American? Yeah? Want some cocaine?

Bueno, chicos, tiempo para escribir otro bloggage.  Disfrutalo. 

So, a lot has happened in the last 4 or 5 days since I blogged.  I mean…a lot.  I’ve had lots of “cultural” experience and lots of orientation boredom.  First on the latter, then the former.

Boredom.  Hard to stay awake.  Distracted.  Sleep.  Woozy. 

Sounds like a class you don’t want to be in, doesn’t it?

Yeah, exactly.  That’s where I’ve been.  In a bunch of “orientaciones” designed to give us some idea of some random thing that we’re going to have some type of interaction with.  The orientations have been lately mostly about classes and picking them.  The system for picking them is, like my friend Michael recently said in his blog, un quilombo.  That’s the Argentine word for a mess.  We can take classes from FLACSO (the school that our program is partnered with, more or less), IUNA (An arts school in the city), UCA (The catholic university of Argentina, or UBA (the massive Universidad de Buenos Aires). 

Basically you pick a bunch of classes, try them, and the ones you don’t want you drop.  So it would be a bit pointless for me to list all of my potential classes at this point…and I’m really lazy.  I’m almost as lazy here in Buenos Aires as I am in Oregon.  ALMOST.

Now: the “cultural” wildness.

For a while the most extraordinary thing I had done was walk around in certain parts of the city and eat amazing food in yummy cafés/restaurants.  I went to a plaza in my neighborhood with some friends to break that rhythm.  It wasn’t anything extreme whatsoever, but as I was waiting for them to show up, looking lost probably, some dude asked me where I was from.  Then we shook hands.  Then he offered me cocaine.  And women.  Hahahahaha!  I found it very funny afterwards though at the time it was actually pretty scary.  I had to just walk away, while he was still talking to me.  He offered me the drugs as soon as I said I was American.  Way to go Americans!  Great international rep!  That sums up the cultural experience of that night.

The next night I got the opportunity to go to a “Milonga,” which is a bar/restaurant/Tango dancing place.  We got to crowd out a Milonga and Tango lesson, which are extremely similar.  But I loved it!  I took out my dance shoes and danced pretty much every opportunity I had.  It was super enjoyable, and having some ballroom experience helped a lot too.  At one point I even volunteered to be the example for the rest (SCARY, but it went without a hitch).  We also ate pizza – very Italian, very good.  There was one frustrating part of the dancing though: we were many.  We were legion.  I could hardly do more than 2 basics and then I would have to stop before running into people.  It was funny to hear Hustle music that nobody knew how to dance to, though.  They used the Hustle music for announcement time (I Gotta Feeling – Black Eyed Peas, lol).  Too bad I didn’t know how to dance Hustle or have anyone with who knew.  I was missing West Coast Swing the whole time as well.  They played a really slow Milonga song that I found somebody to Bronze Waltz with.  It was fun being the only couple on the floor dancing Waltz!  Salsa was really popular, too, and I saw some AMAZINGLY good Salsa dancers.

Eventually we headed out.  I ended up being part of a group of people that wanted to go visit a bar.  Since the drinking age is only 18, I went along.  A friend and I both got “Licuados”, which are just smoothies.  We chose Frutilla (Strawberry), and it was amazingly good.  The bar itself was a joke though, the only cool thing was the decoration/art on the walls.  The music was baaaaaaad.  Bad bad.

We followed that up by ending up in a line to enter Kika, a nightclub.  Wow.  I’ve never been in one of those, and let me tell you – it’s CRAZY.  I did enjoy myself though.  I don’t think I’ll return…but I had fun.  The music was VERY loud, the air filled with cigarette smoke, perfume, and the dry ice kind of smoke.  And noise.  There were many disco balls hanging from the ceiling and an abundance of strobes and colored lights.  It felt really nice to get outside of the club when we finally made our exit.  After that it was a lot of walking until we took a taxi and got home.  I barely got home before 5am. 

That warrants a mention of the “night life” here in Buenos Aires.  Among friends it is something of a joke to call it “night life,” because the night really doesn’t begin until 2 or 3.  It’s more like “morning life.”

Well, that's all for now.  I have loads of pictures on my Facebook by now - Check them out.  More bloggage to come soon.