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Published: February 2nd 2010
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¡Hola chicos!
I decided I would like Buenos Aires when the first thing I saw from the plane once we´d landed was grass. And, of course, it´s about 30 degrees C warmer than where I´d just been. I lived in a shared apartment arranged by the school. My flatmates are three sisters, two children and a dog, although I´m not sure if they all live here at the same time. The children haven´t been here and I hardly see the girls. In the first week there was one other girl living here, Mercedes from Mexico. We hung out together quite a bit and she speaks often in a lovely mix of Spanish and English which has been helping me rather a lot.
The first Sunday I was there we went to La Boca, which means "mouth" and is the area around the harbour. It´s a really poor area and we took a bit of a sketchy route there (thanks, señor bus driver), but there are a couple of very pretty (very touristy) streets. Mercedes and I had lunch in a place called El Samovar De Rasputin and she got chatting to other people there. One of them turned out
to be a painter called Horacio Piloti (google him). We were very privileged because he drew a couple of pictures for us. Because my Spanish was really quite terrible at that point, I had no idea until Mercedes told me after we left that he was a famous artist; I´d rather patronisingly thought he was just a nice old man. We then visited a museum of a local artist, Benito Quinquela Martin, who used his earnings to build schools in his old hood. His paintings, mainly of people working on ships in the harbour, were pretty impressive.
La Escuela Week 1 - present tense
I really enjoyed learning at school, although Expanish itself was a bit disorganised. I got put in a class of people who knew no Spanish whatsoever, and we had an awful teacher (she didn´t listen, you never knew what she wanted of you, and she took the lift to go one floor). So the next day, I spoke to the head and moved to a different class. It was a Good Move. My new teacher, Juan, was SUPER, and my new class were all really keen to try talking Spanish and it was the best place for me to be, because after one week of lessons, I was quite confident to speak Spanish - even though I only knew the present tense. Not everyone was so fortunate - I heard of one teacher who made the class do written exercises on their own the whole time. My class were lovely people and very sociable. There was Buket from Turkey, Wieneke from Holland, Payson from Texas, Ali from NYC and Marc from Switzerland.
The school organised activities and I went to a few events. On Monday I went to a brill drumming thing called La Bomba Del Tiempo which was in a place that really wouldn´t look out of place in Berlin. Tuesday was parilla night, which means steak night. People don´t eat till really late here, so it was about midnight when my very small bit of meat arrived. It was tasty though. On Wednesday I was planning on heading home to do some studying but instead I went for lunch with my class and then went on a historical tour of BA, which concentrated mainly on Evita (what a bunch of fanatics!) and the Mothers (who started marching to protest against the
disappearance of their children during the - if I´ve got this right - late ´70s and early ´80s). The tour guides showed us a spot where a flyover had been built over an old detention centre. The location of the centre was kept a secret by those who knew, so it was discovered by accident. They´re now excavating the area. Now I know how little I know about Argentine history! I was going to have a quiet one on Thursday, but it turned out to be Mercedes´ 40th birthday! She had read about a free tango on ropes show in a park so we went to that with a couple of others. It was pretty impressive. On Friday, Mel from Oz invited us over to her place for a pool party to party with Courtney from Alaska for the last time and afterwards we went on a terrible touristy pub crawl. Jan from Germany made me drink Fernet Branco which I can only describe as dentist´s mouthwash and coke. In one bar, I said to someone at the bar that they reminded me of someone I once met in Berlin. It only turned out that it was him, one of
Corinne and Kenny´s colleagues! The next day, feeling rather rough, I met with my schoolfriends just behind my house at Recoleta cemetery for a little sunlit stroll through the tombs. I had to rest for the rest of the weekend.
La Escuela Week 2- past tense Our class was in the depths of sorrow on Monday morning when we realised the teacher who we had for the week was only about -1.5%!a(MISSING)s good as Juan. He wouldn´t let us practice talking Spanish even when we asked him if we could. When Payson didn´t catch Eduardo´s drift, Eduardo didn´t even try to help him out, but moved on to the next one! The cheek! Then in the break he asked me if I would help out, like I´m a teacher!! We were a class of mixed abilities but Juan had been able to handle it so well. By the end of Tuesday, as we were all getting more and more frustrated, Eduardo announced that Ali and I would be leaving the clan and moving up a class. We found out after class that our new teacher would be...the same teacher I had the first day! So we complained
and it all got rather confusing. The next day, we didn´t seem to be split up after all and we had a new teacher, Nicolas, who was great. He let the class be our class again.
I went out every night last week, mostly with my class. I spent a lot of time with Ali, which was great as she is wonderful and very good at fileteado (fancy artesan painting style). On Wednesday we were treated to dinner by some friends of hers from NYC and on Thursday, we joined Marc and Juan for a humungous parillada (mixed barbecue) and some cocktails. Class the next morning was interesting as Marc and Ali had to keep making visits to the bathroom and I think I was still drunk. However, Nicolas was patient and handled us all very well.
The final night, we went to a free party, but I haven´t got much to say about that, except that I was sad to say goodbye to my school buddies. I´m not too sad to move on from sticky BA, though, as it´s pleasant enough but there´s nothing to love.
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Jessikerpoo
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small meat?
you must have had the testicles! most meat is massive in BA! a very poignant entry my love, it bought back some interesting memories from my trip, isn't the cemetry at Recoletta beautiful? But you are right, BA is sticky and unloveable....must try and get Big Emma to see our point of view!