Parks and parties

Eek, I'm behind. Also sleepy, so this will be a quick entry.

It's been one week of class, yay! I love love love my painting class at UMSA, an Argentine school. It’s the first painting class for art majors, so it’s not just like, “Let’s paint fun things!” It’s very disciplined. We’ll only do still life in oil for the whole semester, which is pretty boring to look at, yet I still really love doing it. We’re starting in black and white and slowly adding browns and yellows. They don’t start on blue and red until next semester, after I leave! Despite all the restrictions, I’m enjoying it.

I’m in another class at UMSA called “Introduction to Spanish Language and Literature” that’s a first-year class for students who want to be translators. It seems like it will be very interesting to read stories from the point of view of a translator, and maybe sort of a combination of literature and linguistics? I'm not sure; I switched into it late so I missed the first class, and yesterday was kind of boring.

All my classes are taught in Spanish, but those are the only two I’m taking from UMSA. The rest are from IES. I did end up deciding to drop the documentary class, along with a lot of others apparently. Rose reports that the class had eight people in it yesterday, compared to the first day when there were probably 25. So, my three classes at IES are Argentine Poetry, Spanish language, and Creative Writing. I’m excited about the creative writing class, it should be fun.




Friday Rose and I went to run in los Bosques de Palermo, which is not actually a forest as the name implies, but rather a gorgeous park. We kind of forgot about running for a while and just wandered around taking pictures and climbing trees. The park is so fancy that guards will blow a whistle at you if you step on the grass!

Friday night we went to the Armenian Cultural Center with Emily and Whitney for a delicious dinner. It's relatively cheap because it's in a boring banquet hall and cooked by the mothers of students at the Armenian school for a fundraiser. My dish was a sort of cheese lasagna, but picture flaky bread instead of noodles. It was a little too cheesy for me. You win some, lose some when you try to be very bold about ordering mystery foods. Menus are very hard in another language!



Saturday I just stayed in and did some homework. We saw an Argentine movie called La Ventana with no subtitles about an old man dying in a big house in Patagonia. It was very beautiful.

Sunday night a group of us got together at Emily and Whitney's apartment to cook dinner. It was very wonderful, and I hope we do it weekly. Brenda (Argentine) wanted an American dinner, so we made meatloaf, glazed carrots, and a yummy salad. Argentines make very interesting pizzas, but their salads are extremely boring, so it was nice to have a good salad for a change. I was also going to make yummy beans, but I accidentally bought lentils instead of beans. They don’t really eat beans here! Crazy! So I went ahead and put everything in the pot as if they really were beans, and it tasted ok.And for dessert, chocolate chip cookies, mmmm.

Also Sunday I went to the special grocery store that sells peanut butter! It costs a lot, so emergencies only. I miss: Barry's Irish breakfast tea, bagels, feta, cheddar, salad dressing



Today was a holiday, so last night (this morning) I broke the record that I'd set Friday night for how late I came home. That's just standard operating procedure here, though. I didn't get much sleep because I really wanted to take a tour of a huge, beautiful mosque in Palermo at noon, because normally I'll have class during the only tour times, but no tours today because of the holiday. So we went to parks all day, and it was very lovely. After my camera batteries ran out I lied around for a while on the grass listening to a woman casually, beautifully playing classical guitar. I decided that I must spend every holiday (like Labor Day or Memorial Day) in a park, like people do here. Why in the world would you do anything else?




All pictures are from parks in Palermo.

Chirp

Here are some birds from the Ecological Reserve from Saturday.




Last night I went to see the amazing El Choque Urbano at Konex with Emily (IES) and Brenda (Argentine). They play on non-instruments like buckets, broomsticks, and basketballs. Sometimes it sounded like a primal drum circle, other times like an electronic dance party, other times like a hip-hop showdown. Apparently it's a pretty regular event, so I'll get to go back, yay! After the concert we went to Brenda's to order pizza and watch Vicky Christina Barcelona. It was interesting and a bit depressing to watch incredibly rich, incredibly beautiful people who could never be happy in love.



Today was ugh. All the international students taking classes at UMSA (my painting class) went to get the student visa. It was funny because we'd been warned beforehand that we could be there all day, and that there was little order; we could be called first or last. However, it turned out to be much easier than expected...at first. In the first room we were given a number and they followed the order. I decided that it was entertaining rather than frustrating that the official helping me paused for a few minutes to talk about a lingerie store in Palermo with her co-worker. After just two hours of waiting, it was all over......NOT! The next room, where we picked up the visa, was a mess in comparison. Officials called out people's names in their most polite "inside voices" and the order was off enough that I waited nearly an hour more than Rose even though she had been right before me in the first room. We spent about three hours in this stage.

