Estoy en Argentina!

I've been abroad for only a matter of hours and already I've seen the Argentinian version of Richard Gere, a weird public urination display, and, much to my delight, my own breath.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who knows my temperature preference that the last of those excited me the most. Well, I guess even for those who don't know, you could guess. I mean, as far as the first one goes, Richard Gere might be more exciting if I was I don't know 50, and also it'd be kind of weird if the second one excited me at all, so by default the last one must take the cake. But I digress. Now that I'm south of the Equator, the seasons are backwards, so winter is just making the transition into spring. I'd guess it's somewhere in between 55 and 65 degrees outside and it's wonderful.

I actually saw Señor Gere before ever leaving the US--he sat next to me on the plane on the way over. I could have sworn it was really him until he spoke (telling me as soon as he sat down to "please be-uh quiet if he is sleep-sleep") and thus revealed his thick accent. For all I know the accent wasn't even real, merely a ploy to deflect unwanted attention--but anyway if the guy is going to go through all that effort of utilizing a fake accent every time he wants to say something, I'm not about to harass him about his true identity.

Buenos Aíres as it turns out has two airports, and go figure I landed at one and have to depart out of the other, which necessitated about an hour long cab ride. It was during this ride that I saw a guy relieving himself on the side of the highway. There was tree cover about 15 feet back, but using it apparently wasn't a concern of his. The weirder thing is that there wasn't a car stopped anywhere near there, so he wasn't a desperate motorist or anything...I found myself wondering what then possibly could have brought him there to do that. The other peculiar thing about the highways there is the way they go about discouraging graffiti on the overpasses. This is done by, in essence, beating the would-be graffitiers to the punch. Every single pillar had a huge painting of what resembles a No Smoking sign, only rather than a cigarette in the middle there was an oversized paintbrush being grasped by a hand. Underneath each one it said NO PINTE (Don't Paint). The irony is that these mandates are far uglier than any graffiti I've ever seen, which is compounded by the fact that they for some reason see the need paint this on not just one but every single pillar. Maybe they don't care for aesthetics so much as enforcing rules.

My cab driver's English was limited to "hello" and "thank you," so I got the opportunity right away to practice my Spanish. So far it seems the majority here doesn't speak English, which is good news for me--it always seems awkward to try and speak broken Spanish to someone who speaks fluent English. I understood most of what he said, and his solution to my limited knowledge of Spanish was to A) to speak slowly (which unfortunately I still need) and B) use lots of synonyms. This should have been helpful, but it seems like every time he did it it'd be either unnecessary because I knew both the words he tried, or futile because I knew neither of them. For example, he said I should have taken the public bus (right, like I wanted to navigate that in my first 10 minutes here) because it's "más barato...más economico." That translates to telling me that it's "cheaper...more economic." I can't give an example of a situation in which I didn't know either of the words, because it's hard to remember words you don't know, but you get the picture.

I arrived at this airport at around 930 am, and my connecting flight to Posadas doesn't leave until 840 pm, so I've been hanging out in the terminal Tom Hanks-style. Okay, not quite, I have some money and was able to buy myself 4 of the most delicious crossaints I've ever eaten, so no crackers with mustard for me (gross). But Fun Fact--I learned today that Spanish doesn't take the French like us but actually has its own word for them: "medialunas," or "half moons." Then my linguistic-oriented brain takes that fact and thinks about how we also sometimes call them "crescent rolls" and also refer to that sort of moon as a "crescent moon," so they're all really related in a way.

I'm trying to immerse myself in this language as much as possible for the next 6 weeks, so the first thing I did when I got here was buy a novel in Spanish. I'm on a reading kick like I haven't been since like 8th grade, reading maybe 2-3 books a week, so I figure I might as well kill two birds with one book. I sat down at a café for a couple of hours and while I ate my half-moons I worked my way through a few chapters of it. I know enough Spanish that I could understand the basis of what was going on, but I kept my pocket Spanish-English dictionary at hand. The trouble was, I found that most of the words I didn't know weren't contained in my dictionary. A little bit frustrating at first, but I decided it was okay with me--just means that I'm more advanced than a pocket dictionary and need to graduate to a more thorough one. Cool.

That's about it thus far. I'll be really surprised if anyone actually read all this. Okay, anyone in addition to the 3 people whom I KNOW inhaled every word... (Hi Mom & Dad...)

I don't know when my next access to internet will be but I'll write more and reply to comments as soon as I can.

Miss everyone!