By Tracey Chandler
If you’re female and you plan the stay in Argentina for a lengthy period of time as part of a volunteer project, internship, study program or work-related project, making friends will be vital.
Buenos Aires in particular, being such a huge and busy city, can make the single, foreign female feel very alone and very out of place without a band of friends by her side. So… what’s the trick?
What are the obstacles?
One of the main difficulties about making friends abroad is the culture clash. It doesn’t matter if you are the most open, expressive person in the world, happy to embrace everything that the locals in your new “home” cherish. Making friends across cultures is always going to be a challenge because there will be things about childhood memories, popular culture, political environments and “typical phrases” that you simply won’t be able to relate to at first.
The barrier works in both directions. I come from London and there are things about my upbringing, phrases that I used as a teenager, family customs/activities, TV programs, local celebrities (the list is endless) that I can share with my friends in Buenos Aires, but that they still won’t be able to “feel” or “experience” or really “relate to.”
To mix with the locals, or not to mix with the locals… that is the question
If you happen to be in Buenos Aires for just six months or a year, you might be happy to form friendships on a very superficial level and connecting with locals might not be so important to you either. Buenos Aires has a huge expat/foreign visitor scene and you can get away with speaking in English all the time if you want to because there’s always plenty of people in the city from other countries, willing to keep to their “expat circle of friends.”
However, if you find that you begin to fall in love with Buenos Aires (as I did) and you see yourself spending a longer period of time in the city, connecting with the local crowd and making friends with Argentines or people who have lived in Argentina for a long time and plan to stick around, is really important. The “English-speaking crowd” might be good for a few laughs for a few months, but it becomes really depressing when people you had just got to know suddenly leave and a new bunch of “I-just-love-Buenos-Aires” people arrive.
A few tips from a foreign female who knows!
Having lived in Buenos Aires since April 2009, I can happily report that I have found a wonderful band of friends, mostly Argentine, who all live in Buenos Aires and have plans to stay in the city long-term. They have been there during medical emergencies, moments of loneliness, difficulties in the land of romantic love and they have helped me to feel that I belong to the city in which I live by introducing me to favourite musicians, poets, novelists and what to be aware of in terms of political/social spectrums.
Expat friends are great to have. I have a few. They can help in other ways, by relating to what it’s like living abroad, away from family and friends and away from your native culture. By all means reach out to this crowd too, if you get the opportunity, but the following quick tips relate to strengthening friendships with natives, mainly because these are the friendships most difficult to cultivate…
1. Girly chats and mate
If there’s one Argentine custom that will help you to break the ice and make real friendships in Argentine, it’s the drinking of mate… a hot tea-like beverage which is traditionally shared with others in the afternoon. Put aside time for girly chats and mate, every week at least.
When everyone finishes work for the day, meet up in someone’s house to share a few mates, gossip, confide in each other and relax. It’s the perfect recipe for friendship building. Mate might have a strong, bitter taste, but the action of sharing and chatting whilst you drink is the part which will really make a difference in your life and help you to feel like you belong.
2. Learn and show an interest
Ask questions which relate to Argentine culture, politics and customs. Find out about music, get to know the political situation and when the next elections will be. Ask your friends to show you videos or images of the TV programmes they watched as children. The list goes on and on, but the more you ask, the more people will share with you. The more you know about Argentina and Argentine lifestyle, the less of an outsider you will feel. You’ll begin to be able to join in with the jokes and understand the double-meanings behind sarcastic comments shared.
Also, pay attention to what each friend really enjoys and knows about. Ask your politically-alert friend about the up-and-coming elections and leave the questions about last week’s episode of Farsantes (a popular Argentine TV soap) for the friend who just loves to slob out on the couch and buys all the trashy magazines a girl could hope for.
By engaging your new friends in things which really interest them, the friendships will develop quicker and with less difficulty too.
3. Adjust to the Argentine “little-commitment” clock
Relax and avoid trying to schedule or make plans ahead of time. It might be Thursday evening, but few Argentines will commit to going out for a drink on the Friday night anyway. Most social gatherings are organised in-the-moment. Whenever plans are made, most people always end up canceling at the last minute because of feeling tired, or because it’s raining, or because they just want to stay at home and do something else.
It’s crucial to not get stressed about not being able to plan your social life. Making friends will be a lot easier for you outside of your native home if you relax and accept that the whole thing will just take time. Friendships will develop naturally and it might take a couple of years, but trying to schedule in social event, after social event, and book your Argentine friends into a calendar which goes weeks in advance is just impossible. Scheduling will not go in your favour, so just relax.
4. Read, listen and watch
Invest time in improving your Spanish by reading books, newspapers and magazines in Spanish. Listen to Spanish-speaking music artists and bands. Find out who the favourites are in Argentina and get to know a little about the music industry within the continent as well as using the opportunity to practice your language skills and develop vocabulary which the grammar books and standard class situations won’t ever teach you.
Watch movies in Spanish as often as possible. Take time to visit The Gaumont Cinema at the Congreso Plaza. This cinema is subsidised by the government and so the price for a ticket in 2013 stands at just 8 pesos. Aside from the great price, the films shown in The Gaumont are usually Argentine, which means the movies you watch will help you with the idioms used in Argentina, the Argentine accent and the grammatical constructions of the verbs, which are particularly different from the rest of the Spanish-speaking world when referring specifically to the use of the 2nd person.
As your understanding of the “natural” use of speech in Argentina develops, it will become a lot easier to laugh and joke with your Argentine group of pals.
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