Arrival in Goya

Sooo we´ve arrived in Goya on Tuesday of this week. It was a pretty uneventful trip except for the arrival in Goya at 6:30am.... Although all the taxi drivers were pestering us to take a ride with them straight out of the bus, we decided it would be best to wait a little to not wake the senora up tooo early. Anyways, so we end up taking a taxi after awkwardly waiting around for 30 minutes outside in the dark. As we are driving away from the city we were supposed to be living in I start doubting the directions I had given the taxi driver... turns out instead of giving the taxi driver the directions to the senora´s house I had the directions to the farm!!! Arg I was so sure that the reason why the senora didn´t give us additional directions to her house was because the directions on the website were the ones that we needed to get to her place.... Typical Saraism haha I guess it’s my fault for not asking. So we end up out in the middle of nowhere and the taxi driver is like ¨ok here is your stop¨. Hahaha Luckily I decide to call the senora before we let the taxi go and she helps us get to the right address. Sooo glad cause we would have been stranded!!!

 The senora´s house here in Goya is pretty sweet! She says she designed it on her own. And you can tell it’s really unique in its design. Kinda reminds me of Mediterranean houses with the white walls and blue windows. The only problem is that there is no isolation... so it’s always freeeezing inside (actually a lot of the times it’s warmer outside then inside). It’s funny though, I always thought the temperatures in this part of Argentina would be a lot colder than they actually are. It already feels like a nice warm spring day and it’s still winter here! It’s pretty sweet! Much better for farm work! Apparently, it gets really hot here in the summer: above 100 degrees Fahrenheit every day. The landscape does look pretty dry … I guess that would explain why.

 In terms of cultural differences I´ve noticed here… People here seem really open. I do feel like people are a lot more genuine here in the country compared to the city and do not think too much about acting in a culturally sensitive way …. Which can be good and bad haha. I feel like they are a little more reticent talking to strangers. It would make sense since they probably don´t interact with that many strangers in their day to day lives. I guess that makes us extra special! I also feel like I have to be careful with how I act cause it could easily be generalized to the whole American population…. Kinda funny cause I’m not even truly American!

 We are living with this family: the senora who used to be an art and theater teacher and who is now living her passion of constructing a farm based in the ideas of permaculture, her husband who is a lawyer. Their grandson who loves all types of sports especially basketball, and her son who is also passionate about permaculture. I´m still not sure what to make of them. We´ve had a very different welcome here compared to in Buenos Aires. This family is really close, really loud and really passionate about what they do. Part of me really admires the openness and love they all share between each other but at the same time Justina and I both feel weird as how we fit in with the whole family… we feel somewhat like strangers in their house.

Learning more about permaculture is fascinating! I love the ideology. It’s a whole new way of thinking and very eye opening. (Ill blog more about it later when I know more about it)

 Yay! My first official post! Sarah

Chao Buenos Aires!

We´re sitting in a small locutorio with computers, smushed with our large backpacks as we try to update photos for you before we take a 9 hour bus ride up to the farm in Corrientes, where we´ll be volunteering for the next two weeks. woohoo!

Our hosts for the past five days, Cristina and Pablo, have been AMAZING! We´re sad to leave them.

(a thank you drawing..Justina´s specialty :p)

One day we went out to El Cuartito, and decided to get a dessert. Sarah said, ¨Order anything but flan,¨ because she was sick of eating so much flan when she was in Spain. We had trouble trying to figure out what one item was, and all of a sudden, Sarah spontaneously ordered it - una tantarella. Turns out, it was a huge slab of flan.



Over this trip of self-reflection, Justina has discovered she has the accidental propensity to have pointy objects sticking out of her head in photos, and thus...perhaps the universe is telling her that her true identity is..a unicorn. or a teletubby.

Justina is obsessed with Malfada, a popular comic character here in Argentina.

(La vida es linda, lo malo es que muchos confunden lindo con facil. Life is good, the bad thing is that lots of people confuse good with easy.)

We were really lucky to get free tickets to see a Tango musical show at the Colón theater, thanks to our new couchsurf friend Ariel. It was really good and the theater was beautiful.

