Open 25 Hours

Among today´s sights of interest were an intersection juggler and a store that´s open MORE than all of the time. There´s this guy--I can´t yet say whether he´s a well known neighborhood personality as this is my first day here--that was hanging out near this intersection in town early this afternoon. Everytime the light turned red for one side, he´d walk over and stand in front of the cars and start juggling. I didn´t see a bucket or bag for tips or anything either. I don´t know if I just missed it or if that´s just his idea of a good time. ThenI saw this store...well you saw the picture up there. Probably confused you as much as it did me.

We had orientation this morning, wherein the program coordinator (Veronica) and her assistant (Carolina) laid out a few policies about our projects and offered to answer any questions we had and so on. I´ve noticed that subtlety isn´t really a social concern here. Carolina pointed right at me in the middle of the whole thing and said ¨SARAH. YOU will attract unwanted stares from men¨ to which I wasted no time in replying ¨How do you know they´re unwanted?¨ (Just kidding Jon) No, I didn´t say that. Anyway I guess she didn´t see the need to address the warning to anyone else.

At orientation they gave us ¨Chipás¨ which I´m happy to report taste almost exactly like Pão de queijo. I am very excited about that. From what they´ve told me so far there seems to be a lot of similarities between Argentinean food and Brazilian food. Though, the culture guidebook I bought before I left warns me against ever comparing Argentina to Brazil. Not that Brenno isn´t a walking talking example of the reason for this practice. It was kind of funny, Carolina was asking everyone what they were doing after this placement. Charlie (29, England) is traveling all over Argentina afterwards. She was very excited for him, telling him all about the great experiences he was going to have. Lucas (18, Brooklyn) is going to Rosario, so she told him all about that city and how wonderful it was. I said um..I´m going to Rio de Janeiro after this. She said ¨Oh. Nice. Anyway, like I was saying...¨ Apparently the day just recently Argentina beat Brazil in Olympic fútbol was regarded somewhat as a holiday--school was cancelled and everything. I was talking to one guy today telling me all about how ¨Brazil deserved to lose, they really did¨. Anyway, basically the whole point of this paragraph was to get Brenno all worked up because that´s a lot of fun.

So Charlie is from England. He likes to make all these jokes about other Europeans that the rest of us don´t understand. They were telling a story about a girl volunteer they had one time who was a problem, and when they mentioned she was Norwegian, Charlie started laughing exclaiming ¨Norway?! Well THAT explains it doesn´t it!¨ The rest of us were just like No..no Charlie not really. He had made some joke about the Spanish and some other about the French that were equally lost on us I think. Then Lucas likes to wink at me every time somebody mentions something about Americans or the US, so we´ll pray that gets old.

My host family is extremely nice. I have a ¨mom¨ (Raquel) and two ¨sisters¨ (Maura is 21 and Jelena is 19). I haven´t actually met Jelena on account of she spends all of her time with her boyfriend. Maura is actually out with her boyfriend right now too. Raquel and Maura were joking about how Raquel gets so jealous of their boyfriends. I said yeah..my parents can probably relate. Raquel and Maura don´t speak very much English at all, so all of our conversations are in Spanish. Apparently Jelena loves English and can speak it well, but I wouldn´t know. It´s good though. I need to practice. Veronica´s (the program coordinator) mom teaches private Spanish lessons and the other volunteers said that she´s very very good so that´s something I might look in to. I think they cost the equivelant of about 7 dollars an hour. Everything is really cheap here, as long as it´s not imported from Europe or the US. I bought a really nice Spanish dictionary (with definitions in Spanish too--I figured that could be my next step up from the pocket English-Spanish one) for about 4 dollars today.

Anyway, back to what I was starting to talk about last paragraph--the family is really nice. Almost too nice. It´s kind of more like I have 2 personal maids here. They cook for me and won´t let me help, yell at me when I try to do the dishes..basically just want me to sit around and relax all of the time. I listened to them at breakfast and stopped washing the dishes but at lunch I just couldn´t do it... I washed them anyway. Hopefully they´re just being nice and won´t actually be offended if I try to clean up after myself. Afterall, they say they want me to feel like part of the family, but I think I´ll find it hard to ever take the parenthesis away when I type ¨mom¨ and ¨sisters¨if they always insist on treating me like royalty.

Anyway, I think dinner is soon, so I should be heading off. There´s a computer right here in the house that they say I can use whenever I want though, so I should be able to post often. And no Dad, I wasn´t counting you twice. The third knows who he is and so do you :]

Ciao!

Sarah