Excursions...

Greetings from really far south.

The last week has been quite eventful: our final trip for Spanish class was a bus trip to Tigre (north of Buenos Aires) to kayak on the Paraná Delta. My kayaking partner, Harris, and I experienced a wave of competitiveness that made for a pretty fun ride/more soreness than I should admit the next day. Perhaps because he is a fitness instructor? We also had to travel a few miles to our destination, which was tiring but rewarding since the little canals were interesting and we got to play volleyball and lay around the beach once we got there. Needless to say, after also having taken our written final at 9am that morning, we were too tired to function for the rest of the day.

The following day was 102 degrees Fahrenheit. The club that night was REALLY sweaty.

After (contentedly) graduating from our Spanish class, a group of about fifty of us went a few hours north to Gualeguaychú for Carnaval. We stayed in a hostel and apartments in the very rural, South American-style town (dirt roads, horses, stray dogs, barely functional showers, bad cell service, etc) for the weekend and essentially partied on the beach all night and then all day. On Saturday night was the actual parade, which featured some of the most colorful (as well as revealing) costumes I have ever seen. The little town was overflowing with people dancing and celebrating at all hours of the day, which was quite a spectacle... I really enjoyed it. Before leaving on Sunday we also had an asado, which is the traditional barbeque on which Argentines pride themselves (among many other things). I tried my first and last kidney and intestines, which failed due to texture and taste, respectively. We then travelled to the bus station at about midnight via some sort of taxi-van that had no seats other than wooden stools in the back. Very safe. Our bus arrived back in Buenos Aires at about 3am, just in time to go home for a few hours of sleep before orientation the next morning.

Orientation has been mildly boring and pretty much useless for those of us who have been in the city for a few weeks already for the Spanish class. It has been nice, however, to meet people from outside the U.S. (finally) as there are international students from various parts of mostly Europe and South America. I have met French, German, Austrian, Spanish, Italian, Paraguayan, Ecuadorian, Brazilian, and Columbian students as well as many Mexicans. I have already gone out with some new Mexican friends, which is nice because they don't use the 'vos' form and the crazy localized vocabulary of Buenos Aires and Argentine Spanish that I may or may not EVER master. Tomorrow we pre-register for classes, the selection of which is going to be/has been a microcosm of the disaster that is anything bureacratic in this country. It is a rather Type B culture, exemplified by one of the "Things NOT to do" listed in our orientation information that was something along the lines of "be on time for anything." I'm slowly getting used to having only some semblance of an idea of what is going on, walking more slowly, and seldom hurrying because being early is awkward and decidedly American.

One other example of the frustrating/comical disorganization of everything here is the sports office. The athletic director has been incredibly patient and kind to us unaware exchange students trying to join in on the athetics, but it took us about two weeks of "we'll know when tryouts are tomorrow, come back then" to find out when tryouts actually are. Luckily, while they are preventing those of us who are interested in playing sports from traveling anywhere intense (i.e. Patagonia) during our week off before class, it isn't too late to throw together a beach weekend a few hours south in Mar del Plata. Worst case is I save some money and get some excercise; dad will be proud.

Finally, the fun fact of today: I'm not sure if I have already explained the moneda crisis, and it's not exactly 'fun', but I guess 'interesting' and 'ridiculous' are close enough. So the coins worth one peso and 50, 25, 10, and 5 centavos are called 'monedas' and, due to a very strange quirk in the economic system here, they are obnoxiously hard to come by. Since the colectivo (bus) system runs solely on these coins, the monedas queue up in the colectivo system and stay there because they try to sell the monedas back to the government for more than they are worth. The government obviously does not put up with this, allowing the bus system to essentially control the flow (or lack thereof) of monedas. Luckily for me, I can walk most places that I need to go on a regular basis and don't depend on the colectivos; my classmates, though, are often forced to take the subte (subway) solely because they don't have a one peso coin for the colectivo. Cab drivers quite regularly will give a two peso bill as change because they either don't have a one peso coin or would rather hold onto it. It's pretty annoying.