Travel To Tucuman

Home sweet home. Or atleast as close as I am going to get to Washington whether in Argentina. For Father´s Day weekend my family drove up north to the Province of Tucuman to visit family. It was my cousins fourth birthday and my mama wanted to be there for it. Now I have always been a lover of road trips so I was super excited to go...until, that is, that I found out it was an eleven hour car ride with me, my aunt, and my sister Sofi all packed in the back seat. It might have been fine if our car was a cadillac and had a back seat like a bed and us three women didn´t all have hips but unfortunetelly none of that was true. It was an awfully long car ride with very little room to move. We left at six in the morning which thankfully gave me something to do for the first couple hours - sleep. The rest of the car ride was filled with starring at the changing scenery. Which I was happy to find was quite interesting. San Juan is generally really flat and really dry but as we started up north some mountains came along. I also got to see GIANT cactusas. These cactusas were as tall as trees and as wide as a car. I would hate to get one of those prickers stuck in your foot! Once we passed the mountains and arrived to the city of Tucumán, I found the I could practically breathe in the rain in the air. It was wonderful!

The weekend was spent meeting my family and having many lunches, dinners, brunches, late night coffees, and birthday parties until I was completelly exhausted. On the night that I arrived I was introduced to so many relatives that I could hardly keep track of who was my aunt, who was my cousin, and who was an aunt of my cousin! I still have yet to remember all of there names. :) But I can tell you about some of them. I have four cousins: Lourdes (who was turning four), Santiago (who is five), and Valentina and Amelia (nineteen and twenty two). I was so happy to be able to hang out with young kids again! I have been really missing volunteering at the special needs preschool in Washington and I got to play "the crocodille is going to eat me!" with Lourdes and Santiago. It still makes me smile so much. Here are some pictures of when they decided to tackle me:

Sunday was Lourdes birthday party and Father´s Day. We all had asado and lunch together and then a bunch of Lourdes school friends came over. They were all dressed up as princesses and had face paint on. It was all very sweet. I hung out with my cousins and talked with a girl I met at the party. I always love when I meet people who are really interested in going on an exchange. She was only thirteen so had few years to wait but you could just see the thirst in her eyes to get to explore other countries. She reminded me of myself just a few months ago. :) In terms of Father´s Day, we really didn´t do much. I was able to send my Dad in the U.S. a quick email at about midnight when I finally got around a computer but Santiago was trying to tackle we and give me kisses so it was awfully short (I later sent him another email and a couple days later we got to Skype).

Sunday night (We were going to leave early Monday morning), Sofi, Valentina, Amelia, Santiago and I all went out to McDonalds for dinner. Afterwards Santiago was feeling sick and was sent to his mother´s room to lie down and watch cartoons. Us girls put on a romantic movie and curled up on the couch. You might have heard of this movie. It is called "Beastly" and comes out in theaters this July 31st. Yep, that wasn´t a type-o, this movie hasn´t even been officially released! How in the world we got it I have no idea but Valentina had it on a pen drive and it was actually in pretty good quality. Argentiníans are famous for their pyrighting abilities. :)

Monday morning our car wouldn´t start because the battery was dead. My parents decided that we could let it charge and have lunch with the family. Well lunched turned into tea time and soon it was five o´clock and we were just leaving. With an eleven hour drive ahead that ment we would be arriving at the wee hours of the morning. And unforuntely I had school the next morning. I was able to sleep a little in the car but it was never very solid. When we finally arrived home and I got into bed at about three a.m. that only gave me three and a half hours of sleep to work with at school. I am starting to get pretty good at functioning on little to no sleep. :) I was also really sick that weekend so it took me the rest of the week to get better.

It was so awesome to be able to meet more of my family and I always love it when I get to talk about my home country and teach people different things about who I am. My soul was refreshed with the rain and I came back home a smiley (but very tired) happy Sanjuanina.

P.S. Don´t forget to check out my photos by following the link!

The Results Are In!

