My life for the past week has been consumed by bureaucracy. This doesn’t make for very interesting blog posts. It also doesn’t make for a very happy Syd. In the past week, I’ve probably spent 5 hours waiting in line, 15 hours wandering around looking for information that doesn’t exist and several more hours meeting with people who actually don’t know anything. I still haven’t registered for classes, I still don’t have a Visa and I’m still pretty clueless. Welcome to Argentina.

We were told that establishing residency in Argentina is a fairly simple process. On reflection, this might be true. The process, in itself, is simple. The problem is that nobody knows what the process is and about 10 million other people are trying to do it. This results in frustrating experiences like waiting in line for an hour and then finding out you’re in the wrong spot or you don’t have this piece of paper or that form of ID or that you printed such and such out on the wrong size of paper or that your nose is too big for you face.

The same tangled mess of red tape surrounds the class registration process, assuming, of course, that there is one, which I so far have no evidence to support. No one knows which classes are being this offered or when they start, much less how to get into them. As no one else seems worried about this, I’ve decided not to lose sleep other it either. It’s just ironic that Middlebury is already sending me emails about registration for fall semester. I kind of wished they’d stop doing that.

On an unrelated and cheerier note, yesterday was Día de la Mujer and about a million people tried to sell me roses. Sarah and I were sitting at an outdoor cafe when a guy came by selling pretty colored pieces of wire (this is pretty normal). “Como se dice ‘feliz día de la mujer?’ en inglés?” he asked our waiter. “Happy day for being woman,” the waiter responded confidently. Naturally, we complimented his English.