Hello my public. This is what I blog like.


First, everyone is obligated to go see Little Miss Sunshine. Best movie I've seen in ages, where 'age' ≈ 2 years. Quick plot summary: Heroin-snorting grandfather trains granddaughter, Olive, to compete in beauty contests. Unfortunately, she's not Regina George or attractive. Whatever, she wants to follow her dreams. Due to extenuating circumstances, the whole family takes a roadtrip from Albequerque to California so Olive can compete in the Little Miss Sunshine contest. Why this movie is good: the characters are so freaking well written. Here's a little brainstorm of adjectives me and Pags thought up to describe: rich, deep, compelling, complex, believable, endearing. Go see it.

Then (or before, whatever), watch this documentary on beauty pageants. Disturbing. Here are some highlights:

• A 0-18 month old category
  
• 18 month olds with hair extensions in aforementioned category
• a 6 year old boy whose mother seriously debates paying for his human growth hormone treatments or continuing to enter him in pageants
• a wretched mother destroying her 5 year old Swan, first by naming her Swan, and then by psychologically destroying her further by entering her into these senseless, life-ruining circuses.

Let's talk about foreign things now!

I last left you, my faithful readers, in the desert in La Rioja. My latest travelational exploit was Øktøbërfëst in Villa General Belgrano, the provincia of Córdoba. Legend has it that V.G.B has the best oktoberfest outside of Münich. Which may or may not be true. I mean, I have my critiques of this one, but I really don't have anything to compare it to other than Meghan Fenzel's pictures from when she went last year. Anyway, I made reservations at Cabañas Las Princesas, or The Princess Cabins. People in my cabin were Pat, Kristinn (dude from Iceland with a chick name), Ellie, and her friend. Other people at the Princess Cabins were Ben, Nikki, Aron, Adam, Alejandro, and Harsha.

Rewind to me making reservations. Oktoberfest is pretty much the only thing to do in V.G.B., so there's a crapton of hostels and cabins and whatnot. On the cabins' website, they had a little map that shows their location. Unfortunately, their website is down, so I made one on paint so you can get an idea of what it looked like:



Cool. Right on a the river with a beach, like 5 blocks from the bier garden, close to the bus stop. Check. Make the reservation.

Back to the current time. We get there and discover, to our dismay, that the map above is misleading. Apparently, the cartographers forgot to put a scale or that break symbol you need to put when you make a graph and you don't start at zero. What's worse, there was a taxi strike for the weekend we were there. Here is what the map should have looked like:


!!

9 km (5.625 mi) from the bus stop. That's 90 city blocks, or approximately twice the length of the subte line I ride. It was located in a different town. So we kind of freaked out for a bit. Just a bit. Then we realized that although the taxis were on strike, remises weren't, which is a car with a hired driver, and the two options cost about the same. We also found out that there was a bus that ran in the mornings and early afternoon that left from a spot about 20 minutes walking from the cabin. And the paro was over the next day. So it actually wasn't such a big whoop.

Oktoberfest was sweet - mostly beer. Delicious beer.
Things that were good:

• Honey beer
• red beer
• blond beer
• regular beer
• october flavored beer
• drinking the above by the liter
• repeating
  
• sweet hats
• dancing on the stage at the end of the night
• salsa-playing harpists on the main stage at a German cultural festival
• COPA completely taking over
• Adventures to the middle of a river with a completely full moon and being able to see perfectly
• Having three girls ask me for my number after I danced to Hung Up in a circle

Things that were less good:

• Having to think in dollars and not in pesos
• losing my sweet hat and my sweet bierstein even though I "hid" them so dilligently outside the boliche
• The concentration of lederhosen was a little low for my tastes
• the -wursts were pretty much just hot dogs
• being in the middle of a river near the cabin at 2 A.M. and having Kristinn (who decided to not come back to the cabins in the taxi with us) send me a text message that said "Where are you guys? Please respond!"
• Accidentally elbowing one of the aforementioned girls in the face later because the club was so crowded and hey, I had to dance.
  

All in all, the quantity of good>quantity of bad.



