- We walked around the city in the early afternoon, looking for food and the little shops that Karie and Terry told us set up along the river on the weekends. We couldn't find the shops.
- Once we finally stopped for lunch, I ate a dressingless salad at Ojo al Bife. Toward the end of our meal, an entire professional soccer team filed off their bus, stopping traffic outside (which was a big deal - traffic stops for no one in Argentina) and filled up the restaurant. Then we found out that we had been locked in the restaurant once we tried to leave, and one of the waiters had to let us out. Kind of embarrassing.
- In the evening, we went to a bar and a boliche (dance club). Might not have returned home until the wee hours of the morning. It was fantastic.
- I woke up after very little sleep and went to Mass at Nuestra Señora del Rosario, the cathedral in Rosario (fun fact: Rosario means Rosary). Because we were in a gigantic cathedral it was really hard for me to make out the words to the prayers, but it was beautiful to find the familiarity in the Mass, even though it was in a different language. The only thing that really threw me off was when the priest kissed the people that brought the gifts to the altar during the preparation of the gifts. While it is customary in Argentina to greet one another with a kiss on the cheek, I wasn't expecting to see that same gesture used in the Mass.
- After Mass, I walked home through the parks along the river. It was sunny and beautiful and there were people everywhere. I finally had my camera with me and was able to take pictures in the parks.
- At 7pm, I went to the Ariston Hotel for the reception for our two new ESOL B students, Jessie and Monica! It was crazy to see how tired and overwhelmed they were by everything, and how much my perspective on Argentina has changed since I was in their position only 3 short weeks ago.
- ESOL B classes began. I'm only taking one class this session, which is Spanish for educators. It's already very nice to only have one class to worry about.
- We ate lunch at Zona with our new ESOL friends after class, and then I spent the 2.5 hours that the other students were in class uploading pictures to Facebook and killing my computer battery.
- When their class was done, Mary, Emily, Jessie, Monica and I went to get café con leche at our favorite cafe. When Jessie and Monica had to go back to school for their placement test, Mary, Emily and I had a great conversation about education and what this experience has done for us (so far). I love being around people who are as passionate about education and making the most of this experience as I am! The ideas we talked about will have to be summed up in another blog post.
- I spent the evening hoping people would get on Skype so I would have something to do. Had a great conversation with Ellen :)
- We went to a Gaucho Party! We took a bus for an hour over the Rosario-Victoria bridge and through the swampy Entre Rios province, finally arriving at the ranch. Some students rode the horses, but the horses had some attitude so I didn't ride. I enjoyed sitting in the sun and talking with the other people from the program. We ate lunch and watched a traditional gaucho dance, and the dancers were intense. Quote of the day came from Karie, who at the beginning of the show said, "I don't know what's going on, but there's going to be a fight. He has a knife." (the gaucho ended up pulling his knife and stabbing the ground with it, but then we found out it wasn't really very sharp) After the show, we ate a traditional dessert of bread pudding and scrambled eggs that were flavored with lemon and sugar. Very good, but very sweet. After dessert we went home.
- When I got home I watched a 45 minute video of Whose Line is it Anyway bloopers on YouTube.
- Spanish class started at 8am. I wrote a poem to express how I felt about early morning class:
This morning, I woke up before the sun.
Early mornings are no fun.
- After class, Mary and I went to the heladeria for café con leche in the hour between when class got done and when we could eat lunch. I think Mary meant to do her homework but we ended up talking.
- After lunch, we went to el Pozo, which is the part of the Plaza Civica where political activists were sequestered during the Dirty War. There's no real way to describe the experience. I can't describe how it felt to stand in a room and have our tour guide tell us that in that same room 30 years ago, people were tortured through electric shocks (the use of electricity as a form of torture was invented in Argentina). I can't describe how it felt to see the detainment center in the basement, where the tour guide's own mother was held with 20 other women in 1 room, sharing 2 mattresses among themselves. I can't describe how it felt to see how close we were to the center of Rosario and to know that people outside could hear the screams of the people being tortured inside and couldn't do anything to stop it. It's a hard experience to unpack. The tour guide herself was jailed for 3 years, starting in Rosario and ending up in a concentration camp in Buenos Aires, for her involvement in a student union in high school. It was hard for me to piece together both the military history of the country and the history of the detainment center, but it was amazing to see how important this history is to the tour guide, which is why she has committed her life to educating others about what happened.
- After our experience in el Pozo, all the ESOL B students except for Cain and me were off to their ESOL class on biliteracy. Cain, Karie and I took a tour around la Parque de la Independencia, which involved wearing just about all the clothes I brought to Rosario to keep warm, dancing to Michael Jackson's Thriller, and modeling for Karie's photos (one of which involved sitting in the same place where Ernesto Guevara's first picture was taken as a child...that seemed like a bit of a stretch of a tourist location to me).
In case you haven't seen the newest additions to my pictures, here are the links to my Facebook albums:
Bienvenidos a Rosario
Excursión a Córdoba
you little missy have a great blog! i love the bullet points! AOT <3
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