The Grind

OK, so I`ve survived my first week, and come out pretty well. Not that I`ve forgotten that I got robbed, but things feel pretty normal now. I got new contacts yesterday and didn`t realize how shitty my old ones were-my eyes feel so much better! I ended up going to my friend`s brother in law`s clinic instead of the public one. It was more expensive but I got a proper exam and didn`t have to wait 3 hours. Awesome.

So now I`m working on my Castellano for a week before I go for interviews with a couple different NGOs and other places. We`re going over all these basic things, many of which I know already, but there is one crazy thing in Argentina, the pronoun vos. It`s the same as tu for you who know Spanish, but it`s more familiar. And the conjugation of the verb following is different. Everyone uses it, so I know it`s going to screw me up when I get back and talk to non-Argentinians. But that doesn`t matter because I`m here now, and I need to talk to people properly. The accent is silly though, but to them, everyone else in the Spanish speaking world has a silly accent. This is a silly place in general, and I love it.

The buses squeak. It`s something with the shock absorbers, so you can always hear a bus coming because it sounds like a dog chewing on a squeaky toy. Punctuality is a virtue, and it seems like people expect it, but I`m finding that people are rarely on time, even though they`re supposed to be. I dunno. No one seems to believe in the peso...The country has a pretty tough political and economic history, really tough, but the people are still pretty light hearted about things. My landlord calls the peso `funny money` because its worth fluctuates constantly. He told me a lot of jokes shitting on Argentina, one being..... OK when God was creating the earth, he made France and said they will be masters of wine and cheese, he made Italy and said the food and the people will be beautiful, he made England and the US and said they will be great powers one day, and then he made Argentina, and said `they will have oil, gold, silver, mountains, coast, arable soil, every natural resource imagineable,` and the angels protested, `how can that be fair, you can`t give them all of that!` to which god replied,`no it`s OK, because I will also give them Argentinians´.

Anyway, if it`s not funny in text, it was funny when he said it. He`s a funny guy.

Saturday I am going to a soccer match between my volunteer organization and this girls team in Villa 31. It`s apparently a pretty bad area, like a favela type settlement, bordering Recoleta, one of the richest areas in the entire country. So it should be an interesting time. Typical of what I`ve seen in South America, the gap between wealth and poverty is astonishingly massive. It doesn`t appear to be quite as bad here as in Sao Paulo, where my friend and I found it a little disgusting how people flaunted their wealth, but it`s still really apparent. Anyway, when I start working, I`m meant to be helping out at this cooperative called La Juanita, which is a conglomeration of different things that brings services to the neighborhood, also really poor. My other project is to be working on a farm in the city.... urban agriculture is my favorite thing in the world at the moment, so this is perfect. I`ll be learning techniques and how to sustain crops in the city, and why they are doing it here-all knowledge that I can bring back to NY with me. So now I guess the blog should start to get pretty boring, because I`ll just be going on with the grind. The experience isn`t boring at all, every day I see something new and learn something that I didn`t know yesterday. Being away always makes me feel like a child again, because I have to accept that I know nothing about this new place, and open my mind up so I have a fresh perspective, like a clean slate from which I can draw conclusions and form opinions. And even then, there is so much room for something to have been misunderstood or lost in translation, so I`m glad I have a couple of months here to really nail down some things, and hopefully  get a pretty good grasp on the language. I`m finding that I already understand it really well, it`s just that the thinking required to actually speak is a little slower. If you know me well enough, you know that my process of thinking moves pretty slow in general, haha. Ohhhh well, I have to go meet my Spanish, no, Castellano, professor for lunch. PAPA-make sure you don`t miss the one I posted talking about you, below.