Snow Flakes

I think you will all be as surprised as I was by this news, but guess what? It snowed in San Juan! Saturday night my sister, Paula, came running into the kitchen yelling that it was snowing. After dashing out the front door, I saw that it was true! There were snowflakes falling fast and heavy from the sky. Since I was just in a sweatshirt I instantly froze, but it was worth it just to be able to see all the tiny flakes stuck to my whole body. It snowed a lot that night but it didn´t stick to the ground. It was just on the border of freezing so it wasn´t cold enough to let it pile up. But even so, we were all super giddy! Getting snow in San Juan is practically a miracle. Given that it only rains once a month here and that it doesn´t get below freezing all the time, you have got a very small chance that the one day it rains will be the one day it gets into the negative degrees. Apparently the last time we got snow in the city was three years ago. Three years!! I don´t know how they don´t burst into tears hearing that. I would miss snow too much! I talked to my friends about it that night and they said that most of them have never even been sledding. That was probably the hardest to hear- I mean, sledding is one of the funnest things ever and these guys have never tried it! I guess I will just have to hope that Argentina suddenly goes into an ice age and San Juan is covered in feet of snow. Then maybe my friends will understand when I talk about how even though I often crash snowboarding and my bottom always kills me after going off jumps on sleds, it is all very much worth it. :) But until that day, we will all just have to get excited watching the snowflakes fall from the sky and melt on the ground...!

Winter Break

As it is often easy for you guys to forget, it is winter down here. Just think of it all as being exactly the oposite of what you are feeling because really, that is what it is. Even though I am always naturally going to think of July as the one of the hotest months of the year, I would deffinetelly say that it is not hot down here! Right now I am on Winter Break which is really weird in and of itself. First off, where in the world is Christmas? Um, hello? Isn´t this naturally the time of year for Christmas lights and caroling? Well, as only the seasons change and the days of the holidays don´t, I still have to wait five more months for Christmas like the rest of you. :( Thankfully I have found other ways to occupy my time. I got let out of school Thursday the 7th and I go back to school on Wednesday the 23rd so that gives me about two weeks of vacation! My first week was super packed with activities. All of the exchange students except me and a girl from Thailand all left last Sunday so it was their last week here in San Juan. We were all arranging lunches and get-togethers for some last memories with eachother. Saturday night I went over to Maria´s house to spend the night. She is this girl from Austria that only came for a semester but has become one of my good friends here. I hope to visit her one day when I go to visit Jessie in Austria as well. :) We made crapes for dinner which was new for me. Maria says that in Austria it is not at all uncommon to eat crapes for lunch or dinner where as I have only ever eaten them for breakfast. And to had an extra surprise, she has bought Nutella! For anyone out there who has never tried Nutella before, you have got to go out and by some right now. I first tried it when I went to Mexico and I have been in love with it ever since. It is a chocolate and walnut (?) spread that is basically all sugar and one of the best things ever made. :) I didn´t even know it existed in San Juan but Maria found it at our local grocery store! So at eleven o´clock at night we ate crapes covered in Nutella and watched the movie 2012 (which actually wasn´t as scary as I thought it would be). It was super fun to be able to spend some quality time with her before she left.

Tuesday the girl from Tailand, Fran, came over to my house early in the morning. Her parents were going to Mendoza (a gigantic city just south of us) for the day but she wanted to stay home. She skyped with her family in Tailand for a while and it was really awesome to hear her speak in Tailandes! That is one of the coolest things about being en exchange student: not only do you get to live in a different country but you learn little things about other countries as well. I don´t think I ever mentioned this but when I was at my arrival Orientation in Buenos Aires I spent a whole bunch of time hanging out with these guys from Australia and New Zeland. If their accent wasn´t enough to make me love them, they taught me all these card games from their country and we spent hours comparing different words and pronunciations between our countries. It was absolutelly a blast!

So later that day Fran and I met up with the other students in the center park and went out for lunch. We chatted and laughed but the topic of their departure just kept coming up. As much as we all wanted to ignore it, they were leaving in just five days. I don´t think anyone of us could believe it. But even with that greyish cloud hanging over us, we enjoyed every minute. We spent the whole day together and walked over to a little mall near by. There we got icecream and I met up with my friends from school, Vero and Maria del Mar. One of the greatest changes that has begun to happen over the last month is that my ability to participate in conversation has hugely increased. It has given me so much more freedom to talk about whatever subject is on our minds. And that day it was boys... :) It was so good to be able to just chat with girlfriends again about all the crazy things guys do. I had been really missing that since I left Washington. Not only did I arrive here without any best friends but I also had this giant sign taped to my head that said "I am from the U.S. I don´t speak Spanish" so it made it a little hard to just talk about normal stuff. :) But time and hard work has paid off and that is changing! I didn´t get home till about ten that night and I was exhausted from being with people all day. I crashed in my bed and slept until one the next day. That is one of the greatest things about Argentina - sleeping in isn´t looked apon as a waist of the day. But don´t worry, most days I have my alarm set for nine or ten so I can get up and do something with my life. :)

