Alright, I am going to continue with the free-flowing train of thought-style blog posts. Mainly because I am lazy and don´t want to have to organise my thoughts too much. I´ll try not to sound like too much of an arsehole, although that will be tough cause I think fundamentally, I am a bit of an arsehole. Not in the way that I actually treat people, I hope, but in what I think. Does thinking about these things make you an arsehole if you don´t reveal them to anyone or act on them? I´ve been working hard on trying to be a nice guy, but it´s tough... I do believe that if given enough time talking to someone, I will eventually say something pretty offensive. I just have to hope that I´ve built up enough goodwill to withstand it. Anyway...
Last weekend was pretty busy for me. I went out both Friday and Saturday nights, changed my homestay accomodation and went to see some guys go paragliding.
On Friday, the language school held a barbeque with a free tango lesson before hand. I decided to give the tango lesson a shot, cause at the very least, all that instructions would be in Spanish and I could practice my listening a bit. I arrive to find that the three other students in the class were two guys and a girl who were in Cordoba to do volunteer work. One of the guys and the girl were from Spain, and the other guy, Freddo, was from France. Tango is hard... I love the music and I love watching it, but it is hard. I don´t claim to be a great dancer, but I am co-ordinated and generally pick up physical activities quickly. I think Tango is a bit like Spanish... The individual elements aren´t tough to grasp by themselves, but putting it together is a big challenge. Just standing with good posture is unnatural for me, let alone remembering to have the right pressure when holding your dance partner, moving your feet in the right way and to the right rhythmn....all while an attractive but stern tango teacher is barking instructions in a language that you don´t speak very well. It was fun though. The Spanish girl was really pretty. Unfortunately, she had super hairy arms that I could feel while dancing with her. She was also really friendly and chatty....only I couldn´t really understand anything she said. I think it was a combination of her speaking super fast and the fact that it was Spanish Spanish as opposed to Argentinean Spanish. There is actually a reasonable difference. They use ¨vos¨here instead of ¨tu¨and there is no ¨vosotros¨. It´s different even from other South American Spanish dialects... There are some new students in my class from the Netherlands and Switzerland and they say that the Spanish here sounds a lot like Italian. Cool... I wouldn´t mind speaking Italian-Spanish...I wouldn´t mind speaking any form of Spanish really...
The main event, the barbeque was good. It was my first experience with eating large quantities of meat here in Argentina. I thought it was very tasty, but wasn´t blown away. It just tasted like good barbeque in New Zealand, albeit a little more salty. It certainly didn´t compare to Jinzhou´s world famous shaokao. Man, I could go for some yangruo chuanr right now. My experience with Argentinean food here has been mixed. There are some tasty things, but the cuisine in general is a bit on the bland side. It took me a while to realize what was wrong and why I´ve been craving things like mee goreng and tonkatsu curry. They don´t really use any spices here. Even stuff like the Mexican food they have here is fairly bland (what are you doing eating Mexican food in Argentina when you are going to be vising SoCal, Dave?). I really want to go to one of the few Chinese restaurants I´ve seen around here, to see if their food is similarly underspiced. I´m sure things will be different in Buenos Aires, but there really isn´t much variety in the cuisine here. I haven´t seen any Japanese or Korean restaurants yet, no Thai, no Indian. If you like steak, meat sandwiches, ham and cheese sandwiches, Italian food and pastries...you´ll love Argentina. Ooh...there are many really nice quaint little places that serve really delicious-looking pastries and cakes. Moot moot moot!
Anyway, the barbeque was good but not great and the company was good as well. After dinner, three Argentinean youths performed some local traditional music. Two guitars and a guy playing a wood flute or pipe or recorder thing. They were good, competent...however the music did start to get a bit samey. I prefer my Argentinean music to be of the more upbeat, dancey variety. The amusing thing is, that when they were done, one of the Swiss guys from the language school got up and played some tunes on his sax. He was pretty bad-arse... He played the theme from the Pink Panther, which I guess all saxophanists play, but he absolutely killed it (in the good way). He also played ¨All of me¨, which is one of my favourite jazz standards of all time. I felt a little bit bad for the kids who had just played, cause they were completely overshadowed.
