10 Weeks Unbroken: What an Intensive Spanish Course Taught Us About Life in Buenos Aires

Two Passports, One Plan

We landed in Buenos Aires in the second trimester. The following Monday, we were in a classroom. 10 weeks later, we walked out with every exam passed and a working second language.

Here’s what we did, what went sideways, and what we’d do again.

I am Swiss. My partner is Thai. This defines how we plan everything. My passport opens most borders with a stamp. Hers requires visas, onward tickets, proof of funds and a sharp eye on every rule. We call this the Passport Power Gap.

My partner is a former Executive Assistant with years of international living behind her. Having lived in several countries on a Thai passport, she knows the Passport Power Gap herself: The visa applications, supporting documents, questions at the border… That experience shaped this move as much as my planning did.

We came to Argentina to learn Spanish. Properly, in a classroom, not from an app. If you want to understand a country, you speak its language. From personal experience of a few trips to Paraguay, I know how hard it is to actually thrive living in a Spanish-only speaking country.

I just imagined how many countries knowing the language it would unlock living in.

There are roughly 21

The course also gave us time on the ground. Time to see how daily life works here, and to understand the country’s immigration and residency rules from the inside, not from a forum thread. The Spanish came first. Everything else followed from it.

The Route in: Bangkok, Zurich, Buenos Aires

Our origin was Bangkok, and we did not fly direct. We routed through Switzerland for a week to visit my family, then crossed to South America.

The friction started at the first check-in desk in Bangkok for our flight to Zurich (11.5h). The check-in agent asked for our “return ticket”. We had none. What we had was a confirmed onward flight out of the Schengen Area to Buenos Aires (15.5h). I stated that clearly, showed the booking. After a quick IATA Timatic check, we got our boarding passes.

Any traveller flying one-way to a country that isn’t their passport country, and where they hold no residency, should expect that question. You answer it with documents. Ours was an onward flight to Argentina.

Flying pregnant also meant doing the homework early: We checked each airline’s pregnancy policy before booking and travelled well inside its limits.

We only booked our onward flight from Buenos Aires to São Paulo after landing in Zurich. If anything had stopped us from boarding in Bangkok, we would not have been left paying for flights we could not use. At this stage of a pregnancy, we wanted to commit to one stage at a time.

After a week with my family, we boarded our flight to Buenos Aires and landed after a total of 27 hours of long-haul flights. The plan at that point was simple: a few weeks of learning Spanish in Buenos Aires, a look at Brazil, then back to Bangkok. Then the course started to click, and we kept extending it.

To put our journey into perspective:

If you drill a hole straight through the Earth from Bangkok, Thailand, you would emerge near Lima, Peru.

Buenos Aires is not far from it.

20 Hours a Week, 10 Weeks Straight

We enrolled in an intensive programme at Vamos Academy, a language school in Microcentro of Buenos Aires and started the Monday after we landed. No settling-in week. No jet-lag buffer.

The format was demanding by any standard:

Parameter	Load
Hours per week	20
Hours per day	4, with one 20-minute break
Total duration	10 consecutive weeks
Breaks between modules	None

Our starting points were not equal. I came in with some Spanish. My partner had none. She speaks English and Thai fluently, with some German and French.

The original plan was modest: Study a few weeks, then reassess. I thought studying 4 weeks would give us a starting base, and 8 weeks (after learning all the past tenses) was my internal ceiling. I also assumed the pregnancy would set the limit before the grammar did.

I was wrong about that. More on it below.

Studying While Pregnant: What Made It Work

4 hours of grammar as a pregnant woman from second trimester is a logistics problem.

1. Location first: Only 2 blocks from class. Our first Airbnb was a 3-day test stay about 700 meters from the school. Close, but not close enough. We realized that on a test walk to Vamos the Friday before the course started, when we went in to ask about their programmes. So we moved to a flat 2 blocks from the academy. Door to classroom in 2-3 minutes on foot, no transport, no weather exposure.

The flat itself had to work as a study base, not just a comfortable place in the city center:

• A large, renovated studio with an extra sofa for rest during the day
• A real desk and a rolling office chair for homework sessions
• A cooktop with an extractor hood, which is less common in Buenos Aires rentals than you would expect, is essential for cooking proper meals at home

2. A nap after every class. After class, my partner took a 90min nap, timed to roughly 1 full sleep cycle. Waking at the end of a cycle meant she came back sharp rather than groggy. It was optimal for her because she was dealing with pregnancy fog. That way afternoons stayed productive.

3. Eat well, learn well. We cooked most meals ourselves and kept our diet consistent. The food scene in Argentina is surprisingly health-oriented because everyday items are nutrient-dense (e.g bread is fortified with folic acid in wheat flours), exceptionally fresh meat available (even in fruterías) every few blocks, and lactose-free dairy options are visibly marketed.

4. Two learners, one team. When a concept didn’t land in class, I broke it down again at home in plain terms. Topics like Doble reemplazos, por/para, se impersonal vs se pasiva, ser vs estar, past-tense contrasts. We worked through them together until they stuck. Some topics challenged our limits, but none were too complicated. Most of it came down to sorting the basics early and adjusting as we went.

More details on the Spanish classes will come in a separate post.

Finding a Flat Without Knowing How Long We Would Stay

We didn’t know how long we would study. We didn’t know how long my partner could sustain the pace. So we couldn’t lock in a long lease. That uncertainty had a cost. We also postponed our flight to São Paulo to immerse deeper in Spanish.

Here is how the 10 weeks played out on the housing side:

1. Base flat, 3 weeks. The 2-blocks-away Airbnb. It worked.
2. Forced move, about a week and a half. Someone else booked our base, so we took a temporary flat. No desk, and cold. Not fit for study. We tolerated it and counted the days.
3. Back to base, 4 more weeks. We rebooked and went back to our safe haven study base.
4. Week-by-week extensions, twice. We reached week 8, my planned endpoint. My partner wanted to keep going. So we extended 1 week at a time, twice.

