1. Going barefoot is unacceptable in Argentina. People wear shoes or house slippers at all times in their houses. I think this is because people in Argentina consider feet dirtier than shoes, where as in the US, a lot of people consider shoes dirtier. Other explanation: my friend Briana was doing laundry the other day in her house without shoes on, and was getting shocked by the laundry machine when she touched it. Her host mom explained that she got shocked because she wasn't wearing shoes, and it didn't happen again once she put shoes back on. She said you always need to wear shoes when using heavy electronics.... since electronics in Argentina aren't safe enough to use barefoot.
2. Argentinian women wax instead of shaving. Shaving is considered for men. So it's hard to find shaving cream and razors for women in the store, but the waxing salons are really cheap. It costs like ten dollars for a wax, where as back home that costs like 80 dollars
3. Argentinians are pretty clean people, they shower everyday. My host family actually spends a lot of time in the bathroom getting ready. The three of them share one bathroom in the house, and they take really long showers then spend hours in there blow drying their hair or listening to music or doing who knows what!
4. Bidets are really common in Argentina. I've still never used one because the bathroom in my room doesn't have one. They are supposed to be environmentally friendly because you use water instead of toilet paper, but I think most people still use toilet paper after the bidet, so it really just wastes water. A lot of my friends have said they've made better use of them in their bathrooms, such as for washing off feet or shaving your legs in.
5. Argentinians in my opinion are contradictory in their health habits. It's pretty common to work out and stay fit in the park, by running or rollerblading, and there are quite a number of gyms and people who go to my gym and work out, but Argentinians also don't like to drink much water (they prefer Tang, and nobody carries water bottles with them), and don't eat that much, or the healthiest food. The meat is normally really fatty, and people load up on salt and mayonnaise and bread. I've actually heard that Argentina has one of the highest rates of eating disorders. I read that 1 in 10 women have eating disorders and after Japan, Argentina has the most eating disorders in the world. Along with this, 1 in 30 have had plastic surgery here. There is a lot of pressure in Argentina to stay thin, and being overweight is really frowned upon, and not as often seen as in the US. I've definitely noticed this when shopping for clothes; there is pretty much one size for clothes, and it's size skinny teenage girl. This health mentality, combined with the typical work ethic of Argentinians, means that people sometimes just don't eat if nothing is prepared. One friend's host mom described it as "cuando no hay, no hay!" which essentially means that when there is no food in the house, that means that there is literally nothing to eat and you might as well just not eat all day until somebody else makes food.
6. Teenage pregnancy and having kids out of marriage is prevalent in Argentina. Abortion is also illegal in Argentina. I think sex education is more of a taboo subject here. One of our Spanish professors told us that is normal for mothers not to teach their daughters about menstruation until after it happens for their daughters. It seems to be part of the religious culture that families don't discuss these kind of topics, which in my opinion, only causes more problems for teenagers.
7. The way people hand write here is very odd. On a lot of the numbers or letters that have a stem and a loop (such as a 9), people write these characters with the stem in the opposite place as we do in the US. So peoples' 9 here look like a line with a circle on top like a lollipop. g, p and q get really confusing in lower case letters because they put the lines in really odd places. Then one of my professors writes his d like a circle and a line that aren't connected, so it looks like an o and an l.
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