One of the things I had to mentally prepare myself for before I came here was that I was going to get bad grades in my classes. As many of you know, I have been a little bit of a fanatic for striaght A´s and it was hard to think about me failing classes here. Well have no fear, because my reputation is still intact. I mean to say that I haven´t failed anything yet since I clearly wasn´t able to keep up my straight A´s. :) Here, we are graded from one to ten with ten being the best and one being the worst. You might find it interesting to know that it is impossible to get a zero. If I turned my test in blank, well what do you know? I got one point! I don´t quite understand the logic behind it but for all I know there might not be any! :) I have a total of twelve classes and the beginning of June was the end of our first trimester. That means report cards! So here is the general outline of my grade update:

Lengua y Literatura II - 8.80
Lengua Extranjera: Ingles II - 10
Matemática II - 9.75
Educación Física II - 9.60
Biología I - 8.50
Geografía I - 9.33
Derecho I - 8
Teoría y Gestión de las Organizaciones II - 7.50
Sistemas de Información Contable I - 8.50
Economía II - 8.25
Tecnología de la Información II - 10
Catequesis II - 9

Incase that you can´t read Spanish or are to lazy to look the words up, here is the list of classes in English:

Literature
English (Foreign Language)
Math
P.E.
Human Biology
Geography
Law
Theory and Management of Organizations
Accounting
Economy
Computer Excel
Religion

So in general I would say I am doing amazing for having taken all of these in Spanish! Of course, I studied my butt off and spent lots of time translating all of my notes. Now though that I have proven that I can recieve good grades, I think I am going to take a little break. :) Starting with the Teory and Management test that I took today which I only spent an hour studying for... Yeah.... it may seem like a lot but when it is in Spanish that is just enough time to translate it all into English and read it over once. So I can´t not study completelly but I sure didn´t study enough to get a good grade! There is something in my blood that just makes me start to have a nervious breakdown at the thought of a failing grade. Which is why I am determined to get one here. :) What better place to get more relaxed than when my grades don´t mean anything? And this way, when I come back and start college I will have had a year off of studying hard and have saved all of my energy for getting good grades when it counts! If you think about it, it really makes sense. Why push myself to spend my time studying when I could be hanging out with my family or friends? The first trimester here I spent HOURS each day studying, translating, and reading all of my notes. I could have taken that time to explore my city or play a board game with my sisters. I have got six more years of college to do all the studying I want. :) But I am only in Argentina for one year! I deffinetelly think I should live it up as much as possible even if that means having to get mediocor (I really have no idea how to spell that!) to failing grades. Don´t you agree? :) Yep, I knew you would.

Another Adventure to Rodeo...But a Lot Different!

Hey Guys! So this last weekend I went to Rodeo again! This trip though was with AFS and was an orientation. Mainly it was designed for the students who are going to be living in July but it was a fun way to get to hang out with the other kids. We left at five thirty on Friday morning (I got to skip school!) and drove the three and a half hours to Rodeo. When we got there, I discovered that there was frost on the ground and my Blue Converse that I love so dearly just weren´t up to the jo of keeping off frost bite. Since I have no other warm shoes here, I resorted to double layering socks and long underwear. My moms (both here and in the States) would be so proud! There are always trying to get me to wear more clothes. :) Our first stop was at the High School where we had "breakfast" which is cookies and chocolate milk with them and gave a presentation about AFS. Then we went to a local Radio Station! At first we thought that only some of the students were going to talk but the interviewer guy wanted to talk to all of us.

As you are probablying think, I kind of went into a miny panic attack right then because this is LIVE radio and I was really scared that I wasn´t going to understand what he asked. But I actually stayed pretty calm. It is one of those things that I am really scared to do but I know that it will be worth it in the end. Even if it is just to say that I did it! So the interview went pretty good. He asked a few basic questions of each of us and I only needed a little help from one of the AFS Volunteers to understand one of the questions. It was actually pretty fun! And the guy was really nice so that made it easier. I can add talking on the Radio to my list of First Things in Life Done in Argentina.

That day we also went to a grade school and did about the same sort of thing that we did at the High School. The next two days were pretty relaxed. We did a whole bunch of AFS activites where we talked about things we like and didn´t like about Argentina and the other students talked about how they were going to go through the process of re-adjusting to their old lives in their home countries. We explored the area around the Dam where we took a million pictures with all of the AFS flags from different countires. It was really funny because everyone wanted to have the picture taken with their camera so the Volunteer would have nine different cameras hanging off her arm and we would all stand their smiling while she shot a photo with each one. We must have spent two hours just taking photos. :) We also visited a local farm where the farmers had a resturaunt and grew all of the food for it. They also had Lamas! Thankfully we didn´t get close enough for them to spit on me.