I guess that's just Immigrations. It wasn't as terrible as I made it out to be; in the first room, I struck up a conversation with a friendly Chinese-Argentine immigrant. I was delighted to learn that there is bubble tea in Buenos Aires! I also passed the time be eating three of my yummy new found Chewy Bar substitutes. I'd brought my recorder, so I interviewed Rose about being a barista and another IES student Ian about being a waiter. I have no idea what to do with the material, especially with all the background noise, but I'm craving some editing practice.

Speaking of editing: I'm not sure I want to take the documentary class anymore. My favorite part is editing, but there isn't enough time to teach it so everyone has to fork over $150 (US$) to pay a professional to edit it. This used to be the class I was most excited about, but in addition to that letdown, it's a huge time commitment compared to others and I'm wondering if my time wouldn't be better spent producing a few radio pieces. Film is a mere tangent to my love of radio, and I know the class would be rewarding and beneficial to my radio aspirations, but maybe not as much as practicing on my own with my recorder. I'm still not positive about it...

Beautifully unplanned

Today was surprisingly amazing, considering that I didn't do anything I'd planned. Maybe this isn't something unique to Argentina at all, and it's just me finally realizing that I don't need to make plans for everything all the time. I'm so used to trying to efficiently cram in as much activity as possible into one day, especially after living off campus last semester, when my schedule had to be much more rigid because of the drive. Even the weekends were engineered to be efficiently fun. That's not to say I was inflexible, but I was always planning, planning, planning.

I woke up today with a few options in mind--San Telmo market, back to La Boca, buying supplies for paint class, picking something interesting out of a guide book--but nothing seemed that urgent. So when Emily asked if I wanted to play soccer, I said yes without hesitation. Rose had really wanted to sit around in a park reading and drinking mate, but after some indecision she caved and came along. We took the subway to Emily's friend Brenda's. When we got there, Brenda said we could either go to a nearby plaza to play or take an hour-long busride to a huge park in Belgrano. After a half-hour subway commute, an hour-long busride did not appeal, but the little group seemed to be leaning toward it so I wasn't going to be the aguafiestas (party pooper) to ruin everyone's fun.

We walked a bit to the bus stop, and had some pleasant bus conversations, but I was having lots of bus second thoughts. The route ended near a medium-sized plaza, and it was fifteen more blocks to the big park. We almost gave up and played in the plaza, but there were no good spots. So finally we made it to the Belgrano park. We set up some goals with bags and water bottles and played a little bit of two-on-two, but some nearby young men kept asking us to join them despite our protests that we were terrible. After some introductions and cheek-kissings all around, we started to play six-on-six.

It was the most wonderful soccer game I've ever played. Nevermind the fact that I am mediocre at best, and most of the guys were more pro than anyone I've ever played with. No one was keeping track of scores, and the teams were evenly matched. It was about playing, not about winning, and for once I stopped feeling incredibly embarrassed every time I passed to the wrong team. I truly enjoyed the near-impossible game of trying to get the ball away from guys with magical footwork who seemed bemused by my efforts. It was all so beautiful, and sometimes during slow points I stopped and thought, How could this day be any more perfect? I'm in a beautiful park in a beautiful country playing a beautiful game with beautiful people. Incredible.

I liked the part where we got nicknames. They called Emily (who is from Iowa) "Chicago," and I think Rose and I were both "Texas" for a while before they switched to "Rubia" and "Roja" or something like that.

After playing forever, Rose and I met Pablo and León, Emily and Brenda's friends. They were really cool and funny, and I felt terrible that we kind of screwed things up by not bringing any of our stuff with us to the park. We could have gone out to eat with them or driven around the city some more, but we didn't even have phones to call home and say we'd be late, so I didn't want Miriam or Maruja to worry too much. Oh well, next time...

I think my bed was made for someone half my size and weight. I woke up with a very sore back today, and it's probably because I've managed to carve a depression in the matress after only two weeks. I guess I wasn't sleeping in it properly last night.

