Argentina

So I watched the presidential debates and I was quite surprised with all the cold-war type talk. Forming a "league of democracies" that excludes Russia and China? Really? What the FUCK!!! Are we really trying to have another Cold War? Unbelievable. I think the US is going to have a difficult future if we start going back to that mentality. Especially since Russia and China will be economic powerhouses in no time at all. It was very clear in the debate the rhetoric that each candidate was trying to put forth. Obama tried to make the point that McCain is another George Bush, and McCain tried to make the point that he is not, and also that Obama is too naive to understand the concepts at hand. It was actually quite ironic when McCain said naivety because he pronounced it wrong. It was more of a "nigh ehv it tAY." Not important. The candidates had some good arguments but a lot of it seemed to be pretty shallow general stuff that is impossible to prove or disp...

Before I launch into my journey to get my package in the mail I would just like to give props to Brandon, Valley, Noodles, and Valicoff for making the Tour de FRAt possible last night. Basically, last night I was carried around on his laptop from room to room and I got to talk to various people from the frat through Skype. We both had video cameras so it was official. I pretty much felt like one of those celebrity-heads-in-a-jar you see on Futurma. He just carted me around from room to room, it was technology at it's finest. Ok, to the journey. I was very enterprising this morning, and although I had just 6 hours of sleep I pulled myself out of bed at 8 a.m. to go to the International Mail Center in Buenos Aires because the Harvard kid told me that the whole process takes a long time and it's best to arrive early(He had already done it because his Mom had sent him 3 boxes of his favorite cereal Cinnamon Toast Crunch, totally serious). Bread with dulce de leche, 3 cups of m...

It's been a while since I've made a meaningless list so here we go: 1) I understand the thought behind making toilet paper with cute drawing of puppies on it, but in practice, I just feel bad because I am wiping the cute puppies' faces in my poo. 2) I had my first mid-term today, my topic was selected at random and I had to answer how the inter war years between the First and Second World War marked the beginning of the decline of European dominance in International Relations. A pretty good question really. I wrote it in English and finished with 1 minute to spare. The professor speaks Spanish, English, French, and Arabic, any of which the students could answer in. 3) I received a note today saying I need to go pick up my package. Hope is not lost. 4) I bought three t-shirts today for $20 pesos each to add some variety to the 5 t-shirt rotation I have been sporting for the last 74 days. 5) Yesterday, my efforts to go to San Andrés to study were foiled by a train strike....

Well I've been studying all day. And I don't mean it in the exaggery complainy way, I mean, besides eating, and drinking mate, of course, I have been studying all day. Mate is crack for studying by the way. It's great. For some reason writing in my blog seemed like a good way to take a break from studying, not really sure why. The professor is a huge dick and didn't give us any help on what to study. Originally I thought he would give us the ten possible questions and then when we got to class it would be one of them. Instead, he gave us no questions, topics, or ideas of topics to focus on. What does that mean? About 200 years of international relations history which is quite a bit. It also means that 90% of what I am studying will be ultimately useless, except for maybe my eventual appearance on Jeopardy. Hopefully Alex Trebeck hasn't died by then. How old is he anyway... I digress. Before you give me a speech about not studying because I am in a forei...

Really going in cold to this blog. Not even really sure why I'm attempting a post when I don't have anything to say, but I will find something. By the beard of Zeus, I will. So the one thing I have learned from my International Relations class is that the US is a huge dick when it comes to foreign policy. I will give one example. After the WWII when the world was hungry for peace, we risked all out conflict in Korea with China and possibly even the USSR. We provoked war with North Korea with 1,274 border infringements until they declared war on South Korea. North Korea had un-American interests at heart you see... they wanted to have a free and open election to decide their future. The US knew that the puppet-American governement that protected capitalism's investements didn't have popular backing and would lose. Therfore, the US refused North Korea's push for free open elections. Freedom for all, a motto that is so often touted, but only when it's con...

So I don't have school for the next two weeks because everyone is supposed to be hunkered down studying for the mid-terms. Luckily I only have 2 mid-terms and a paper whereas most of the locals have 4 midterms. Some of the other foreigners have no midterms because they are taking classes like Photography and bullshit like that. Turns out I am getting a great deal on San Andrés. I am paying what a semester would cost for a home school tuition, roughly $3,000; people from UPENN, on the other hand, are also paying what it normally costs them to go to school for a semester: $15,000. That means they are paying five times as much as I am. Holy shit. In case you were wondering, the Argentineans pay about what I pay. The sands of time are passing ever faster. Over two months I have been here. Two months is a lot for a short time, but short for a long time, if you know what I mean. It's hard to notice any vast improvements in my Spanish on a day to day basis, but when I look b...

I haven't had a chance to write for a few days so let me recount Sunday-Wed. Sunday morning I woke up, like any other morning you might say, and ate spaghetti for breakfast. These things happen you see. The difference from this morning from any other, was that I had a text from an Argentinean inviting me to a professional soccer match between the number 1 and number 3 teams in the country. So I went. The two teams were La Boca and Independiente, a classic match only surpassed by the game between the number 1 and 2 teams (Boca v. Rivers). Anyway, we arrived to the stadium and had to pay somebody to watch our car so that nobody breaks into it. Pretty sketchy neighborhood actually. Another obstacle was the fact that we didn't have tickets. Apparently getting tickets to La Boca games is really difficult because they only go to the socios (aka Argentineans who have something like season tickets). We had to do reventas, which is a spanishy way to say scalping. So my Argent...

As Borat would say the party was "great success." Everyone loved the idea of having your beverage duct taped to your hand. Unfortunately the duct tape cost $100 pesos, which is a ton of money down here. In the US you can pick up a roll for a few dollars, but I had to buy it because I had promised everybody we would play it. I don't know what it is, but something is innately funny to seeing somebody duct taped to beer bottles. During the party I was in charge of duct taping and I took a few liberties. The basic rule I had was both hands had to be taped in someway so you couldn't use them. One girl wasn't drinking, so the only logical thing to do was to tape here hands together. Other people hand their hands duct taped to plastic cups, and beer cans. If a girl complained that two liters of beer was too much, I simply taped both her hands to one bottle. It was amazing. Also, we didn't get in trouble with the neighbors or anyone even though we weren...

We had our first inter-mural soccer game yesterday and we got murdered like baby seals. Our team is just foreign exchange students minus the goalie. Many factores worked together to prevent our winning: 1) We arrived to the field 3 minutes before and had no ball to warm up with 2) Two of our starting players couldn't come to play 3) A third starting player was 10 minutes late 4) It was the best team in our bracket 5) It was the first time we had ever played together With these absences we began the game with two outside defenders who were horrible. The first goal they got was in the first 5 minutes when one of these outside defenders had it stripped from him and gave the other team a break away goal. It was already 2-0 when the starting player who was 10 minutes late turned up. We played better but by half-time it was 3-0. Individually all of our players are O.K., but together we are not good. Most the players were quite selfish and would try to take players on all the time ...

The soccer party on Saturday was great. I caught a ride with some Argentinean and we piled six people into a car the size of a Geo metro. When I arrived to the party I saw a ping pong table and I thought, "Great, we're going to play beer pong;" however, much to my surprise the table was only used for playing actual ping pong. How strange. I was, however, successful in exercising some good old fashioned American hegemony by organizing a game of Kings. They showed me some of their games and they mostly involve numbers and strategy in comparison to American games that involve obscenities and chugging. I had a great time and even learned the basic steps for Cumbia which is the equivalent to Country in the US. Argentina is great because now I am an acquaintance of all the girls I met at the party so whenever we see each other at school we exchange kisses. This is a blessing and a curse because some of these girls are really cute and it's like a tease to only be abl...

It's obvious that my posts are getting farther and farther apart and less and less funny. This is because after almost 2 months, everything seems more normal. It's normal that when you are walking you have to be on the alert for the dog shit all over the side walk, it's normal that you greet every single person individually when you enter a room, and it's normal that life is a constant search for moneda and small bills. The only exception is guys kissing guys when they greet, that will never be normal. I'm slowly getting more entrenched with the Argentinians whereas before it was only the other exchange students. For example, yesterday after soccer practice I went with a group of players to a cafeteria type thing and we shot the breeze for an hour or so. Still, it's hard to understand them but if I keep doing this type of thing there is a possibility I could pick it up. Random News: Eloise Mumford is going to be appearing in a new t.v. series based on the ...

This message was from Thursday, I intended on adding more but I'm just going to start a new post. "So I´ve finally tried mate and it really hits the spot. I was studying in the library with a few argentineans, and my intention was to read until I was tired enough to take a nap. Anyway, we started passing around a gourd of mate and I was on level orange alert. It keeps you perfectly concentrated and it tastes really good. Mate itself is a bunch of little bits of herbs smashed up. You all the herbs into a gourd until it is three fourths full and add very hot water from a thermus. Then you drink through a metal straw. The way we did it is one person drank a gourd´s worth (not that much because it´s mostly the yerba (herbs), and then pass and refill. It was really really good and I´m going to start buying it. Our apartment is going to have a Edward 40 Hands night with the other intercambios and argentineans. We´re calling it Eduardo Litro Manos. It´s next Thursday so I´...

So we had a soccer match on Saturday, the first one for me since I missed the one last Friday because I was moving. Anyway, like I said before of the 30 or so who practiced only about 18 were invited to the game so it was a good first step to be invited. Now normally being a new player in a new country I wouldn't expect to be able to start the first game I went to, and this game was no exception. Although I know that I am better than all the current defenders, you gotta jump through the hoops when you're new. The team we were playing was the champion of the league last year so this was an important game. Our team had many opportunities in the first half, one clang off the post, and another sailed inches wide of the upper-V, but in the end we couldn't put it in before halftime. In the last minutes of the first half the other team took advantage of a defensive mis-communication and scored. It was 0-1 until the 70th minute or so when we scored. At this point I was think...