Hey, Argentina! Como estas?

So as the title of this post may or may not suggest, I'M IN ARGENTINA!! After an hour-long delay due to a thunderstorm in Miami, the group flight arrived safely on Monday morning. We had a bit of trouble getting taxis (the program took care of it for us, though) because it was raining, but I made it to my host family's house and promptly took a nap, then unpacked and started getting used to living here.

My Argentine family is wonderful. The first day my host grandmother, Jolie (this is how you pronounce it, at least, but I think it's short for Yolanda?) let me in and took care of me until Silvia, my host mom, came home from running errands. I was late getting in because of the taxi situation, but it was all alright. With Silvia came Gala, one of her six (I think?) grandchildren, who is in second grade and entertained me for much of the day. Silvia and her husband, Eduardo, have four children, two of whom live with them-- Ignacio, the youngest, who is 22, and Federico, who sort of lives here. Sometimes. He's been here for two of the nights that I have so far. Monday night I also met Agostin, Gala's dad, and then we went out for dinner and a movie with Paula, Silvia and Eduardo's daughter. Eduardo is especially wonderful-- we had a super great chat last night but it means I didn't get to bed until 2.00! Haha. They have all been super patient with my broken and nasty Spanish and I love them for it.

I've had orientation for the past three days and will for the next month, but mostly I've been getting used to the city. Some things that are weird about Buenos Aires:

• There are no shower curtains. Every morning when I shower I wet the entire floor but it's completely unavoidable! There is a drain between the toilet and the bidet, though, and so to fix the whole wet tile thing you take this gigantic squeegee and push all the water into the drain on the other side of the room. 

Notice that there is no shower curtain...

So I have to use this squeegee so as to not flood the bathroom!

• You have to hail buses like you hail taxis. There are stops, sure, but busses don't stop at every bus stop, so you have to hope you see them when they're coming and let them know you want to get on. You also have to let them know when you want to get off by pressing a little button near your stop. Buses also don't have a schedule-- they kind of come whenever-- so you better hope they're running in a timely manner or you'll be late to wherever you're going!

• The equivalent of Crystal Light here is called "Clight," which makes me a bit uncomfortable.
• People speak in vos, which is the same as the tu form but a completely different conjugation. I'm getting used to it.
• Keys are crazy old-fashioned! They're these big metal affairs and you could probably pick the locks with a toothbrush and a bobby pin, but they are so cool.

The key to get into my building. Well, the inner door-- that scary looking black one is the key to the outer door they close at night.

My room is also really nice. It's quite large, and I have a GIGANTIC desk as well as a large closet.

We like books.

Silvia is also an artist (and artistry runs in the family), so the entire closet is covered in newspaper clippings and drawings! Even the inside is doodled up.

They really like the Rolling Stones and Bob Marley.

The inside of a door. This is only half of my closet... the other door is even more doodled up but I couldn't get a good picture of it.

My host family has also had quite a few students before me, which is awesome because it means I didn't have to buy maps of the city or even plug converters. Which is GREAT.

Basically, I'm getting used to living here but I'm enjoying myself a lot. I've never lived in a city before so it's a totally different experience-- Buenos Aires is the seventh largest city in the world!!-- but it's one I'm liking so far.

Midwestern Grocery Stores vs Argentina: A Comparison

Alright, since I drafted that post yesterday and didn't post it only because I forgot, I'm calling it yesterday's post and writing another one for today.

Today's post is dedicated to travelling. This is not only because I leave for Argentina in a little over a week and am completely freaking out about it; we went to visit my grandparents earlier in the summer and I found some photos I'd forgotten about, so I figured today was a good a day as any to lump everything together under one heading.

So, to get this over with: Things I Like (warning, it's a little picture-heavy today)
 
3. Midwestern Grocery Stores
Yeah, I know, it seems like a pretty strange thing to find on this list. Really, we didn't do a huge amount of grocery shopping so I'm talking about one in particular: Woodman's. I can tell what you are thinking. You're calling up all sorts of stereotypes about the kind of people who live in the Midwest, the types of food they eat, and the kind of things they might have (and not have) in their grocery stores. I can tell this because I was the very same way until actually experiencing one of these behemoths.

I can honestly say that I was so astonished by the Woodman's we went to that I just had to add it to the list. This grocery store must have been the size of a small castle. You could probably jog around the place and call it more than a mile; this place was GIGANTIC.

They even had crazy things like okra pickles!

And they had everything in there! Their selection of hot sauces alone was larger than any I'd ever seen outside a hot sauce specialty shop. They also had huge containers of things, like jars of pickles and olives bigger than my head.

Hell, this store was so large they had to organize the aisles with numbers AND letters!

