Monday, June 23, 2008

The first day of school...in June?

Hey everyone!


I haven't written in a couple days but here's a little update on the (what I believe are) interesting things which have happened! I wanted to go to church on Sunday morning, so Marta called up an old friend who goes to a non-Catholic church (I wanted to attend a protestant church), and got the directions and time for it. I went and it was fine - except it was in English. I swear I happened upon the only English-speaking church in this entire city. I asked around and the good thing is that they have a service in Spanish at 6pm, so I'm gonna head off to that next sunday!


I also went downtown with a few people from the group and a couple host brothers, and took a few pictures. Here are some various pictures I took throughout the day:
















This is a photo of part of the downtown skyline as
seen from a boardwalk in downtown Buenos Aires

















This is called "La Casa Rosada" (The Pink House)
and is exactly like the White House in the U.S.,
except it's pink. Go figure.

















A photo of that same clock tower that I took a
picture of a few days ago, except this is at night
and I just think it looks cooler :)


Fast-forward to this morning...and school started. That's right. In June, I have to face that word that children everywhere dread: school (Or, if you're bilingual..you might dread escuela...?). Anyway, I take the train to class, and the ride is only one stop, about 5 min once the train actually gets to my stop. I waited for I believe 30 min for the train before it finally came this morning, but hey that's ok. I'll start timing things better the longer I study here. We didn't really do much, we just had a little introduction to the university, a safety talk, campus tour and placement test in order to see which Spanish-level class we'd be placed in. Classes formally start tomorrow, so I'll see how that ends up going. Should be fun, I am really looking forward to having some other spanish stuff to fill the parts of the day when I'm not actually speaking it.

Interesting piece of information for the day: Tomas is a bartender on the weekends, for a company that goes to big weddings or fancy parties and does the bar. This coming weekend is a big wedding (only really rich people apparently can afford to hire the company Tomas works for), and I'm going to go help out! That is, yours truly, Nate Sooter, is going to be a bartender at an Argentinian wedding. And I am pretty excited to do so - it's more Spanish practice (in a super crowded environment...mixing drinks which I have never tried in my entire life seeing how I've only ever been to two bars), and I get to see what a wedding in Argentina is like. The main difference is that my job starts at 10....pm. And ends around 7am. Soooooo, we're gonna see how that goes. that's how they do weddings here - when i mention that weddings in the US start in the afternoon and end usually by 10-11-12, they were appalled, since that's when things are just getting going in Argentina.

I have tea and dinner left tonight, followed by getting coffee with some friends here in San Isidro....there are always things to eat here! Hope all of you are having a wonderful summer, wherever you might be at this moment!

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