Since Øktoberfest, I have been reaping the benefits of parents coming to visit. Jen's dad's flight got delayed, so he missed his flight, and as consolation to Jen, who was quite disappointed, he instructed her to take 2 or 3 of her favorite people out to dinner on him. Lucky for me, I fall into that category! Benjen and I had a terrific dinner at this trendy, posh restaurant that played videos of sadomasachistic softcore emo porn and dined on sushi, grilled shrimp with avacado moussé, rack of lamb, filet mingôn, salmon, white wine, torts with mango soups and bruleé, and the like. All for under 20 bucks a head! Thanks Herman!

Then, when Mr. Lewkowitz finally got here, he treated the three of us to dinner at Siga La Vaca, which I may have previously mentioned in this space. All you can eat of any part of the cow you can conceive of, plus each person at the table is entitled to an entire bottle of read wine. Good stuff.

Ben's mom got here yesterday, so the three of us are actually going back to SLV tomorrow. Getting pumped.



I'm pretty sure I'm going to Montevideo this weekend. Gunna go to the beach. I guess that means I need to get a bathing suit. Probably. They say it's pretty European here...


Academic stuff: School year is winding down. I handed in the only real thing I've had to do since classes started around July 28th, which was a 6 page paper on Facundo: Civilización y barbarie, which may possibly be the densest book ever written.
Things left to do before Nov. 16th when classes are done for real:

1. 15 minute oral presentation on Blacks in Argentina in the 19th Century
2. Midterm, in which I need to summarize (orally, with a partner) part of an article that claims that - listen to this - your ABO blood type corresponds to your personality type. I'll have to write an entry later just railing on how scientific thought does not exist in this country. Scientific method, people. Observation, hypothesis, dependent/independent variable. These are not widely accepted as valid in scientific endevours. Don't even get me started on the evolution lesson. I'll rant about it eventually. I swear it could solve most of this country's problems. It makes me really look forward to orgo next semester. Honestly.
   
3. 4 page paper on human rights in the Arg.
   
4. 15 page paper on children's literature. Hopefully I will be able to mention moles who get shat on.
   
5. Final oral exam for the non-science-accepting psychology class.

I think I can probably handle it.

Absentee ballot is getting faxed tomorrow, and FedEx is offering free priority shipping to all citizens abroad here. Sweet. Voting is pretty much my favorite.

P.S. I figured out how to configure my keyboard to be "International," thus all the unnecessary accented characters. áéíóú sometimes ý, ñÑ¿¡²³¤€¼½¾‘’¥×«»¬äåé®þüúíóö«»¬áßðø¶´æñµµç¹£÷¦ÖÓÍÚÜÞÉÅÄÁ§ÐØ°¨Æ¢Ç

How sweet am I?

For any psych majors, I am listening to Gunther's album while I'm writing this. Let's see how it manifests itself.

This past weekend was a long weekend and also my birthday weekend, so I went away to La Rioja province with Maria (tee you eff tee ess represent), Mara, and Glen. The theme of the weekend was pretty much the reaction of everyone when I told them I was going to La Rioja (host mom, dad, brother, professor, program director):La Rioja? Nobody goes to La Rioja.

Bit of background:
La Rioja is in the desert in northwestern part of the country. Poorest province per capita. Has 1/6th the population density of Mendoza province. Major export: aceitunas. Blech. Aceitunas are green olives. The gods have ambrosia, Lucifer has aceitunas. They're in everything and disgusting.

Back on topic:
Wednesday night we leave from the bus station in BsAs at 8.30 pm and arrive in La Rioja (La Rioja is both the name of the province and the capital city) at 11:00 the next morning. So you don't have to strain yourself, it's 14.5 hours. Luckily, the bus was pretty luxurient with leather lazy-boy style seats that reclined to about 150 degrees. Theoretically, one would be able to sleep on such a bus if the bus drove on the interstate. However, we drove on dirt roads about half the time, so you know, it was bumpy and stuff. I was able to sleep, though. Ok this post is pretty boring so far.

Racism!

