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.