La rutina lunes

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It's a bit like being in classes here. Perhaps because, you know, I'm in classes. Unfortunately, that means that there's not much to tell you about half the day. I practiced talking? We practiced tenses? Including the subjunctive...which I suppose is a bit interesting, because there's not really a true equivalent in English. While English does have its own subjunctive mood, its use is limited and usually not noticed, because, as with most conjugations of any given English verb, it's the same as the infinitive. It's usually used to express suggestions or unrealities, but often sounds unnecessarily formal in English, whereas it's common in Spanish.

As an example, "I hope you study" translates to "Ojalá que estudies." Both of these are in the subjunctive mood, but most English speakers will neither recognize nor know that it is, while any Spanish speaker could look just at the word "estudies," even out of context, and tell you it's subjunctive. So yeah...that's more or less the kind of stuff we're doing in class. Talking about tense usage (although English has more, most of them use the same 2 or 3 conjugations, and therefore don't require much practice. Each Spanish tense uses 5 or 6 different conjugations, with minimal overlap between tenses), and the like.

Anyway, after the morning, we went to get our money changed - at the "backdoor" rate, of course. We actually got a much better rate; my first two changes were at 11.5 and 12 on the dollar, but I got 13.3 here, which adds up faster than you'd think. We usually change in $100s, and given that most of our empanada lunches are between 30 and 60, that difference gives you an extra 2 or 3 lunches on each change.

We came back to see a lecture on Argentine economics. Although I do study Economics, we've rarely touched on Argentina. Surprise, given that Nobel laureate Simon Kuznets said "There are four kinds of economies: developed, underdeveloped, Japan, and Argentina." It was an interesting lecture, but didn't unfortunately hit on much that the books we read for the trip didn't cover.There are only a few important points.

This is some of the best food-growing land in the world, and as a result, Argentina has the capability to feed 10x its population. Their biggest export is soy, mostly to China, but as through most of their history, they don't add much value, if any, before exporting (inviting China and others to easily supplant Argentine soybeans, inviting another early 2000s-style national economic crash). Most of the country outside the pampas (the flatlands around BA) doesn't have much production, and is relatively poor. They have - and have tended to have - low class mobility. They got hit hard by the World Wars, as they don't have much internal production, so when imports got cut off, it hurt. Their external debt then exploded over a matter of a couple decades, leading to the big crash. A$ 1 from 1930 is currently worth about A$ 90 trillion. For reference, U$S 1 from 1930 is worth about U$S 13.65. A bit different, no?

After coming home, going for a run, and cleaning up my room a bit (and eating, of course), we went out to a local bar for a bit before crashing for the night. A couple of my readers have asked me how (and why) we manage to go out so much and still function and not crash. There are a couple reasons for that:


• It's a cultural thing. People go out here.
• We're young. We bounce back quickly.
• Who said we don't crash?
• Lots of us (yours truly not included) enjoy naps.
• Usually, on weeknights, most of us go home by 1:00 or 2:00, which still gives us about 6 hours of sleep. There are a couple who I've heard have gone out until 6:00 on weeknights. That I don't understand. But going out until 6:00 on a weekend is fine, because we can sleep in the next morning.


Anyway, it's dinner time now, so I have to go and leave you again without pictures. But there will be pictures, I promise, in the next post!

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