We pull in to the bus station in La Rioja and Mara and Maria go to ask for directions to the tourism office, because we traveled 14 hours without any real plans for what to do when we got there. Two police officers come over to me and Glen and ask us to register in the police office/broom closet. Real routine, they say. Ok, seems pretty harmless. They take us into the 'office' and take out a blank sheet of paper and ask for our names and document numbers. Then they ask to look in Glen's bag. Real routine. They take out every single one of his belongings - underwear, unfold them and shake them out. Contact case - open each one of his compartments. We're just looking for guns and drugs. Real routine. Blah blah blah. When they're finally done, I put my bag on the table. I don't even get my zipper halfway opened and they say we're free to go. Sorry? Didn't you just make Glen unpack his entire bag? But you don't really care what's in my bag? By this time I was pissed cuz I realized it was a race issue, so I started unpacking everything - opening up my camera case, opening my toiletry kit, etc. They insisted that we were free to go, so we took off. Asswipes.
By the way, we were the only people they asked to register.

Next, we went to the tourism office to find out what people do here. The people in the office were helpful and attentive since probably 5 people go in there a day. What they basically told us was that we were on the wrong side of the province and we had to take a bus to Villa Union, which was like 3 hrs away. And the last bus for the day left in 20 minutes. So we thank them and run like crazy yanquis to fetch a cab to go 8 blocks to the terminal so we don't miss the bus. (Gunther is over now, switched to Journey Greatest Hits). The bus tickets are sold out. Yes!! Sweet!! Don't worry, reader. We weren't stranded. The people in the tourist office were dirty dirty Argentine liars. There was another bus that left in an hour. No problem. Cool.

We go to Villa Union.

Villa Union is the smallest little shittown ever. But it is adorable and I love it. We stayed in this little hostel with this adorable little family and vomited and vomited from the adorableness.

Friday (the beginning of my third decade) we went to Talampaya and Ishigaulasto National Parks. Freaking sweet. Not gunna be hubristic and try to describe these places using words, so get yourself to my facebook albums or http://picasaweb.google.com/stevenpdyer.

Saturday. Did some horseback riding. Saw some more cave drawings that were probably fake. Paid 6 dollars for a 3 hour horseback ride. This made me content. My horse was 30 years old and probably fractured some joint-type bones, but he could giddyup when I told him to. Mara informed me that I ride Western style, not English, and that I know how to 'post' while trotting. I call it "not becoming sterile while trotting". Plate tectonics continued to play a major role in the scenery. La Rioja is the spawn of Arizona and the Meridiani Planum.
In the afternoon, we took probably the most incredible bus ride anyone has ever taken to Chilecito, which means 'Little Chile'. The chileciteños must have failed geography or something, because it is neither a small country nor a small pepper. They just failed across the board. Anyway, Glen has the pictures of the bus ride. I'll get a link to them soon or something.
Chilecito was a neat little town. Everyone in this little clothing boutique hit on me and Glen because we knew the lyrics to Celebration.

Sunday morning we were going to go to the botanical gardens (which specialize in different varieties of cactus), but they were having a special showing for reporters only. Jerks. Didn't want to look at your stupid cacti anyway. The ladies went on a trek up a mountain and Glen and I went on a photo-snapping spree throughout the town.
Bus station - the creepy man with the falling off face didn't chop us into pieces and put us in his
juicer. Success!

Went back to La Rioja (city) for the sole purpose of going to the state-owned ice cream parlor to get a scoop of communism. Took a nice little photo essay. Then I had all of my dreams shattered by the evil woman who worked there, saying that La Rioja has never had state-owned ice-cream parlors. Fucking dream bubble popper.

Disconcerting moment of the trip - it was a holy day, for a saint or a virgin or something, and they were having a procession from the church to the plaza. It was probably the creepiest thing ever, and that's not an exaggeration. Yes it is. Ok, it was a little uncomfortable because I appreciate the separation of church and state.
Accompanying the statue of the virgin was the military. And the police. (side note, addressed to the Argentine military and police- if you want to command respect, don't text message and make cat calls while in uniform and in public. Might help the total disregard for your position and authority. Just saying. It might be a start).
The priest was giving a sermon about how God hates gays and how homosexuality will destroy all of our families.
Then, two nuns recited the Lord's prayer in the Devil's Interval, and the procession started. I never want to see another religious symbol followed by men in fatigues again. I had to eat some apple pie, invade some countries, play some baseball, have a stable governent for more than 20 years, and gain 40 pounds to overcome the discomfort.

