First night out with Porteños

Exchange rate: 3.723, just keeps going....

I had my first experience with real Argentinian night life anoche.

During orientation yesterday I went up to one of the program assistants and starting talking ot him in Spanish. After our little chat and after class, he came up to me to ask if I wanted to meet up with his friends that night. I immediately thought of what I learned in class and I was not sure in a different culture what this meant and involved etc. I immediately used my friend justin for protection and I said that I was gunna go somewhere with him initially so would it be ok if he came too. I ended up going with two friend, justin and jesus, to a bar with this guy leandro and his friends. We got there and we had a great ol time! All of his friends knew a good bit of english so we swapped slang terms and curse words and laughed at each other saying them. They also taught us a lot of frases and sayings. At one point, tv programs came up and we realized there were a lot of the same programs in BA as in the US. For example HEROS (Heroes), House (Dr. House), Dancing with the stars (bailando con las estrellas), Lost (Perdida), Sabrina the Teenage Witch (Sabrina la bruja adolescente) etc! It was fun to hear them say the show in spanish and then we put it together and said "OOOOOHHH, dancing with the stars!!" or whatever the show was.

It was also very interesting to see how important small sounds are in helping one understand a word. There is this band called Keene and the portenos were saying keeeeen and we couldn't figure out what they were talking about, but somehow, when i figured out the band was keene and told justin that's what they were saying, he immediately understood me. The portenos were all frusterated cause they couldn't figure out the difference in the way they said keene and the way I said it. It's true, I don't even know what the different was, but some small change in tone made all the difference.

I also talked to my host parents last night during dinner about music. My host mom really likes all these american singers (opera singers, norah jones, elvis, ect). She is so suprised when I don't know one of the names. Some time we say she knows more about the US than I do. It is interesting though to see what tid bits of information are known here and in Madrid. My host mother there received a lot of news about the US through television. Mostly when I was there, it was about the election, but at times they reported more on Obama and Hilary than on their own concurrent elections!

Time for breakfast!

Luego,
Kati