día 13

Man, time flies. I can´t believe I´ve been here for almost two weeks. And today I have my last spanish class already, already. Yesterday was a good one. I had a relatively calm morning which I filled with errands and some café time. Then it was off to the cousins for lunch and then off to Spanish class. Yesterday´s class was 4 hours of verb-filled fun. Past, present, future - whatever, I´m your girl. But then I got into trouble because there are all these different sorts of adverbs in spanish that we don´t call adverbs in english.... unless of course I´m completely wrong, which is entirely possible because my grammar training in school was not fabulous.... but once I got over that; things were fine. We listened to a couple of songs and identified all the nouns, etc. I was pretty tired when that was done. After my class, Ximena and I went out to dinner. At 9:00, we were the first people in the place, and they warned us that if we wanted pizza we were going to have to wait 30 minutes for the oven to heat up. But we were there for pasta and a good bottle of wine. I had a canneloni kind of thing, and Xime had ravioli. Both were excellent. Our two pasta plates and a bottle of wine came to about $15. Ridiculous. But we weren´t complaining..... Then I went over to Xime´s house to watch the first part of the US-Argentina soccer game. All was well with a 1-1 tie when I left her house, but then she started calling me while I was in the taxi to let me know that things were not going great for the US. The taxi driver was happy, for sure. And he still brought me safely home even after he found out I was from Los Estados Unidos. Unfortunately, I think I have a bit of a cold. But I already feel better this morning than I did last night. Fortunately I don´t have much of a schedule today until this afternoon.

One funny thing here is that they use the word ´´feo´´ (ugly) all the time. If somebody doesn´t like the food, it´s feo, if there is a bad smell, feo, and of course, if there is an ugly building, it´s feo too. So yesterday at lunch I was reaching for what I thought was the soda to put in my glass when one of my cousins screamed something to the effect of, ´´ay! no! es feo!´´ He saved me from drinking some fermented tea thing that all the adults in the family like but the kids think is disgusting. As near as I can figure out, you make a big batch of tea and let it sit out on the counter covered up for some period of time. It looks awful and I have to agree, without even trying it, that it´s feo.