Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Hi Everyone!!
Thanks for keeping up with the blog everyone, hope you're all enjoying it!
In This House, You Speak Spanish!
So we've now been living in Buenos Aires for about a week and a half. After where we left from the last blog (the soccer game) we had one thing and one thing only on our mind- Spanish school! For those not in the know, some level of fluency in Espanol is one of our major aims for this trip so with this in mind we decided to undertake Immersion classes - 4 hours a day, 5 days a week. We began on Monday with Analia teaching us grammar for the first two hours of class and Gisela teaching us Conversation for the second two hours. Analia is lovely and very clear in the way she teaches though grammar is a hard slog. It's funny you often don't think about Grammar in your mother tongue, cause you speak the language from birth and just learn the grammar along the way. So learning all the verbs and pre prostions from scratch in Spanish in order to be able to form sensible sentences is hard! Gisela is so much fun and a little loco. At the start of every class she steps in the room and says "Now, Spanish only!" and we are literally only allowed to speak Spanish for the next two hours, The only exception is if we say "Como se dice…Insert English word here" (How do you say…. Asparagus lol) if we need some vocab. If we slip up and speak English she just says "No, I don't understand" . So we struggle through, she draws a lot of pictures and makes a lot of hand movements, but it really is useful. Her teaching theory makes sense because she says that she hates "translating" from English to Spanish because there often isn't a direct translation- it's better just to learn vocab sentence structure and how to use it all in Espanol. SO after those super intense 4 hours every day we generally feel like our heads might explode from information overload- so tiring! However I must say, we both feel like we've learnt a lot just in a week and everything and everyone around us is making a lot more sense than when we first arrived in the city.
Genaralmente A Las Tardes…
With Spanish school in the mornings, we haven't been doing a huge amount each day, so rather than bore you with explicit detail, I'll try and do a bit of a summary on our activities from the past week. We've mostly spent a lot of time exploring our suburb, Congreso, and the fringes of surrounding barrios. On Wednesday we wandered a few blocks north of our apartment to Av Cordoba, a street full of restaurants, cafes and theatres. As it was raining on this particular day (and when it rains here, it pours) we decided to try our luck with a movie - Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona. This was a movie which we had seen back home and both loved, seeing it this time with Spanish subtitles during the main part of the movie and no subtitles during the Spanish spoken parts made for an interesting twist. Thankfully it wasn't dubbed! Later in the week we wandered to an area known as Montserrat, again not too far from our place; this time a few blocks south. Here, we explored La Manzana las Luces, a square of beautiful old 18th century buildings, and afterwards Iglesia (Spanish for "church") de Francisco as well as the oldest church in BA. Other less interesting activities include dining at cafes and restaurants and utilizing the one half of the menu we can understand with our basic vocabularies, listening to Spanish language radio (the station we listen to plays equal parts Spanish and English speaking music- we've even heard Johnny Farnham!) and watching Argentine TV and somehow managing to purchase gelato to eat in the park near our house near the cool little carousel.
