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Energía Argentina.
I’m not even going to apologize for the fact that I’ve severely neglected this blog lately. I know I have, and no amount of apologies can really fix that. 😦 When I last posted, I told you guys that I was at the top of the culture shock curve, right before that frightening-looking cliff. I think that I was accurate because, within a couple of days, I plunged off the edge. I didn’t want to post when I was so homesick but I’m in an excellent mood now, lucky for you! The culture shock is completely different than I expected too. I don’t have any complaints really about the culture itself yet. I still absolutely adore everything about being here: the music, the nightlife, the school, the language, the friendly people, I could go on and on; but what is really pulling me down lately is missing everyone back home. It’s super tough I have to admit, and it makes it quite a bit harder knowing I won’t see you all for the next 10 months. That being said, I’m FINALLY starting to make good friends here–the sole medicine that can save me from my homesickness 🙂
Time is going so incredibly fast. I’ve been here two months, can you believe that?! The semester students in the group are leaving on the 10th of November, which means that they are already halfway through their study abroad!!! With everyone else in my group in a sad sort of shock about being on the otherside of the hill I keep thanking myself for choosing to stay all year. I feel like I’m only just now reaching the first knot on the rope in gym class–I could never get to the top and ring the bell if I were leaving in two months. However much I feel like I NEED to see you guys over Christmas break (summer break here…) I know that if I’m strong it will be worth it and that you guys will still be there when I get back. I’m going to have to give up a few valuable hugs from you all and some Olive Garden breadsticks for this experience. I’ve already learned so much about myself and changed so much you might not recognize me.
And I dress nice (am dressing nicer…) 😛 I’m not one for fashion necessarily, but let me explain my first couple of weeks here, enserio. Have you seen the movie Inception? No joke: During my first weeks here, I would be walking down the street and feel like I was intruding on someone’s subconscious. The people would begin to double take at me, turning their heads in curiosity, like the projections in a dream in Inception. They would stare at me more and more until I really wanted an Alice in Wonderland shrinking potion. Of course, that was an impossibility, so I changed the way I dressed. I went out last night with a group of Argentines for a friend’s birthday. One of the girls who went out with us told me that she had no idea I wasn’t from here until I opened my mouth and told her, which made me feel accomplished. I am really trying to learn the culture from the inside out as much as I can.
Her comment was also particularly uplifting for me because the women here are beautiful. At first, and still a little bit, I was terrified of them. I’m only just now starting to make girlfriends because they seemed so unapproachable and intimidating. That’s not a bad thing necessarily, I don’t want to offend anybody at all!!! They’re just dressed to the nines, always, skinny, with long dark hair and a certain pride in their eyes that you’d have to see to understand. They speak impossibly fast and don’t hesitate to show how much they love their friends in public (stroking each other’s hair all the time, rubbing each other’s feet, etc.) Not that we don’t do that, but when was the last time I gave you a foot rub??? For the typical American, it makes it hard to picture yourself as a part of their group. You suddenly feel that zit on your face has grown to an impossible size, that your hair is frizzy and uncontrollable, and that everyone’s noticing your little tiny paunch in the dress you chose to go out in…which couldn’t be further from the truth but still makes me shake in my fancy leather boots. 🙂 I’m definitely working on my confidence with them though. You’d be shocked to see what I wear to school everyday. It’s not even that fancy but I would probably only wear something like that if it were my birthday back in the states. So long T-shirt and jeans; hello scarves, heels and skinny jeans.
^^The above picture is me holding a MEDIUM-sized coffee at McDonald’s haha But it’s the only picture I have of me wearing a scarf (with my rain jacket because it’s constantly raining here…). I don’t have many other pictures lately but I’m working on the camera situation.
Anyhow, I was going to talk about the Argentine nightlife in particular in this blog. I’ve started writing a bunch of entries about all of the different experiences I’ve been having, but they all started making me homesick so they’re sitting in my drafts box half finished. I will post them as I finish them 🙂
This weekend is a four day weekend. Today is Monday, the last day, but it still feels like I’ve had a week off, maybe even two. I have some really important midterms next week and so I’m studying today, but the rest of the weekend I just went out and had fun. I’ve already told you that the nightlife here is rather insane–hours upon hours of constant dancing, partying, and socializing–but I must tell you that this weekend, as I floundered along after all my friends trying to keep up, I experienced the insanity on a whole new level. On Monday, I got invited by one of the guys in my class to his “country” for Thursday and Friday nights and half of Saturday. To say I was completely out of my league with this type of experience and unprepared for it is an understatement. I’ve never been to a country club–actually I’m not completely sure this was a country club…it was a huge house with a beautiful yard, pool, and pretty much every ammenity you’d ever ask for about an hour outside of the capital–and maybe it’s just my small town roots but I am not really accustomed to such extravagance.
