My crazy sister

I ment to add this last time, but forgot. Here is the web address to a video of my llittle sister
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71DeNOUC6Dk
She is absolutely hilarious.

First Impressions

Last week I finally finished my registration and I am now officially signed up for 20 classes and I have absolutely no idea what I am going to take. I showed up to one of my classes today and there were 200-300 people in the room and there were no desks. Everyone just ran around trying to find desks in other rooms and brought them into our classroom and most of us just ended up with chairs. I couldn't hear the professor or anything and it was supposed to be a four hour class on Latin American Literature, needless to say I decided that this was not the right class for me. In Argentina the Universities are free so anyone can attend, and you don't know whether or not you have been accepted into the class until a week or two after it starts. I have never seen a University quite like it, there were huge propaganda posters hanging up in the classrooms that were anti government, there was graffiti everywhere (which is always politically charged here) and vendors all over the building selling random items like earings.


I feel like every day I encounter something new and peculiar here. Last week I was walking out of a restaurant with some of my friends when we saw that a road in the middle of downtown was blocked off for a waiter race. I have never seen anything quite like it there were hundreds of waiters dressed up in their uniforms carrying trays with bottles of water and coke and a glass full of coke. The race was to see who could go the fastest and spill the least. Not only is it one of the most ridiculous races I have ever heard of, they literally shut down one of the main roads for an hour to host this race.

Yesterday I was reading the newspaper and there was an article about Néstor Kirchner (the Argentine President) and some of the new policies he is proposing and there was a direct quote where a reporter addressed him as Penguin. Everyone in Argentina calls him penguin because he is from Patagonia, but to call him penguin to his face and have it published in the newspaper was unreal to me, that would never happen in the states.

There is random artwork all over this city too; I have never seen art quite like it. Pretty much just about everything here is bizarre. The napkins in the restaurants are literally tissue paper; the bathrooms in the universities don't have toilet paper, soap, or paper towels. It is so hard to explain what it is like here.

My host family is absolutely amazing! My host mom makes me breakfast every morning and has a glass freshly squeezed juice for me. I was talking to her boyfriend one night and somehow music came up and I told him that I love listen to music and so the next day he came over with a stereo so I could listen to music whenever I wanted to. The other day they took me to the Manuel Puig Museum, which was really cool for me because it was a whole museum dedicated to an author that I had learned about in class and read his most famous novel. The museum was actually located in this awesome building that used to be a German brewery and so we started talking about their native beer here (Quilmes) and so we are going to go to the Quilmes Brewery together. I don't see my host brother too often because he is always off with his friends, but I hang out with my host sister quite a bit and she is absolutely hilarious.

I´m Finally Here

I am going to keep this one fairly short, I wrote a long one yesterday and I accidently deleted it. Anyways, I finally got to Buenos Aires and I absolutely love it. I live with a single mom Christina and her ten year old son Axel and her seven year old daughter Victoria. The children spend half of their time with us and half their time with their dad. We have a cat, which is the most annoying cat I have ever seen in my life. She is sickly scinny, dosen´t pure and her meow sounds like something dying. I live in San Telmo which is the heart of Buenos Aires, it is the home of the tango and la casa rosada. I thought I was going to be living in a corner or something, but my room is actually two stories and I have a walk-in closet and my own bathroom.

I have been in training all day every day, which has included taking walking tours where I have learned a lot about the history and taking tests. I will start registering for classes on Friday which will be a little different because I will be registering for three different schools that are spread out over ten different locations throughout all of Buenos Aires.

The city is a little intense. There are 749 different bus routes and they don´t have schedules, needless to say getting around the city can be a little crazy. I absolutely love the crazyness of it and once you learn how it works it isn´t that bad. The bars and clubs out here don´t even open until one in the morning and they don´t close until seven, the night life is a little intense, but I looking forward to familiarizing myself with it. Fortunatly, one of the girls that I have become really close with only lives two blocks from me so I have a partner in crime.

I hope everyone is doing well and I hope to hear from you soon! I will post pictures as soon as the internet is fixed at my house.