Vigilante car guard

Yesterday morning I felt really homesick for the first time. I missed everyone and everything. I missed having a place that was mine and a place where I could have people over to hang out, cook, play board games. There was talk last night of doing that sort of thing regularly at Whitney and Emily's place, which would be delightful.

I wanted to go to the Ecological Reserve for a run yesterday, but it was a logistical mess to get there. We couldn't figure out how to take a direct bus, so we ended up taking the subway, walking, waiting a while, and then taking the bus, which all took about forty minutes. It probably wouldn't have taken too much longer to walk. After all of that, it started storming out of nowhere about twenty seconds after we arrived. And that's exactly when my bad mood finally lifted. I just couldn't help but laugh; it was like a rain cloud had followed me there! How ridiculous! I ran in the on-off rain. The exercise, the trees, and the birds made me even happier, as I knew they would. There's one bird that looks sort of like a mockingbird, which was cheering.

Rose, Emily, Whitney, Samantha, Sabrina, Laurie (?), and I went to a fancy Japanese place for dinner. It was so fancy you had to ring a bell to get in. I didn't like the sushi I got. I'm a fish novice and a sushi novice, and I didn't like the plain chunks of salmon as much as I like the cute little rolls. But everything else was amazing, and the service was outstanding. They didn't charge us for stuff like soup, hand towels, and fruit for dessert. Pricey, but not overpriced.

Yesterday I saw:
-a vigilante car guard in camo pull out his nightstick and sprint out of sight
-a small girl's sandal abandoned on a doorstep
-a Brit saying "These people are such weirdos," about the park vendors
-several men in a row on the sidewalk saying, "Want to dance, ladies?"
-a passed out man hanging out of the window of a moving, white, unmarked van. His friend noticed him from another window and sheepishly pulled him back in the van

Fotos (words below)

1-6. El Cementario de Recoleta
7-9. La Estancia
7. Mate

The craziest thing that happened in your taxi

YAY! Orientation is over! I'm registered for: Spanish, Creative Writing Workshop, Argentine Poetry, How to Make a Documentary, and Painting, all taught in Spanish.

I thought that maybe McDonald’s would have better burgers here because it’s a meat-loving country. Rose and I tried a cheeseburger today to test this theory, but it tasted the same as ever: gross.

Rose and I went to the Cemetery again. I tried to take lots of cat pictures, but it’s kind of hard to get interesting stuff in the background. This will take more trips, which is fine, because the Cemetery is very beautiful and I love exploring.

Yesterday I had my first ride on the collectivo (public bus). Another adventure! Everything is an adventure. The bus almost left without us, but we managed to get on. Then we drove about a block while I was standing in the doorway. The open doorway. Jesus.

Whitney, Rose, and I went to a concert at the Konex Theater. It was a really cool venue. They had these fantastic hanging basket swings, and a giant fly sculpture. There were no smoking signs everywhere that went completely ignored. The music was Latin, therefore danceable and fun. Before the concert began, we were talking and a guy came up and started flirting with us. “You’re so beautiful…Are all Texas girls this pretty?...Can you teach me how to speak Texan?” He had an interesting way of making himself heard—he would lean so close to my ear that I’m surprised he didn’t accidentally eat it. I kept backing away, and finally he said, “Am I making you uncomfortable?” “Yes, a little bit,” I said, so he turned his attention to Rose. It was uncomfortable just to watch him in action! My goodness. Soon he left though, and didn’t bother us anymore.

I’ve been asking all the taxistas if anything interesting or strange has ever happened in their taxis. So far I’ve hit the jackpot twice. The first one had been robbed at gunpoint by a passenger, and then he read a few days later in the paper about the robber: he’d been killed by the police when he brandished a plastic gun in public. Today’s stories were even crazier. The first one was a little mysterious and concerned a Chinese woman. He said they didn’t speak each other’s language, but they still understood each other, and he would have expected a Chinese woman to be cold, but really she was very hot. He said that (whatever “that” is) was the craziest thing that ever happened in his taxi. Hmmm. Story number two: he found $1500 left in his taxi. Story number three: someone died in his taxi. The guy had a heart attack but the paramedics thought it was an athsma attack, and they killed him because the asthma medicine makes your heart beat faster. Well, that’s what he said, I don’t know anything about athsma and heart attacks. Anyway, I really like talking to these guys. I’m a little intimidated about the logistics of interviewing them (sticking a microphone in my driver’s face seems dangerous, and I don’t want to carry that recorder with me all the time), but I’m trying to figure something out. These guys are a goldmine of crazy vignettes.

