Athena - Argentina - Oopsies! Language & Cultural Misunderstandings

This is my third day in Argentina so I’ve been here long enough to make several mistakes and get strange looks from the locals. Yeah, it’s been fun. Thought you might get a good laugh over some of my experiences here so far:

·         I go to a café and start to order at the counter. The lady looks at me weird and I’m thinking “Ok, this is simple Spanish, I’m sure I didn’t screw it up”. That’s when she tells me that here you don’t order your food & then grab a table, first you sit down at a table and a waiter comes to you and takes your order.  Oops. They definitely have better service in coffee shops here in Argentina.  Who knew?

·         Pastel. This word has a different meaning in Spanish than I thought. I asked for a ‘pastel de manzana’ and got a strange look from the waiter. He leaves and then returns with a slice of apple pie. I thought I had ordered an apple flavored pastry, which I had eaten at another café the day before. Now I understand why the waiter gave me the weird look—it’s 9am and I’m ordering apple desert (in this case pie)! I’m sure he was thinking silly foreigner. And by the way the apple pie was very yummy and surprisingly it had raisins in it. Not a lot them, just a few randomly floating around.

·        Riding the subway can be confusing. I entered the subway at the nearest entrance, paid, and then looked around for a sign that would say which direction the train was going in… and to my surprise there were no signs.  I wasn’t sure what to do and couldn’t quite figure out how to ask my question without appearing to be too stupid to know how use the Subway and to ask the question correctly in Spanish. So I just hopped on the next train and hoped that I was going in the right direction (thankfully I was). Turns out that some subway entrances (not all of them) have the signs with the direction of train on the outside of the subway station (on the street level).  

·         The buses don’t have schedules like the ones in the U.S. do—they may come and go whenever they feel like it. So you might wait 2 minutes or 40 to catch your bus. Great. Can’t wait to start taking the bus to school! #funtimesatthebusstop

I’m sure I’ll have more moments where I’m culturally inappropriate or say the wrong thing. And I have tons more respect for people who come to America and figure out how to navigate the weird things about our country.