Losses and Gains

Needless to say the past few days have been a little loco. i am still here, painting the town red, as is to be expected, with a few lifes lessons under my belt since the last time i wrote. i experienced my first omgiamabroad mini-crisis! Two days ago I was sitting at a restaurant eating lunch with three new friends. the restaurant was nearly empty the entire time we were there. we had a nice meal and are splitting up the check when my friend Luisa turns around to find her bag gone. she had hung it on the back of her chair with her coat over it, three of us were sitting at the table with her, and one man was behind her, and nobody saw it happen. i quickly fell into the role of keeping Luisa calm, we went straight the the bank, where i lent her some money and we spent the rest of the afternoon cancelling her credit cards. she had been carrying around her entire wallet, ipod, us phone...it sucked. I was so glad i had been so vigilant up until that point, carrying only one card on me at a time, guarding my stuff with my life...in the end, though, it was good in that something i was afraid of happening happened (fortunately not to me) and we just dealt with it and moved on. To add insult to injury, though, when i took out money from the atm to give to luisa, i was so focused on getting back to the program center so we could cancel everything that i forgot my atm card in the machine and had to cancel it when i realized what i had done after the bank had closed. obviously. when it rains it pours sometimes.

other than that mishap, everything has been going very smoothly. I have the metro system figured out--buenos aires is an extremely easy place to navigate, most of the streets are on a grid system that makes getting places very simple. other than the 45 minutes it took me this morning to find my way to the university that was two blocks away from where i got off the subte, i have been able to find my way without any trouble. i have been making friends with a few other kids in the program, although i always forget how offbeat my sense of humor can be until i am in a new social situation. next week i will register for classes, for which i cannot wait. there are a million and a half courses i want to take, but i will probably only be able to do three or four. the only two classes i know for sure i am taking right now are intensive spanish, which is required, and a class throught the program that pairs you up with an organization at which you do community service---i cant wait! i told them that i have a lot of experience working with children but i am very open-minded about what i want to do. there is an organization the coordinator was telling me about that is all about womens issues, everything from reproductive health to supporting the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (mothers of those abducted and killed by the military dictatorship of the 70s and 80s, that still have weekly demonstrations in the main downtown plaza). there are also a lot of extracurricular clubs and courses that are not for credit that i might do--maybe tango or photography or basketball...not.

I went tonight with two friends to see a production of Cabaret--i had no idea how much theater they had here! they quality of the prodution was absolutely Broadway--amazing talent, sets, costumes, everything, and the production itself was very well done and interesting. it was so crazy to see it in spanish, though... i cant imagine how hard it would be to translate a musical. i can say that during the money song they just said ¨moneymoneymoney,¨ which certainly has a nicer ring to it than ¨plataplataplata.¨ For the next two weeks there is a something called the Exposición Rural, which i think will be something along the lines of a state fair(!) with animal competitions and lots of vendors from all over the countryside, which should be very fun. Other than that, i am starting to adjust to life here- barely eating breakfast, light lunch around 1, dinner at 10(!) going out at 11 and waking up again at 9. i am suffering hardship, i know. anywho i hope you are all well and i would love to hear from you if you want to drop me a line sometime either by email or if you want to call me it is free for me to recieve calls and my number is