Back in Buenos Aires

After being out and about for so long, I'm finally back to my current definition of real life: meaning 12 hours of class, 30 hours of work and 5 hours of sleep. I still don't really have a voice after travel congestion, but am loving every minute of things here so no complaints.

Notable stories worth sharing:

• Cooking: After a month of living in an apartment, our stove finally works! We can cook dinner instead of buying takeout, eating leftovers, using the microwave or making sandwiches every night! To celebrate, I cooked pasta for the first time ever with Jordin's help. The verdura & carne ravioli (vegetable-meat) with fileto (red sauce) tasted great, and honestly, it felt great to cook something and then be so satisfied with the meal. Why we didn't overcome this issue earlier, I'm not quite sure, but I foresee the next month full of cooking endeavors when time permits :)
• Signs in Spanish: For some reason, I find professional signs and announcements absolutely hilarious when they are very comparable to things in English. At Iguazú National Park, there was a lot of this. One example was the "don't cross the train tracks" signs when we took the train to the waterfalls. The rest range from stop signs that say "PARE," advisory warnings on food, and my personal favorite- the floor numbers at work. Kind of like we say 2nd and 3rd, the floors her say 2 DO and 3 RA, for segundo and tercera (2nd/3rd) respectively. I can't pinpoint why this cracks me up so much, but I think it relates to Stacey's amusement at seeing stores named exactly what the textbook said they would be. Like when the bookstore is called LIBRERIA. Because in the USA (or as we commonly just say, the states), these stores have names. But here they don't. Heladeria is the ice cream shop, fruteria is the fruit store, and lavaderia is the laundromat. You can't distinguish one from the other, only by location. They're funny because we're so accustomed to seeing them in English, that it looks like a joke translated into Spanish.
• Simone de Beauvoir: For my gender studies class, I read some chapters of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir where she presents a lot of theory about how women have always been seen as "the other" and that you are not born, but become a woman. Our professor also assigned a 50-minute video documentary to watch, so I figured I would watch it the night before so the information was fresh in my brain. This was a poor decision, because when I clicked on the YouTube link last night to begin, the video was in French with Spanish subtitles. En serio. What?! As challenging as this was, I can say I comprehended as much of the video as I would have if I watched it in English. It took a lot of pausing, note-taking, and not blinking to catch every last Spanish word, and was essentially like watching a video without sound, but misleading with the sound of French language. All in all, an obstacle was overcome and I improved my Spanish and gender knowledge by listening so closely!