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.