^^Me enjoying the tranquility of suburban posh 😉
^^You can’t really tell because it’s a bad picture, but this is the greenest grass I’ve ever seen in my life.
I’m not going to lie, we partied for two days straight and slept about as many hours as a cat spends with its eyes open…which is saying something. No one seemed to ever tire though! We just
kept pounding the energizer bunny drum. And although Saturday was a relief when I finally got back to my own bed, I only slept about five hours before I couldn’t stand it anymore and got up to enjoy the beautiful sunny day.
Saturday night was a friends birthday, the one which I mentioned earlier. We all surprised him with a preboliche fiesta (because you can’t go out to the dance clubs until 2 AM here, they pregame at around 11 or 12 and hang out until they can actually go dance…) and then went to a boliche and danced until 6 in the morning. I wore my new heels, which I actually didn’t completely regret until we had to run to catch the bus home. You guys would be SO proud of me though! I didn’t lose anything, injure myself, or break anything all night Saturday DESPITE wearing heels*.It was a fun night all in all. Just a generic night of dancing, nothing too crazy 🙂 Oh! One thing that just had me in total fits of laughter were the guys dancing on the bar. Not only were there guys dancing on the bar without being thrown off, but there were (before our group got up there) ONLY guys dancing on the bar, and the way they were dancing was just, for a silly yanqui like me the summation of hilarity. They weren’t bad at dancing, far the opposite, but they could seriously move their hips better than me. Those of you who have seen me belly dance know that’s saying something. I seriously envied their moves.
^^Too much to explain the carebear costume lol Just don’t worry about it.
When I woke up Sunday afternoon, I fully intended to spend the day studying and have a quiet relaxing night at home, but since my host mom and host sister are gone for the weekend, my host brother couldn’t resist continuing the celebration. He invited a bunch of friends over for what he told me was just intended to be dinner. HA! We DID end up having a big dinner, to his credit, but then a group went out to buy some beer and I foolishly mentioned that I had bought ping pong balls and poor excuses for solo cups a couple weekends ago and knew how to play beer pong. That was that. Although there wasn’t enough beer to really play, I managed to explain the entire game and we got a few games in. It was an awesome taste of home and everyone had a great time. I went to bed at 6 AM this morning again…and I was the first one to poop out. I heard my host brothers talking in the kitchen this morning at 10, and I’m pretty sure they didn’t go to bed until like 10:30 in the morning. Ridiculous!
Anyways, I have to get back to studying….which is tedious and annoying (Seriously, this is ONE sentence in my history book, and the next page, which consists of two of these columns, has a grand total of four sentences. I posted it to facebook and said I felt like my mind was running on a hamster wheel…so accurate.)
I promise you guys I will try to keep up with the blog more than I have been. I am just having too much fun actually living here to write about living here 🙂 Love you all!
*The rest of the weekend I cut my middle finger really deeply trying to clean up a champagne bottle that someone…who me?!…broke, scraped my back on the side of the pool, and lost 100 pesos, but considering my usual average…I still have my phone, uncracked 🙂 and I haven’t broken any bones or chandeliers or or or or…so you should be proud of me, really, considering I’ve spent three days awake with minimal sleep!
Maté-Maticas
Awww…it feels so nice to sit. I’ve been running around since the crack of dawn this morning (9 AM haha) and doing errands and such so I’m feeling a bit cansada. This post really doesn’t have a particular focus so if you decide to continue reading be prepared to try and follow my stream of consciousness. It’s a chaotic atmosphere, my mind.