An Eye Opener
Our weekends, however, have been much more active and make for much more interesting blogging. On Saturday we set out reasonably early, and had a quick breakfast at a café over Argentine newspaper La Nacion (we felt like frauds when the time came to speak to our waiter!). Afterwards we set out towards the city's central landmark, El Obelisco, where we were to meet David from my (Ryan's) work, who happened to be passing through BA on a comprehensive tour of certain hotspots in South America. After meeting up, we made our way back to Plaza de Mayo to show David the famous Casa Rosada, which we had visited earlier. This time however, being a weekend, we were fortunate enough to get inside the building and managed to jump on the tail-end of a Spanish language tour. Surprisingly, we were able to understand certain parts, but only with very intense concentration! Afterwards we made our way back towards David's hotel, near El Obelisco, and stopped for a quick lunch. All of us had steaks (Hayley's was admittedly, a soy version) and once we had finished our meal, we were approached by a young boy, around 10 or 11 years old, who briefly said something to us in Spanish. Hayley and I being used to this type of interaction, thought the boy was asking for money, a common request in such areas of the city. But before we knew his intent, the boy reached over and grabbed the finished meat bone off David's plate. This obviously helped us figure out what he was after, and we then offered him all of the contents of our bread basket, which he stuffed into his pockets, before he quickly ran off down the street, eagerly gnawing on the bone. Such a scene is sadly typical of Buenos Aires. This is an awe-inspiring city of great beauty, with magnificent opulent buildings, swanky barrios, havens for the nouveau riche, and an incredibly grandiose tapestry of history and culture. However, there is an undeniable twist to this romantic city, which tourism often seems to overlook. There are slums, there is poverty and there is an aura of hopelessness amongst a generally proud people. There are people everywhere you go, even in the fringes of the wealthiest barrios, who are in need. We live in a relatively nice part of town, yet just a few blocks down the road we passed a father, with his young daughter in his arms, clearly desperate for welfare. Despite the fact that this is not a city completely rife with crime, that there is a perfectly adequate sewerage system, and that the vast majority of people live to a standard akin to back home, there is no question that certain aspects of this city can be considered 'third world'. For us at least it has certainly been a very eye opening experience thus far, and will surely become more so as our trip progresses.
Phenom
Later in the afternoon we made our way to Palermo, which is situated about 10kms northwest of our apartment, to meet some friends for a drink, and also to check out the area's popular clothes market. Palermo is one of those swanky barrios I referred to earlier and also a large number of expatriates/tourists - all of them seemingly American At one cringe worthy point, we even heard in passing how a girl's champagne from earlier that day had been "phenom". I guess this makes us seem kind of arrogant, but it's moment like those that really makes you hate gringos! (I know, we hate ourselves :p). All told however, it is a beautiful area, low rise and laid back in contrast to the rest of the bustling the city. Hayley particularly loved the tree lined, cobblestone streets and very cute boutiques and restaurants. After wandering through the market in Plaza Serrano, we made our way to a bar where we spent a few hours over a couple of litre bottles of the local pilsner lager and some nibblies, which of course only wound up costing us a handful of pesos (J). At around 10pm, we met up with Zack, who we had gone to the futbol game with the previous week, and looked around for a place to get some dinner, randomly stumbling upon a vegetarian all you can eat restaurant (quite a mean feat for Buenos Aires!), and after a quick dinner, we made our way back to a bar in Plaza Serrano, were we met up with another friend from the futbol. We then proceeded to spend the rest of the night speaking only Spanish, which was tough at times as we were quite possibly the least fluent at the table. But we gave it a red hot go, and kept the pace with the general conversation. It was 2am by the time everyone had decided to go out properly (to a club), but by this stage, we were far too tired after our big day and decided to call it a night. We braved the city's crazy bus system to make it back home which was fairly straightforward - the one thing we found amazing was all of the portenos (locals) making their way out from their homes at 2 or 3 in the morning to hit the clubs! These portenos are crazy!
Nosotros Caminamos
The next day after a big sleep in, we met up with David again and caught a train out to San Telmo to the enormous antiques market, which we had also been to the previous week. As we no doubt mentioned, this market is absolutely incredible. It's huge and filled mostly with antiques, but also has crafts, street performers and the like. The market runs through one particular street, Av Defensa, and starts in San Telmo, and runs throughout the length of the barrio. All told, it is around 3kms long, and we ended up back at the Casa Rosada, where we had been the previous day! We picked up a couple of things along the way - Hayley a couple of cool old photos, while I found an amazing antique compass which should also be useful on our travels. After all that walking we were pretty tired out so we said our farewells to David and made our way back home for a quiet night, ready to attack Spanish school the next day.
And that brings us up to date once more! Once again, thanks for all your comments and messages - we love hearing from you all and getting your thoughts on what we have written, as well as updates from back home. We will be posting some more photos very soon, including some cool shots from the futbol game we attended and wrote about last week. Hasta luego!
Love Ryan & Hayley
- comments