Hello everyone!
Well once again, more than a week has past with out a post from me... I apologize. Perhaps when school begins and I start procrastinating more you will hear from me a little more often.
I remarked in my last post that I wanted to talk about reasons why I have come to appreciate the U.S more. Perhaps I will elaborate a bit more on that in this post.
The first thing that comes to mind when I think about this topic is the cleanliness of the city. Bearing in mind that I come from a particularly clean part of the country, here are some things I have noticed about Cordoba:
First of all there is a lot of trash on the streets. People seem to be ok with just setting their wrappers down on the sidewalk once they are finished. Because of this, the parks and other public places don't appear as pleasant. In the neighborhood, people set their trash in open wire crates for the garbage men to pick up. This looks a bit odd the first time you see it as well, because the trash is just sitting there in plain view. I'd imagine the wind probably blows some of the trash out and litters the streets as well.
The air is a lot more polluted. It feels thicker when you breathe it in, and it has a certain smell of gas, sometimes sewage, and smoke, depending on where I go in the city . If I had to guess, I would say the amount of people who smoke in this city is well over 50%. It's sometimes seems unavoidable...walking down the street, sitting in a restaurant, or sometimes even sitting in my room and having it waft in through the windows from a neighbor's.
Other than the cleanliness, there are other things. There are abandoned dogs EVERY where. Literallly. They don't bother you but it's just unfortunate. There is apparently a dog pound, but it's almost as if there's more dogs in the city than there is room for in the pound. I'm not really sure.
People are absolutely horrible drivers here, and I don't understand why there aren't more laws enforced. People form their own lanes, weave in and out of traffic whenever and where ever they want, sometimes drive right through stop signs and lights and seem to have absolutely no regard for other drivers on the road. The ironic thing is that people don't appear to wear their seatbelts very frequently either...and often there aren't even any seatbelts in the taxis.
It is not uncommon to find buildings, sidewalks, and streets ripped up or broken down, and I trip. A lot. : /
People seem to be way too concerned with outward appearance. It is perfectly normal for teen-age girls to get breast implants for their 15th birthday. People strive to have the body of a model, and for this reason there is a ridiculously high rate of anorexia and bulimia. Sometimes I see women look me up and down, possibly examining the outfit I am wearing that day. I am not quite sure. But wearing fashionable clothes and having all of the right shoes seems to be at the top of the list for a lot of people here. Everyone sort of seems to wear the same thing too (skinny jeans, chuck taylors, flats, sandals) so the fashion here is getting sort of old.
Another thing that took some getting used to was the graffiti. In general when we see grafitti in Lincoln it is in the (for lack of a better word) "poorer" part of town and seen as something rebellious high school drop outs do to make adults mad. At first when i saw graffiti almost every where I went, I applied these same ideas to what I was seeing. But my ideas are changing... One of my friends told me that grafitti is "so South American"...Basically, Argentina wouldn't be the same without it. Now, after having lived here a month, I've began to understand graffiti more as an art form, or political expression. There have been so much political instability in the past and still now, that it is almost as if you can see a little bit of history written on these buildings. People also write poetry and declare their love for each other these walls. I would like to spend a day just looking at graffitti. I'm sure I'd find some interesting things.
I think over all I have just come to see things from such a different perspective. The ordinary, every-day things I have in the U.S now seem like luxuries. Air conditioning, gauranteed hot water, large selections of foods at the grocery store, clean air, buildings that are kept in good shape.
Hmm. I don't really feel like this post has really captured what I'm really feeling about all of this, not to mention my grammar is getting worse by the day. But anyways. I had a good conversation with my parents about how before I came here, the U.S was all I'd ever known, and so I didn't really have any reason to be proud of my country, or grateful for what I have. But now I do. And this is a developed country. I can't imagine what I would be thinking had a gone to a poorer country.
I don't know...I'm just going to post this now. It's hard to explain what I'm feeling.
