I am in the BsAs Herald!

YAY! I am in the Buenos Aires Herald! Awesome! My friend is a writer for this newspaper and he did an article on the destruction of old buildings in Buenos Aires. I am currently living in a house in La Boca that is over 120 years old with a group of artists and he wrote a little about what I am doing here in Buenos Aires and the house I live in. You can find it in the life and leisure section. There is not a photo in the online version but in the print copy. I will be FAMOUS (not really…) OK, but still pretty cool for my growing list of things I experienced in BsAs. 

So this is the LAST Class – not really there is one more – but the last official class in the sound booth. I have to admit, I was really hoping David and Jimena would hook up, I guess it is the whole TV series style approach to the learning that goes on. She does end up leaving her boyfriend though, and it seems that her and David just have a really fun playful friendship. 

This program has been excellent and I would recommend it to anyone. This is definitely the best computer program for leaning to speak spanish that I have ever encountered and hope that they have a series 2. I will write one more entry as there is one more class left (I believe it is a phone call class) and then give an overall review of the program. 

Another interesting things about class 29 is they went over all of the beautiful places in Argentina. It was a good reminder that I need to do some traveling before I leave. The waterfalls in Iguazu look absolutely amazing, and the glaciers in Patagonia. This truly is an incredibly beautiful country! 

brujulas y concha

This episode is great! Look, I even find myself calling Bueno, entonces… an episode when it actually a learning program. That shows you how different it is to all the spanish learning tools out there. It is really the best spanish program I have ever found.  I included the picture with the brujula because I think it is an excellent word in Spanish and one that I have used many times as I have a tattoo of a very old symbol from Haiti that symbolically stands for a compass. People ask me all the time what my tattoo means because it is a very intriguing symbol so I learned that word in my first week. In the lesson though good ‘ol David is using it to refers to his “man hood” compass that always points north in the love corner of the house. He goes on and on about his Kamasutra course (injured pride from the girl before saying he was bad in bed) and explains how to determine the Feng Shui love corner in your house using an oyster. You apparently through a live oyster against the ground to break its shell and then the animal climbs out and crawls toward a direction in the room…this is the subsequent corner of love : ) even if it is all tall tales it is superbly entertaining! The name for shell in spanish is “concha” which also stands for one of my favorite parts of the female body…go ahead and look that one up! Its a spicy word! They go through a lesson of the house and furniture within it by revealing sexual experiences had on/against each said item. The writing of this program is genius!

Vamos a Mendoza!

This episode has inspired me! David is apparently following his mother in Mendoza to keep an eye on her and the tanguero (gigolo). He is talking about the beautiful lake, trees, vineyards, and clean air. I can not remember clean air. I have been in the city for so long I need to get out. I think my monday is free from work so I could have a long weekend riding a bicycle and trying tinto (red wine) to my hearts content. I have been looking at bus tickets! I took a 23hour bus ride to Bariloche a few months back and it blew my mind! The long distance busses here are INCREDIBLE! They give you piles of food, wine, desert, and whiskey! Additionally there are multiple movies and the seats recline into beds. If you are ever in Argentina the busses are a must! Central America is a whole other situation though. I was afraid to sleep on the busses for fear of waking up at gun point and needing to have a plan of action formulated. The busses get stopped by street gangs and robbed, often with many people being killed.  They cannot drive past a certain hour due to the danger of driving on the streets (these little facts are the things I try to leave out when telling my parents I am heading south solo with a backpack). 

Anyways, David is tracking his mother in Mendoza all the while on the phone with Jimena who is tailing her boyfriend because she fears he might be cheating on her. Hate to stereotype Argentina, but the men down here are PRETTY scandalous. Most of the guys I meet who are hitting on me have girlfriends, and most of the women I have talked to are aware their boyfriend has cheated on them or had a boyfriend who cheated in the past. Malisimo! Why have boyfriends?

push my buttons

Class 22! I am cruising along and actually learning with this program Bueno, entonces…David is such a chamuyero but he does make the lessons interesting. I don’t know if I will ever be able to approach an ATM (cajero automatico) without thinking about David’s little tall tale of the transvestite behind him in line with the “baskteballs”  and the policeman waving his hands, the cell phone going on speaker phone with the woman yelling that David is bad in bed. The humor really locks the lessons into your brain with memories you don’t actually have but access as if they are your own personal tales. I think I will see if I can steal his little story to retell in spanish as a person test for myself. I love that he raps it all up with a reference to Jimena about being able to work her like a cash machine, but she tells him he has no idea what buttons to press (the above clip refers to that). You just can’t get a better language learning program with humor than this. 