Madman and I got separated from our parents at one point... and were afraid we would never find them again. Don't lose your kids in here.

It was great. I'm sure you could find just about anything in that store (except, strangely enough, plastic serving platters). It was AWESOME. I maybe even for a second considered moving to the Midwest... but only for a second.


Moving to Argentina, however, is a completely different story. I really like travelling but I think it's the whole idea of going somewhere for five months that's freaking me out. And I am really, supremely, and completely freaking out about going to Argentina. I've mostly just avoided thinking about it; I only started thinking about packing yesterday which is bad, considering I leave in a little over a week. Whoops.

I don't know. I guess what's getting to me the most is the fact that I'm going to be away from everyone I love for half a year. More than the thought of being in a completely foreign environment, more than the idea of getting used to another language, even more than the idea of having to pick up tons of strange customs and live with a family is the stress of being away from everyone. If I were going on a summer program it would be completely different. I don't see a lot of my friends during the summer to begin with; while some of them do live close to me a lot of them live on the other side of the country or places where it's just not convenient or practical to visit. I do get to visit people some, but my parents are really big on spending time with me (I am NOT complaining about this, but it's hard to balance family time and friend time, for sure).

Mostly I think it's the thought that the semester will still go on without me that is making me hesitate so much. People will still take classes, have parties, and get to know each other without me. Life as usual will go on without me. And I'm going to miss everyone so, so much, but I can't do anything about it. And I think that's what's killing me a bit inside. Is that normal?

Things I Like (and then some)

First of all, I just found this lovely new song from Mumford and Sons called Lover's Eyes and gosh, it is wonderful.





Second of all, I found a lot of unloved pictures on my phone that, oddly enough, represent things I think are awesome. So I've decided to showcase them in a list of things I like and do not like. To start it off...

Things I like:
1.  Boxes as tall as my mom
This one doesn't include a picture for the sole reason that she would kill me if it ever saw the light of day, so, to make up for it, number two on the list...

2. Pancakes the size of Texas

Yeah, that's right. That pancake is just shy of a foot in diameter, covered in sugary, baked apple-y, wonderful goodness. The one in the background, in front of Miss Roomie, is a Dutch Oven pancake filled with strawberries and powdered sugar and was also scrumptious! I stayed over at Miss Roomie's house for her birthday and we went out for pancakes that morning, and gosh, were those pancakes worth the 20 minute wait. Mine was a baked pancake-- they cooked the apples, lined a pan with them, poured an eggy batter over it all and baked it-- and I don't even like egg but I thought it was delicious. IHOP has nothing on these pancakes. We only ate about half of them but they were so, so good.

Oatmeal

There are certain foods I don't like, don't care about, and really could care less whether or not my tastes for them change. Eggs, for example, are a food I could definitely do without. The smell of them makes me want to vomit, which really doesn't make me want to ever think about eating them.

Oatmeal, however, is not one of those foods. I have always really wanted to like oatmeal. In the bowl it always looks so delicious, so creamy and good for your soul. Once in a while I'll have an urge to make a bowl to see if my tastes have changed, and I always end up with the same, disappointed feeling when oatmeal and I don't get along.

So when I found a Heart Health Awareness Month series on the TasteSpotting blog for different ways to eat oatmeal, even though my brain told me that I should want nothing to do with oatmeal my mouth couldn't help watering. Oatmeal with fruit and honey? With butternut squash? Mushroom risotto (Ris-oat-o)??? It all just sounded so good!

I found myself obsessed with one recipe in particular. It was very simple but sounded so delicious. The secret was to drizzle olive oil on the cooked oats, and then add salt and pepper to taste. Sounds wonderful, right?

Over spring break when I was home alone and lonely I ended up making it. The oatmeal smell wasn't as incredible as I had hoped, but the olive oil, salt, and pepper were divine. The first few bites were heaven-- the earthy oats complimented the toppings perfectly-- but after that my love affair with my oatmeal began to sour. Oatmeal raisin cookies are one of my favorite types of cookies, so I really think my dislike for the dish is a texture thing. The oats I've had are always pretty mushy, so maybe the secret is finding someone who actually knows how to make proper oatmeal.

My oatmeal experience ended poorly over spring break. What started out as a terrific discovery ended up with half a bowl of oats uneaten and unloved. That's not to say that oats lose their special place in my heart. I still really want to like oatmeal. Until I find someone to teach me to make it, though, I'll just have to love it from afar.

Never a Dull Moment

Before I get started, two Public Service Announcements:

1. I'm trying to see if I want to move my blog over from Blogger to Wordpress, so for the next little bit I'm going to be posting at both chiccasroughdraft.blogspot.com and chiccasroughdraft.wordpress.com.

