Soccer, valentines, birthdays, etc

I was going to wait to post again but there's way too much to tell. We are entering our third and final week of Spanish class (thank God) after having our midterm Wednesday and an excursion to La Plata Thursday. We saw a natural history museum that wasn't particularly interesting after having seen the enormous one in Mexico City a few years ago, but we saw a really cool, really HUGE cathedral which may or may not have been the largest in the Americas. I'm not sure if I heard him right. Anyway, it was a nice day off from class and I have some cool pictures that I'll figure out how to show you all somehow. Last week I went with Ben to see the U.S. vs. Mexico men's soccer game in a sports bar filled with rowdy Mexicans... that was interesting. Thankfully we won and didn't have to deal with their ridicule, although they did harp on the one other American who was there pretty badly. It was quite entertaining.

Yesterday was Valentine's Day and, since many things from the U.S. are considered "cool," the Argentines have imported our holiday celebration habits. Luckily for us, we have three amazing boys on our trip who took it upon themselves to invite the girls over for wine and brie at a table with name cards and roses at each place. The cards not only had romantic Spanish poems on the back of each but also the name of our "date" for the evening (each boy had two girls) who would take us to dinner. It was very cute. So after that some of us went out to a boliche (dance club), which was very fun but prevented me from sleeping more than three or four hours... oops. Today I went to my mom's cousin, Mary's, house in San Isidro to celebrate her grandson, Lucas', fourth birthday. He, his brother Marcos (2 1/2), and his sister Ana (6 months) were absolutely adorable. Young children speaking Spanish is one of the many very simple things that make me incredibly happy and it was therefore a good day. Lunch was delicious as the family is Hungarian in origin and made homemade gnoccis with a cream sauce made with oregano grown in the garden at their beautiful home. The kids called the gnoccis "snakes;" one of my favorite Lucas quotes of the day was when he said, upon seeing the huge bowl of pasta, "¡hay muchos snakes para mi cumple!" ("There are so many snakes for my birthday!) I also enjoyed when he was asked to count about five birds by the window and he said, "uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, diez, ocho, nueve," which means, "one, two, three, four, five, ten, eight, nine." I guess he's still learning.

Today was a special occasion, hence the special meal, but most Sundays the family has an asado or barbeque by the pool in the backyard. Hopefully I can return another weekend to join them for one of those! Next weekend I'll be travelling with another group of students from a different program to Guayelguaychú for Carnaval which is very exciting. We have a week off after our orientation week at the beginning of March and I'm hoping to go see some glaciers in Patagonia. Hopefully that works out.

Fun fact of today: like I said, Argentines like to import things from the U.S. and other English-speaking countries, especially words. For example, at a bar you can "tomar shots" instead of chupitos, clothes aren't de moda but rather they are "re fashion," receipts are referred to as "tickets," "hacer gimnasio" is usually said "hacer aerobics," and so on. The funniest one that I have heard, other than the pasta snakes at lunch, was when Lucas had to use the bathroom before going swimming. The door wasn't locking properly and he was very concerned that someone would open it or the wind would come because he had to "hacer poopy." This was very entertaining. p.s. "Hacer" is to do or to make; sorry if you don't know Spanish and this makes no sense.