When you have a group of teenagers in a cabin at night where it is freezing out side so we can´t go partying, we are obviously going to find things to do. :) We found card games. Now you might be thinking that that is clearly a harmless thing to do; and you would be right in most casses. But when we started playing, soon the games started changing to ones where you have to get a tea bag and every round someone is short. Which lead to tackling someone to get the tea bag, which lead to chanting when you won, which lead to us all on the floor in a circle with our playing cards ready to spring the moment someone shouted "Chancho!" when they got four of the same card. It might sound a little confusing or a little crazy but that´s what it was. AFS students now have an inside joke about "Chancho Té" where when ever any one says it we all start pumping our fists in the air and chanting. Yeah, it sounds a little creepy to me too. :) But oh well. I guess that´s why AFS orientation are always so fun.

So on Sunday we left at about four thirty in the afternoon and were going to arrive at about eight in San Juan. But within the next fourty minutes our van suddenly turned off. We were able to get off the high way and thankfully there was a lot of room for us to hang out being in danger of getting hit. I thought it was just something that could be fixed fast with the van but we were there for two hours before somebody showed up. They weren´t able to fix it either so they towed us to a near by rest stop type area that had cabins. We waited there until ten o´clock for another van to show up. At this point I was really feelign sick. I had a sore throat and my head hurt like you wouldn´t believe. To make it worse all we had to eat for dinner was cookies, chocolate milk, bread, and a little bit of this tun fish type dip because we weren´t expectly to have to eat dinner. So I was also starving. We didn´t end up leaving until eleven because then we discovered that the new van didn´t have enough gas so we had to wait until they went and got some more. WE finally arrived in San Juan at two in the morning. My parents also ended up waiting an hour for me in front of the Cathedral because there was confusion about what time we were going to arrive and then I didn´t have coverage and then I fell asleep in the van. All in all it was a long night. But it was a fantastic weekend!

To wrap things up, that last few days I have been super sick and haven´t gone to school. Thankfully, I am a little better today so I think I will make it to school tomorrow. Just in time for my giant Business test. Yay! (not) This weekend my family is also hoping to drive up to Tucum which is twelve hours from here and spend Sunday with family. I really want to be well by then so I am doing all I can like drinking tea, resting, taking cough drops, and staying warm. Wish me luck! Oh! And enjoy summer break up in the U.S.! I will be jealous down here in the cold winter weather. :)

100 Days From Washington

Today, June 2nd, is the 100th day I have been away from my family in Washington, the 97th day outside the U.S., and my 95th day living in San Juan! In honor of this amazing accomplishment I have made a list of the most interesting little things that are either different from back home or something that is just silly to share:

1. I LOVE tomateos. (I used to hate them)
2. I have mayonaise on everything.
3. I always wear shoes in the house (because my parents don´t like it when I don´t)
4. We don´t have a bath tub.
5. People drive on both sides of the road whether it is a one way street or not.
6. There isn´t recycling.
7. People don´t get in trouble for throwing trash on the side walks (A girl even asked me why I put my wrapper in my backpack instead of just tossing it).
8. In little shops instead of being able to just take things off the shelves, you have to take a number and wait for someone to help you.
9. I wear a uniform to school.
10. We only have one computer.
11. We watch TV during every meal.
12. My mama wakes me up every morning.
13. We use commas for periods and periods for commas in Math. For example, one thousand is 1.000 and one half is 0,5!
14. There is never a moment when you can not see alteast five dogs on the street.
15. My classmate was shocked to learn that we have Oreos in the U.S.
16. My classmate thought that since so many people have very light hair in the U.S. that we don´t shave our legs.
17. I don´t go to bed until 11:30 on school nights.
18. High waisted shorts are considered popular for girls when going to clubs at night.
19. People here have no idea what Enchiladas and Salsa are!
20. My most common name here is Jeni although pronouced like Yenny, Shenny, Jenny, or Henny depending on the person.
21. I have to unlock the door, lock the door, unlock the gate, and then lock the gate when going to school every morning.
22. I have my own set of keys.
23. My new favorite TV show is "Friends".
24. Everyone calls Facebook just "Face".
25. I can´t drive.
26. There is always soda and cookies in my house.
27. I am the youngest sister.
28. P.E. is my easiest class.
29. I can walk to my friends house!
30. I am supposed to answer the phone even if my parents aren´t home.
31. Random strangers talk to me just because they know I am not from Argentina.
32. You can´t change the temperature on our oven.
33. My parents often stay up later than I do!
34. Milk is sold in bags.
35. I forgot how to say "15th" and "Report Card" (it took me several hours to remember) and many times I am able to explain things better in Spanish than in English.

And finally, I now have TWO wonderful families that I always know will love me, TWO sets of best friends and classmates that can make me laugh, and TWO countries that both have a place in my heart. I love Argentina and I can´t believe how fast time is passing by.... :)