Wine, Beef, and Tango!

This has been an awesome week! After our excursion last Friday to the galleries, we completely switched gears for Saturday night. One of the IES profs who happens to be the coolest guys ever, Julian, set us up with free tickets to an underground tango show. YES! It
s true. So after a cab ride to the middle of nowhere, we got out and looked around for the club. It was literally in a hole in the wall. We walked through this metal door and then through some curtains and we found ourselves in a dark bar with lots of tables and a stage. I felt like we were on the set of RENT! on Broadway. We grabbed a table and waited for about an hour for the show to start. It began promptly on "Argen-time", about 30 minutes later than when it was supposed to start. But it was soooo worth the wait! To our surprise, the show was not tango dancers. It was tango music! Shame on us for expecting dancing, because we know better. Tango lyrics and music are just as important, if not more important, than the dance itself. Pictures and audio/video clips are up on Snapfish for you to take a look at! The accordians, violins, bass, and singer were all phenomenal. It was such a fun event! After the tango show, we headed out for pizza - one large pizza for five pesos!!

The rest of the week was pretty low key. We are gettin into real homework now, but classes here are pretty interesting. At least for me! I love my Literature and Politics class because what we are reading sparks such interesting discussion (in english, haha). And it is really an awesome experience to be in a classroom with students that go to big public schools, smaller schools than Wesleyan, and a professor teaching us in his second language. Sometimes its frustrating, but overall it has shown me that IWU has done a great job teaching me how to speak intelligently about texts that we read. Some people sound like no one has ever taught them how to analyze a text or how to make comments based directly from the text itself. So frequently, people make vague-outofleftfield-whattheheckareyoutalkingabout comments that i just roll my eyes and deal with it.

Monday and Wednesday I observed in the class that I will be teaching soon. I love the atmosphere of the classroom (but not the temperature! Its freezing!). The students are so much fun and seem very self motivated to learn a foreign language. I need to give a 15 minute presentation on something interesting in a few weeks...any suggestions? Absolutley anything! My friend Nicola is talking about her Crew team in Oregon. I'm not sure what I'm gonna do yet...

Thursday night was soccer practice - and what a blast that was! I got there an hour late because when I got off the bus I walked the wrong direction...about 30 blocks the wrong direction! Ughh it was quite a warm up before practice! But things are so laid back here I just arrived and jumped in the game and played! There were a lot of new people there so people freaked out when i dove to save a corner kick. They did't realize that I actually play the sport and I wansn't some crazy field player that volunteers to play "arcera", goalie. We have an away game next weekend and I'm so excited! I took the right bus home, ate dinner with Ana Maria, took a shower and then headed back out for a night out with the girls. We headed towards Puerto Madero, a really nice part of downtown and we ended up at Puerto Pirata - thats right Port of the Pirate! It is an entirely Pirate themed bar. It was so much fun. All of the waiters and waitresses are dressed in red and white stripped tops with bandanas, swords, and eyepatches. They give out really good free popcorn too. After our Pirata experience, we headed home around 3 because we all only have one class on Fridays later in the day.

Friday night I went out with the girls to a restaurant/bar/dance club called Madagascar. We made friends with some Argentine boys there (pictures up on snapfish) and helped one of them celebrate his birthday. There is honestly no better way to practice Spanish than with cute guys at a bar. That is when you reeeeeally feel self motivated to practice/use the language! Forget talking in class, give me some pizza, music, and some cute boys and I'll definitley talk!

Saturday morning I slept in wayyyy late...like 1:30 in the afternoon late. Something I rarely do. I got up and ate breakfast with Ana Maria while she ate her lunch and then I went to Bri's apartment to meet up with Kate and Bri's Argentine sister, Vicki. Vicki went to go get her car and picked us up in front of the apartment for what would be an awesome afternoon. First things first, we headed to the WALMART on the outskirts of the city to check out the goods. Mainly, the girls and I were looking for peanut butter, and me turkey, and we didn't find either! Most of the merchandise was Industria Argentina, but we did find some things that we needed. I found a huge section of children's books that the girls couldn't tear me away from. I made some awesome purchases that will be so fun to use when I get back with my Spanish classes. I also bought TABU! in spanish! Being the nerd that I am, I thought it would be a fun way to practice vocabulary. After standing in line to pay for 45 minutes, we drove back into the city. Along the way, Vicki pointed out really cool buildings and historical places that we hadn't learned about yet. We made our way to the China town of BA (only about 2 blocks big) and that is where we found peanut butter! The whole place smelled so good..I can't wait to go back there for dinner some day. Vicki dropped Kate, Bri, and I off back at my apartment where we dropped off our goods and hopped on the 59 bus to Plaza Italia and met Nicola at her apartment. We proceeded to try ordering Chineese food in spanish. Luckily the menu had numbers! But when the food came, we realized that we must have had an old menu, because all of the food was wrong!! Kate and Nicola went back to the restaurant to try and fix the problem, but to no avail. They said, here's a new menu, deal with it! So we ate what we had, Rodrigo came over, and the six of us sat in the apartment and played TABU in spanish. What an educational experience for a Saturday night! Five American girls and one native speaker. It was a total riot. After my team won we called it quits and put on a movie...Evita! It was so funny to watch the movie while actually being in Bs As. Half way through we were all to tired to watch anymore so we left and hopped back on the bus to get home. Halfway home, we started to get really annoyed because it seemed like everyone on the bus was staring at us. We are pretty used to it because it is rare to hear English on the streets or on public transportation, but there was this really annoying buzzing sound that wouldnt stop! Pretty soon i realized that my butt was resting on the buzzer that you push to have the bust driver stop and let you off! It was much lower because we were standing in the handicapped section! Ooooops...

Sunday was the Boca Juniors soccer game. Boca is the B.A. team that Maradona played on back in the day, and needless to say, the stadium was INSANE!!! Everyone was cheering from before the game started until after the game ended. Boca won 2-0 and there are qutie a few videos and pictures up on snapfish under week 5. Probably the best part of the game is when the other team's goalie got a red card and they had to put a field player in the goal for the remaining 30 minutes of the game! He had a shutout...pretty impressive! I can't wait to go to another game...the crowd is so intoxicating and the game was so fun to watch, even though ten minutes into the game it was raining and the wind was blowing like crazy. We were all the way up at the top and we completely froze. But we were hardcore and stayed the whole game! During halftime I ate the most delicious choripan that i've had since i've been here. A choiripan is basically a chorizo (sausage) on a bun with onion and really awesome salsa. ooooooh it was so delicious!!!

GO BOCA!!!!!!!!!!!!

~Amanda