Week 10

Yes my friends, it is the end of my 10th week here in Argentina. I've befriended three really great girls: Megan, Tanique, and Erin. We've been hanging out, watching movies, drinking terere, studying, and practicing our  Spanish together for the last couple of weeks. Last Sabbath we went over to a friend's apartment (his name is Isreal but we we call him Izzy) and had a home cooked meal there. It was really nice in comparison to the comedor. This week was the end of school for the rest of the UAP. It's the end of their school year, not just Christmas Break for them, so everyone is going on their summer break. Some students have finals over the next few weeks (why they're so spread out I don't know) but  one of my roommates has already left for home. I got to move down to the bottom bunk which means I can use my computer and charge all from my bed now. It's really nice :-). ACA will basically have the run of the campus until the end of February.
Next week is finals for me. My hardest final is in Folklore and that's on Monday. As long as I get 85%'s on my Grammar, Composition, and Conversation exams I will be moving up to the Advanced 1 classes. I already and getting signed up for classes for the next trimestre. I'll be taking the three language classes along with Bible, Folklore (which is focusing on cooking and food this trimestre), Phonetics, Translation, and one other class, I dont remember what it is.
I'm ready for my Christmas Break to begin. It's been a long couple of weeks. In another two weeks we will have been here for four months. It's hard to believe I've really been here for that long and yet it feels so much longer. I made a comment the other day to the girls that it feels like this has always been our normal life and that everything else wasn't real. I suppose that's how life gets sometimes.
Anyway, it has been a very long week and I'm planning on sleeping soon. Good night and happy Sabbath.

Thanksgiving

Today is, of course, Thanksgiving. I think this year is the closest I will ever feel to how the Pilgrims felt all those years ago at the first Thanksgiving. They were far from home, in a land different from their own, having to communicate with people from a different culture with a different language, they had strange foods, they missed their family and friends.
Today is a day where we traditionally give thanks in preparation for one of the greediest holiday traditions in the world: Black Friday. Instead of ranting about the irony of the situation, I've decided to take some time to really think about the past year and what I'm most thankful for. Below I'll be listing those things:

1. It is the end of week 10 here, which means I'm just over 1/4 of the way through this experience.
2. Tonight we get "real" food (aka not food from the comedor)
3. My parents were able to help me with this trip financially.
4. My church family has helped me financially.
5.  I have a fan to help keep me cool in my dorm room.
6. My roommates are going home in two weeks.
7. I get to go see some really cool things over my Christmas break.
8. My sister is awesome
9. My friends back home have been supportive and encouraging about this experience.
10. I'm learning something while I'm here :)
11. I don't have to deal with snow for another year.
12. The internet is faster than I thought it was going to be.
13. I don't have to write any papers.
14. Besides Folklore, my classes are not that hard (except for them being in another language)
15. I know that I have mail coming my way soon.
16. The update from Skype has made it easier for me to talk with people while being in my dorm.
17. I'll hopefully be getting my actually computer over the Christmas break.
18. I have 2 weeks until break left.
19. Most of my finals shouldnt be over much new information (except Folklore of course)
20. I haven't broken anything (a kid here broke his foot)
21. The stray dog leave me alone
22. The really tough semesters I had over the past year prepared me for this.
23. My sister is taking care of my fish for me :-)
24. Tabasco sauce.
25. Although I'm writing this last, it is the most important: God knew this year was the year I needed to be gone, not last year. I'm thankful the pieces didnt fall together just right two years ago for me to have been gone last year. It all worked out. :-)

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Midterms, Elections, and Funny Realizations

It has been another busy week here in Entre Rios Argentina. After a week with only one class and walking around Buenos Aires, it was really hard to get back into things. I found out Sunday afternoon that a midterm exam I thought was next Monday was actually this past Monday. I didn't get to study nearly as much as I wanted to and it was not a very good test. It was pretty confusing and I don't think I did well in it. Thankfully that test, in Folklore, was the hardest exam I had all week. Tuesday I had my Ortografia exam. Orthography is like Hooked on Phonics, we are learning the rules of Spanish spelling kind of like "i before e except after c." Right now we've been focusing on syllables and tilde placement. I memorized the rules and I think I did fairly well on that exam.

Tuesday night I stayed up with Sheryll and Megan to watch the election proceedings in the basement of our dorm. We fought off spiders and cockroaches until 4 am our time; but it was worth it to know who was leading our nation and hear Obama speak. It was also not the smartest decision I made all week. I had two exams Wednesday morning (beginning at 8:30 am): Grammar and Conversation. Both of the tests weren't took bad and I think I did pretty well on them. We reviewed for our History exam during class in preparation for our exam next week and I'll have a unit exam in Bible over Hinduism. Yes, I came to Argentina and I'm taking world religions...again .