I am currently working on a painting right now with architecture from my balcony window. The houses in this area of La Boca are so incredible, the one I live in is over 120 years old! I sit in my balcony and sketch the surrounding buildings and iron work patterns for inclusion into my painting. Life is pretty sweet! And the guy who sells my produce downstairs is hot so I get to buy my  veggies while practicing all of Davids ridiculous lines : )

beware the telo

Some spanish programs teach you about the “room” and the “bed” and go through descriptions to be able to speak about the boring room. Not Bueno, entonces…in class 21 David describes the “Telo” he went to with the girl he likes. Now this is pretty hilarious because a telo is basically a sex hotel where you pay by the hour. Now, honest – I haven’t been so lucky to see one of these establishments yet, and I hear in BsAs they are quite the trip. Super sketchy, dirty, benches with belts and straps, bad lighting, pornographic pictures on the wall. I love that they go through room descriptions in spanish so David is able to describe the awful experience he had in this place and now feels that he has a dirty soul. 

Ya never know when you might end up in one of these spots, so pay close attention to lesson 21 

: )

I have been painting like a possessed person, making art and playing guitar all the time. The newest piece I am working on is inspired by the incredible architecture in the barrio of La Boca. The old architecture and wrought iron work supply a never ending flood of ideas. I sit out in the streets and on my balcony to sketch and take ideas back to the art space. My mind feels like an open conduit and the ideas rush in faster than I can create them. I kind of just want to sit up and drink mate and paint to my hearts content!

The “magic” awards

I do not watch much TV, in fact I have not owned one in around 10 years. But there are some new shows out there that re define sitcom for me. My three favorite are; Arrested Development, The Office, and Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Now I mention these in order to better describe the event I went to last night called “The annual Magic Awards”. One of my favorite characters from Arrested Development is called “Job”, and he is such a fool. He is a professional magician and you get these peaks into the twisted land of cheesy preforming magicians. Well, I just experienced that last night, in the real sense, here in Argentina. I went to the show because I had a friend doing a dance performance there and did not know it was “the MAGIC awards”. The whole production was so overwhelmingly cheesy I could not stifle my laughter at times. A completely other world. The presentation went on in Spanish – of course – and I did OK following the general idea. It is hard to just listen to the words and not be close enough to read the eyes and hand gestures. So much of language learning is inferring through the gestures. This is why Bueno, entonces…is such a great program. You get to listen to the language, but more importantly watch the expressions and see pictures associated with the lessons. All of this serves to better cement the vocabulary and cadence of the language into your brain. Well, this day is lovely so I am off!

A donde vas?

It is too cold, I am having one of those “what the f*#k” am I doing in BsAs moments when I could be stretched out on a beach in Thailand drinking cocktails, fire dancing at night, and eating incredible food?!!! AHHHH, Then I remember, when I break it all down to the real purpose, I am here to experience this incredible culture and learn to speak the beautiful spanish. I experienced a frustrating moment today when asking for direction to the art store….sometimes you think you are getting comfortable with the language and then a whole string of nonsense comes out and when it is important like directions, you are screwed. Amazingly enough my spanish class today covered these points, I am just going to watch it over and over on repeat…Lesson 11 was really helpful. AHHH, so cold in this enormous art space, I am wearing boots and my toes are still freezing…but then I think about the children you see in the streets with out shoes and I feel like a total spoiled baby with my abundance of socks, shoes, and complaints. I am going to begin working on a program with a friend to design a class to teach people how to make really simple shoes with very basic materials, often you can find them as scraps by all the leather factories, additionally the fabric stores lay out scraps. 

I have attached the lesson from Bueno, entonces… with the directions, it is helpfull:

vamos a tomar mate!

I have found the BEST empanadas in BsAs! Well, I make a pretty mean empanada myself…tasty fillo dough esque pastry treats, stuffed with your choice of fillings, typically: carne picante (a lie, there is nothing picante about Argentine cuisine), pollo, humita, verduras, queso azul, jamon y queso…ricisimo! I have found a stand in La Boca that sells these incredible hot from the oven empanadas for 2 pesos each (that is about 50 cents). I could eat 10 a day, with an ice cold cerveza…I better join a gym 

: ) This country is dangerous to my girlish figure. Screw it.