Then we came home. I had 81 emails. The Gmail notifier was working overtime. Thanks for the birthday wishes, everyone! Also, it's really cool that my host family actually missed me.

P.S. In La Rioja, they say r's like y's or ll's. So it's "la zhee-OH-ja".

P.P.S. My last post was better than this one. I acknowledge this.

On the periphery of Buenos Aires' sex trade...

I'm just going to give the general rundown of this past weekend. Many people ask me, "Steve, what is your typical weekend like in Buenos Aires, Argentina??" If you are one of these people or if you hadn't really thought about it until now, but now you are really interested in the answer, here is the answer! This is how most of my weekends go.

Friday night began at 11:45 pm when after texting 7 people from 10-10:30 pm, I got one affirmitive response from Tim Hallowell. Cell phone calls here don't happen cuz it's like 1.5 pesos/min. Tim, Greg, and I decide to check out The Alamo. I had no idea what type of place was, other than it was a bar. I arrive at 12:15 am and discover that it is an ex-pat bar. Important features:

• 90% of clientele are American college students
• both of the bartenders are American, which leads to funny epiphanies when "oon zheen ahnd toe-nick" is met with "So you want a gin and tonic?"
• Tequila shots are 4 pesos ($1.33) for ladies and 7 pesos for guys
• They show ALL NFL games
• Sunday lunches have all you can drink beer.

At about 1 am, literally 40 COPAs roll in. Let me say this: COPAs are superior to all other Americans in Buenos Aires. We're smarter, more intelligent, and morally superior. Just saying.

Jesse lives-around-the-corner-from-me Rogers' friend was there, and this friend is a promoter for various clubs in BsAs. This particular night he was promoting Mint, so a bunch of COPAs got 20 peso passes that let us jump to the front of the line (instead of waiting for an hour and paying 50 pesos). We head out at about 3:30 to go to Mint. Mint has two floors - one that plays techno so loud that the soundwaves can fracture ribs, and a hip hop floor with a more reasonable sound level. It's a buena honda and I think that I've mentioned it before. Anyway, at 5:30, the bouncers close the doors between the two floors. Then, everyone on the hip-hop floor (including me, obviously) gets corralled by bouncers out of the building and onto the patio. Once everyone is outside, everyone on the patio gets corralled off of the patio and onto the beach (which is no longer Mint territory) and gates are closed. We realize that we just got kicked out. 400 of us. Apparently they were over capacity and we have to go around and wait in a line to get back into the club so they can control how many people go in at a time. Hey geniouses, isn't that what you were supposed to be doing in the first place? Me and the three people I was with decide that this was just as good as time as any to test out our cross-language chewing out skills. I think it was the first time I correctly used the phrase "concha de tu madre." Mad props to me. Two of us had jackets at the coat check, so after a few min of fighting with the bouncer, he lets one of us go retrieve the coats. Thanks, ass.

We decide to bounce.

We grab a cab, and it's the first female taxi driver I've had. Cool, man. First we have to drop off Jasmine. Jasmine lives on the corner of two avenues, which means that all taxi drivers know where it is. Jasmine is a native speaker, so there was no miscommunication. (At this point, your foreshadowing detectors are undoubtedly tingling. Just a few more sentences.) We are driving down Avenida Cabildo. One of the subte lines runs under it, so it's a pretty well-known street. We pass the last subte stop on the line. Jasmine is talking on her cell (ok, so sometimes people talk on cell phones). We go twenty more blocks. Jasmine realizes that we are pretty much no longer in the limits of the city of Buenos Aires because we passed her street 30 blocks ago. (that's the feeling of release for the reader, cuz we finally got to the point of the foreshadowing). Another chance to practice chewing out skills! All 4 of us at once! We tell her to pull over and we get out without paying, cross the street, and hop on a colectivo to get back to civilization. Jesse lives-around-the-corner-from-me Rogers and I hop in a taxi and go home. I get to my house at 6:30. 6:40 my 31 yr old host brother comes stumbling in and says "Steve, I have an awesome place we should go to right now. Let's go." I politely decline. He goes into his room for about 5 minutes and then goes back out. 6:45 I get into bed and go to sleep.

2 pm my alarm goes off. I shut it off.

