Argentines live pretty exciting lives during the school year. Case in point: apparently the small, private Catholic high school I was supposed to go had the police called in to maintain order towards the end of the year because of rampant water balloon fights which I hear didn't stop even after the arrival of the authorities. So if your school year is a series of water balloon fights and weekend night clubbing, what does summer look like? How do you improve on that? Just about everyone goes on vacations to another city. I would edit that sentence, but it's a fun example of how Spanish is affecting my English. This includes people who aren't that well off, but probably does not include legitimately poor people. The better off you are the further away you can go and the choicer spots you can hit. The trip is generally about ten days.
I went to Punta del Este, a city on the easternmost point of Uruguay that only exists so that people can go there during the summer. The beach is lined with giant condo buildings. Each building has its own little strip of beach and a couple of dudes sitting on chairs waiting to set up chairs and umbrellas for anybody from their specific building. Guys constantly wander around the beach yelling either, "Heeeladoooooooooooos!" or "Cafe! Cafe cafe! Dulceamargosemidulce cafe!", which has to be the worst job ever. You can't swim in the ocean and the beaches are crowded. Overall, I'm surprised that everybody was so impressed when I told them that's where I was going. I think the classy reputation comes from the fact that there's yachts EVERYWHERE, and apparently that is (or was) one of the top rich person vacation destinations. The coolest part of the trip was definitely the hotel I stayed in, Casapueblo. They didn't build patches of wall so that you could see the cliff face it's built onto. Because the lobby floor is at ground level and the floors descend, all the floors are negative numbers. The whole thing is awesome and disorganized and every place in the hotel is unique and very floop's castley. Here is a picture of it.
I'm afraid I have few exciting revelations about Argentina left. When people pass a church or religious spot like a little Mary shrine (of which there are many) devout/practicing/old/people-who-remember-to Catholics do the cross thing. Ham and cheese is kind of a big thing. There are ham and cheese empanadas, pies, pizzas, croissants, chips and, of course, sandwiches. Man I don't know, I'm seriously running out of random fun things.
The fact that I am is kind of a big thing itself, though. I'm no longer finding the differences between the US and Argentina interesting, and I'm discovering new differences on a very infrequent basis. I've learned the language to a beyond functional point, I can wander around the house in the dark or in my underwear if I feel like it, I go everywhere by bus, and I don't feel awkward grabbing food from my family's cupboards or inviting people over. Being this functional is really nice, but I also kind of miss the feeling of discovery when I first got here. It's definitely a good thing though. Living like that is hard.
I started university a few weeks ago. I'm going to the National University of Río Cuarto. The national bit means I don't have to pay anything. Not only do most people go to public colleges, but they have higher academic reputations than the private colleges. Because they have to compete against the national universities, people claim that they let their students float through in order to keep enrollment up. Two of the most common career tracks oh jeez. Ok they don't get to pick their own classes. When they enroll in college they choose a "career" that determines every class they take every year. Most careers are for four or five years, and everybody gets a fun title when they graduate, like, "Jamie Biesanz, Social Communicator" would be mine if I were to finish what I've started here. Right so two of the most common careers are Veterinarianism or however you say that and Agricultural Studies. So the university has a lot of LAND. Not a campus, but like a practice farm kind of a situation. It's pretty neat. The students go out into the fields and talk about the different kinds of bugs and diseases that can afflict soy. Oh man. Before, when my Spanish wasn't as good, I'd just ignore people when they weren't talking to me because it was too much work to focus on stuff that had nothing to do with me. Now I'm at a point where I pick up what people are talking about whether I like it or not. And they talk about corn and soy a LOT. How much it rained on so and so's corn fields and how such's soy harvest is looking. How efficient a crop corn is.
In any event, another difference in the university is that almost no one gets student housing. There are a few small buildings off campus that low income students from other cities get to use. Other than that, people from Río Cuarto generally live with their families while they go to college, and everybody else rents apartments. When I described dorm rooms to my aunt here she said it sounded like a prison. There are stray dogs everywhere, but they don't get inside most buildings. Except, apparently, university classrooms. It was raining today and wet dogs were wandering in and out. At one point a guy came in in the middle of the professor's sentence and asked if he could have a moment of our time. He told us that he wanted to tell us a joke: a white one, a yellow one, or a light green one. Everybody wanted the light green one, so he told us the yellow one. It had to do with cutting a woman in four parts. Afterwards he sold us gum.