2. I submitted Self Expression, a shirt I designed, to Threadless last summer and while a lot of people were excited about it, it wasn't chosen to be printed. This summer, I'm printing it myself! Right now I'm trying to figure out if people like the red or yellow color scheme more, so if you have an opinion please weigh in (click here for better pictures). Otherwise, keep your eye out for the sale! It should go up in a couple of weeks.


In the meantime, I have a lot of other projects on my plate! I know that the summer is supposed to be a time to recuperate from all the stresses of the semester. Anyone who knows me personally would also know that during the semester I am way too busy to sleep-- between fencing, a capella, work, and, well, life, there just isn't enough time! So I don't know that anyone would be surprised to hear that even though I leave for Argentina in July, this summer I ended up with two jobs and a zillion projects to complete!

 In addition to working with a wonderful medical billing office, I landed a job with one of my favorite professors. My class last semester on the Criminal Justice System was the first class he'd ever taught, but this was one of the best classes I've ever taken. Normally he's a defense lawyer, and this summer I don't have enough time for a full internship. He promised me an internship for next summer, but this summer he has me organizing and designing a website for him! It's right up my alley and it pays really well, so I am SUPER excited.


In other news, I'm getting so far on my sweater! Look look look!




I don't remember if I mentioned this before but I've been working on a sweater on and off since last summer. It's called Tree Jacket by Zephyr Style and I'm knitting it up in this burgundy-maroon soft wonderfulness. I took this photo at about midnight but since then have finished the top garter section and have moved onto the body lace. I'm super excited!



In my queue I also have a hat for Clara and the second half of my mommy/baby monster pair. I decided to knit them in GIGANTIC yarn and Baby looks was truly a MONSTER. The original picture from Danger Crafts' Etsy is at top left, and Baby's picture is below. Yeah, that's right. It took up my entire lap! Anyway, waiting in my queue is Mommy Monster, who I expect to be at least twice the size. Whoo!!



Look for lots of posts in the next few days, I think. I just uploaded a bunch of pictures from my phone and have a lot of catching up to do!

Breathing

I don't generally complain that my life is boring. I understand that life can't be like the movies-- love doesn't often happen at first sight, I won't always have a great hair day, and no, I probably won't save the world-- but every once in a while my life gets really, really exciting. It's pretty exciting right now, don't get me wrong. I've started dating a cute boy and I'm happier than I have been in a while. But it's about to get even more exciting.

Want to know why? I'll let you in on a little secret:


I'M GOING ABROAD NEXT SEMESTER!!


To Argentina, of all places!!


That's right. You read that right. I'm going to be living in a wonderful, foreign city, staying with a family I don't know and speaking in a language I don't fully speak. I'm going to navigate a city I've never been to in a hemisphere I've also never been to. I'm going to be taking all my classes in Spanish and trying to make friends. I even plan to fence down in Argentina, which will be both strange and exciting but leaves me with the problem of carting all my equipment down there.

In reality I am both excited and mortally terrified. College has been the first time I've ever been away from home for any extended period of time, and I'm really not all that far away from home. I see my parents every couple of weeks during the fencing season because my meets are all in the area and I get to go home during breaks. But Argentina is not only another country, it's in another hemisphere. It's a really, really long plane ride away. And I know it's going to be an unimaginably awesome experience, but I can't help worrying about what exactly it's going to be like. Will I be able to communicate effectively? Will I make friends? Will I stick out like a true American? Will the way I dress and purport myself scream "pickpocket me"?? Will I ever get used to using vos instead of tu?????

Some of those really shouldn't be things that keep my up worrying at night-- don't worry, none of those actually do keep me from sleeping-- but I can't help worrying about them in the back of my mind.

Anyway, this is all distracting me from the main point of this post. When I leave in July this blog will turn into a bit of a travel blog. I hope to upload photos and stories of my travels, and hopefully I'll have more time to update regularly.

In the meantime, look for posts about projects and adventures around home. I hope you all are starting the summer off right!

Like a Sheep

Well, that's it! I've done it! I am newly shorn.

Whenever I get my hair cut recently I get it cut short, but it's never been this short before! It's a cute little curly bob and I am so, so happy with it. Perhaps next time I might go even shorter? We'll see.

In other news, I'm spending my spring break buried under Kleenex and blankets. The only good thing is that my mommy is taking care of me and making me yea, yum!

In other, other news, I've applied to go abroad next semester to Buenos Aires, Argentina. I'm still waiting to hear back from the program, but this bloglet might go on the road in a very short time! Keep your eyes peeled for updates.

I hope those of you who are on spring break enjoy yourselves and RELAX, and those of you who aren't should enjoy yourselves and relax anyway.  :)


Love,
Chicca