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

me zsamo zsael

Wow what can I say about my first impression of this marvelous city. It is safe to say that Argentines are pretty much some of the friendliest people on the planet, and believe me when I say that they know how to enjoy being alive. I am in a program for American students studying abroad; there are about 100 to 120 kids in the program from all over the US. I am living in a homestay--ie in someone´s home-- and that someone is a 30-year-old woman named Silvina. I cannot even describe how awesome she is, nor what a perfect match we are. She happens to be Jewish, from a city in the Patagonia region of Argentina, and she has a Sociology degree from the University of Buenos Aires. Her apartment is in a neighborhood called Villa (pronounced here ¨Vee-zsa¨) Crespa, known by some as Villa Creplach because it is primarily Jewish. Ha! The building in which she lives is absolutely amazing. Because it has been a Jewish neighborhood for many years, it used to be a sort of garment district, as that was an industry run primarily by Jews. Her building is actually a converted textile factory, so the apartment is great--High ceilings, lots of space, particularly in the middle of one of the largest cities in South America. The building is very old, so all the paint on the walls of the apartment are peeling, which I think looks cool--makes me feel very Bohemian. She said that she used to paint every year because it never seems to adhere to the walls, but then she decided to take a vacation with the money she would need to paint--peeling paint is a small price to pay for a vacation. It is so amazing because she has exactly the same taste as me--all her furniture is orange and yellow and red and she has prints of klimt and modigliani everywhere--for those of you that don´t know, my room at home is painted orange and I have had pages from a Klimt calendar on my wall at school for the past three years. My room is at least the size of my room at home, if not larger, with an entire wall of closets (painted mustard yellow). The one drawback to the place is that it is very cold--none of the buildings here have central heating, only these small box-looking heaters that attach to the wall and have actual gas flames in side--very fire-safe, I know. Anyway, I hate being cold, so I have taken to just sitting in front of the heater a lot and putting on more layers until I look like the Michelin Man. Fortunately my bed is very warm and the shower is great, so I end up kind moving around a lot between these three sources of heat. Another thing here that is a definite sign of the times is the elevators. Nearly all the elevators here are the kind with two doors--one on the outside and one on the inside that you have to open and close every time you enter or leave them. I love it.
The food is fantastic here. The first night we arrived the program took us out to this restaurant with the most elaborate buffet I have ever seen. Even though I don´t like to eat pork, I wasn´t about to let it stop me from tasting everything I could. I don´t even know half the things I ate, though I must say the cow intestine was a pleasant surprise. Some unpleasant surprises were the blood sausage (clotted cow´s blood in sausage form), which really just tasted like cinnamon but looked as gross as it sounds, and the cow kidney, cut so that the outer layers of the muscle were left on....I honestly think it was the most disgusting thing I have ever eaten, but hey, at least I tried it. I think I could eat empanadas every day for the rest of my life, and the citrus here is fantastic. Last night Silvina heated up schnitzel!! and when I exclaimed ¨schnitzel!¨ she had no idea what I was talking about but said that they eat it all the time here...I think I will still call it schnitzel because hey, that´s what it was. I have yet to choose my classes and therefore have no real rhythm or regular schedule but the orientation has been very helpful in my adjustment. I am already taking the subway (¨subte¨) on my own between my house, the program center, and the rest of the city.
Anyway, I think that has been the past few days in a nutshell. I hope you are all well and enjoying the summer heat up there!
xoxo