Thursday IES took us to a beautiful estancia (ranch) outside of the city. Even though we couldn’t ride horses because it was muddy, it was still a wonderful day. First we had a huge asada lunch (Argentine version of barbeque), but it wasn’t nearly as good as the one I had before the city tour. There was a mini-zoo of sad, lonely birds and rodents. We found and rode wonderful two-person bikes that were like pedal-powered golf carts. Samantha and I chatted with a gaucho for a while. I guess I should have asked him if anything interesting or strange has ever happened while he was riding a horse. Emily, Rose, and I played some soccer, but I’m terribly out of shape so I didn’t last long. Somehow I thought that walking all over the city every day was enough to maintain myself, but that is very untrue. To cap it all off, we went swimming. What a day! I’m beat.

Not a pumpkin pie

It's not actually pumpkin. It's butternut squash. But I like the word pumpkin better, so I'll keep calling it that.

Today Samantha and I went to eat lunch very late, because we took too long to do a worksheet with Emily in Plaza San Martín. How can anyone keep track of time there? It's too beautiful. Too many pretty people and bears. Guess who we found at the restaurant? Rose, Sabrina, and Whitney! Who among us is psychic?

I saw an enormous pumpkin pie (the savory kind) and my eyes grew just as enormous and I ordered it. But it was too much pumpkin even for me, even with Samantha's help. Next time I will conquer.

A mountain of us went to IUNA School of Movement because everyone who visits Argentina must learn tango. But I won't take lessons there, even though it is free there for IES students, because I do not like taking the subway very much. And six hours a week is time better spent on radio projects, taking pictures, browsing used book stores, etc.

The subway is too crowded, and you have to fight to get on and fight to get off, and it doesn't wait for you, and it's super-dangerous as far as getting robbed goes. I felt pretty silly wearing my backpack in front, but even men with backpacks look pregnant on the subte. It's much safer that way.

Rose and I picked up our laundry today. That's how they do it here--you drop it off one day and get it back the next, folded and smelling sweet. I want to find a place to do it myself, so I don't have to pay as much.

No pictures. It was a beaureaucratic day, and no one wants to see pictures of that.

Monday pictures (words in following post)

I really don't like how blogspot puts pictures in the blog, so I'm going to start using a new system: one post with the written blog, and another with accompanying pictures. Let me know if you hate it.
1-4. Colorful houses in La Boca.
5. The former port at La Boca.
6. Plaza de Mayo, the political heart of the city, where there are many protests.
7. A perpetual protest (I'm not sure how long) about the Malvinas (AKA Falklands) that Argentina wants from the UK

In which I write about food and your fat mother.

Saturday we had an IES official city tour. It was pretty boring; we were on a bus, and only got off three times: La Boca, La Plaza de Mayo, y El Cemetario de Recoleta. I’d heard from people that La Boca is very tourist-y and boring, and it was very tourist-y, but not at all boring. I want to go back for more pictures and to browse the artist stalls. The Recoleta Cemetary is amazing, but I don’t have any pictures yet because it started to rain. I want to go back, and I’m thinking of doing a project photographing the many cats in the cemetery. Pictures of statues would get boring after a while, but focusing on the cats could be interesting.

The boring tour was very worth it because of the lunch they gave us beforehand. All the students were sitting at a long table, and they brought out plate after plate of little appetizers and side dishes, and eventually amazing steaks. Every side dish was amazing: empanadas, fried spinach balls, cheese balls, roasted potatoes, spinach ravioli, this wonderful pizza that had egg on it (like a quiche), and more. I’ve talked to people from two other tour groups, and they went to an Italian restaurant, so I feel very lucky that we got to eat there.

The pizza in general is pretty different here. I’ve had four very different pizzas at four different restaurants, and each one has been very good. Tomato sauce is not common, and it’s drowned out by cheese if it is there at all. There are strange and delicious toppings like hearts of palm and pumpkin. I’m getting hungry just writing about it!

