Buenos Aires dos

What's up? So today is Monday and on Friday I leave Buenos Aires to go to Brazil to celebrate Carnaval, awesome, I'm excited.

Posing with my Advanzado II teacher.

Last Friday was my last day in my Advanzado I class and today I am starting with Advanzado II. I switched to afternoon classes this week, which will be wonderful!!! I went out every day last week until 4-5 am, and that schedule with 9 am classes just really wasn't working. I couldn't think for the first hour... or two... or three, depending on the day. Anyways, now I have classes from 2-6 pm, so I'll be able to sleep in.

Last week I went to a Peña Folklorica, which was just a traditional northern Argentinian restaraunt with a live band playing traditional music, it was awesome. A woman fronted the band for a few songs. Her voice was incredible, really emotional. Someone described her as an Argentinian Tori Amos. Since then I've been to 3 other traditional restaraunts, the food is great.

Fiesta-ing at an outdoor concert.

I went to one Saturday night with my roommate and after we ate and were receiving the check, an older Argentinian lady struck up conversation with us. We were talking and having a friendly exchange, but then she just talked with us, or rather talked to us, for about half an hour, talking about everything from food, to travel, to her ex-husband. She was sitting alone and seemed pretty lonely, and it was hard to finally break away and leave. Sorry, that story was probably in no way interesting, but was just something that happened that was pretty funny at the time.

Another night I went out with some friends and we went to a trendier bar for some drinks. My friend ordered a cup of the "house" wine and then ordered another cup later. When we got the check, the cups of "house" wine were 40 pesos. To compare, the Vodka Redbulls were 14 and the mojitos were 12. The girl didn't speak Spanish so well so I talked with the waitress, she said "look here's the wine" and pointed to the menu, and I told her that I wasn't arguing the fact that there existed such a ridiculously-priced cup of wine, but rather that she didn't order it, she ordered the "house" wine. The waitress told us that they didn't have a "house" wine, so she just picked one, which happened to be the most expensive (most were about 12, and the second most expensive was 22). Ridiculous. Finally she just paid for one glass, which was still a rip but oh well. We just told ourselves afterwards that we would't go back, but then I ended up going there 2 nights later with a different group of friends...

I didn't go to Gualeguaychú this past weekend. I decided that since I'm going to Brazil in a week a week anyway, I really didn't need to go to the Argentinian version of Carnaval. I heard it was fun though.

View of the stadium during River Plate game.

I went to a River Plate soccer game yesterday. River Plate is one of the biggest soccer teams in Argentina along with Boca Juniors. They are both from Buenos Aires and are huge rivals. The game itself wasn't that great. They played Lanus, a team from just outside Bs As, who they should have beat pretty easily, but they only won 1-0 and the lone goal came in stoppage time. The atmosphere was awesome though. The stadium holds about 60,000 and it was practically full. There were fans with huge drums and the whole stadium chanted songs the whole time, non stop, it was awesome. The opposing teams fans sat in a lone section that was fenced off from the River fans. The top of the fence was lined with barbed wire and there was an empty section on both sides, with a line of policemen making sure that noone crossed. Awesome. Their fans were crazy though too.

I'll write more later on, I've gotta go. Ciao...