Wow.

So I have less than 24 hours left in Argentina.

Right now im in a cyber because they cut the internet in our house, the peopole are comin g to fiix it next week. And I won´t be here next week...

I´ve been feeling lots of really strange emotions lately, mostly I think it´s that I´m trying not to think about haveing to leave and blocking it out. I can get really upset on the plane. Or something.

It´s about 3 riht now and I´m about to go to Flor´s house. I think we´re going to go downtown foor my goodbuye ceremony -thingy. I still need to buy yerba and alfajores. And spanish style cards to play Truco. No one knows how to play truco in america though....

Ive decided that AFS shouldnt be allowed to offer semester programs. Because you don´t actually figure things out until after 4 months. And I don´t mean cultural things (although it can take awhile to understand that too..) I mean things about life. I think ive learned quite a lot here. And now I have to leave understanding only half of everything. Great.

Tomorrow I´m going to school right before my flight to say goodbye to everyone. Crap.

Oh, and I borrowed my familys cam and took pics today and yesterday. Yesterday was my lasat day of pe and they gave me a going away paarty.

I´m really erally really goingto miss my friends. AArgentineans are just different than americans. Not that one group is better than the other, its just that you have to have both because theyre completely distinct.

This was probably really random, but I don´t care. Ijreally exhausted and I ahve 40 of travel to look forward to.

And what if Aei, Firn, and Anita don´t go to the ariport to say good bye?? And Mizuho y Phyliss?? xq a la fiesta de despedida ibamos a juntarnos, pero al fin no fui, and no me despedí de ellos :((

I really hope I can come backbefore they all leave....

Oh! And someting really important happened last week. I went to the kiosco to buy credito the other day, and when I walked in Marta took my hand and told me, ¨Last week when you didnt go to the asado,I really missed you. There was something missing. I want you to know that I really love you, and when ever you can come back we´ll take you in. I love you. ¨And I walked out of the kiosk crying. It was a good cry, I think.

Ok, have to Florss house!

Chaucito!
We´ll all be seeing eachother way to soon:/

YAY. update.

So I´m finally updating for real. I got back from the waterfalls last Monday. Isabelle, another exchange student that I had met in BA in Feb. stayed for a few days in Neuquén when we got back. But I had to go to school anyway :(

So, school. It´s pretty frustrating. I still can´t do everything normally. Not even close. Not that I enjoy writing essays or anything, but I really really want to be proficient enough in Spanish to be able to do it. Yesterday, I took the Geography exam. There were four questions, and I had 70 minutes to answer them. How many did I answer? 2. Two essay questions in 70 minutes might not seem terribly bad, but my answers weren´t that long. Grrr.

And I think I might have failed Chemistry. The first test we took I scored a regular, which is like a 5 or 6 out of 10. Yeah, I know, not very impressive, but I beat most of class, the majority of which failed straight out. And today we had another test. So last night I studiously put myself to work, memorizing stuff about polar molecules. And I had everything down.

So today, I went to take the test, feeling all confident-like, and the teacher hands me the test. And you know what?? It wasn´t a test on polar molecules. It was a retake of the stuff from last time. All of which I had already forgotten. So I think I might have failed chemistry this semester. Great. And I only have one more month to un-fail myself.

Anyway, I´m going to post some fotos to make me feel a little better.

The first one is of me, my class, and the cake they bought me all together :). Just for fun I´m going to name them all. Ok, so you have me in the far left, and from left to right, Ticho, Facu, Oso, other Tincho, Fern, Anto, y Jimena. Oh, y Cony is inbetween Facu and Ticho, in her own little line. The next row is Silvina, Lorena, Lu, Jennie, Fabiola, and the other row is Noelia, hugging Nanu, Dalila, and finally Sophi. For some reason though she is really bright and you can´t see her face....

The next fotos are of my fam. I don´t remember when the first one was taken, but I just had to post it....

My host dad, with me in the background. Can you believe that sometimes he is actually serious??

This one is my brother, Martin. As you can see, he is quite special.

That´s my hand too. I don´t know what I was doing. But I think the better question is, what was he doing...?

This one is of me and Vicky. She used it for her fotolog profile pic, so I figured I´d post it as well. You can also see Negrita in the middle. She is sticking her tongue out.