Rose’s dad came over on Sunday and brought 20 roses for Día de la Mujer, which was very nice. He finally met Miriam and then went with us to run a few errands and go to a café. Rose went to a Manu Chao concert that she really enjoyed, but I didn’t want to pay more than $20 for an artist I’m not familiar with, so I opted to go to dinner with other friends instead. We went to the cheapest area restaurant in my guide book (which was still not super-cheap…I need to stop acting like I’m on vacation and leaking money). It was very good, and I got an interesting salad with celery, apples, walnuts, and Roquefort cheese. The funny thing about salads here: whatever it says on the menu, that’s what you get. It didn’t say lettuce, so it was pretty silly of me to expect that all of those yummy things would be on a bed of lettuce. Similarly, I’ve heard of people ordering a tomato salad and getting a bowl of tomatoes. My salad was decent (surprisingly), but I think that is one thing that we do much, much better in America.

My favorite part about last night was when Julia and I were waiting at the meeting point and we saw some street performers making “you’re mama’s so fat” jokes. I couldn’t understand most of them, but for some reason it was so delightful that they have these jokes here too.

Rose and I are going to take a painting class at a local university (UMSA). I’m so excited! I’ll get to meet actual Argentines and learn how to paint simultaneously. Who could ask for more? We went to a used book store after the UMSA Spanish placement test, where I found this fantastic book called Lucha Libre that’s full of diagrams and instructions on how to be a professional Latin American wrestler. I haven’t yet found a section on how to choose a mask. Nor have I decided what to do with it, but I like to collect things like that in the hopes of making them into some sort of art project someday.

más fotos

--Cómo te llamas? --Joe Student, and you?

I still don’t have any coins. Although I don’t want to take the bus, I can’t, because I don’t have any coins. There’s a general shortage of coins here, and yet they are absolutely essential to take the buses, because you must have exact change on the bus. Most stores charge to the dollar, which is possible because there is no sales tax. And ask a store clerk to change your paper money? Are you joking? Of course, this creates opportunities for the wily, and I’ve heard that you can buy coins from vendors at more than their face value, but I haven’t actually seen that yet. One of my teachers said that we should read 100 Years of Solitude after we’ve been here, and we will see that a lot of the so-called “magic realism” is not magic at all, because if Márquez wrote a story about these coins, Americans would call it magic realism!

Speaking of Márquez, I once read a story by him (I think it was him) where a body washes up on a beach in a small village, and the villagers decide to give him a funeral. They adopt him as one of their own and make him out to be sort of a hero; they love him. The villagers named him Esteban. There’s a guy in my orientation class named Esteban, which reminds me of that story. Yesterday was the first time I talked to him, and it was so embarrassing…

“Hi Esteban, have you ever read that story by Márquez with your name in it?”

“No.”

“Oh, well, um…it’s about…” and I told him. How weird is that? “Hi, you remind me of this dead guy in this story…”

Rose and I have been very frustrated by the American students’ desire to speak English. Three times in a row, I swear to you, we have gone out with people who were actually good at Spanish, who had had real-world experience before the program started, and they all explicitly asked us to speak in English. That’s not even the worst of it; at least they were polite about it. Most of the time, I try to talk to students in Spanish and they answer in English, pretending like they didn’t notice the effort. Why are these people here if not to learn this? If it is not an important goal, why didn’t they all go to Australia, where they wouldn’t be inconvenienced by a language barrier? It makes no sense to me that students would restrict themselves to the classroom for speaking Spanish with their peers. Classroom speaking exercises are often terribly inane, and they must concentrate on one concept at a time. A real conversation is a more holistic and fun lesson. Hopefully all of this will improve in time. I don’t know how it could be much worse than three requests in a row.

I finally have a phone! It was not easy to get it (not all Argentines are friendly and helpful to foreigners) but I have it, and it kind of works. And now we also have wi-fi, so I can call home with Skype!

We had a wi-fi adventure/debacle last night. Miriam told us earlier this week that a man was coming to fix it on Saturday, but we have an IES city tour at the time. Rose said that often the router just needs to be restarted, so we wanted to try that so the guy wouldn’t have to come for that simple reason. We tried that, but it didn’t fix the problem, and when Miriam saw us messing with it she decided that the problem needed solving immediately even though we told her that Saturday was perfectly fine. At first we didn’t even know that she was calling, and by the time we realized, it was too late. We were uncomfortable with the situation, because it was late and totally unnecessary…I think maybe she was also partly upset at the company because she was paying for something that wasn’t working. As you might imagine, with her age barrier and our language barrier it was pretty impossible for her to fix a wireless router over the phone, and she wouldn’t listen to our insistence that we didn’t have to fix it right now. Eventually the phone help hit a brick wall and I asked to talk to the IT guy. It was tough, and sometimes I had to ask him to slow down, but eventually I fixed it! Yay! The whole process took over an hour. It was sort of a nightmare.