3.30 pm I wake up, check facebook, go into the kitchen, and make a turkey sammich. 4.15 said host brother wakes up and comes into the kitchen to join me. I begin to inquire about his evening. He proudly tells me that he had one of the best nights of his life the night previous. He and 5 friends went to a whorehouse. He chose the girl from Warsaw. His other options were a german, an austrian, and some argentine chicks, all between 20 and 25 years of age. I am assured that all of the women were knock-outs. Unfortunately, they charge a lot for their services, which is why he returned home at 6:30. He had spent all of his money between 12 am and 6 am and had to come home to get more and happened to invite me to "a great house party he knows of." He got back home for good at 9 am.

Start my day Saturday by being 15 min late for a thing at the Plaza de Mayo that was pretty lame. Went to Subway. They don't have chipotle sauce here, which means I'll never go to Subway again here.

Saturday dinner we went to a middle eastern place with 8 others. We decided to meet at 10. I got there at 10:10 and was the second one there. By 10:35 everyone was there. Food was terrific, company was exquisite, service so-so. There was a dog wandering around the kitchen. We paid the check at 1:45 am. We part ways, and Greg and I go to a house party hosted by a German chick where the COPAs Ben, Raul, and Alejandro are. The hostess won't let us in cuz it's too full, so Ben, Fernando the Spaniard, and Marcos the Argentine decide to leave and we walk 5 blocks to a bar. There's a huge line, which pisses off Fernando. He really needs to pee and drink a beer. He also would like to follar. After waiting an hour in line and we are 3 feet from the door, Fernando gets fed up with waiting, so we get in a taxi and go to another boliche "that is wicked sweet." Greg parts ways to go to where his Harvard friend Mia is. The 4 remaining go to a birthday party in the function room of a snazzy hotel downtown, but the doorman doesn't let us in cuz it's too full. Get in another taxi. Marcos knows a great club. The bouncer doesn't let us in cuz we're 4 guys and it happens to be a swingers' club. Marcos argues with him. We're told to come back on a Wednesday by ourselves cuz we'll get in and the cover is only 30 pesos instead of 60. Or comeback anytime with a girl. For those who are unfamiliar with what a swinger's club is, I offer you Marcos' explanation (which he explained in English):

So you go to this club with your girlfriend. And you go to someone who looks nice and you say to them, "you fuck my girlfriend while I watch?" And then some guy come to you and he say to you "you fuck my girlfriend while I watch?"

Just for the record, Mom, never once did I even consider going into the club, even if the guy would have let us.

After this last rejection, we finally found a place that would let us in. Cell phone says 4:45. It's a nice place near the Recoleta cementary and it's playing Bon Jovi's "Shot through the heart" and Journey. It's gunna be a good night.

5 am, they change format to Argentine national rock. Similar, except with 75% less awesometude. 6 am they change format to merengue/salsa/brazilian. 6:30 we bounce and Ben and I go to the 24 hour McDonald's across the street. A group of 6 girls at the table next to us hears us speaking English and starts joking about us, so we let them know that we speak castellano. They comment on how cute we talk and join us. Me and Ben are pretty much celebrities and everything we say is the most interesting thing ever.

Cab, home. Sleep at 8 am.

Wake up at 4 pm. Go with Fede to watch the Boca game at Grandma's house cuz Silvia has the ladies over for tea since my host dad is in Oregon for his 40th high school reunion (he was a foreign exchange student).

9 pm the whole extended fam comes over for dinner cuz it's Auntie Cachita's bday. I always love big family functions. I'm a family-oriented kinda guy. As ususal, the conversation turns to how Americans are fat and Argentines are all crazy and have body image problems, and everyone puts me to shame with their in-depth analysis of every good American film, none of which I had seen. I translated some of the notes in Eduardo's yearbook for the family. Lots of laughter. Yes, everyone in America gets a yearbook, Argentina. I come to the conclusion that Argentina is the only country where people still like Americans. Or, just as likely, the only place where the people don't have the balls to tell Americans to their face that we suck.

Either way, it's 12 am at this point and my weekend is technically over. Everyone goes home.

Congratulations if you read this whole post! It's 3 pages in Word, single spaced, size 12 Times New Roman.

This blog post is dedicated to Matt Chan cuz he pointed out that it's been 8 days since my last confession.

