Week Four & Five?

It is still so crazy for me to think about the fact that i´m in Argentina. Sometimes i start talking with someone in english and forget that they won´t understand me :). However i have to say, my spanish has improved quite a lot. And yes, if you were wondering, there is probably a lot of pride behind that sentence (pray for me!). But really, I love learning the language and opening up that part of my mind. It´s so interesting getting to delve into the different words and try to put them all together. And of course i´ve thought of new cheesy jokes to make things easier to remember. For example... Cheap and Expensive are Bariato (ok i just learned this today and i usually need a lot of repetition.. so all of you real spanish speakers out there dont need to comment on this correcting my mistakes :P ) and Caro. Since i didn´t want to confuse them and call cheap, expensive or vice versa i made a phrase for both. Carros estan Caro. Bariato es Barbaro (Cars are Expensive. Cheap is Awesome. Anyways, it doesn´t make much sense in either language but it helps me not confuse the two.

My past few weeks have been Barbaro! (yeah, i´m not translating that.. you guys need to remember the meaning.. lets get your heads working as you read my blogs.) By the way one of my friends here said something to me that made me think yesterday and i´ve quite agreed with her statement. You see, we have these ´creative journals´or ´Cuaderno Creativo´each week and we have five questions we need to answer to let our disciplers know how we´re doing and whats going on for us in the week. Most people summarize what happened and it works out very well for them. But for me, my discipler each week kept telling me to ´go deeper´with whats going on in my heart and stuff. And i was like... the Lord is going deep in my heart, i just have trouble summarizing it all into this tiny little book... and so (entonces) (oh yeah you´d better get used to my random spanish words in spanish... they´re only translations.. not anything that you need to look up in the online spanish-english dictionary) i decided to start writing in my joural as if it really were a journal, not just summaries in the corner of the page to leave space for all the decorations and magazine clippings. By the way, the decorations and things are supposed to represent you, so people always get really intense with them. But since i never wanted to waste space with them i decided that my journal just wouldn´t represent me. But what my friends comment was, that my journal was a really good representation of me.. and i didn´t understand at first. But you see its a great representation for me because i´m always trying to say so much, going off on random bunny trails and getting side tracked with every other sentence. (which of course i do in my blog as well.. we are all very acquainted with my ranbling and bunny trails.) Anyways.. yeah, that really wasn´t as funny as i was hoping it would be. oh well.

Oh and the food here has improved slightly! At least they´ve served a bit more veggies lately and i´ve been really quite happy about that. However they´ve also had the attack of the salt container as well. I swear i´ve seriously contemplated rinsing my salad of numerous times and not caring about the lack of dressing... it would probably still have salt residue after giving it a ´thurough´rinising. (i just realized how i completely dont know how to spell ´thorough´or is it ´thurough´or neither? i have no idea!)

This is really random but someonthing i´ve become more acquainted with as i become closer to the people in my school (because the closer you get the more you feel you can really say whats on your mind..) is that americans are a good bit more intense than people here. At least i am.. i have heard the word ´tranquil´so many times this past weeks. (its like saying to someone to calm down). but not just with random hyper spouts or like being upset about something.. its just in my normal day, talking with people or soemthing... all of a sudden people are telling me to calm down.

Oh and even though i have failed to take pictures for you i am now able to take them. A friend of mine has the same camera and i can borrow her battery. So hopefully two weeks from now (as next weekend i dont think i´ll be able to make it to town) i´ll have some pictures to post for you. :D exciting eh?

Even more exciting is the package my mom is sending me! i can´t wait. there´s almond butter in it! and dried mango! and real chocolate! and so much more! how do i always come back to food... i swear i need to ask Jesus if food has become an idol in my life. So much of my day circulates around meal times and snack times.

Theres so much more to say and a billion e-mails to reply to but i fear (hah! i can´t believe i said that! ´i fear´) i have to leave before i miss the bus... like i did two weeks ago... Miss you guys so much! I hope this was interesting!

Week Two & Week Three

Hey guys! Sorry i didn´t get a chance to blog last week, i ran out of time quickly. Life in these past three weeks has been a worldwind of challenges, spanish, pain, and much much excitment. Life here is much different from life in the states (obviously..) I´ve been learning a bunch about the culture and i love it; Things like (i´ve noticed this is generally among women) everything is done in groups, for example: if you need lunch you wait, no matter how hungry you are you wait until people arrive to join you. Life is much more relaxed, they´re never in a hurry to go anywhere. I´ve had to learn Much patience whenever it comes to walking anywhere because Argentinians walk SO slow, and if you know me then you know I get annoyed with the speed southerners walk at... think of how much slower that makes argentinans. In the city there are no places to buy food and take it with you, the only fast food is mcdonalds and subway. Everything else is a sit down resturaunt. And the concept of walk and eat is completely foreign. If you don´t have time to eat something right now, then take it with you and eat when you get there. Heh. And there are dogs Everywhere! I was walking down the street today and it was the middle of the day so all the dogs were sprawled out on the side of the streets baking in the sun. Their fur was all mangles and dirty and they were laying in ways that i didn´t know their sad pathetic bodies could stretch to.. i swear it looked like a dog massacre, all that was missing was blood. Speaking of the sun, if anyone has looked at the weather and seen it say ´70´or ´60´and thought it wasn´t so bad here and that i shouldn´t have complained about giong back into winter... let me tell you something. It lies. Ok not technically. But the sun is the only thing that supplies warmth here and the heat here is Very intense in mid day. But only in midday. Basically what i´m try to say is that when you wake up its in the 40s and makes it to the 50s by noon. Then finally from about 3-5 it makes it to the high for the day. heh, i usually end up changing my clothes for the afternoon. But cloudy days ... oh let me tell you, i´m not such a happy person.

Oh and by the way, i´m not sure if i told all of you about this yet or not so bare with me. (i bet that was the wrong ´bare´i can never decide if its supposed to be ´bear´or ´bare´). But anyways, the Argentinian eating style consists of large quantities of these four items: meat, bread, sugar, and salt. (carne, pan, azucar, y sal). Those four things are mixed together in many ways but are always 70 percent of the meal. On the base, for breakfast (desayuno) at eight we have either oatmeal (avena), sweet bread with these pretend dried fruit bits in it... they´re really just gummies (pan dulce), or cookies (cashetas... and that word is definitely spelt wrong). I´m not joking by the way, we really do have cookies for breakfast. Every so often we get apples with breakfast, and twice there was raisins with the oatmeal. And for the people who don´t like oatmeal, on mornings that its served they just drink milk with sugar. There always always sugar bowls out! One day we were served this meat and potato mixture and people were putting cinnamon-sugar on it. Anyways, we have a ´break´around 10:30 which is usually that same sweet bread or cookies. Sometimes they surprise us with random things like crackers with dulce de leche (its like a caramel spread). Then Lunch is at 1 and we normally eat rice or potatos with some form of crisco covered veggies or meat which people bury in salt. And of course there are always baskets of bread out. Always always bread. Merienda (or tea time, as i´ve dubed it) is at 5 and we have sweet bread or cookies again ( i hope you guys are seeing the trend here..). Then dinner is at the ungodly hour of... well actually i can´t remember exactly. I believe either 9 or 9:30. Maybe its at 9:15, i dont know. But this is early for Argentina, some people eat their dinner at midnight and i´ve heard rumors of eating at 1 or 2 in the morning. Dinner is as well their biggest meal, meat, potatos, crisco with veggies, rice, bread, salt... a good mixture of it all. and usually salad dressed in oil and salt. Heh, let me tell you, it is going to be a miracle if i make it out of this country without gaining weight. For the past three weeks i´ve bought raw veggies and fruit to eat in place of or with the meals we have here. But eating healthy is quite expensive here, i´m just beginning to learn my way around kiosks since they´re cheaper. But my spanish will have to improve before i can really learn where to go.