Thursday, Harry Potter 7 part 2 came out in theaters in San Juan and after reading every single book twice and now reading them again in Spanish, I wasn´t going to miss the first showing. :) I went with Gime and Ivan and a couple exchange student guys and it was great! Thankfully we chose to watch it in 3D in English with Spanish subtitles. There was also a version in Spanish but I am not quite ready for that. I like my British accents thank-you-very-much. :) I also discovered a fasinating fact. The pop corn here is always sold sweatened.  Some people have tried pop corn with just salt but to most of my friends, the thought of pop corn with salt AND butter is pretty much foreign! Well I am determined to change that because you just can´t go through life missing out on something as awesome as this. I am going to have a movie night at my house pretty soon.

And then Sunday came around. The day that we were all going to go to the bus station to wish the students well on their way back home. The truth was, as much as I got to know these guys, I didn´t expect to be super upset when they lefted. What I mean is that I wasn´t at all prepared for the crying and bawling that I encountered on the platform. As soon as they showed up the tears just started rolling. And I don´t mean a few sniffles and a tissue. These people were truly torn apart at having to leave, and they just let their feelins come poring out. And it got to me too. When I had to say goodbye to Laura, we both just started crying our eyes out. And I just couldn´t stop. I think the thing that made me so touched by everything was that I knew I would have to do this same thing in just six short months. I would be in the same place that they are now and have to say goodbye to my family and friends and the city that I have grown to love. Even now I am tearing up just writing this. So in order not to short out my keyboard from falling tears, I should probably move on. But first I just want to say that although I know it will be so hard to leave everything here, that isn´t stopping me from loving it even more. :)

So far my vacation has been busy and full of emotions. My whole time here has taught me so much about my self and about other cultures. I love learning things from my friends here and getting little facts about the countries they came from. I hope everyone in the world can have the chance to experience what I am feeling . Because really, there is no better way to learn about yourself and what really matters in life than what these students and I are going through now. :) Have a wonderful summer! Send us some warm weather!

You Call That Juice?

One of the things I find most interesting about Argentina is the differences in the kind of food they eat. I have yet to find a kind of food that I don´t like but I have deffinetelly found a lot that are way different from what I have grown up eating. My favorite example of this is juice. In Washington, I have the pleasure of living on an apple farm sort of thing. That means that each fall we make fresh apple juice from our own trees and freeze it for the winter. But even without living with hundreds of trees, I can garantee you can find more than you can drink of fresh juice in Washington. And even if it is imported orange juice from Florida atleast it is still made from actual oranges. I am sorry to say that what Argentinians know as juice is not. The first time I went to pour myself a nice cup of apple juice with my morning cereal, I was surprised to find that it was white. Kind of like a watered out milk. Hmmm....ignorantly I figured that was just the color of apples here or something. After tasting it (and almost spitting it back up with surprise at the flavor) I found it was deffinetelly nothing like apple juice. As you might have guessed, I figured something was wrong with it. Maybe it was old or had something else poured into the carton. But after asking my Mama about it, she explained that the juice here is "fake" or atleast most of the juice is. It turns out that the apple juice here (or atleast the kind you can easily buy in stores) is actually milk based with apple flavoring (that would explain the white coloring!) It also comes in a nice carton decorated with Barbies or Race Cars; that should have been my first sign something was up! :) A few weeks ago I got to taste "real" orange juice which was deffinetelly made from real oranges but unfortunetelly for my taste buds it had absolutely no sugar and tasted....well, not at all sweet! It has taken me a while to adjust to this thing they call juice. :) And although I still can´t manage to drink the apple juice with out worrying I am drinking rotten apples, I have found that peach juice is much more to my liking. Maybe it is cause I have never drunken peach juice that much before and therefore don´t have a lot to compare it to. All in all, I am finding things I love about Argentina and things I won´t be missing very much. Whether it is apple juice, the buses, my family, or the cute little dog that always sleeps on the side walk outside our front door. But no matter the outcome, it is always a funny process to figure them out. :)

Boliche Nº 2: Popeye!