As for food, everything has been great since the disastrous cheese episode. In fact, I made a big step in my life goal to eat an entire fish by age 30, and I ate a quarter of a fish. Perhaps I should have been more ambitious in that goal. There are three recipes I would love to learn from Maruja: vegetable pot pie, pumpkin pot pie, and her amazing tomato sauce. We still haven’t had empanadas somehow, nor have I had a proper steak. For lunch today I had an amazing pizza with pieces of pumpkin (though the English translation on the menu said “buckets of pumpkin”), onions, olives, and blue cheese. I like ordering random things just to see what happens.

Pictures: Yesterday Rose and I tried to go to the famous cemetery nearby, but it was already closed, and instead we saw the Floralis General. Today we walked around Plaza San Martín with Rose’s dad and our awesome new friend Samantha (who speaks Spanish with us!). There's lots of cool graffiti here. Couples are not shy about showing their affection.

These feet are made for walking (but they'd prefer better shoes)

I walked a lot on my own yesterday while Rose was in Orientation and took loads of pictures. It was fisheye day! So much so that I realized I went a little overboard—in some situations, I would have taken better pictures without it. But that’s ok, lesson learned. I went to Plaza San Martín and saw a HUGE tree that I really wanted to climb.

I had a lunch adventure at a Chilean restaurant. I wanted some of the famous Argentine beef, which we haven’t had yet, so I went straight to the meat section (it said “Parrillada-Steaks”). The cheapest one was $15 (1 American dollar=3.5 Argentine pesos, and they use the same symbol). I asked the waiter what it was, and he said, “queso,” and motioned with his hands to show it was flat. A cheeseburger? I thought. Sure, why not. And I ordered French fries, hoping for the pillow-like fries described lovingly by my mom and grandmother. As I was waiting, it suddenly occurred to me that it might be a grilled cheese sandwich, which I am not a huge fan of, but I quickly banished the thought, remembering that it said “steak.”

Then it arrived. It was grilled cheese. Not a grilled cheese sandwich, just grilled cheese. It was a good 6-7 inches in diameter and had some oregano on top. And the fries were just plain old American-style French fries. I ate as much cheese as I could to be polite, attempting to make it more like pizza by putting it on top of bread, crackers, or fries. But I started to feel sick after half of it. So that was my lunch—fries, cheese, and bread. Ugh.

The restaurant was not very good in general. I asked the waiter for a napkin, and he gave me a very reproachful look that said, “You are an idiot,” and pointed to the cloth napkin that was covering the bread. I thought that was a strange place to put one’s personal napkin. What if there had been two people? The final straw—they charged for the water, and for the bread that was on the table when I came in. One was $2 and one was $5.50, and I’m not sure which one was more of a rip-off. Ok, so I read in my guidebook that it’s becoming common practice to charge for table setting, but it’s still a total rip-off.

I went shopping a little bit and bought some sandals, even though I told myself I was going to browse around longer to decide what constitutes a good deal here. Also I was confused and thought at first that they cost $36, but later realized that they were size 36, which equals American size 6. That explains why the first two pairs were so small, but usually I’m a size 8 so they I’m amazed they fit at all. By the time I noticed that they cost $100, I’d already been sold.

My orientation was very different from Rose’s—the staff introduced themselves and went over the schedule for the next two weeks, and then told us to get to know each other and left. There were about 25 students there. It was a bit difficult to get going, but soon I stopped being so shy. It makes me very grateful for Rice’s O-Week, where they forced us to get to know each other.

There was a lot of confusion about cell phones. I'll get one today or tomorrow

For dinner we had chicken-fried steak! They call it Milanesa here, and it’s pretty popular from what I understand. Felt like home (not really, we never ate that at home).

Today so far we've had more orientation, a combination of boring presentations and middle-school-style activities in Spanish, about as boring as that sounds.

Bienvenidos

Bienvenidos! Yesterday was Argentina Day 1.

I only slept for about 3 hours on the 10 hour flight, but I’m not too tired. The travel part was all very easy; the luggage came out quickly, I exchanged some cash at the airport, Rose and I booked a taxi, and left. Only, there was some confusion about the sequence because the recommended taxi company was in an area that you could not return to, so we booked it first and then we couldn’t go out and find the IES people. The driver just whisked us away. So I gave them a call to let them know we made it alright.

