i'm in buenos aires. nuts.

oh my goodness. this city rocks.

so as i write this i am concluding my second day in argentina. and so far, i really really like it here. my family is awesome. i am with virginia and vicente, a retired couple in their 70's who are awesome and have been hosting students for a long time. we are in a decently sized apartment in the belgrano district and about a 10min walk from school. i have my own room, which is nice, and pretty comfortable lodgings. we had are first day of classes today and we had a test in order to place us in the correct language level, and for some odd reason they put me in advanced. so i have advanced conversation and composition (scared about the writing part, i'm terrible at that) from 10am to 1pm and latin american political systems from 2 to 5pm. i only have class on monday, tuesday, and wednesday. yeahh. spanish is going to be tough, we already have a 15min presentation next week without any type of notes, definitely have to prepare for this one. the politics teacher is really hard to understand and his writing is almost eligible, so that make it rough, but i believe the material will be interesting.

the language here is definitely a change. the accent is hard to get used to but i really like it. the "y" are pronounced like "sh" and the double l ("ll") are now "j". for example: yo (I) is now pronounced like "show" and lluvia (rain) is know (roughly) pronounced like "jew-via" when it was "you-via". tough to get used to, but awesome.

everything here has a european flavor to it. the majority of the people here are white (italian, german, europian heritage) the only exception is that spanish is spoken in place of english. i am definitely not the minority anymore. and there are a lot of tall women, so life is good.

something crazy about this city is the night life. supposedly the nightlife picks up around 3 in the morning and ends around 6-7am. luckily for me i only have class three days a week. so my four day weekends are going to be nuts. however, this weekend we are going to visit the iguazu falls in northern argentina (right on the border with brazil). i know we have two more planned trips on top of this one, but they are only day trips. one to a city in northern argentina called el tigre and the other trip we are taking a 45min ferry ride to a city in uruguay, which i'm really looking forward too.

well, my hour on alloted internet time is running out. would love to hear from all y'all. shoot me an email sometime: ss1307@messiah.edu

alright, later.