Last night I went to my second club here in Argentina. It was my friend Juli´s 17th birthday, and she wanted to go out partying to celebrate. Before I get into the details of the night, I want to explain a little about boliches (clubs) in San Juan. Technically you are supposed to be 18 to legally enter a club but that rule isn´t always followed. Places like Kika and Popeye actually don´t let you in if you are OVER 18 years old. They are clubs designed for teenagers between sixteen and eighteen. You might think that the cops would have places like this shut down in an instant, but think again. Sure there were cops there last night but they acted more as bouncers than as cops. They didn´t stop us from entering, they didn´t stop us (or should I say my friends) from buying alcohol, and they sure didn´t carry out any fire safety regulations (I will explain that a little later). So I have learned that as long as you know where to go, you can get into clubs even though you are under age. There are ofcourse clubs that check ID and that my mama wouldn´t let me into even if I could slip past the guards. But that is okay with me. I am happy just hanging with my friends at the younger clubs. :)

Where to begin? I guess that only way to describe the night it to go through it step by step because otherwise you just might get lost. My parents dropped me off at Juli´s house at about midnight where we packed eight people into a four person car. Yep, they recently invented seatbelts for a pile of kids stacked ontop of eachother...in Argentina they call them arms :) When we arrived at Popeye I decided to leave my jacket in the car as I figured I wouldn´t need it once getting inside. There are no windows in the building and if we were going to be dancing a lot, I didn´t want to be stuck carrying my jacket all night. Of course, we get out of the car and then have to wait five minutes in the freezing night air to be able to get in. I was wearing my flats, black leggings, and a long sleeve shirt (with an undershirt underneath) so basically I started missing that jacket REAL fast. Thankfully we inside it was the perfect temperature and I warmed up to a more normal and not deadly low body temperature. The inside was a lot nicer than Kika (the other club I went to). It had disco balls and tons of strobe and colored lights. It also had a roof (which I don´t know if I mentioned but Kika didn´t). The only thing that made it worse than Kika was that it was tiny. For those of you who know about how big my living room and kitchen are combined, it was about like that. By two a.m. they was probably close to a hundred teenagers packed in there and you could barelly move enough to dance. At one moment I had the scary thought about what would happen if a fire broke out as surely whoever was in the middle would be trampeled (that is where the police comment came in). At first I was a little uncomfortable. I felt awkward being my my leggings as I am used to something a little less...tight fitting and curve showing. Also, people were smoking inside and given that there weren´t any windows, my eyes started burning. Then add a strobe light so everything is moving all weird and music that was unimaginablly loud. But soon I was able to relax and start dancing. My eyes got used to the smoke and I actually started to enjoy the stobe light. Three girls, me, and about four other boys were able to open up a little circle and danced together for a while. A lot of my classmates were there to party with Juli so I got to check out some of the boys dancing. That is one of the things I absolutelly love about Argentina. Guys actually dance. And it is not just the swaying side to side that many guys at Homecoming try to pull off. They are busting moves, singing along to the music, and basically making a fool of themselves like the girls. I have also found out that many of the guys often dance more than the girls. If you are looking for some fun dancing all night long, deffinetelly find your guy friends. :)

I was super glad that I ended up leaving my jacket in the car. With so many people inside, there was a ton of body heat and by the end of the night every one who was dancing was sweating and trying to stay cool. The music in boliches is also fantastic! As I might have mentioned in a previous posting, at first I really didn´t like it. It was weird to dance to and since I didn´t know any of the words, I couldn´t sing along with everyone either. But now I love it! Potentially more than music in English but I am not ready to officially say that yet. :) As the night went on the music just kept getting louder and louder until I couldn´t even hear. You know that feeling when the music gets so loud that you can´t even hear the words any more and only the bass? Probably not since I didn´t know the feeling until last night either. It was litterally so loud that I couldn´t hear the words to the music and we were all just singing by memory. :) I also couldn´t hear myself talk. It was like when you plug your ears and you feel like your voice is almost echoing inside you heard. I know that by posting that I am probably going to get some hearing loss lectures from my parents but I figured you guys should know every little detail. :)

The boliche shut down at about four thirty and Gime´s papa brought me home. I got in bed at about five a.m. and slept soundly until my alarm went off at two this afternoon. I figured I would probably sleep the whole day if I didn´t set an alarm and I was right. Even after lunch I could only think of sleep but I knew that if I slept more today, I wouldn´t be able to sleep tonight. But given that I have to get up early for school tomorrow, I think I will go to bed a little early tonight. :)

In order to help you better get a feeling for my boliche experiences, here are some videos that I took: Oh! And the weird light and skipping thing isn´t your computer. That was literally how everything looked from my eyes. :)