Today I had my geography exam. I could have studied a little bit more, but after only sleeping for 3 hours Tuesday night, I was exhausted and chose to sleep instead of study more. After my exam I got right back in bed today and slept until around 12. Actually, I've pretty much been in bed all day. It's been raining here and since I didn't have any classes and I didn't want to get drenched (down pours all afternoon) I stayed in bed.

The power's been flipping on and off all day. It was quite a pain because my fan would obviously stop working and so did the WiFi. The weather's calmed down a bit but I think we're in for more storms tonight. I hope not though. I'd rather my fan work all night long.

It's been in the 80s all week and relatively humid. Today, because of the rain, has been very humid which is irritating my knee.

It feels like I've been here for a long time already but at the same time I'm not sure how it's already November. We're still working on Christmas plans, which will hopefully be finalized soon. But we really only have 4 more weeks of classes and a week of finals before our Christmas break. My roommates will be going home for the summer and the campus will be less full for a few months. Hopefully I won't get any new roommates and the internet will speed up. I've been told it does. I still don't have many friends, really no real friends to speak of, but I'm much more acclimated to being here. Every day there's a new reason as to why this was the best time for me to come.

Thanks for all of your prayers and cards of encouragement. I'm working on writing back to everyone, I promise I will write back as soon as I can.

Until next.

Pictures of Buenos Aires

^This is me with a random soccer sculpture guy at La Boca. 

^These pictures are slightly out of order, but this was a sculpture outside of the president's house.

^All over La Boca they had this really cool murals. I loved them!

^This guy was just chillin and playing music for the shoppers in La Boca. I gave him 2 pesos. 

^La Boca is known for tango as well as the soccer field thats nearby. 

^This was a relief sculpture at La Boca.

^This was a fountain outside of the President's house, which is in the back ground. 

^This is the President's house which is called Casa Rosada. 

^This is a church/shrine to San Martin, the guy that liberated Argentina. 

^This is me in front of Casa Rosada. 

^This is the actual shrine to San Martin inside that church from above. 

^They had guards outside the shrine to San Martin. 

^The obelisk. 

^Me outside a church near the cemetery we went to. 

^This was a giant tree. I didn't hear what it was exactly but we made a stop here so I took some pictures. 

^This is a special cemetery. I also didn't hear anything about this place either but it was super cool. There were 55,000 shrines/crypts. 

^This was one of the crypts in the cemetery. It looks like a real church doesn't it?

^This is another shrine. I thought It was cool because you could see inside. 

^After the cemetery we went to a rose garden. It was SO pretty!

^Baby geese in the rose garden. I was confused for a minute, and then I remember it is spring here and not fall. 

^The rose garden. 

^A bridge at the rose garden. 

Well that was my trip in pictures to Buenos Aires. There will be a few more things happening tomorrow but I will have to post those pictures at the UAP, and we all know how well that works. 

Fiesta de los Naciones

^Some of the ACA girls finishing up the booth for the USA at the "Fiesta de la Naciones" From left to right: Shelby, Megan, Dylon, Vernee, Tiffani, and Rikita.

^Me pointing out the White House and WAU on the East Coast. :)

^The Peruvian students were beast. Apparently there was a competition on the booths and the presentations. Peru won. Clearly.

^The Canadian booth. I thought it was cool. 

^Part of our presentation. We had students pretend to be from various countries and have Uncle Sam accept them as US citizens. The two kids on the right are actually Korean and, of course, respresnted their country. From Left to Right: Marianne, Spencer (as Uncle Sam), Jane, and Christian.

^Me and Uncle Sam (Spencer).

Pictures (Catching up with the first few weeks here)

 ^ The ACA girls I was on the team with in the tournament.

 ^ Me warming up :)

^Those of us that made it to the awards ceremony. From Left to Right: Tina, Molly, Cheryl (on the floor), me, Leah, and Jane.

^Our trophy. Cheryl, me, and Leah.

^This was about a week after the award ceremony. Jane, Tina, and Cheryl with our trophy at Panchos. Panchos is a restaurant that sells hot dogs (aka panchos in Argentina) and hamburgers. And since this is mostly an Adventist town, they have meat and vegetarian options.

^This is Jason with his clown nose at the escuela we sang at for the La Sonrisa trip.

^The ACA students in our group created a skit about brushing teeth. Megan, Andrea (hidden behind megan) and I were BonBons (chocolate candy with different fillings) and our fried Daiana (for the UAP not an ACA student) was our fabulous tooth brush. Kyly (not shown here) was the dentist. 

