Going to Córdoba - 16:43
A little change in color, I think, to usher in the next slew of entries. And a new month.
At ten tonight I go on my first foray into the country outside of the city, and Iguazu with the class. Chris, Cynthia, and I are heading to Córdoba. It's about an eight hour bus ride from Capital Federal. That's about all we've got planned as of right now.
It's actually been kind of cold here lately. I mean, I know it's winter here, but it hasn't felt like it. August is the month for the cold then, I suppose. Currently it's right around 40 but yesterday it dropped around 32.
Yesterday I had a series of quite in depth conversations in Spanish, which made me feel very good about confidence and all that. Some days are better than others, and yesterday was regood. (they use "re" instead of "muy" sometimes).
I met up with Juan, another who'd been at Maryland last semester, and we along with one of his friends went into Palermo for one of the many weekend ferias, though this one was more clothes and less chachkes. Feria, I have decided can be easily translated into very-busy-sometimes-outdoors-sometimes-wall-to-wall-of-the-inside-of-bars flea market.
It's real nice to have friends, or even just acquaintences here that are porteños. They can show you the city from the inside.
Saturday I met up with Talia, who is studying at the University of Buenos Aires in el centro and who is both a friend of a friend and daughter of one of my sister's teachers from last year. Small. World. We too were in Palermo, although really we had no idea what to do, so we had lunch and walked down to Alto Palermo and tootled around. We ate lunch at this pretty affordable and tasty corner restaurant near one of the little plazas inside Palermo Viejo.
That evening I went out with Dario and his friends to a cool Rasta-themed bar. I had some interestingly heavy conversation that night as well with two of his friends. Nothing to in depth, but politics can get that way rather quickly. We tried to go to another club afterwards, but it was apparently closed and so we opted to go to this late-late-nite restaurant called Carlito's. Their specialty? Panqueques. And I'm not talking about your mom's panqueques or the Original Pancake House panqueques...I'm talking filled with veggies, or meat, or dulces...yeah. 'Twas good eating and I was quite hungry.
Speaking of food, I forgot to mention in the last entry that I think I marked four or five meat meals in between entries. Between this and the last, I've had one or two less but it's so readily available.
Friday I went back to shul after spending the afternoon with Cynthia at el Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. It's not the kind of museum you see in one hour and a half, which was the amount of time I had in between of having lunch and going to shul--time flies!--so I plan to go back at some point. It had a very interesting exhibit on pre-colonial South America and on the portrait painting in colonial Argentina.
Thursday marked the last day of classes in the Intensive program. We took a written test in grammar, and I was very happily surprised by how fast and how well structured my essays seemed to me. For one, we had a prompt to write a short essay on a movie we'd just watched, and the other was more of a letter to a friend who's considering studying in Argentina.
a bit more (and photos)