The drive was really fun. The freeways were normal, but once we got into B.A. proper, all bets were off. There were usually no lines down the middle of the one-way streets to mark lanes. That made the streets nice and flexible; they could be one- or two-lane, as the need arose. One consequence (benefit?) is that you can jam more cars into a road without those silly lines telling you that you can only fit so many. At one stoplight I could have reached over and shaken hands with the bus driver next to me. The lights were also unusual—they go green, yellow, red, red-and-yellow, then green, so everyone kind of starts going when they are red-yellow. Maybe that’s because all the cars are manual? The motorcycles and bikes just drive between all the cars. My favorite part of all: no stop signs. At many of the four-way “stops,” the drivers just slow down, make sure no one is coming, and go. If two drivers reach the intersection simultaneously, they just slow down and decide who gets to go first (this could get risky if they played chicken!). It’s faster than stopping, that’s for sure.

My new home is a flat in an old but lovely apartment. At first we were confused about where to go, because 1st floor actually means the 2nd floor, so I went upstairs and rang the doorbell, and a shy teenage girl opened the door (Sophie). That was immediately confusing, and I forgot how to say “baggage,” so there was some awkwardness, and then an adorably tiny old lady appeared, figured out what was going on, and helped us bring the bags up in an old-fashioned elevator despite our protests that we could do it ourselves just fine. I gathered that she wasn’t Miriam, and I figured she was the grandmother of the household, but later found out she was the maid (her name is Maruja, I think. It's unusual so I keep forgetting it). A maid! That was a bit of a shock. She’s very sweet. I’ve already decided that she will be the subject of my documentary (if I end up getting into the How to Make a Documentary class).

We each have our own room, which are comparable in size to a Martel single; they just contain a bed and some shelving. The bad news: no air conditioning. It’s probably just not standard operating procedure here, because it wasn’t on in the airport either. Good thing it’s fall and not summer, so it's not terribly hot, though the humidity is hard to bear. The good news: wireless internet! Hooray Skype! Miriam needs to get the password for us though.

Miriam is very nice and talks slowly and patiently for us. She kept saying, “I want you to be comfortable,” over and over. Sophie is a little harder to understand; maybe her accent is stronger or something. She’s 15 (Kaily’s age!) and shy, and lives here. At lunch she did get into the conversation a couple times; once, when Miriam asked what kind of music we like, Sophie proclaimed vehemently, “Not Jonas Brothers!!”

Then there was this really awkward moment where a bunch of bananas were passed around on a plate, and I was the only one who took one. The plate really threw me off my game, and I became very self-conscious…perhaps they eat bananas differently down here? So I started peeling and no one was talking, and there was an empty plate in front of me (what for?), so I broke off a few pieces with my fingers, and finally I said, “I don’t know what is the normal way to eat a banana here.” Sophie thought this was hilarious, and said, “Well of course, there are two ways, you either peel it and eat it [she motioned this] or you cut it up into pieces with a knife and eat it with a fork!” She had a point. How else would you eat a banana?

Later Miriam took us out to (sort of) show us the school. She took us about halfway and then split to go hang with her homies. We didn’t quite find it yesterday, but we did this morning. It’s about a 20-minute walk.

I was a little surprised by the city. I was expecting something more glamorous, not so dirty and full of homeless people and covered in graffiti. I’ve never seen a homeless child before, and yesterday I saw two boys. Houston has its share of crazy homeless people (luckily the ones here don’t seem that crazy), but downtown is so empty; it’s just a place where people work and look for entertainment. People actually live here. I live here! Don’t get me wrong, it has beautiful architecture and big trees. It’s just a little shocking.

Tonight the family unit was complete with the arrival of María, Miriam’s 18-year-old niece who goes to college around here. Her family lives outside the city, so she spends most of each week here. She said she is studying medicine, which is a bit mysterious since Americans don’t study medicine at age 18. Maybe nursing? Maybe they start young? She’s not as patient with the language, but that’s ok. I’m hoping she can help us meet some Argentines.

The language is going ok so far. It’s a struggle to be coherent and to comprehend, but it’s not terrible. In fact, when I’m not doing things like writing an English blog, I’ve been pleasantly surprised that I’m actually thinking in Spanish! Pretty cool! Good thing my thoughts aren’t too complicated yet since I haven't started classes.