This last one is of a fraction of the group in the viaje al norte to Iguazú falls. I´ll try and post more fotos of the falls later, because they are abosolutely gorgeous. Here we are in this foto, from left to right, Mizuho (Japan), Paige (USA), Nina (USA), Me (USA), Anita (Australia), Katy (USA), Margaret (USA), Isabelle (USA), and Rita (China). That day all of the exchange students went to Brazil to see that side of the falls (Brazil and Argentina both share the national park and there are waterfalls on both sides). But apparently Brazil hates the USA, Japan, Australia, and China, because we needed special visas to go, which we didn´t obtain. So we went back to the Argentine side of the falls, which we heard after is the better side :). Igual, I really reallyreally wanted to go to Brazil. And that night, after everyone got back, we found out that they were going to go back that night because there was some kind of traditional dance-show thing. Which we all couldn´t go to still...

......And you know what??? Blogger won´t let me post the foto. Let me try again.

Wooo! It worked. So here it is.

That´s all for now. Don´t forget to comment!!

hsoghowghwe

Really tired in Buenos Aires right now. Todo bien, fotos and stuff when I get back to Neuquen.

Fotos...finally.

Hola a todos! So finally I am able to upload some fotos. Because blogs are no fun to read without fotos :-) My host dad had to take my camara to work and there they took out the chip and put the fotos onto a portable USB. And now I have fotos!

The AFS chapter meeting was really fun, even though a few of them didn´t come :-( We had tennis lessons at this club which was pretty fun. I forgot to bring my camara though... I met some of the kids who had already been in Argentina, which was really cool. They were all really good at Spanish, but they had already been there for 7 months. Now I´m sad that I won´t get to stay for a whole year... Anyway, tonight I´m going to an AFS exposition in Plottier, and I´ll bring my camara to that.

This week I missed two days of school because I´m sick...I went to the doctors today, and it looks like I just have a cold, so hopefully it will blow over soon. Especiallly since I´m supposed to be going out tomorrow night with some other girls in Quinto. Usually I feel really bad when I miss school because I have to make up work and stuff...but not here because I know at least 2 of my teachers didn´t show up for class, because today everyone got out at 11. And I don´t have to make up work here anyway yet because I cant do it...Hopefully I´ll be able to do the work soon and understand everything. Biology is really a killer in Spanish. And so is Economics.

Anyway, with my extra free time yesterday I went to the centro with Vicky and her friends, which are really nice. I have some fotos of that as well. So, without much further ado, here are some fotos!

Everyone in Buenos Aires

I´ve just discovered that it takes forever to upload fotos from this compu...so thats the only one for this post. To see all of them go to http://picasaweb.google.com/xxbethanie09xx/FirstMonth

Besos until next time,

Bethany

Escuela

Monday was my first day of school. And Catholic school is...interesting. In a good way, I think. Very different. We got to school on Monday before it was light out, and stood around the basketball court for a while. Then they started opening ceremonies, which included the Argentine national anthem and and the anthem of Neuquen. I chatted a little with all of Vicky´s friends, which are all really nice, and then they went to class. I had to go to the office with my host mom because they still hadn´t placed me in a grade yet. Because I had already completed half of my junior year, they didn´t want put me in cuarto (the equivalent of junior year) because I would be starting all over again (the seasons are the opposite here, summer just ended and the school year is starting). The ended up putting me in quinto, which makes me a senior :-). Then this lady led me to the cafeteria, which is really a small room where sodas are sold, and she said ¨These are your new friends¨(in castellano of course) and pointed me to a group of girls. One of them just grabbed my hand and pulled me through the school, pointing out the library, bathroom, office, etc. Then we went to my class room to drop off my stuff. Everyone else was having class then, except for us, because the teacher didn´t come in. As I was told, when teachers don´t show up for class, instead of getting a substitute, they just cancel class. Which is actually really nice... After that we had some type of social studies class, I forget what it was called, and the teacher dictated questions to us and we had to answer them. I was kind of just sitting there stupidly while everyone else was workijng. One of the kids came over to me and handed me a sheet of paper, which turned out to be the questions translated into English. Yipee. Then we had Bio, and then Math. I suppose no one really wanted to be working, so all of my classmates crowdedaround me to ask me questions. It wouldn´t have been so bad, but theyall talked at thesame exact time, so I never knew who to look at or respond to. When I didnt understand something (which was often) they all triedto make me understand atthe same time. I was really tired after school.

