Good weekend

My internet is not working. Mostly this isn't a huge problem, but I did take some photos and videos this weekend to post with this entry and now I can't upload them. So I'm going to go ahead and post and hopefully I'll be able to upload soon.

This weekend I had my first authentic Porteña nights—at least in terms of when I got home! On Friday night a friend from my program, Mariano, invited me to go to a ska show with him at a club near my apartment. I was really not familiar with ska, but I really enjoyed the music, and I had a great time!

The show was in a small bar in the basement of a building and was pretty packed. The headliner was a band called Skaineken, but the 12 peso cover bought us performances by quite a few other bands as well. One of them was called No Cashes and had very enthusiastic fans in the audience, including two small children who I'm pretty sure were the lead singer's kids. This is why I love Buenos Aires. There were two kids who couldn't have been more than then years old in a basement bar at 1:30 a.m. watching their dad play a show. Anyway, the group was good and very high-energy. They got the audience to sing along and at one point had some of their friends get up on stage to sing with them. They also did a few covers, including a great one of Red Red Wine (video to be inserted here).

Skaineken was also good (more videos here). When you can see the videos, you'll see a man dancing who is much older than anyone else in the bar. His name is Miguel and he befriended us--I met him outside when he stopped to tell me I have beautiful eyes. He was easily 55 or 60, which isn't really the crowd that usually shows up at things like this, but he was very into the music (as you will be able to tell by the worshipping gestures, you know, when you can see the video). The bands were getting a huge kick out of him and kept engaging with him. I thought he was great.

After the show we went to a bar and then dancing. The sun was coming up as I made my way home, around 7:30, thoroughly exhausted, but happy.

On Saturday I slept until 3:30--something I cannot get in the habit of doing once school starts--and then went out again. Meg, the girl from GW who I met in class last week, invited me to go to Plaza Serrano, a popular Saturday night destination. It’s a big circle lined with bars and full of extranjeros (foreigners), but Argentines can be found there as well. There are tables outside and you’re likely to run into people you know, so it’s fun.

We went with some of Meg’s friends. Then some of their friends showed up, and then some of their friends showed up, and it ended up being a pretty big group of people from all around the world. That’s something I love about traveling; at one point there were four different languages (Spanish, English, Portuguese, and German) being spoken at the table, and Spanish was the common language for some of us. There was Meg and a couple people she knows from GW, then there was Michael from England, Gabriel from Brazil, siblings Carolina and Martin who are German-born Peruvians (Martin studies at UVA and Carolina goes to university in Lima), a group of Germans whose names I didn’t actually catch, and Daniel from Uruguay and Antonio from Ecuador who both live in BA. We sat at a table outside in Plaza Serrano, drank wine and ate empanadas and tostados (traditional toasted ham and cheese sandwiches), serenaded by the music and horns of passing cars and solicited by small children selling roses. It was the first time in a long time I’ve hung out with a group of my peers like that, and I had a really great time.

Today I spent a lovely afternoon in Recoleta with Meg and her friend Rachel, but I’ll write about that later. I do want you guys to keep reading my blog, so I’m trying not to write too much at once.

This week my classes start in earnest. We have a few weeks to “shop” for classes before we set our schedules, and we have the option of taking classes at four different universities: la Universidad de Buenos Aires (la UBA), la Potifica Universidad Catolica Argentina (la UCA), la Universidad del Salvador (USAL), and la Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. I am trying out courses at all of them except Di Tella. This week classes start at la UCA, USAL, and the social sciences department at la UBA(the department of Filosofía y Letras, where I also have a class, starts next week). My IFSA program classes are also starting (one on human rights in Argentina and my Spanish class—my class’s topic is popular urban music in Argentina). It looks like I’ll be trying about ten classes, which will be whittled down to two. I know it seems like over-kill (and I’m not looking forward to going to that many three- to four-hour seminars in a week), but I have so little understanding of what the courses are going to be like and what I want to take that I figure it’s better to just try things out and drop them later.

Wish me luck this week, and stay tuned for the videos and an update about my day today!