my god, I don’t know the word for stamps! What will happen when I need to buy stamps?!” Then I realize that I can just describe what I need or look it up (stamps is sellos, btw) and that everything is going to be okay.
Speaking of looking things up, I am flying a Brazilian airline and have a layover in São Paulo, so I looked up some travel Portuguese and printed out a little list because even though I’m sure they’ll speak English on the flight, seeing as how we’re flying out of New York, I don’t want to be that ‘Murican who has no awareness of other cultures. Plus I think the stewardesses appreciated my lousy attempts at German on our way back from Austria two summers ago, so I figured I’d go for it again.
Well, I’m off to make dinner and run one last errand (I can’t find my bathing suit top so I have to go get another one since I’m leaving this freezing winter behind!) before snuggling up with Dan until I have to leave on Saturday. It’s going to be a hard five months away from him, but I’m sure I’ll find plenty of things to do to distract me!
I have launched another blog to document my trip, and if you’re interested you can follow along here:
http://aniowanabroad.wordpress.com
My goal is to update about once a week with lots of pictures and stories about what I’m doing, as well as my general experience with culture shock and other things like that.
¡Hasta luego!
