holaa

Hi everyone! Today is Thursday, I just got back from school and now I´m eating lunch before I have to go back. Today is also Max´s (the boy from Denmarl) birthday! Me and Nat (girl from Thailand) are going over to his house today for leche chocolatada and i think cake too. Yesterday we went to centro to buy him a shirt and little necklace. While we were shopping, we found a shirt for 80 pesos, which for me isnt that expensive. I thought it would be perfect for Max, so i kept pushing for us to buy it,but Nat got really nervous and walked out of the store quickly. When I asked her what was wrong, she said that the shirt was really expensive and that we should look somewhere else. Then I realized that for her the shirt would have costed her 800 bahts! Money value isnt something I had thought of as a problem before. Now I know to be more aware of cultural things like money. Anyway, I also bought my mom a nice perfume that smells similar to mine because she loves mine so much. Her birthday is on Saturday. I also bought the finishing touches to my dance costume!! The show is next week. Can´t wait. Hmm what else..oh and i bought a belly button ring that has the face of che guevara on it........dont worry mom, i dont have the hole... :) and the BEST thing i have bought myself so far is the calle 13 cd!!!!!!!! which i listen to every minute that i can!! Life here is pretty much the same as usual. Right now there is a big debate on when school is going to end. first it was the november 21st, then the 28th, and now they´re saying december 12th so that students have time to get their grades up so they dont have to come back in the summer. yesterday my brother had to go to gym, and i asked him if he was going to go, and he told me¨"well yeah, if i get even one tardy i fail all my classes and have to go back in the summer to make up all of them, which isnt that big of a deal, considering im only passing two." here it is very common to be failing a few classes, one because you have amillion opportunities to make them up and two i think that the education system is.......lacking, shall we say. today i spent one hour sitting outside and playing soccer, and then i spent the other hour copying down a photocopy. :/ oh well. right now my class is planning the goodbye party for the seniors.......we´re trying to have it in the most popular bar, el soñado, but we´re not sure if its going to work. everyones all huffy because its an all alcohol party. now this just makes me laugh. actually its kind of sad that kids my age dont know how to have fun without alcohol. well thats not true, but it is what everyone looks forward to on the weekend. well thats enough for now, i think im going for a walk by the fields before school starts. see you later......

my trip to cordoba

Hello everyone......I just got back from my trip to Cordoba this weekend. I got home at 3 in the morning today so I didnt have to go to school in the morning and I only had english class in the afternoon so its starting off to be a pretty good week. The AFS trip was a really good experience. THinking aboout all the people I know from all around the world is really crazy!! Now i¨ve met kids my age from places like turkey, tailand, iceland, latvia, france, italy, germany and more. The cool thing is that although we come from different places and cultures and speak different languages, we really are all the same person with the same thoughts and views of the world. The coolest part is that not everyone can speak English, so we all have to communicate with eachother in Spanish! its so awesome. i definitely learned a lot about myself over this weekend and now i have about a million places to visit!! on top of that cordoba is just and AMAZINGLY beautiful city, with a little bit of everything in it. In the camp we did some little activites to help understand the feelings that we´re going through and what else we can do or what objectives we can make to maximize our study abroad experience. I really liked the activites. In one, we had to create a mask of what we think people see when the look at us on the outside and on the other side of the mask we had to create who we really were on the inside. Through this activity I learned how much I have grown in these past months! Its crazy! Then my group got into a really heavy discussion with the boy from Turkey, who literally came to Argentina out of survival. He has a beautiful tattoo on his arm of all the instruments he plays. He says in Turkey, its forbidden to have tattoos and that when he has to go to the army next year they were going to try to either cut it off or just beat him. I also found out that someone had cut his stomach with a knife because he doesnt believe in God. I didnt even know this was going on in Turkey, and just to stand in front of him and listen to him tell me this made me really sad and angry at the world. I´´m not really sure what I´m going to do to help change things, but I know I will do something. we are all the same animal and killing and hating each other wont solve anything.