Tomorrow is the first AFS chapter meeting, and I get to see allof my AFS friends and all the other kids who were already here when I got here. I´m really excited to see Eei and the girl from Japan, Mizuho, because they came knowing absolutely no spanish. Im also going to meet my liason/counsler person. More later.

Asados in Chile

So I´m in another internet ciber in Curacautin, Chile, and I can´t upload any fotos. The computer won´t recognize my USB, and the one time it did it said that there was something wrong with the connection. Oh well, it was in castellano.

Anyway, so last week I was in San Martin de los Andes, which is a popular vacation spot for the residents of Neuquen. We went to a different playa everyday, and the water everywhere was really nice. I burned my back really bad though, even though I put on sunblock every 20 minutes and I was wearing a shirt when I wasn´t in the water, so I don´t know how that happened. We stayed in a really nice hotel, it had two floors, with a kitchen, 2 bathrooms, and 5 beds. We also went to the centro a lot too, and it´s bigger than downtown SC. In general the trip was really fun, but it was also really hard. Argentine families are uber uber close, and right now I still don´t feel completely part of the family, although it gets better everyday. It was really hard to watch how close they all were, and not be able to communicate everything I wanted to. I´m not really sure if my spanish is improving yet, one minute I feel like I´m getting better or that I will get better if I put in more effort, and the next minute I feel like I´ll never learn spanish and that I´m completely lost and helpless. I´m just hoping that my spanish will really improve once I start school (March 3rd).

Anyway, so now I´m in Chile visiting my host families relatives. If I wasn´t confused with Spanish before, now I certainly am, because I had to adjust to a different accent. It was slightly easier than beffore, because the accent here is more similar to the way were taught in spanish class, but people talk so fast. Another thing I noticed is that people sometimes just leave off the last syllable of a word. Like, my cousin was telling me something about school, and she was saying the words viernes and domingo, days of the week. But when she said it, she said viern and domin. It is all just so utterly confusing I don´t know what to do. Yesterday, my tio was teaching us card games, and after an hour of trying to understand I felt like I was going to pass out.

Chile isn´t that different from Argentina culturally, at least from what I´ve seen. They also do asados, which are barbeques. Today we went to the ´campo´or the field, of one of my tias, and we had an asado of lamb. The thing though is, here, since we were on a farm, we had one of the lambs from their farm. When we arrived, we went to pick out which one we were going to have. They wrangled it and put it in a wheel barrel, and brought it out. And then they killed it. Here, in Chile, its a local specialty to have sheep blood with lemon juice and bread. So instead of just killing it straight away, they bled it into this pan of herbs and lemon juice. After about 15 minutes I think it was dead, but it was still twitching a little. After that they skinned it and stuff, and a few hours later we were eating lamb asado.

And I tried the lamb blood. Is it bad that I kind of liked it? Seriously, a little cilantro and lemon juice and you can´t even tell its blood. The only thing I didn´t like was that some of the blood clotted at the bottom of the pan, so there was a sort of clotted bloody jello at the bottom. It was kind of chewy. Anyway, I had 3 spoonfuls and some with bread. If I hadn´t known it was blood, I probably would have had more than that. I have lots of great fotos of that...

I really hope that this post makes some kind of sense. I´m really exhausted for some reason and I can´t really think straight.

Estoy en Chile!

Well, I successfully crossed the border from Argentina to Chile, after lots of drama from Chilean immigration/border control. AFS had told us all we needed was to pay some extra money to get me in, then my host parents talked to Chile and they said I need official permission from my parents and an official translation of the document, which would have taken too long. We weren´t sure if I was going to get in or not, but we drove to the border, and with no trouble or having to pay anything, I got in. I´m really glad that I did though, because it´s so beautiful here and Vicky´s family is really nice. Yesterday we went to a pool that was fed by a waterfall, and on the way we saw two volcanoes. Chile is lots of fun! Hopefully I´ll be able to get some fotos up soon, Chile and San Martin are absolutely gorgeous.