Puberty's a Bitch

It seems to me when I got off the plane in Buenos Aires I unexpectedly went through puberty again. I thought my years of feeling huge and awkward were long behind me, but oh no, it seems like I am, yet again, the tall uncomfortable girl in class.

I did not come into maturity gracefully (for those of you who missed this fabulous time in my life let me illuminate); unlike some of my cute-as-a-button classmates, I was the first one in a bra and the first one to be over 100 pounds. Oh the acne breakouts, the greasy face and the BO.

How could I not want those days back?

Why, you may ask, am I feeling like I have been tossed back into the throws of puberty? 

Let me explain:

The people here are tiny. I think the average height is the size of my bubbie.

I was taller than her when I was 11.

I am neither a tall nor a big girl by any means. But at a towering five foot five and an ungodly weight of 135 pounds I am somewhat of a mutant here. Perhaps it is from our steroid enhanced milk or maybe it’s something in the water, whatever it is, I am accustomed to walking into a clothing store and saying “I’ll take the biggest thing you got.” 

Advice

If someone has an accent, there is no need to point this fact out… believe me, they know they have one.

I was walking to class today and I ran into someone I knew in front of my building, I said hola and then he proceeded talk to me in an over exaggerated accent from the United States (he is from Argentina). I thought of pointing out to him that he had a horrendously ugly accent when he spoke English, but I was late for class and it was not worth my time.

Here is something I have learned;

It is ok to laugh at someone’s new language skills SELECTIVELY. I have to admit, when I mean to say is that I have an itchy foot and accidentally say that I’m horny (which in Spanish, is an easy mistake for foreigners to make) it’s ok, I can even laugh at that little mistake. But every time I open my mouth, you fall on the floor laughing? Now that’s just excessive. 

Keep your eyes on the prize

Last week I was walking to class, the sun was shining and it was a beautiful day. I was feeling great because I had gotten up early and gone to the gym and was just walking along (if I whistled this would have been a good time to do so) and I was looking around me, and all of a sudden I slipped on something, much like cartoon characters when they step on a banana peel… but this was no banana peel. Lucky for me, I walked right into a fresh pile of dog poop, lovely. It was so fresh and so big that I nearly fell right on my back. (Fortunately, I didn’t)

At this point you just kind of have to laugh. What else can you do? I think the gods of Buenos Aires have a terrible sense of humor. When things are looking up, and you are feeling great, you step right into a pile dog shit.

But I digress… There I was with a little something extra to bring to class, but I had to do just that, go to class. I was going to be that kid that smells like shit, great. (I have a new found empathy that kid)

I managed to find a nice big dirty puddle to wash off my shoe. I thought I had gotten all of it off, but when I got out of class I discovered that I must have crossed my legs in class because I had gotten some charming Argentinean dog poop on my jeans.

Yup what a great way to start your day. 

 

Born in the U.S.A

Today I walked into my marketing class and the teacher said, “Ok, pass in your homework.”

I didn’t realize we had homework. And I was feeling so on top of things too! 

Well I am right back to being a bumbling American. I might as well be wrapped in an American flag, holding an apple pie in my hands and singing Bruce Springsteen hits at the top of my lungs.  

Things are looking up for this Yankee

My Spanish is improving! I can feel it happening (well, some days). Today just happens to be one of those days here is way:

I have posted this blog using our brand new Internet! It only took about 3 weeks and hours of frustrating phone calls to get it but we have it non-the less. Here is what happened… we were at our landladies’ house signing the contract and they told us all we had to do to get Internet was to call this number and we would have Internet in no time. Wow that sounds so easy. Looking back I now see how naive we were; Things in this country are neither fast nor easy for us Yankees (they say it shhhaaankees here).

 Anyway, I started calling the Internet Company, fumbling my way through, explaining that we are the new renters and we don’t want cable and we want to add Internet. Que fácil no? Well…

Just as soon as I felt like I was getting somewhere, they would transfer my call and I would be on hold, waiting and waiting, and then all of a sudden, it would say, “I’m sorry everyone is busy now. Goodbye.” Now repeat this sequence of events 6 to 10 times. It was like talking to Verizon times 100 thousand.  

