quite sorry about the delay in postings. it's been a fairly busy month and a half so the blog has been a lower priority. ANYWAYS
so quick catch up on my going ons-
spent the entire month of January taking the TEFL course- a whopping 100 hours of class time, 10 hours of classroom observations, and 10 hours of practice teaching time in only 4 weeks. fairly intense, but definitely covered a lot and gave us a lot of tools for future teaching. I spent the next 3 weeks taking Spanish classes in the mornings from 9-1, which for anyone who knows me you can imagine the struggle that took place dealing with early mornings again, which was a nice brush up and grammar review but still really need to be speaking the language more if I'm going to keep improving. Dan and I moved into a guest house in Barrio Norte right by Palermo that's pretty nice. It's a big place with 7 bedrooms for long term stays for foreigners (minimum 2 month stay). Rent is about half what it was in Boston, and this place isn't even that cheap. Our plan is to stay here for three or four months and then try to find an actual apartment with some Spanish speakers to immerse ourselves better. The neighborhood is great, there's a park right on the corner, a lot of affordable food in the area, and it's really easily accessible by bus and subway. Now we're just filling up our teaching hours and applying to the various language institutes around the city. We've both started teaching, I have two students now that work at Cinemark, a movie theater chain, in Palermo and am supposed to start teaching a new student tomorrow who's the head of communications for an Argentine congressman or senator or something of that nature.
Ok, enough of the boring wrap up. Argentina is still treating us quite well. It's been excellent to get our own place with our own rooms, and it's still beautiful summer time (currently 79 degrees and not a cloud in the sky). Classes and teaching have dominated much of our time but we've been able to explore a bit more. Our good friend Ian Goodstein spent 10 days down here visiting us, so we were able to move our schedules around to show him around and how much fun Buenos Aires is. We finally got around to checking out the Recoletta cemetary, which is an amazing cemetary full of mausoleums and tombs where many of the rich and powerful people from Argentine past are buried. It's really an amazing sight, check out the pictures below. Ian and I also made it over to the japanese gardens, which are pretty cool too. It's pretty much what it sounds like; a large garden in the style of ancient Japan with coy ponds, samurai statues, a large lake in the middle with an island in the middle and a bridge connecting it to either side, and such. We forgot cameras but Dan and I will go back and I'll remember to snap some photos. The whole place is guarded by Samurai Duck (as we so aptly titled him), a black and white duck with a ruby red neck, who spends his time intimidating visitors with his battle dance consisting of sticking his neck out on alternating sides while slowly approaching and furiously shaking his tail feathers. At one point he even taunted us by turning around, raising his tail feathers, and proceeding to flex his ass muscles at us. it was surprisingly effective.
Ian arrived on my birthday, and we had an asado that night (an Argentine style barbeque) that Pablo, one of the house owners, was nice enough to cook up for us. Check out the pictures to witness the deliciousness that is Argentine grill.
While much has gone down in the last month and a half I'll stop here to prevent this post from getting too long and try to be better about updating it more frequently. Hope everyone is doing well stateside or wherever you may reside
Here's my room. nothing fancy, but nice to have my own space finally.
our living room couch and a view into the kitchen
Pablo cooking up a delicious feast
THE FEAST
most of the asado crew, with some especially lovely expressions from eulalea on the left and brandon (harry potter)
the recolleta cemetary:
so many angels
our theory? the guy on the left decided he was tired of being shown up by the angels next to him, said "ehh screw it", and just sat down. that look is pure contempt.
nice dome... i wonder what's painted on the underside...
oh, only jesus ascending into heaven with the help of some angels. no big deal.
Evita Peron's resting place