That part last time where I said my schedule is ok is a fib. It's great. I switched my satire class for a children's literature class, which meets 3 hrs a week instead of three and has only one paper at the end instead of a midterm, take-home, final, final paper, and 2 other papers. Life is good. But that's not the real reason why it's a good class. The real reason is today we read "Birolo the Mole and Everything That Could Have Fallen on His Head."(1) Here's how the book goes: A mole pokes his head out of his hole to see if the sun is out so he can go play. A "sausage that is not a sausage" falls on his head. He becomes upset, so he goes out on a search to find out who pooped on his head. In "are you my mother" style, Birolo goes around the barnyard to ask the animals if they pooped on his head. And sure enough, they each vehemently deny the accusation. And to prove it, they say "I don't poop like that, I poop like this," and then shows Birolo what their poop looks like. By pooping. (This is a picture book). After asking the pigeon, horse, cow, goat, and bunny, he finally gets to the houseflies. The houseflies taste the poop and tell Birolo that it was the dog! Birolo then goes and poops on the sleeping dog's head. THE END.

P.S. Read this book if you want to learn Spanish onomatopoeia for the pooping sounds of various animals, read this book. Hint: bunnies go "plip plip plip plip"

P.P.S. This class is worth 1.5 Tufts credits. That's the same as organic chemistry.


1.) Holzwarth, Werner (texto) y Erlbruch, Wolf (ilustraciones). Del Topito Birolo y de todo lo que pudo haberle caído en la cabeza. Traducción de Francisco Morales. Buenos Aires, Centro Editor de América Latina, 1991.

Two things to start out.

1) I'm pissed because Snakes on a Plane doesn't come out here until september 14, and they're calling it "Terror on Board". Balderdash.

2) My host dad works in film/tv and was the producer of the family film "Secret of the Andes." John Rhys-Davies was in this movie. John Rhys-Davies is a 7 foot tall actor, so they had to buy him a special big bed for him to sleep in during the week they were shooting in northern Argentina. When they were done filming, my host dad volunteered to take the bed home with him and he and my host mom are currently sleeping in it. Who is this John Rhys-Davies? You may know him as the actor who played Gimli in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, or more importantly, the voice of MacBeth from Gargoyles. That's right, my host parents sleep in Gimli's bed.


Ok now that the important news is out of the way, onto boring things:

Classes started for real. My schedule is ok - I only have class tue, wed, thur, so I'll be able to travel on weekends, but I have more hours of class than I would have at Tufts taking 5 credits. I'll get over it. My classes are Psychology of the Personality, Argentine Literature, a Spanish class through my program veiled with the title "Human Rights in Argentina since 1973" and Problems of Argentine Literature, which is sort of like a satire class. The first three are going to be a piece of cake cuz they're at private universities, but the Problems class is going to destroy me because it's at the public university (It's backwards here - the public universities have a higher academic level than the private ones). It also assumes prior knowledge of Argentine literature. And it meets 6 hours a week. All at once.

UBA (University of Buenos Aires, aforementioned public university) is a real interesting specimen of culture. It is chronically underfunded by the government, so the building is really run down and the professors barely get paid. It is quite common for the professors to strike because they haven't been paid in months, or for students to strike for whatever reason. It is also a very political place - there are posters and signs and picketers and pamphleters everywhere. The police and military are not allowed to enter the school, so it creates an interesting atmosphere. I'll eventually take pictures and post them to better illustrate.

I think I'm going to a dude ranch this weekend. Let's see if I can get it organized tomorrow. If not, it will have to wait for a couple of weeks because next week COPA is going to Iguazú. Speaking of which, the Brazilians are stingy bastards. They charged me $111 for the tourist visa, but it's only valid for 4 days. That's the same they charge for a 5 year tourist visa. Jerks. Stupid latinamerican burocracy. It's not like I was planning on going to Brazil for longer than 4 days or anything. I just kinda want to complain about something. Everything's been so good so far.

That's enough blogation for now. Chauchau

I've been giving out the wrong cell phone number to people for the past 2 weeks.