Going to Cordoba

hello everyone........sorry for the delay, part of the argentinean culture is to wait until the last minute for everything so i dont think the computer will be fixed for awhile. today i am going to Cordoba with all of the AFSers in my area and the the ones that are in the province of Cordoba. We´re going for the whole weekend. I guess I am pretty excited. This week I have been really busy. On tuesday we had paro again so i didnt have to go to school. I went to the plaza with my friends and had mates and so forth. Wednesday I went for a run on the road the leads to all of the farm fields and the cementary. It is a really beautiful area and I enjoyed the exercise. Yesterday I went to my dance class again, we have a show coming up on November 8th, so we are preparing really hard. I only know one dance because i joined late, but i am asking a girl in my class to teach me another one. School is finishing up too, November 28th is the last day. Here it doesnt really matter if you fail a class during the school year because you can go back in december or march to re take a test and get your grade up. i find that kind of crazy! The weather is getting super hot, i still havent been able to try out my dads pool but according to all my friends every day in the summer is used up swimming in pools so im not too worried. Other than these little things, Im starting to be more aware of the culture of the people here. The girls are very nice, but also very jealous-I have learned the hard way not to mess around with a girls crush or even their ex-boyfriend from years ago. I also have noticed that the girls do EVERYTHING around here, and the boys do nothing which is very hard for me to swallow. My mom works all day and comes home to my brothers screaming and yelling and begging and whining. The other day we celebrated Mother´s Day here, and my mom was the one who made the meal and washed the dishes........talk about going against the whole idea of Mothers Day. I bought her flowers and I´m still working on her letter, I still have a little bit of trouble writing in Spanish. In other news I am pursuing a boy.....hahaha. My mom calls him my future boyfriend, because its been awhile since I´ve showed interest in him but we´re still not ¨together¨. His name is Maxi and hes tall and he likes to talk...a lot. which all people here do. He also makes me laugh because he´s such a chamuyero, a boy that likes to sweet talk girls until we´re all left with cavities. :) Something i am really proud of is doing a presentation for school in spanish! i was really scared but i was very proud of my accomplishment. i went shopping the other day, i still cant find me nice pair of jeans but i got some shirts so of course im bringing them all to cordoba. speaking of cordoba, i should get going to gym class now, not that arriving 10 minutes late is out of the ordinary for anyone :) will write soon!

huge update...computer still dysfunctional

okay people just to let you know i had just written a super long blog explaining a whole bunch of stuff and it totally just got erased and im really super mad on top of that im using the stupid computer that the mouse doesnt work so im not really sure if this blog will even work anyways things here are pretty good. on tuesday after school my brothers and i went to the plaza thats right outside the school and picked blackberries off the trees and ate them!! it was so much fun, then i stained my backpack purple and guillermo stained my face, my entire face, purple-he then told me that blackberry juice doesnt come off of people that have yankee blood. now normally i wouldnt retort back to this because i get "yanqui" (thats how they spell yankee, i mean, if your gonna make fun of me at least spell the word right) jokes a lot, but this time i told him that it was a good thing that i had iranian blood then and that shut him up pretty quick. im also a very bruised being because of all the fights and tackles i get caught in the middle of on the kitchen floor, actually everywhere, the kitchen floor, bathrooms, on top of tables, fights break out whenever wherever. so anyways ive been caught in a few of those before, and trust me, it hurts. the weather is getting superrrrrrrrrrr hot and everyone is getting excited for summer, which officially starts november 28th, last day of school! hopefully i dont fail any classes, if i do, i have to go back in december to take a test for another chance to pass, which im like, we dont get that in the US! so i guess its not really that big of a deal if i fail or not. hahaha. hmm what else oh yes my package finally came!!! my grandma was very skeptical that something had been taken by the argentinean mail people, but i think everything was there, i sure hope so, considering i paid about $200 for it to get here. This weekend has been full of rain, we had a thunderstorm last night. me and my brother went dancing in the rain last night while we were waiting for his friends to arrive, then i went walking about 10 blocks at 3 in the morning with josue (very cute, very single) to buy a coke and sandwiches at an open kiosk. dont be alarmed, this is a very normal thing to do here!! i guess you could say im used to the nightlife here now. im so sorry for the very late response, i promise to write more as soon as i can!!

sorry.....my computer broke

sorry i haven´t been able to write, my computer caught a "virus" (it was really probably one of my brothers who doesnt want to take the blame) and now the mouse doesnt work, so i have to go to my dads house if i want to use the computer until the other one gets fixed, which probably wont be for awhile. anyways, this week i´ve had an extremely inflammed throat for four days, i didnt have to go to school tuesday or wednesday though! now i feel better, just in time for the weekend!!! which this week went flying by!!! yesterday "me di una vuelta" with guillermo´s friend. i should explain to you all what dar una vuelta is. WHen i first came here, i realized that if my mom needed to go buy something, my brother always wanted to go with. one time i went with to buy cell phone cards and i realized that my mom purposely missed the turn to our house and kept going. then i realized mariano always asks my mom if we can dar una vuelta.......then i realized what it means! if you have a purpose for going out, you dont just go and come back, you take your leisurely time driving or walking around....at first i was like, what the heck is the point of this? but now i kind of like it. so yesterday i walked around my town with coco for about half an hour. it was really nice. Everything here is much more laid back and relaxed, which i´m starting to really appreciate!! Well thats all i have for now, until next time.