99 days..

I have 99 days left to go.. and I have been here 27 days, on thursday it would have been here one month!

A very exciting thing I have to look forward to is the AFS trip to the Iguazu falls! This from the 24th of October until the 2nd of November. I'm so excited! I'm not too sure on the exact itinerary but we will travel on an overnight bus to Buenos Aires. Then once we get there we are going on all sorts of tours around the area then travel to the Entre Rios province to do all sorts of different things. The cool thing is we are going to the Brazil side of the falls, this will give a really cool perspective of the falls :) Don't worry once I have gone on my trip a big blog post is coming!

Above I have stated lots of days and dates but here this is not very common. People don't really count down but choose to worry about now, rather than the future. Everyone's pretty relaxed about the concept of time. For example people will say 'en un ratito' which is 'in a moment' or 'in a little bit', this phrase is so misleading! In New Zealand this would mean a few minutes or 10 at the max, but here it means anywhere between there and 1 hour! This makes it hard to know when exactly to get ready or be waiting to go haha...

A perfect example of this is my orientation. I had an AFS orientation on the 27th and 28th of September and I met the 9 other exchange students that are in Roca. We talked about our countries and Argentina and did lots of activities, it was really great. So anyway the Orientation started at 9.30am on the Sunday and this included the host families. You can imagine me stressing because at 9.20 I was the only one ready and my host mum told me we would go 'en un ratito' this stretched to 9.50 when we finally left. I was convinced I would be the last one and everyone would be waiting 

Turns out I was the third one there and no-one was phased at all! This is a perfect example of how the concept of time differs. Another is the supermarkets and big shops. At 'Easy' a shop like Mitre 10 mega there was only one checkout open for at least 20 people and no-one seemed to care about waiting! There was no hurrying people through, everything was so relaxed.. we ended up waiting about 30 or so minutes to be served. If you have heard of Island time, here is the exact same!

I think this will be quite hard to get used to but we will just have to see.