75% over

I arranged to fly home July 17th, meaning I'll get in early morning July 18th to the MSP airport (10:30am more or less for those of you who are so anxious to see me that you feel the overwhelming urge to meet me at the airport! - oh, and I'm flying Delta from Atlanta if you want to look up my flight). I am excited to get home but the longer I stay here, the closer I get to my Argentine friends and the sadder I am to only have 89 days left with them. School is still school, and I have been making an effort to keep relatively up to date with my work-load. AIESEC has been great lately, and taking up a lot of my time. This past weekend was the induction retreat/ conference for the new members. About 60 AIESECo's went to the 2 days over night event, planned by my new 3 best friends and I. (Um, this is a bad sign, I am not sure whether that should read "and I" or "and me").... hmm, losing my English skills, Mr. Ford would be appalled.



Photos form the Toga PARTY!!!

I have no new photos, because my camera battery charger got stolen, what a shame, what a shame. I am hopeful that someone will upload a few photos from the conference from Saturday night though, because we had a Toga party. My toga was beautiful and I would love to share it with the world - so professional looking. Anywhoo, the conference went swimmingly and all of the newbies loved it, the oldies had a great time, and I slept 6 hours in 2 nights. When I got home on Sunday evening around 8pm I showered, skyped my Dad for 4 minutes to say happy birthday, ate dinner, and immediately went to bed. I continued to sleep for 10 hours, go to 3 hours of my 4 hour class, leave early, sleep the whole bus ride home, wake up a few blocks from my apt, get home and take a 3 hours nap. I feel like I am a whole new person now.

Tonight at 6.30PM i have Portuguese class and then tomorrow I have my Radio class and in the evening half way through my History of art class I am heading out for MENDOZA! Wine country in the Andes Mtns, pretty much directly west of Buenos Aires. Its an overnight bus ride and I am heading there with 3 other girls who are on my program and have been in Argentine since last July, just like me. We should have a lot of fun as there is great hiking, white water rafting, etc in the region too. I'm looking to make the best of my 4 days there as we are heading home Sunday evening and getting back early Monday morning, in time for my morning class.

Other than that, I don't know what more I can update. Nothing too exciting has been happening - School, volunteering with AIESEC, going out with friends and some cute boys, drinking lots of mate.... I dunno folks. I'll try to send some pictures your way in the near future.

A hug and a kiss. I'll be seeing all your Rothes in Door County!

La GRIPE A!!

La gripe A, aka the swine flu, H1N1, whatever you want to call it - I'm just going to say I have something similar. Sick as a dog, not really that sick, but I do definitely have a mild flu (which is all the swine is/has been for most people). The world health scene got all worried about the 'epidemic' because it is more catching than your every day flu - but when I had it at Madison last year I was surprised by how mild it was. I am currently holed up with a very low fever (we're talking 99, 99.5), muscle aches, congestion, and coughing. My host mom, being the typical melodramatic Argentine woman has suggested every few hours that I go to the clinic, or the HOSPITAL. For a cold/mild flu. Hence the use of the word melodramatic.

Other than being cooped up in my bed watching and digging into my host moms stash of ripped off DVDs, I started my Portuguese class today! As you can all tell, I have been extremely bored all day so I am writing in my blog twice in two days, after not writing for a full month. The class was really fun, although it was 3 hours long and I started feeling pretty wretched by the end of it, regardless of how many mg of ibuprofen and throat lozenges I popped. It was fun, the professor spoke to us in mainly very clear, slow Portuguese, which was awesome, considering that I really understood some of it!!! It's also blowing my mind thinking of all of the material that we covered today. We started with the alphabet and the phonetics of the letters then moved onto pronunciation rules, basically the exact opposite of Spanish, where everything sounds as it looks (in Portuguese it seems to me that NOTHING sounds as it looks!). We continued on with pronouns, 3 basic irregular verbs in the present tense, as well as a smattering of vocabulary words that were throw into the mix. I would have to check my 6 pages of notes to be more precise about EVERYTHING we covered but he already had us doing a work sheet, a listening activity and learning the mandatory compound words! The professor is muy buena onda, or pretty legit in American, and I can't even imagine how much I will learn in just 16 weeks with him.



I threw in this picture just to give you an idea of where I would like to use my Portuguese in 2014, if anyone else would like to start taking classes now and be my travel companion. In the off change that I don't make it back to South American in 2014, I am going to do my best to make it to Brazil before I come back to the states - hopefully in time for Rothe Door County 2011.