nothing better to follow up some empanada eating then a tasty mate. Mate is a drink (see the foolish photo of Dave above), actually the name for the container (gourd) the tea is drank from. The tea itself is called yerba and is a green woody like substance that is steeped in water and than drank through a metal straw called a bombilla. EVERYBODY drinks mate here. They even have hot water machines in some of the bus stations to refill your container so you can drink mate at all moments during the day…bus drivers cruise the street drinking mate (and yelling love promises at pretty women out the window), construction workers drink it while working, people kickin it on the street…it is one non stop mate party here (maybe this is the secrete behind the non stop libido – this has to be one country where viagra sales are in the red – old men in their 80′s will whistle, smile, and look you up and down with an appreciating “que hermosa que sos!) Back to the mate… I like the taste although it takes some getting used to. I lived in a co-op in Berkeley CA with a group of international people, so I have been drinking mate for sometime, but the first taste is a bit intense. Kind of like hot, bitter, tree clippings. Ummm, tasty. Something about it grows on you though (well, it is a drug) and it has a beautiful sharing ceremony associated with it. The mate is filled with yerba and after removing the excess yerba dust (variety of techniques for this trick as well) hot water is slowly poured in so as not to saturate the entire pile of yerba. It is drank hot with the bombilla and once drained, refilled with hot water and passed to someone in the mate circle. This continues around with the same person refilling the mate with water each time. When you don’t want any more the customary thing to say is “gracias” and then it will not be passed to you again. Many of my Argentine friends drink mate for breakfast instead of coffee…I wouldn’t go that far, but it is a nice after coffee pre beer beverage choice. They do a great job breaking down the mate ceremony in the 8th class for Bueno, entonces…

my waiter did a pole dance!

This city is amazing, outrageous, and completely heart breaking at times. I went to the most beautiful house concert at a friends house. It was an incredible indoor/outdoor patio space with everybody sitting on the floor, candlelight, wine, and panes rellenos. The music was beautiful, many guitars with a very gypsy swing Django Reindhart sound, some of the best and most passionate live guitar playing I have seen in my life. The man is a friend of mine – Elio Giraldi. He is INCREDIBLE! There was another man playing Brazilian bossanova as well – a beautiful intimate night, I felt very lucky to be a part of it. And nobody spoke any English! Forcing me to really pull out all the material I have been learning with Bueno, entonces… The next day I headed to the San Telmo street fair and played guitar in the streets with my friend Alicia and attracted a fun group of people who danced and clapped to our songs, we even sang a few in Spanish. We then headed to one of my favorite parrillas called Des Nivel and decided to split a steak because the portions are so huge, and the night was fairly young. This caused some serious eye rolling of our absurd waiter, who sighed, gestured as if he were annoyed, and seemed to try to ignore us in this very contrived way. It was so ridiculous I decided he was putting on a show and that I would break him down, and get his fun side to come out…well hell, I did better than that apparently because as we were leaving (and this is a pretty damn nice restaurant) my waiter grabs a vertical pole in front of me and straight does a pole dance, completely gyrating his hips all the way down the pole, then takes my hand and kisses it. I laughed so hard tears were spilling out – he was maybe 100lbs, 55 years old, classic Italian/Argentine looking guy. To much – only in Argentina!

Heart was broken this morning on the subte on my way to work watching a nine year old huff glue from a bag and just be completely out of his mind…the homeless and working children in the streets is nothing I will ever be able to get used to. The lack of love they have received in their lives is so overwhelmingly apparent that they almost feel like a different kind of human being, the energy is very primal and empty at the same time…it is so sad.

Hola che!

Fourth lesson in and I have to say I am still impressed. They are covering all the things that my spanish class that I took in BsAs didn’t. I am only in the fourth lesson but they have gone into all the really cool slang that people use in the street here: “Hola che! Que onda?” “Che boludo, venis a mi casa”…you here more “che” “dale” and “boludo” in BsAs than any other words I can think of. If you can figure out how to properly incorporate those into your language usage you can work wonders in the bar. I was thinking back to my brief flirtation I had with the Rosetta Stone program (brief because it was free for a short while through my University library). Bueno entonces is so much more entertaining! Don’t get me wrong, Rosetta Stone is a great tool, but INSANELY expensive, around 500$ whereas you can get Bueno, entonces… for under 200$ for the DVD set or less then 150$ downloaded to itunes. And Bueno, entonces… is sexy! I know I keep saying that, but its like going to Italy and not eating the pasta…Argentina is dripping in passion and sexuality, the path to learning the language should reflect this part of the culture. There are some hilarious lines where Jimena explains the secrete of the “Latin Lover” stereo type and the loose tounge…you should watch this: