¿Comprenden chicos?

#Winning

An account of exciting occurrences of the day that fit with the Twitter hashtag #winning.

• We have finally become colectivo (bus) pros! Stacey, Jordin & I got to Universidad Austral for Spanish class in just 30 minutes after taking a new line!
• Did you know that if you click SHIFT + OPTION + ? on a Mac, you'll get the upside down question mark!¿!¿!¿ Excitement!
• Food from Wok China in Argentina is better than Chinese food in the US. Even better for the cost-conscious college student, it's enough food to feed me for three whole days!
• Elizabeth and I did our grocery shopping, and we successfully made popcorn! I had milk for the first time this entire trip (chocolate milk) and got a 1/2 gallon for $1! Other sale items included 2.5 gallons of gaseosa de pomelo (grapefruit soda) for only 6 pesos ($1.50 USD), and dulce de leche flan at two for 4 pesos ($1 USD)!

Things I learned today

From news to Spanish to gender studies and more!

• A review of commands, specifically in the forms of vos and vosotros. These are not used in Spanish spoken in the US or Mexico, so it's been a challenge to teach myself the conjugations, especially with people at work.
• The phrase "No me importa" doesn't mean it's not important to me, it holds more of a connotation of I'm not interested! I said this at work when they asked which of the two office cliques I wanted to have lunch with, and one of my co-workers jokingly acted offended. I was incredibly embarrassed/avergonzada.
• Because I chose the one clique who ate inside the office, Brenda, Vanessa and I took a 15 minute walk later to get out and enjoy the sunny afternoon. We talked about the difference between Fahrenheit and Celsius and Vanessa told me it hasn't snowed in Buenos Aires in over three years!
• Other word conversations on the walk included "tips" and "Atlanta." The women get a kick out of the American A sound, especially with the Chicago accent, so they made me say Atlanta. They were also unaware that "tips" had other meanings besides leaving money at a restaurant. They were excited to know that "tips" could be short pieces of advice. Language is so underrated! Some people don't know all of these things!
• The word document en español is archivo, like archive, so naturally I have been pronouncing it arKivo. En realidad, it's arCHivo with emphasis on the ch. Whoops!
• Get ready to cry. Mizzou takes us on one trip while we were here and had planned a trip to Bariloche, which is where Patagonia and the Andes mountains are. Much to my dismay, a volcano is soon erupting in Bariloche and our trip has been cancelled. As excited as I was to see this gorgeous site, I'm trying to take it lightly after all that has happened in Joplin. We are blessed that there were warnings of this before our trip; natural disasters are not in our control. We'll be going to Montevideo, Uruguay instead, and I guess this timing just calls for another trip to Argentina in the future to see the mountains. To read more about the situation in Bariloche with the volcano, click here.
• All my research at work paid off today when I went through the relevant websites and posted advertisements for our clients on them! This included creating accounts, emailing press releases, writing text for the ads and more.
• At the end of creating all these accounts, I had to verify myself as a human by typing in the anti-robot codes. This is even more difficult here because some of the letters have acentos on thém! Imagine how long it took me to get the code correct!
• Tuesday evenings end with my Women & Gender Studies course taught by Carolina, which never ceases to amaze me. I can't even begin to explain how much I'm learning in this four-person course and how happy I am to be taking it in a session where I have the time to continue to research these situations for fun and learn more about sexism and stereotypes. More elaborate blog posts will come later, especially since I'm writing our first research paper this week!