^This was our whole group that sang and painted at the escuela. I dont know everyone's names so I won't try to identify them. I am, however, in the back row, second from the right in a grey t-shirt.

^The statue here was some form of the Virgin Mary. As you may know, Argentina is predominately Catholic and pretty much every city has some statue of a saint or Mary hidden there. She was kind of creepy looking up from. But I thought from afar and at sunset it was a nice picture.

^This is the entire group of La Sonrisa participants. I chose to take a picture instead of being in this one. There were approximately 250 students that attended.

^This is me in front of the place where we were staying for the La Sonrisa event. 

^On the way home, the sunset was really pretty and I snapped a couple photos out the bus window. This one might be my favorite picture of Argentina so far. 

^Last week (Oct 19-26th) was a week of prayer at the UAP. The chaplain office asked for the ACA student choir to do a special music. We made a smaller group for the special music. I will see if I can post the video tonight since the internet is cooperating here. Sorry that this picture is off center. There group was a little larger but I couldnt see this picture very well when I was choosing which to upload. Anyway, from left to right: Camilla (half cut off), Marianne, Melanie, Hawa,Daryll, Dainia, Cameron, Jason, Me, Symone, Rhondi, and Camile. 

^My pictures are a little out of order. This was at La Sonrisa. We had a bunch of free time in the afternoon so we went down to the flooded river and skipped rocks. 

^These were all the ACA students (plus Daiana there all the way on the left by me) and students from the escuela. From left to right: Daiana, Me, Andrea, Vernee, Marvin, Megan, and Christian. And at the bottom, Kyly and Jason. 

Buenos Aires

Yesterday (Monday Oct 29), today, and most of tomorrow has been/will be spent here in Buenos Aires. We left from the UAP aroudn 6:30 am yesterday morning and arrived at Hotel Victory around 1 pm. We settled into our rooms and then headed to the local mall as a group for lunch. The people I was with ended up not wanting to eat in the mall, so we took off in the rain and down the walking street to see if we could find anything to eat. I ate breakfast really late because I fell asleep on the bus so I didn't eat lunch. We found a Starbucks and I bought Megan and I Argentina Starbucks mugs. I don't really collect things. But we both collect Starbucks mugs and I also collect Coke bottles from places I've been.

Last night for dinner, some friends and I ventured out into the rain again and went to a Thai restaurant a few miles from our hotel. It didn't open until 9 pm so we had to wait out in the pouring rain (under and awning) for 20 min or so. Needless to say, after a full day walking in the rain and then standing on a sidewalk that was flooding in parts, I was soaking wet . Dinner was good. I got some form of curry and then Jasmine tea to try and warm me up a bit.

Today we left the hotel around 9 am and set out to tour the city. The bus took us to La Boca, which is where they have the soccer stadium and I think Haroldo said it was where there was a lot of Tango places. We stopped at this touristy place. It was really cute, I took a bunch of pictures and then purchased a mate cup, bombilla, and yerba. Mate is a kind of tea they drink here. There are two forms: mate and terrer. Mate is hot, terrer is cold tea mixed with juice. I like both forms. The cup is painted with a couple tangoing and the Buenos Aires obelisk in the background. It's really nice and I got all three in a pack for about $9 USD which is really good.

After we went to La Boca, we headed back across town to Casa Rosada (the president's house. It's called the Pink House like our's is called the White House. And yes it is a shade of pinkish). Across the street was this church/shrine for Libertador San Martin. San Martin is the one that fought for Argentine independence...I think lol. It was really awesome inside; very typical Catholic church.

We went to Grantis for lunch. I think that's how you spell the company's name. They are the Adventist company that makes the cookies and crackers packs we can buy at the UAP. It was, obviously, an all vegetarian buffet restaurant and the place mats had an Ellen White quote on them. :)

After lunch we drove buy the Obelisk and then headed to this really cool cemetary. I didn't hear the history of the cemetery, but all the people buried there are in these very elaborate crypts. Some of them look like houses or churches. Most of them have engravings or sculptures on them. We walked around in there for a while taking pictures of them.

After the cemetery we went to a giant rose garden. It was really pretty in there. I decided if by some stroke of luck I got an all expense paid wedding (and the flights of everyone I invited paid for too) I would want to get married there. It was so gorgeous.

Right now, my hotel mates and I are resting in the hotel room until we decide to go to dinner. I'm not sure what the plan is exactly for tomorrow, but I know we have to be out of our rooms/checked out by 10 am and then we are doing something. Then we have free time and we are leaving for the UAP around 6 pm so we won't get back to campus until 12 am or 1 am Thursday.

Classes for Thursday morning have been cancelled. I have some homework due in the afternoon but I never have class on Thursday so it doesn't really affect me at all.

Anyway, until next time.