Now you have an inkling of how I felt.

One thing I have noticed in hindsight:

Now usually I hate it when people speak to me in English. I want to tell them, “Hey I am here in YOUR country to learn YOUR language, if you want to speak English go to an English speaking country.” Time and time again people hear my accent and want to “try out their English”

In this case I would not have minded if someone spoke to me in English. I would have welcomed it! But do you think anyone spoke English at Fibertel? Not one. I started out every conversation with them like so… “I’m sorry I don’t speak Spanish very well, do you speak English?” They would reply to me no or try to “transfer” me to someone, in which the call was always lost. Umm interesting.

Anyway the moral to this story is go to the actual Fibertel store, because I found one and in no time I had an appointment for a guy to come and install the Internet. No one could hang up on me there! They told me anywhere between 8AM to 2PM someone would be by. Well at 2:30 I get a phone call and they told me that sorry no one has been by, but stick around until 5 and someone will come. Greeaaat sure I can just hang around my house all day long!

Finally someone came… he came and said, “I’m here to install the cable.” What? I said very clearly (at least I thought it was clear) that we DIDN’T want cable. Haha And what’s more, there are apparently two types of wireless Internet, one for PCs and one for laptops. Of course the guy had the one for PCs.

Well back to the Fibertel store I go and set up ANOTHER appointment. The next set of guys come and have the correct wireless. But one more catch, when I ask if they could set up the password for us, the told me “no we can’t, but all you have to call this number to set up a password”…  I think I will forgo this “simple” task.

I am counting the little things here. Getting Internet: one point for Jenna on her odyssey to learn Spanish. 

Iguazú

I have realized that I blog to procrastinate. Right now I have many many chapters of reading in front of me, but every time I start to read, I find myself thinking about what to put in my next blog. Lucky for all the readers, not so lucky for my grades.

Mimi, Leah Snyder (a friend for the University of Pittsburgh) and I started our trip to Iguazú on Saturday at 2 PM. We boarded the bus that was scheduled to arrive at 7 the next morning! The trip felt surprisingly short. The buses here are not your typical Anderson buses. You have three choices when picking your bus: semi cama, cama or cama executivo. We were on the semi cama bus, which wasn’t even that bad. Although the food was horrendous, the seats practically folded into beds (thus the name semi cama).

Anyway we rolled into our hostel, (which was more like a five star resort the only difference was you had 5 other people sharing your room. There was a pool, free breakfast and free Internet all for the affordable cost of $10! What a deal.) We met up with some of our friends, had some breakfast and jumped on a bus to Iguazú at the ungodly hour of 8:30. (Let it be said that we were up since 7!)

The story behind the falls is from the Guarani Indians. The Guarani Indians are the tribe of people that inhabited the area before the conquest. There are many variations of this story, but this is the one I found most often. M’Boi, the Serpent God, fell in love with a beautiful Guarani girl named Naipi. He wanted Naipi for himself, but unfortunately for him, Naipi was in love with another, the mortal Taruba. They planned on fleeing the place by canoe but M’Boi saw them. Outraged, M’Boi slithered down after them creating new twists and turns in the river. He finally caught up with the lovers and turned their canoe over, throwing Taruba to the river bank. He turned Naipi into a bolder and Taruba into a palm tree and then split the river, creating the Garganta del Diablo (the Devil’s Throat) so that they could see each other but never touch. Although it has been said, that they show their love by creating a rainbow, which starts at a palm tree on the Brazilian side of the falls and reaches over to the rock of Naipi in Argentina.

The Falls consist of 275 cascades that stretch over 1.67 miles. Apparently when Eleanor Roosevelt first saw these falls, she remarked, “Poor Niagara.” Poor Niagara indeed. We spent all day wondering around looking at the beautiful falls set in the amazing jungle of northern Argentina and southern Brazil. I found myself unable to stop taking pictures even though the pictures could not to the place justice.

We only were able to see the Falls from the Argentinean side because being American, we would have to get a visa to go to Brazil. This visa would cost somewhere around $200! (American dollars) I have found, that we also have to get visas for Paraguay, Chile and Bolivia. They do this to us because the American government makes it so difficult and expensive to get into the United States that it is their form of retaliation.

