Bienvenida a Argentina!

Hola de Buenos Aires. (Jenn, queria que poderia estar aqui con nosotros!) I had forgotten my love affair with Spanish. I love it! It's Castilian Spanish here, though. I am so out of practice though, but it's coming back quickly.

Okay here's a quick recap. After some problems with my flight (it was over an hour late and the Brazilian airline Gol literally changed the departure gate 4 different times so all of us trying to make it to BA were running around the airport) I finally arrived. Lee was there to pick me up at the airport. I'm still so excited to be here! The first day we walked a lot around the city and then met with some of her friends (two were from Brazil and speak fluent Spanish). We ate ice cream and drank mate tea. Different from mate (ma-chee) in Brazil, it's a communal way of drinking tea. The Brazilians loved when I made mistakes in the language too, because I bring a lot of Portuguese forms and words into my Spanish.

So far I've seen the Pink House (equivalent to the white house), the Plaza de Mayo, the cathedral, the Plaza de la Republica, and a really strange awardwinning Argentine film Encarnacion that I thought was horribly boring. Also Alicia brought me to her internship with the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, the organization that fights for the justice and memory of the "disappeared" victims of the military dictatorship in the seventies and eighties. It was so cool because we met with a survivor of one of the military detainment camps. He was disappeared for 53 days and tortured and then officially detained for a few years or so. His story was very emotional and it was so awesome to connect with someone that lived through an event that I had studied in school. Here is a link explaining the organization:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothers_of_the_Plaza_de_Mayo

I'm so proud of my Alicia, studying and fighting for human rights in South America!