Wow lots to catch up on! Friday night simon (agus's brother), richard and I headed to one of simon's friend's, martín, house for his birthday party. So we sat around with his friends and drank beer, ate pizza, listened to music and chatted. Its seriously tough to understand when they are all talking in a group since first you have to get over the weird accent and different verb endings and then there is all the slang they use on top of that!! Had a really great night though nonetheless and really feel like I'm starting to get the hang of the local lingo! On the way home we got a reminder that we were in Latin America, easy to forget when you work at a private school and everyone you meet has plenty of money. When we came to hail a cab, which it turns out are basically free in Argentina, there weren't any since they were all on strike after one of their colleagues had been shot dead the night before. So we ended up with a pretty long walk back into town and back home in the end.

Saturday morning I got up early and watched the lions game, threw it away, how did Vickery ever make the team in the first place?! Then I gave Alan a call and headed off for my first taste of Argentine rugby! In turns out they had planned a practice game so I actually got to play in a real match. To call the warm up old school would be an understatement since it involved jogging around the pitch load of times in two lines passing a single ball back and forth and doing high knees! At the end of which I in no way felt warmed up at all! Then the game started up and I found it really tricky to get a foothold since it lacked a lot of structure and I was struggling to read it. As the game went on I got more and more into it won a few turnovers, had a couple of big carries and scored a try so that was good! Was in a hell of a lot of pain afterwards due to the hard ground and the fact that I hadn't played in quite so long! The perfect cure to any sort of rugby ailment, however, has to be an asado which is basically where they cook huge chunks of beef over a fire! This is apparently standard post game fare over here and all for the low low price of 5pesos(less than £1)! Spent the afternoon relaxing and recuperating at my host families house and after a while headed over to Agus's to meet up with everybody and have a few drinks. Then we headed over to Alan's house to have a few more drinks and play some poker, I lost! After which we went out to a few bars at 3am, something I still can't get over! So we had a few drinks, a bit of a dance and chatted to a few people, there seem to be people you know everywhere in this city, and then eventually called it a night at the flyweight time of 530am! So Sunday was pretty much a write off all things told, but had a little potter about town didn't really get up to much. Monday was a pretty standard day at school involving various odd jobs, teaching english to a couple of the older students and playing lego! After school Simon came around and we drank mate, which is kind of like our tea I guess except everyone drinks it out of the same cup. I personally hate it, but I'm trying to like it since for obvious reasons its a big social thing here! We had some pie from the fridge and then I got a lift with simon back to his where I got a pretty stern test of my spanish as we debated about argentine economics and politics with his father! Ironically I think I am almost more comfortable with this than "pass the pepper please" since it is what I have spent my last 2 years at university studying! Anyway I can feel my spanish improving day by day, although it'll be weird to switch back to normal spanish when I head up to Mexico! Tuesday was a pretty standard school day although I didn't go to sports as I was beginning to feel a little ill. Unfortunately I had caught the same lurgy that practically the whole school had been off sick with over the past week! One student told me she hoped I didn't have swan flu, which I certainly hoped too, and to think I was only worried about swine flu! So I was laid up in bed the whole of wednesday feeling absolutely dreadful although I did feel well enough to have dinner with the family to celebrate pancho's birthday. It was really nice all his cousin's, aunts and uncles and grandparents were. Another good test of my spanish and I actually felt pretty comfortable, but then pancho's friends and arrived to give me a reality check!