Anyways, today I had several goals, most of them which I met 🙂 I had to go with Christine to buy PotterCon tickets, then we were going to go to the maté store, then I had to go to my local cell phone company AGAIN to deal with yet another headache of a misunderstanding, and through it all I had my eye on this alpaca sweater that, for now, resides in a shop across the street that I have been trying not to splurge on. It´s actually pretty cheap because it´s on sale (only 100 pesos, which is about $20) but I still should test my resolve and refrain from buying things that aren’t necessity. Maybe if I successfully get a job or if I do well on my first project next Thursday or something I will reward myself. But it’s hard. Humph!
I’ll start by explaining PotterCon. Yeah, it’s like ComicCon but with Harry Potter. In my opinion it’s a therapy session for everyone, including myself, who still haven’t recieved their Hogwart’s letter (Do you think owls come all the way to Argentina?) Throw out the boring muggle clothing, go to the park and find yourself a magical looking stick because for the next eight hours you will be challenged to duels, sorted into houses, and maybe even meet goblins and house elves. I don’t have any Harry Potter stuff, and if I did I don’t think it would have made the cut and apparated to Argentina with me….but I’m still kind of excited in a nerdy sort of way to eat a chocolate frog. We found out about it from this girl we met at the hostel in Córdoba. She and her boyfriend, from Rosario which is about 4 hours outside of Buenos Aires, were there enjoying their first vacation together. She’s very excited and keeps posting on my Facebook and liking everything. It’s kind of adorable 😛 Anyways, tickets were sold out so we’re going to have to buy them at the door on Saturday. Then we went to the mate store recommended by a director from our program as not having crappy tourist quality tea supplies. You may have seen a couple of pictures on my Facebook of the mate I bought and been worried that Argentina has turned me into a drug addict 🙂
In all actuality, the supplies to drink mate, the ritual, and the effects of mate are all similar haha but I can quit whenever I want I promise!!! Haha, but no really. Mate is like caffeine (matteine) but it just makes you feel soooo much better than coffee. It doesn’t make your heart race uncontrollably, keep you up at night, or make you shake. You just feel genuinly healthy and awake. It’s amazing. There’s an entire culture surrounding it and very specific customs. It’s a social thing kind of like hookah would be (except you’re not destroying your lungs!) and it’s even more common in Uruguay. You can tell a true Uruguayan from a tourist because of their third limb, the thermos of hot water they wouldn’t go anywhere without. I bought one while I was in Uruguay. It came with a car charger, a wall adapter, a shoulder strap, and a side strap if I wanted to carry it as a clutch..wouldn’t wanna be in a bind without my hot water! Below is a picture of my thermos, yerba (the tea), and mate/bombilla (the gourd you drink it out of):
Water costs money at every restaurant you go to but they’ll fill your thermos with hot water for free. It’s fantastic. You drink mate out of a little gourd after a complicated preparation process. It doesn’t taste very good (like bitter tea with an aftertaste of tobacco) but once you associate the taste with the feeling, you’re golden 🙂 Anyways, you drink it through a metal straw called a bombilla that looks better suited to cooking heroine. The tea looks like drugs too.
I think it’d be like the perfect way to quitting smoking actually (although I don’t smoke.) It would give you something to go do for five or ten minutes every so often (like a smoking break) and then give you a little energy and relaxation several times a day. I’d recommend it if you can figure out how to make it and find someplace that sells it there (drinking it from tea bags is really really not the same.) Learning the social rules is a bit complicated without a guide though. I think, though, that I’m going to be thoroughly addicted to maté and all of the customs that come with it by the time I head home. Ready yourselves 😉
Anyways, after the mate stuff, Christine went home to eat and I headed to the cell phone store to fix my phone. Although it’s been sending texts and making calls just fine over the last month, it wouldn’t send them anymore…I ended up going to a little branch store like 5 blocks from my house, where they told me I’d have to go to a bigger store to try and get it fixed at the mall…which was like twelve blocks. But before I went I talked to the guys working at the counter for about twenty minutes to a half hour about Argentina and studying here. Everyone is just so friendly and interesting to talk to. One man working there had never even been out of Buenos Aires and he was around 40 or 45 years old. Apparently that’s not that uncommon. He and his coworker were both completely perplexed as to why I WANTED to be here over the US. They told me to come back anytime if I had any questions or if I just wanted to chat. It’s interesting just to hear other people’s stories. Anyways, I went to the cell phone store and got everything sorted out. They’re always very helpful…but my service
is just mediocre and I have a hard time understanding my bill/getting things to work
Standing In Argentina 