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.
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