Day 3

Well last night we went to Nani´s hermano´s house where Kelly, another American, is staying. We ate "picado" which is kind of like finger food, salami, hot dog bites (and NO I did not partake in that), hard boiled cornish game hen eggs, cheese, peanuts, just all sorts of random things. We ate, talked, drank wine and had a good time. Nico (Nani´s brother) is hilarious. He was making fun of english accents and all sorts of other things. Then we piled in Nani´s little car and went to the Cafe di Musica which is a bar where they play American music. Last night we rocked out to the Phil Collins tour special DVD. The Argentines go NUTS for Phil Collins, but none of us had the heart to tell them that he sucks in America! :)

I ordered a margarita, which was probably my first mistake, because it was NOT a margarita. It was more like tequila and lemon juice....I think? We stayed there much longer than I thought we would, and we got home around 1:30, which is pretty early for a Saturday night. I didn´t have any trouble sleeping last night and actually had a hard time waking up for language class this morning!

Anyway, I left early this morning so i could go check out the city before class. Class was from 10-12 and Nani picked me up to take me to pick up her other brother (not Nico) and his wife and son, Filipe. We headed to their parents´house for lunch, which was more like a special dinner.

Nani´s mom is Italian, so she made spaghetti from scratch...I´m talking about the pasta, part. It was the most amazing pasta I´ve ever had. Except they insisted on filling my plate for me and it´s rude not to eat all of your food. So about halfway through my plate of pasta and carne I was completely full. I kept eating though. It will probably make me hate any other kind of spaghetti! Her parents don´t speak much english, so it was fun to try to communicate with my limited spanish and their limited english. Nani´s sister in law speaks English like I do spanish...knows some words, but has a hard time putting them into sentences. Finally Jorge (her padre) found his spanish-english dictionary when we couldn´t figure out how to say¨"sheet rock" or "drywall" in spanish. We never did figure it out.

After the amazing pasta we had dessert, which is a big deal here, so normally I´m always ready for dessert, but this time Oh, I was soooo full. But I ate it anyway, not to be rude and all. Seriously, I don´t think I´ll eat until tomorrow, except it would be rude of me not to eat dinner tonight. I´m trying to do as much walking as I can so that I can hopefully counter all of this eating I´m doing!

Later in the day we had some guided tours of Villa Maria and Villa Nueva (the neighboring town) and it was interesting and I´m finally starting to catch on to what people say in Spanish.

Tomorrow we have class at 8:30, which will be a beast if we are out until late tonight, and we have 2 lectures on the Argentine economy (conducted all in Spanish with some translation) and a tour of a cheese factory. Please cross your fingers that the cheese factory doesn´t gross me out so that I don´t ever want to eat cheese again!

Hasta luego!
Jen