Zapatos y Pesos y Tormentas, Oh My!

Yesterday was a solid day. En la mañana, I went into the center of Cordoba with the familia. They own a pharmacy there, so while they were working, I walked around the city and explored lots of shops and saw all sorts of people. I found the language school I’ll be attending next week, and I took a test that will place me in the right class. Walking around for hours, I learned that Argentines really like shoes. Just about every other tienda was solely dedicated to shoes. So. Many. Shoes.

I spent my siesta researching exchange rates and how they work and why the Argentine peso has depreciated in value so quickly. A year ago, 1 dollar = 5 pesos. As of today, 1 dollar = 8 pesos. And in the black market, 1 dollar = 13 pesos. Es loco! 

 

I think I have been more up to date on Argentine news in the past three days than I have been up to date on US news in the past year. Other people’s news is so much more interesting. 

Last night, algunas parientes (some relatives) de la familia came over to swim and drink mate. There were three nenas (little girls). Las nenas weren’t sure what to make of me at first – I don’t think they’d ever met anyone that couldn’t speak Spanish. But I didn’t know what to make of them either. It was the first time in my life that I couldn’t have a conversation with a five-year-old because their vocabulary was too wide. 

Anyway, tuvimos una tormenta anoche (we had a big storm last night), and everything cooled down significantly. Hopefully the warmth that left here will find its way to all of you.

Los fotos

Some quality Chilean culture, brought to you by the Santiago airport:

And some pretty mountains (the Andes):

Grados de Celcios

Today I learned that 43 degrees Celsius equals 109 degrees Fahrenheit. Take comfort, mis amigos norteamericanos. Argentines are in solidarity with your extreme weather problems right now.

I also am continually learning and forgetting vocabulario nuevo. I decided to try writing down, before I go to bed, the vocab words I remember from the day. We'll see how that goes. Hopefully I'll eventually get to the point of having too many to make it worth it. Last night I only remembered three. =P I'm aiming to do better today.

Also, verb conjugation and I are not friends. 

Estoy aca! (I am here)

Snowy goodbyes in Syracuse,

Monster airplanes, 

Two dinners (because I didn’t know my flight would feed me delicious meals for free),

Patient and talkative Chilean seatmates, 

Excellent Latino movies (except for that one where I couldn’t figure out why the main characters were upset and had to break up),

Free wine, blankets, and those stylish looking eye mask sleep-aid thingers,

Several 5 minute naps,

A wee bit of confusion and mix up as to which country I needed to meet my host family in,

Breaking (and fixing!) part of the bathroom stall in Cordoba’s airport while trying to shove myself,  my violin, and my giant suitcase out of it,

Four security checkpoints,

A quick hop from winter to summer,

An embarrassing moment where I tried telling two people that they looked really familiar to me, but then they didn’t speak English and everything I tried to explain in Spanish just made me seem weird and creepy,

Lots of lost games of spider solitaire,

A host family that’s taught me about a billion words already that I’ve probably mostly forgotten (I feel bad for the amount of patience they’re going to have to expend on me)

And 33 horas later, Estoy aca!

Hasta Luego, Norteamericanos!

Alright, world. I'm heading to Cordoba, Argentina for three months, and several of you have asked for updates and pictures. Since my primary goal is to learn Spanish pretty well, telling stories repeatedly over English-speaking skype dates wouldn't really help me out a ton, so instead I've decided to breath some life back into my blog and use it to share some my aventuras in Cordoba. I'm not sure that my reasons for being in Argentina make for riveting blogging material, but hopefully I'll get into some share-worthy healthy mischief along the way. Stay tuned.

Encouraging Things Actually Happen

My browser has been full of tabs lately, and half of them are devoted to finals week nonsense, but the other half are full of encouraging things happening in the world. I thought I would share:

1. People are celebrating Nelson Mandela. This is to be expected. But the exciting part is that not only are people celebrating him, but many people are not watering him down in the process. I've seen a lot of people posting things like this, that remember Mandela for some of the controversial and unpopular things he spent his life fighting for. I hope those challenging and transformative kinds of things can be what we continue to remember and share. 

2. Especially lately, I've been empowered by thinking outside of the box when it comes to my own life, and so seeing other people realizing they have the power to step outside the normal ways of doing things and be creative to address a problem gives me a lot of joy. 

3. Police, as an aggregate, are really hard for me to respect sometimes, because of the way they are tied to some really corrupt systems. But these police in Thailand give me a lot of hope.

A Rare Visitor

My soul feels the soft, quiet magic today.

Its visits to my body are elusive, rare
and always unpredictable. 

It's the kind of hopeful, peaceful magic
that compels me to write poetry and that
swells in my whole being,
just making me excited
about something
I can't quite put my finger on. 

It's akin to being swaddled in God's wonder
and seeing past everything as I normally see it,
looking out at the world
as if it is on the other side of a window I am sitting at,
inside the safety and warm home of the spiritual.

It's a feeling that holds me,
bids me to dwell in this feeling,
this experience. 

Just be.
That is all I can do,
all I want to do,
all I am being asked to do. 

The world of people rushing around me
with tasks and deadlines and goals and agendas
seems foreign and irrelevant. 

Urgency is absent -- this is not a sensation that compels me to action.
It is the deepest experience of just dwelling
in peace, love, wonder, and the reality
(which, on account of how little we actually
trust in and dwell in it,
is often a surreality)
that nothing is ultimately critical
because we are not the ones holding anything.
God holds it all.

Ukranian Gymnasts Are Not Human

I love the commentator, who does not seem a bit phased or surprised.