When we returned from the Falls we took a dip in the pool and made dinner. We woke up early the next day (8 AM) and walked to Las Tres Fronteras (the three boarders). From this point, I guess it is kind of self explanatory, Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay can be seen.

The only bad thing about the place was that there were lots of bugs! There were tons of bees at the park, thankfully I didn’t get stung, although Mimi had some crazy allergic reaction to the mosquitoes and now it looks like she has golf balls under her skin. One thing that was really interesting and strange was that there were masses of butterflies! I felt like I was back in the butterfly garden in Costa Rica.

We had lunch and we were back on the bus to Bs. As. All and all I think that it was a great trip. It was good to get out of the crowded and dirty city, even though it was only for a few days. It was nice to be able to walk in a straight line without fear of plowing into someone or stepping in dog shit.

A Place to Call Home

We moved! Finally we can stop sharing a closet for four and start walking around in our underwear.

I feel like I need to write the whole story in order for you all to share in our feeling of complete and utter relief.

Our landladies, well they aren’t technically our landladies but our understanding of the situation is that the owners of the apartment commissioned these two sisters to rent out the apartment. Mimi knows this girl, Samantha Fernandez, and she was living in Argentina, working. As luck would have it, she was going back to the States just as we were getting to Argentina. She is the one that put us in contact with these two women.

Their names are Susana and Amalia. These two sisters live together and rent out apartments. They do not speak clearly and they are constantly forgetting that they are talking to two girls that do not speak Spanish fluently. When they do try to clarify things, they do so at the same time and then start fighting about how to adequately get their point across. They will tell us how to do something one hundred times and when we do as instructed, they tell us that they never said to do that to begin with! All in all it is really confusing and frustrating.

One example.

They said that we could stop by anytime to drop off some money for the deposit and the first few months of rent because the landlords have stated that we must pay them in cash, not by checks, credit cards or money orders. How convenient for them.

<---our room in the hostel

A few days after Susana and Amalia said this, Mimi and I came back with some pesos. When we got to their apartment they looked shocked and perplexed. They didn’t know why we were giving them money and they then asked us to call be for we came. I think the worst part is they speak to us like we are kindergarteners. (I guess that’s understandable because I do speak Spanish at about the same lever as a 5 year old)

We finally got into the apartment and everything had a nice layer of scum: the walls, the floors, the plates, everything. Not only that but the décor is something strait out of the 1970s… doilies on the tables, black lamps accented in gold and some nice mirrored night stands.

The second Mimi walked in she said, “If my mom saw these curtains she would die.” The curtains are really grotesque. They are a grayish color and at first glance, they look dirty but we have concluded that that is just how they came. Gross.

Tonight Mimi and I made dinner. (Thanks to Mr. D’s lovely recipe of meat and potatoes.) Everything was in the pan all ready to be put in the oven, and then we realized, we had no idea how to turn the damn thing on! It is a gas stove and after a few seconds with the gas on, we concluded that it didn’t have a polite light. As we are waving around the lighter in the stove, I am having visions of us getting blown up. We ended up deciding that this was not the best way to go about lighting the stove. Perhaps it was time to consult the neighbors.

There are four apartments on our floor. We knocked on each one once and then rang to doorbell for each one. No one was home. Finally one person was home. His name is David (said daveed FYI) and he answered his door in basically his underwear (apparently he likes to walk around in his underwear too) and said he would gladly help us out right after he put something sensible on. He was really nice and tried not to laugh when we told him that we didn’t know how to light our stove! Haha

All in all, we really love our apartment. It is located on avenida Santa Fe and Puerredon. It is literally right across the street from the metro and it is in the neighborhood of Palermo. Our building has a security guard at all times as well. (AKA it is nice and safe… parents and grandparents you can now take a breath.)

We have a nice balcony and the picture of outside is a view from it. The only drawback to living on such a central place is that it is loud! I’ll just have to put my notesinspanish podcast on every night while I fall asleep. (maybe I’ll start dreaming in Spanish faster!)

Lots of love,

Jenna and Mimi


<---Our little kitchen!



Our room in the hostel
View from our balcony and our living room.