Around 11pm, the party was winding down, so Chase made the call to head off to a club where there was going to be a hip-hop party. A hip-hop party in Argentina? Why the fuck not? I was really happy to tag along and to continue socializing with my fellow students. If you are my friend on Facebook (it´s not too late to come back, Menina), you can view the pictures from the party. Well, at least the crappy one of me that Julieta tagged. God, I look like a fricken´zombie... I´m glad that I´m not self conscious when I get in the dancing groove, cause I bet I look fucking hilarious, retarded and terrible at the same time. Anyway, it was good times... I didn´t get as wasted as I did the previous week. Mainly, I think, because I stayed away from the Fernet. Also, I think having the right people in your posse is key. You need to have people who dance because they are feeling the music and who just love to dance. I hate going out and dancing when it´s just a bunch of guys looking to score and who are only dancing to pull or to grope or whatever. I´ve been doing some thinking about why it is that I prefer dancing with girls, even though I might not actually be dancing with them. I think just being in the vicinity of people who love dancing is infectious... You look around and see them having a awesome time and really getting into the music and you can´t help but feed off that energy. I think girls just love to dance more than guys (there are exceptions, like Stu, I´d go dancing with him any day of the week....well not any day of the week, but him going dancing would be a drawcard for me to go two). One of the girls in our party was a Brazilian girl, who I think is actually a dancer of some sort. Anyway, she was a terrific dancer and I was happy to occupy dancefloor space next to her. On a related note, I think that having girls in your party puts other guys at ease. If I´m with a bunch of girls, some dumb fuck is less likely to feel threatened and think I am trying to mack onto his girl. I think this is particularly important here in Argentina, where there is a bit of a macho culture. There´s no way I would hit on a girl here that I didn´t know (not that I could anyway, with my Spanish). It´s even worse in China, I would actually move away if a Chinese girl started dancing close to me. Drunk Chinese dudes can get very over-protective and image conscious. Their girl dancing near you makes them lose face, especially if you are a foreigner. No....I don´t want to fuck your girlfriend, you short, fat, ugly, pock-marked, BO-ridden motherfucker... You can take her back home and ¨bang¨her with your one inch chode. She´s only into you for your money anyway... you piggy fuck. Whoa....there is definitely some hostility there.... better navigate away from the topic. Yeah....in short, the party was great, the music was great, the dancing was great, I didn´t get fucked up......which was great.
What wasn´t great was having to get up at 9am (after 4 hours sleep), to move out of my previous unsatisfactory homestay, into an awesome new place, that is actually a home. I don´t want to talk too much about the old place, primarily because I think to some degree, it´s not really her fault. The old lady did do the bare minimum, I guess. Her food was nice enough. She did make some attempt to talk to me some time. Problem is that it wasn´t really a home, I mean a living home. Sure, she lived with her daughter, who is a doctor and never at home and she was stand-offish anyway, but I mean it wasn´t a living breathing home. It was a home once, as evidenced by the old pictures she kept around the house. I imagine it was a pretty warm and inviting place once, when her five kids and husband were still living there. But now, I think her husband is dead and four of her offspring have moved away and it´s mostly just her and her two cats alone at home. I feel sorry for her. I don´t want to live with her, but I feel sorry for her. My new homestay are also grandparents, but they have one of their grandsons living with them and they have family visiting almost every single day. I get the impression that they are reasonably happy and content, and I think that was the main thing missing from my previous place. Unhappy people shouldn´t be homestay hosts.
Yup, so I was busy moving into my new place. I now share a room with Yusuke next to Jamie´s room. A new American kid, Chris, moved into the room down the end. It´s nice having people around. Oh, and the food is fantastic. The best meal I´ve had in Argentina was last night´s dinner. Jorge makes incredible roast potatoes and the roast beef was good as well. A few hours after I arrived on Saturday, I sat down to a traditional Argentinean 1st of May meal, ¨Locro¨. Locro is a type of stew, and the one we had was a simple beef and bean stew that was very good. They had some picante salsa to go with it that wasn´t actually very hot at all, but then again, it might have been by Argentinean standards. After lunch, Jorge´s son Marcos invited us to go watch some paragliding out near a small town about an hour´s drive out of town. Yusuke and I gladly accepted. It was a bit of a mission climbing to the top of the hill where they were jumping off, but it was worth it cause the view was magnificent and it was cool to have people taking off a few metres to the side of you. I hadn´t really been out of the city at all, so it was nice to get some fresh air and peace. I wish I´d brought my camera. Heheheheh.....Yusuke took some pictures. I think I might see if I can steal them off him. But no promises, I am toying with the idea of making this a pic-free blog and making you wade through paragraph after paragraph of text. You can choose not to read....no one´s twisting your arm. I hate taking photographs.....I suck at it. Don´t make me take photographs.... I just need to get other people to take them, then tag me in them on Facebook. Paragliding was cool... Not that I did it or will do it...... but it was cool.
We got back around 8 and started to contemplate plans for the evening. Jamie was trying to organise to meet up with Ricardo, who was going to a party. However, none of us have an Argentinean cell number, so all this had to be done via Facebook. Not the most efficient way... To cut a long story short (cause I´m getting pretty tired of writing and my eyes are sore), we didn´t meet up with Ricardo, we ended up going out, but I was tired after only 4 hours sleep the night before and we weren´t with any girls who loved dancing. We went to a pretty big club on the outskirts of town, and it was packed and pumping....but I was falling asleep on the couches in the outdoor smoking area. We got back at 5am and I was glad to tumble into bed.
Sunday was a rest day. I got up at 1 and just chilled out the whole day. I did some study, which was badly needed, in a park but it started raining, so I then moved to a cafe, which is so Susie. I was really happy to receive that compliment. :) ...... and yeah...... that´s about it. I think that´s me done for now. Chau.