I've decided that it's hard to have culture shock when everything is going terrifically. There is hardly anything to complain about so far. Allow me to relay to you what has been happening:

First, and most importantly, BEEF. The beef here is so good. Us gringos need to teach our cows to speak spanish or something. I don't know what they do to make it so good. Probably half of the good things that have happened so far revolve around beef. This week I went with Fede and Augus (the bros) to an asado with their friends from work. "Asado" is a word that means "everything that is good" or "barbecue." What happens is you put an entire cow on the altar (or grill), invite 20 people, and eat the cow and drink 9 bottles of red wine (asados are a team effort, so most people bring a bottle of wine or a chunk of cow) and engage in uproarious belly laughter for like 6 hours. They put every part of the cow on the grill - regular steak, ribs, entrails (i'm not sure if that is the best translation cuz it's just regular beef), chorizo sausage (holy crap is it good), sweetbreads (aka thalamus glands aka brain - so good) and the small intestines (they are so good cuz they get really crispy on the outside). After you eat literally 4 lbs of beef you order 3 gallons of gellato for $7 and eat it all (yeah, they have gellato delivery places!). We ordered 6 flavors, and I'm pretty sure one was mayonnaise. They said it was mango, but I'm pretty sure it was Hellman's. Either way, it was still really good. To review: beef, wine, beef, gellato, laugh. It looks like this: (I stole this picture from my friend Nikki)



What made this asado particularly fun was that I'm 80% sure that there were famous people there. My dad and one brother work at the big TV station here in BsAs and my other brother is a professional photographer that does work for TV stations and some big name magazines (and also lingerie catalogs - life is tough for him), so they have friends in the entertainment biz. Two fo the people that were at the asado (it was actually one of their houses) are radio personalities on an FM station here, which I'm pretty sure makes them famous. They key part of their title is "personality", meaning they are the best people imaginable to get drunk with. So much fun.

Another highlight of this past week: I got to see Mel Henry a couple of times during the 4 days our stays overlapped! It was great to see her. I also got to meet her 'amigo' Pablo, who is freaking awesome. We kinda just hung out the first day, which centered around consumption - a coffee, some burrs in a pub during happy hour (they call it happy hour here), then pizza. I was quite impressed with her acquired argentinosity from how well she speaks castellano (it's not spanish here) to even her facial expressions and hand gestures. Good job, Mel.
Mel and Pablo and Jeff Goldberg (another Jumbo here) and I went out to Maluco Belezza her last night here, which is a Brazilian club. It was awesome because the place was full of Brazilians and pretty much every single song is choreographed a la electric slide, except for it's the sexiest booty-shaking electric slide you've ever seen, and all of the Brazilians know all of the dances. I felt like I was in a Brazilian teen movie. All in all it was a blastie.
Probably the best part of the night was the fact that not more than 8 hours previous Mario, the director, gave us a lecture on safety in the city and told us not to go to that club because it was partially run by the mafia and that they were running a prostitution ring out of the club and that a girl last year on the program who was taking dance classes there had to be flown back to the States from the American embassy because they wanted to sell her into prostitution in Mexico (this is a run-on, but one does not revise blog entries). Don't worry, though - I didn't get sold into prostitution. I don't feel that I have the qualifications to be a prostitute.

Weekends here are great. I can take three taxi rides all across the city, have a couple of rounds, and dance until 6 in the morning at the hippest, chic-est club in the city and spend a little more than $15. This is a great city. The club I went to this weekend was half techno and half pop-hop from the '90s up until 2004, ie, Hey Ya, Crazy in Love, and I can't recall what else. When a couple of us were outside taking a breather, two Argentines heard us talking in English and came up to start talking to us. They were so impressed to be actually talking to a real, live American. As he said "It's so far away, it's almost like a fairy tale." I kind of felt like a celebrity because he knew so much about American culture and politics and all that. Pretty neat.

That's one of the more interesting parts of this culture - people here are very aware of American politics, but the people I've talked to about it have had this weird respect, almost reverence, towards our politics even if they don't agree with them at all. I think it might be due to the fact that they lived under a really harsh military dictatorship until 1983 and coups every 20 years at the most for their whole history, so for them a country who has always had a stable democracy is a really cool thing. I'm not sure yet - the echoes of the dictatorship and the economic collapse of 2002 are very strong in the country's personality. This opinion might change, though, after starting classes at UBA, where today a professor walked past us and yelled "No Bush Aca" (no Bush here) while we were signing up for classes.