To end:
We saw tango in La Boca

and were so inspired we then tried it for ourselves



Language and Piercings

Sarita está en bsas! Y la aerolínea perdió su equipaje también jajaja. Qué pena. 

I´m so happy because Sarah told me that my Spanish got a lot better. YES! Achievement unlocked!

So Sarah and I are playing a game...we HAVE to speak only in Spanish with each other (except in high stress situations) or else you get a Naughty point for speaking English. The person with the most naughty points at the end of the trip is the loser and has to treat Justina to dinner ;) (yeah that's right Sarah, you're going DOWN).

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New vocab:

Porteño: a person from buenos aires
Boludo: an affectionate/vulgar way to address friends, could also be used as an insult for strangers...literally means something like "big balls" but porteños use it alllllll the time, even the cat is called boludo
Chao: goodbye
Acá/allá: for here and there, instead of the usual aquí/allí
Claro/Dale: porteños say claro kinda like one uses "yeah" while the other person is talking, and dale to say "okay" like after someone asks you to do something (ex. Dale me lo prendo: ok I'll stick to it).
A vos: another way of saying de nada, you´re welcome
Un bahón: that sucks

In Argentina they use vos instead of tú for you.

Also the ll always makes a ch/j instead of y sound. Once someone offered me an empanada and told me it had 'jam and cheese' inside and I was like hm, thats wierd but okay I´ll try it, took a bite and realized she had been saying ham and cheese. 
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I met a couchsurfer from Denmark with the most hilarious story...A cute porteño had emailed her with the salutation, "Hola Linda!¨ She got super annoyed and responded, "My name's not Linda!!!!" without realizing linda means pretty. hahaha.


On a random note, a lot of people in bsas have eyebrow piercings! What the. My first day here I was like ¨my people!¨ haha!

Another random note, when I ask porteños what they think of people from the states, they usually say fat. 

the beginning

link to photo album

Upon arriving in Argentina after my lovely 24 hour flight+layovers, I had the most pleasant surprise...the airline left my baggage in Colombia! Arggg! So I spent over 60 hours wearing the same clothes and smelling funky. Good thing I bought special REI traveler´s underwear :p

Uriel, my first couchsurfing host, has been so good to me. He woke up early to ride the bus to pick me up from the airport, helped me yell at the airline, cooked yummy food to share with me, and gave me a key to his place. Un chabón re copado! He even invited me to take a weekend trip to Mar del Plata (5 hours away) for his mother´s birthday, and his family was so incredibly generous and hospitable, I still can´t even process it.

My first few days in bsas were unhappy, mostly because the language barrier was so frustrating for me (I can write, read, and speak....but not understand!). The Arg accent is especially difficult  because it sounds Italian sometimes and not all sounds are enunciated. People in bsas seemed a lot like New Yorkers at first, intimidating and cold. Moreover, the 10pm dinners were a huge adjustment..maybe my hunger made me grumpy.

But now, I´m so much happier after having met so many cool people; couchsurfing.org helped a lot with making new friends and assimilating smoothly. I actually have friends who accompany me around the city and invite me to live life with them, hang out with their friends, eat with their families. Wow. I´ve experienced so much in just one week. One of Uriel´s friends taught me some Aikido, another showed me around La Boca and taught me a ton of Arg history and bad words I never learned in Spanish class. I taught one of Uriel´s friends a Taiwanese hand game and he was so stoked. I went to a Tango class with a bunch of other couchsurfers from all over the world. I slept over at the house of a really cool girl from CS.org and she showed me some punk and vintage clothing shops and I taught her some fun art games. I hung out with an awesome Argentina-born Taiwanese girl and she invited me to hang out with her group of friends (mostly Asian, just like it is in the states haha). That was a really mind-blowing experience, hanging out with that many different Asians speaking Spanish...in an American-themed diner restaurant in Argentina @_@

More on food, my embarrassing faux pas moments, etc later. Sarah arrives in two days and I can´t wait :)

To finish, I love this hilarious Arg comedian talking about street harrassment in Argentina:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTPJwSPc5lc

hasta luego...chao chao boludos!
beso,
JWong

Hola!

Hi from Buenos Aires :)

Here´s my photo album so far, with pics from bsas and Mar del Plata:


S&J photo album