Have a good night everyone - and AVOID THE SWINE FLU!

The last month (pathetic, I know)

Sorry sorry sorry - I just have not been able to motivate myself to write in my blog since getting back to Argentina. I have about 3 partially started blog posts that I never got around to finishing, so I'm throwing them all out and writing something a little more substantial and all encompassing.

I got back to Buenos Aires on March 5th, a Saturday and had a nice long 4 day weekend where everyone I knew was out of town (as the following Monday and Tuesday were both holiday days) so I basically did nothing. On Wednesday I went into my program office and registered for classes and then started class the following Monday. Its all panned out so that I have a "practice making radio" class that meets for 4 hours a week at the public university, La Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA); "political and social theory 1" class at la UBA that meets for 6 hours a week; "history of art and culture in america and argentina" at USAL where I studied last semester; "Portuguese 1" at UBA (its an optional class that I paid $100 to take).

The radio class has been a joke so far, since the major switched buildings and we don't actually have a studio to record in. So for the two hours per week when we are supposed to be recording, we just chat about whatever randomly pops into our professor's head. The other two hours per week we get lectured to in funny anecdote form by a different professor. The political and social theory class is interesting but quite intense, we meet Monday morning at 9am for FOUR hours to have what would be equivalent to "discussion" in the United States, but its really just students reading off their summaries of what happened in the book we happen to be reading at the moment. We just finished reading "The Republic" by Plato (500 pages of 2500 year old Greek political philosophy in Spanish, people) for class today and are reading 1/3 of Aristotle's "Politic" for next Monday. The 4 hours drag on and on when it is just students who are unsure of what they are saying droning on and on - and today was the first class that we actually did an interactive activity. We got a list of questions that resemble our midterm that concern Plato and his theories. The other two hours of that class are actual lecture, that has some correlation with the discussion material, but we will only be tested on the discussion material so its really hard to make myself go Tuesday mornings as well at 9am. The Art History class is still up in the air because there are currently 12 or so Americans going to the class and only 5 foreigners are allowed to take each class at USAL to keep it fair for the students paying tuition and actually studying the subject, aka the Argentines. There is a lottery this week to find out if I am still in the class with the Precolombian art and the awesome laid back professor or if I'm in the Colombian art class with the hard ass professor. On the other hand, I am really excited for my Portuguese class because it starts tomorrow night!!!!!!


Promoting AIESEC and the Universidad Argentina de la Empresa (UADE)

Other than school I have been really involved in AIESEC since getting back from summer vacation. I joined the organizing committee for the weekend-long conference for the new members that are going to enter now that our recruitment period is ending. Also, I have been doing quite a bit to help out with the recruitment: going to universities to promote AIESEC, monitoring group interviews, performing individual interviews, etc. Also, the Argentine, Catalina that I was managing last semester got an internship in Budapest, Hungary with Nokia - so she is in the final stages of preparing to start working there May1st-ish. It's fun because I've got to design a lot of flyers for our conference and the toga party that we are going to throw there, so its work but its fun. Plus I LOVE LOVE LOVE all of the AIESEC people from Buenos Aires.


Hanging out with the OGX (Outgoing Exchange) team of AIESEC Buenos Aires


In La Plata with Matt at my friend from Oktoberfest's house.

I have been hanging out a lot with my Argentine friends that I made last semester when I was camping at Oktoberfest, from class, and just from around town. This semester I also decided that I was going to go on more dates with more people - and I've so far been on dates with 3 guys more my age than anyone else I'd met here last semester. They are 21, 21 and 22. I TURN 21 IN 30 DAYS!!!! START THE COUNT-DOWN, not that it really matters since I have been legally drinking for the past 11 months but anyway. I've been waiting for this morning for 20 years and 11 months and it's finally coming and I am happy to say I have Sean O'Connor and Matt Roelse, two good friends from Madison currently in Buenos Aires to celebrate with.



Matt and Sean have introduced me to some of their friends from their program (they are here with the Wisconsin Business School, not with IFSA-Butler). As you can see from the above photo, I took a sassy stance on making more American friends, especially the ones who do not or will not speak Spanish instead of English. Not to say I don't speak english with Matt and Sean, but that's different.

Host family wise the Blaksley/Echegaray clan are now officially like family. We quibble and joke and tell secrets. My host mom, Sara and I have had some really great times together, some of them involving her 14 year old grandson Salvador, as you will see...... We played for about a half of an hour with the hair from my hairbrush......





Anywhoo, I will try to keep you more updated in the near future.