When we arrived, my friends and I started to play our game. What's our game? We pretend to have different identities when meeting new people.
-Imari is from Viriginia, USA and pretends to be Emilia from Canada
-Guillermina is from Montevideo, Uruguay and pretends to be Margoux from Luxembourg
-And I, Sarah, am from New York, USA and pretend to be Siobhan from Ireland.
Why do we pretend? It allows us to act (we are all interested in performance), developing our accents and background stories. It also gives us some distance from Uruguay, so we can ask porteños what they think of uruguayos, or the people from Uruguay.
Honestly, when we first arrived, Buenos Aires felt hostile. We asked our cab driver, who is porteño, what he thought of uruguayos, and he said he thought they were vagos and mentirosos, or lazy liars!
It was hard for all of us, especially Guillermina, to hear these stereotypes, but we expected them; Argentina and Uruguay have a long rivalry, but I didn't get too upset; we remained interested in meeting other people who held a variety of beliefs!
Buenos Aires is the capital of Argentina, lying on the east coast by the Río de la Plata, or the Plate River.