Ok, one more topic for this post - Spanish here is completely different. This paragraph is mostly for people who speak spanish, sorry for the esotericism.

First of all, the word tú doesn’t exist – it’s vos, but luckily the conjugations only change in present and mandato. You just shift the accent except on ir verbs, where it stays as i. Ejemplos:

Tú hablas vos hablás
Tú comes vos comés
Tú vives vos vivís

Stem-changing verbs don’t change. Ejemplos:

Tú puedes vos podés
Tú quieres vos querés
Tú tienes vos tenés

Ser is the only tricky one: vos sos.

Mandatos are also easy – r comes off, accent on the vowel, and only one irregular.

Habláme, comé la cena, vení acá, tené cuidado, sé bien

Ir is the irregular – it becomes andá.

Yeah, verbs!

For pronunciation, the ll’s and y’s are pronounced like a zh/sh. Also, the intonation makes it sound like they are speaking Italian with Spanish words. Other than that, they are pretty easy to understand because they don’t drop s’s and d’s like in Puerto Rico or Spain, respectively.

Here’s a list of words that are different here:

We learned................ Here they say...
Coger .........................tomar/agarrar (coger/escoger etc mean to have sex)
Vale ............................de acuerdo/bien/ok
De prisa .................... a pulado
Coger un resfriado ...tener resfrío/resfriarse
Ligero (comida) .......liviano (ligero means fast)
Apartamento/piso ...departamento
Aquí/allí ................... acá/allá
Falda ......................... oyeras
Bolso ......................... cartera
Bonito ...................... lindo (everything in this country is lindo, guapo has a different meaning)
Melocotón ............... durazno
Fresa ....................... frutilla
Piña ......................... ananá
Avocado/aguacate...palta
Bistec .......................bife

Ok that's all for now. Oh, one more thing - it's 39 degrees Farenheit here now with highs in the upper 50s during the day.

So I have decided to forgo the mass email updates in favor of a blog that I will try to keep relatively updated so that I can keep people who are interested updated and so that I don't fill up people's inboxes with really long emails that no will read anyway.

I got to Buenos Aires last Tuesday after a long but relatively uneventful flight (thanks, Drammamine). There were some other COPA people (COPA is the name of the program I'm on) on the flight, including another girl from Tufts, Rachel Geylin. The COPA people were waiting for us at the airport to welcome us and within 5 minutes we were all in taxis going to our host families. My first impression of the city was "why did I choose this??" The first 15 minutes of the 30 minute drive was on a highway where on both sides were slums in terrible conditions with deteriorating buildings, graffiti everywhere, and garbage in the streets. However, the closer we got to the city center where I live, the better the conditions became. (I found out later that it's the inverse as in the US - the suburbs are the very poor areas and the city is where the middle class and upper class live). My initial impression was proven quite wrong when I first arrived at my host family's apartment. It is in a safe section of the city on a main street in a neighboorhood that would be considered middle class in the States, and there is so much around me - a park, good restaurants, shops, a subway station, a mall, an awesome gelato spot (less than $2 for a kilo of gelato!), bars, etc. The apartment I live in is quite big, especially for a large city like this one. It has 5 bedrooms, 3 baths, kitchen, a living room, family room, dining room, an office, and a studio (my host mom is a painter). My host dad works for NBC and speaks English pretty well, but luckily he doesn't speak it to me. They have 4 kids - the oldest daughter, Paula, is married with 2 kids; Fede is 25 and is a professional photographer, Augustin is ~21 and has a 2 yr old, Gala, who also lives with us (but they are moving into their own house August 1), and Nacho is 19 or so, but he doesn't talk much because he is mentally challenged. At least up to this point, I could not say enough good things about my host family. They have been completely accomodating, and since they have been hosting COPA students for 5 years, they seem to be very understanding of foreign students' issues and know what to expect. I am getting along with them great.

I have so much more to write (that I promise is more interesting), but I've been really busy and haven't had much time to get it all down. Pictures are up on Facebook now and I'll put them on flickr or something similar soon for those that don't have Facebook accounts. I'm already having language interference, so if I wrote something that doesn't make sense, please make fun of me.