Highlights from the past week:
-Friday (April 1): Went to a party at Jack's (friend from BC who is randomly in one of my classes here) apartment that he shares with five other international students. As I wove through the thirty plus people, I felt as if I were touring the world as students from Amsterdam conversed with Parisians to my left, Spaniards charlaban (chatted) with Germans to my right. For once, English was not the common language; together we all spoke Spanish.
-Saturday: Lena and I took a bus-train combination North to the river delta of Tigre. It was nice to get out of the city. We sat by the water and enjoyed a fruit salad with ice cream as we each trudged through Manuel Puig's Boquitas Pintadas.
-Lazy Sunday
-Thursday (April 7): After three hours of a Spanish Grammar class, and before a three hour story writing workshop I headed to San Martin de Tours school for girls, were my host mother teaches English in the afternoons. She had invited me to come in and talk with her fifth and sixth graders about where I am from, what I like to do in my spare time, etc. The second I walked onto the school property, girls flocked to me asking if I was Emily and wanted to make sure and say hi. Both groups of students ooed and awed at the pictures that I showed them of Oregon's mountains, beaches, and Walla Walla's wheat fields. They all gasped in horror when I told them that we don't have Dulce de Leche nor Alfajores in the US and were intrigued that we eat eggs in the morning rather than later in the day. I had given two independent presentations and two questions overlapped: "Do you have a boyfriend?" and "Do you have a best friend?" Neither of which has a definite answer.
I got home in time to grab by rain shell before heading to class once again. By the time I left the house it was pouring, but I had purposely left the umbrella in its bucket because I wanted to walk in the rain. And walk in the rain with a smile on my face I did. Everyone I passed probably thought I was crazy, but I embraced its shower of home. My mood only improved when I got to my writing workshop to hear the professor suggest a remedy for writers block: inebriate, write, and postpone editing until sobriety finds you once again. Also, something that he mentioned that struck me: if someone is such a good writer that you, the reader, pause midway through a paragraph to reflect on how well what you are reading is written, and therefore leave the literary world in which you had been intently immersed, does it mean that the author is a good writer?
After class I returned home to find a pile of papers written by hand all with my name as the title summarizing in broken English everything that I had said in my presentations. Apparently the pictures of my dog and cat made quite an impression.
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| Random cobblestone street I came across on my way home one day. |
-Saturday: Walked through the Saturday market in front of the famous Recoleta cemetery, which houses the remains of those who the main streets were named after. After getting my fill of artisan crafts, I took a stroll through the cemetery. It is its own miniature city with walls that walls kept all the furious noises of city traffic from reaching my ears. It was surprisingly quiet, and as eerie and strange as it might sound, it was the calmest I have felt in a long while. After my rendezvous, I met up with Jazmín to study, which for the first hour turned into us filling each other in on the past two weeks. We eventually ordered in empanadas and talked more until it was time for me to venture off to meet up with the Villa Gesell crowd. We ended up going to play Bingo. If you don't know your numbers in Spanish and you want to learn, go play Bingo...and don't expect to win.
-Sunday (today): Jazmín and I headed to Boca, a barrio in the southern part of the city famous for its colorful buildings.