We learnt that a flexible plan also needs a fallback for housing, not just for flights. Short-term rentals give you optionality, but the best units get booked out from under you. Budget for at least one disruption.

The full breakdown of switching Airbnbs mid-pregnancy has its own post now.

The Result: 10 Weeks, Every Exam Passed

We finished 10 consecutive weeks, 200 classroom hours. Every module exam passed. Exam in this context means the teacher-graded milestone check on every Friday. They are entirely for you, so you can judge whether you are ready for new concepts the following week.

Skill	Level reached
Grammar	Mid B1
Speaking	High A2 to low B1

The gap between the two is expected. At this pace, grammar runs ahead of speaking. You learn the structure faster than your mouth can automate it. Speaking catches up with daily use, and in Buenos Aires daily use is guaranteed. Whether with your daily barista, favorite empanada place or the frutería.

The real result is my partner’s. She started from zero, pregnant, in a language she had never studied. She didn’t just keep up. She pushed us past the endpoint I had set.

Verdict:
A language course like this has no attendance obligations, and you could do it purely for fun. Stacked week after week, though, it gets rigorous. You learn the pretérito indefinido one week and the pretérito imperfecto the next. The week after, the lesson assumes you have understood both and builds the next concept on top.

Why We Kept Extending (And Stayed)

We first booked 4 weeks. The school structures its A1 and A2 levels in 4-week blocks and gives a discount for booking a full block, so that was the obvious starting point. Then we extended twice, making our total course 12 weeks (we have used 10 so far). To fit the extra weeks in, we pushed our São Paulo flight back by 2-3 months. We enjoyed the learning, and every week of immersion pulled us deeper in.

Somewhere along the way, the decision made itself. We fell for the country:

The culture, the pace of the city (quite a bit slower than Bangkok), the warmth of the people, the language itself. Speaking Spanish every day changed how the city received us, and how we saw it.

We never felt homesick. My partner also felt comfortable with her doctor, and her pregnancy was already well advanced. Another move made little sense, so we decided to stay in Buenos Aires for as long as our legal stay allowed. We made sure we understood the rules for extending a stay and took local advice before each step. 2-3 months on the ground also taught us what no remote research could: How the paperwork works in practice.

Choosing a Doctor And Hospital

Staying also meant moving prenatal care here, which we started in Bangkok. With every 4-week block of Spanish we added, the city felt less foreign and the system less intimidating.

We screened doctors the way we would screen any service provider:

• How each doctor works, and whether they practice parto respetado (a legal right that a pregnant person’s choices are respected throughout childbirth where the medical team must obtain informed consent and minimize unnecessary interventions)
• How well the hospital is organized and how it communicates
• The overall experience, from the front desk to the consultation
• Prices, and what they actually include

The private hospitals (at least the ones we visited) work differently from what we knew. Most obstetricians are not employed by a single hospital. They rent space in consultorios (consultation offices) part of a hospital, see patients there, and issue órdenes (written orders) for scans and lab tests.

The birth is billed in 2 parts:

1. The doctor’s fee, which covers the team (lead obstetrician, a second doctor, the midwife and so on)
2. A separate clinical fee charged by the hospital.

Payment methods vary. Some providers prefer cash, others only take card, QR payments or bank transfer.

We planned to meet doctors at 3 private hospitals. The first made a solid impression from the start. At the second, my partner initially liked the doctor even more, until an admin mix-up had us pay twice for a test we had already done. At the third, we never got past the consultorio counter. The staff at the counter were unfriendly, and back then we spoke little Spanish. That alone shows how much friction being able to comfortably start an admin conversation in Spanish can save you. That magic happened around week 4 of our course.

In the end, my partner went back to the first doctor. He is her doctor now, and she feels comfortable.

The Nesting Phase after School

After 10 weeks of class, the brief changed. We no longer needed a flat next to Vamos Academy in the Microcentro of Buenos Aires. We needed a calm, safe base for the final weeks before the birth.

We tested 2 options for a few days:

Neighborhood	The area	The flat
Chacarita	Lively, with plenty of cafés, shops and services nearby	Nice, kitchen with hood, but no desk
Núñez	Quiet and family-oriented; fewer amenities nearby, but enough	New low-rise buildings, hotel-like finish, kitchen with hood and a proper desk

We chose quiet. 2 days after arrival at the Núñez Airbnb, we booked the flat for a full month, covering the final weeks before the due date with room for a late birth. The goal was to avoid any move while waiting for labour.

4 Lessons Learnt when Evaluating a New Base Abroad

1. Language comes first. It is the cheapest risk reduction available. Every legal (e.g. migraciones), medical and housing conversation gets easier once you speak some Spanish. People treat you better when you make the effort to integrate, and you get access to a wider pool of specialists.
2. Evaluate on the ground. A few months of structured, compliant presence tells you more than a year of reading. It also lets you “test” a long-term stay. 2-3 months of immersion is long enough to get past the honeymoon phase, but short enough that walking away costs little if the place isn’t right for you.
3. Design for friction. Visa timelines, onward tickets, housing gaps. Your favorite Airbnb won’t always be free when you want to extend at the last minute. It is probably better to not book a full month before testing a place for a few days. On itinerary planning: Different airline check-in clerks and call center agents will sometimes tell you different things about what you need to board a flight. Understanding IATA principles yourself is crucial if you book independent point-to-point flights (“self-transferring”) and carry the documents to match.
4. Mind the Passport Power Gap. If one partner holds a high-access passport and the other doesn’t, plan around the weaker document. More on that in another post.