Lunes

Typical Monday here in Buenos Aires. Because unlike the rest of you, I did not have off work for a holiday! It was more exciting than I'm making it seem though, you'll see.

Small world
Amy and I were Facebook chatting this morning, and she told me she met someone in Washington DC who just got back from studying abroad in Buenos Aires. The boy she met was in town for the weekend visiting a friend, but from Pennsylvania, and Amy knew the friend. So as they were talking, she said OH MY FRIEND'S STUDYING ABROAD IN BUENOS AIRES, maybe you know her! (Doubtful, right? Guess not....) Knowing that I was blonde and from Mizzou, he remembered meeting my roommates and I in Palermo one night when we met a bunch of American students and chatted with them for a few minutes. We never caught their names, but he remembered meeting us because we were four blonde girls and apparently he caught that we went to University of Missouri. We must really be attention-getters, because last night when Sebastian came over looking for our apartment for the 4th of July Fiesta, he asked someone downstairs if they knew where we lived and he said "Oh the four blonde girls / chicas rubias?" Guess we underestimate our American presence. Both a good and a bad thing simultaneously.

I confirmed that it was the same guy because we had a mutual friend on Facebook from their study abroad program, and he friended Amy on Facebook so I saw the picture and sure enough, we had met him. How small of a world is it that you can meet someone in Buenos Aires for 5 minutes, who proceeds to meet Amy in DC while visiting another college friend?!?!? ¡Qué extraño!

Pasantía / Internship

After I finished a long translation at work during the late morning/early afternoon, everyone moved their chairs facing the center to presumably have an office meeting. I had never sat in on one of these, and was pretty confused/scared about what was going to be said and whether or not I could understand it. I comprehended it all, and learned that the office will allow and encourage employees to work from home on Fridays to avoid the long commute and generally be more comfortable. This decision didn't come out of nowhere and had clearly been thought out if not researched, but they're going to try it out and see if everything works since most of the work is individual based on which clients you're working on.

Evidently, this changed my hours so instead of working from home on Fridays, I will be working Wednesday mornings instead (my only morning off) and traveling on Fridays! ¡Que suerte! The logic makes a lot of sense and I look forward to seeing how it will affect the office. As much as I don't look forward to my two 12-hour days in a row (Tuesday & Wednesday with classes & work, not including commuting), it will be great to have an extra day in Córdoba and Mendoza.

My next project this week actually works with a client in the San Francisco, California area, because an Argentine man owns or works for the business and hired the firm to build the brand and its website. It's great to watch everything come together in terms of brand identity as well as breaking the language barrier. There are countless examples of phrases in Spanish used for companies that have no direct translation in English, so I have to use my thesaurus brain to figure out an alternate explanation.

In other news, as I've mentioned before, Argentines are very picky about accepting bigger bills, so you always need coins/monedas for the buses/coletivos and small bills for everything else. These are the first few days where I've actually run out of coins, and been refused to have change broken jsut about everywhere I go. There's a bank right next to where I work, so I left work around 3 p.m. per usual and was pretty excited to break my 10 peso bill ($2.50 USD). I thought it was horrible that US banks only stay open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. because of business hours, but Argentina bank services (ATMs are usually 24 hours if you swipe your card to get in the building) close AT 3 P.M. So as I happily pranced into the bank to get coins, I got yelled at by the employee who told me the only way I could get on a bus to get home was if I bought something at a kiosk because every bank would be closed. Great. This almost put me at the verge of tears, turning something so simple into the most difficult process ever. FINALLY after three blocks, I found a street vendor and bought some gummies to get on a bus to MALBA. What a journey.

MALBA- Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires

With only a month left in Buenos Aires, I started a list of adventures I'm going to take after work. My roommates and I usually do sightseeing like this together, but with varying interests and a time crunch, it's time to see all I can! I left the office and took a bus to Recoleta/Palermo to see MALBA, the Latin American Art Museum. Even though I'm not the most artistic person in the world, art is growing on me because it differs everywhere you go and I've come to appreciate a lot more since high school.

What has fascinated me about Argentine and a lot of Latin American art I've seen at various museums in Argentina is how modernist it is. While America appreciates creativity, the term museum carries an old connotation and rarely displays recent artwork or creations. In Argentina at expositions such as arteBA and Centro Cultural Borges, this is all they show. Each piece of art uses a variety of materials, and 3D pieces are valued. The first floor of MALBA was a large room going through the decades and displaying the following genres of art:

Decade

• 10s & 20s- modernisms and vanguardism, European influence
• 30s & 40s- surrealism and policy
• 40s & 50s- constructivism and concrete yet abstract thinking
• 60s & 70s- "arte pop," minimalism, conceptual thinking

This is part of the 60s/70s room, observe the alligator eating a woman.

American in Paris, a Latin American classic

After these, I was told that cameras were prohibited in the museum. Whoops. The next floor's exhibit was called Arte Argentino Actual en La Colección de MALBA- 1989 - 2010, which as the title implies, was all Argentine art from the past 20 years. Ranging from lampshades to paintings to video collections, this room made me laugh and smile a lot. The last unique exhibit closing off this room was called El triunfo de la muerte, The Victory of Death. This was a series of framed photographs of a man in a suit, with gunshots taken in various spots on each frame showing the progression of a man being killed. Each piece just amazed me and I was very impressed with the exhibit and museum. The overall shape of MALBA reminded me of the Getty Museum in southern California that my mom dragged my sisters and I to at a young age. The overall design was very friendly and the benches even dragged on and each wooden bar twirled throughout the walls of the museum.

It's afternoons like this where I love living in a city. Where else can you get off of work, pay $2 to see some awesome art and walk home past Argentina's version of Embassy Row? I didn't exactly know where I was since I left my T-book map at home, but all of this excitement and I was still home by 5:30.