Oh my,
Hello everyone! I have been in argentina for 4 days now, and things here are awsome. Everything is in spanish. There are political signs for elections in spanish, there are signs posted about how things are better now, the niños speek niño spanish, this keyboard has an ¨ñ¨ key, todos son muy bien! Not to mention my family speaks the equivalent of no english, which i expected and enjoy, because if they did I don´t think i would try as hard to speak spanish.
My host family is great. Mo madre es un ama de casa ¨house wife¨, and she is almost always at home. I have 3 host bothers, all in their 20´s, and two live at home, the tercero lives in Buenes Aires (I think) and is studying to be an accountant ( I think). Uno hermano que vive en casa is married, and has a 2 year old boy named Juan, who was terrified of me, but less so now. This little family lives in a little house inside the bigger house, there is just a door in the hall that opens up into a smaller house, it is super neat! The other son se llama ¨titi¨ wich is short for Arlnaldo, i think, and he is very nice. He has dinner with us alot, and is letting me use his Ipod charger, por que no tengo, but I don´t think it is working... oh well. I was just bitten by my first mosquito, que peligroso(dangerous)!! Anyhoo, my family is great but mi madre is sooo hard to understand. I nod and smiled alot the first day, and she could tell that i didn´t understand her. Everytime I ended up nodding and smiling she would too, and her smile takes up her entire face, it is very fun. I thought it was just me but then i met another girls family, and I could understand them much better. But our communication is improving, she dosn´t anunciate, and Argentinians leave off the ends of words, so a language i have learned from americans until now is being shortend, with an accent added to it, muy dificil. But she does speak slowly for me, and things are improving. The first night we went on a walk with her friend, and and I could tell they were talking about me because I could hear ¨ella¨and ¨nerviosa¨, but that is all I got out of the conversation, that and a nice tour of the neiborhood. There are so many stray dogs here!!! I want to pet them all and I can´t! They are friendly (I think), but when a friend tried to pet one her madre grabbed her arm and held it for a while. tan chistoso.
Clases are ok, right now I´m in spanish 3, which is soooo easy, we are conjugating in the present tense right now, wich is easy, but not all that useful for improving my spanish.
The busses are a little crazy, not as crazy as i had been led to believe, but still crazy, like all the other cars. Stop signes are suggestions, stop lights are more serious, and pedestrians are up for sport, cars will really not stop for you.
Yesterday Marta, who lives close to me, and I tried to meet a group at la Plaza Independencia, and we successfully arrived via un trole, but could not find anybody, and the return trole was several streets over and it took us a good bit of walking and backtracking to find the street, and more to find a stop. It was for the best though because today was our first day ridding a bus home, and we took the wrong one, but because we had been lost in downtown yesterday it was easy to see we were going the wrong way and we just got off and jumped onto a trole.
There is SO much meat here. Breakfast is tea with crackers, lunch is some kind of fried meat with papas or something and dinner is some type of steak with potatotes or lentils (Charity, because of you i knew what lentils are, and I tried to describe lentil loaf, and recived some blank looks) or something, and it is alll sooooo gooooooood!
So in summary things are good, I speak gringa not spanish, and I´m gonna go read my dictionary,
addios
-Paméla
P.S. There are horses in the streets pulling carts
Hello everyone! I have been in argentina for 4 days now, and things here are awsome. Everything is in spanish. There are political signs for elections in spanish, there are signs posted about how things are better now, the niños speek niño spanish, this keyboard has an ¨ñ¨ key, todos son muy bien! Not to mention my family speaks the equivalent of no english, which i expected and enjoy, because if they did I don´t think i would try as hard to speak spanish.
My host family is great. Mo madre es un ama de casa ¨house wife¨, and she is almost always at home. I have 3 host bothers, all in their 20´s, and two live at home, the tercero lives in Buenes Aires (I think) and is studying to be an accountant ( I think). Uno hermano que vive en casa is married, and has a 2 year old boy named Juan, who was terrified of me, but less so now. This little family lives in a little house inside the bigger house, there is just a door in the hall that opens up into a smaller house, it is super neat! The other son se llama ¨titi¨ wich is short for Arlnaldo, i think, and he is very nice. He has dinner with us alot, and is letting me use his Ipod charger, por que no tengo, but I don´t think it is working... oh well. I was just bitten by my first mosquito, que peligroso(dangerous)!! Anyhoo, my family is great but mi madre is sooo hard to understand. I nod and smiled alot the first day, and she could tell that i didn´t understand her. Everytime I ended up nodding and smiling she would too, and her smile takes up her entire face, it is very fun. I thought it was just me but then i met another girls family, and I could understand them much better. But our communication is improving, she dosn´t anunciate, and Argentinians leave off the ends of words, so a language i have learned from americans until now is being shortend, with an accent added to it, muy dificil. But she does speak slowly for me, and things are improving. The first night we went on a walk with her friend, and and I could tell they were talking about me because I could hear ¨ella¨and ¨nerviosa¨, but that is all I got out of the conversation, that and a nice tour of the neiborhood. There are so many stray dogs here!!! I want to pet them all and I can´t! They are friendly (I think), but when a friend tried to pet one her madre grabbed her arm and held it for a while. tan chistoso.
Clases are ok, right now I´m in spanish 3, which is soooo easy, we are conjugating in the present tense right now, wich is easy, but not all that useful for improving my spanish.
The busses are a little crazy, not as crazy as i had been led to believe, but still crazy, like all the other cars. Stop signes are suggestions, stop lights are more serious, and pedestrians are up for sport, cars will really not stop for you.
Yesterday Marta, who lives close to me, and I tried to meet a group at la Plaza Independencia, and we successfully arrived via un trole, but could not find anybody, and the return trole was several streets over and it took us a good bit of walking and backtracking to find the street, and more to find a stop. It was for the best though because today was our first day ridding a bus home, and we took the wrong one, but because we had been lost in downtown yesterday it was easy to see we were going the wrong way and we just got off and jumped onto a trole.
There is SO much meat here. Breakfast is tea with crackers, lunch is some kind of fried meat with papas or something and dinner is some type of steak with potatotes or lentils (Charity, because of you i knew what lentils are, and I tried to describe lentil loaf, and recived some blank looks) or something, and it is alll sooooo gooooooood!
So in summary things are good, I speak gringa not spanish, and I´m gonna go read my dictionary,
addios
-Paméla
P.S. There are horses in the streets pulling carts
