--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.