Weekend #1

Weekend #1 was as follows:

Friday
Already one week of school all done! Eric and I decided to tour the beautiful calle Florida near BA’s central plaza and it was full of shops. Anything you want: shoes, panchos, plates, flags, MacD’s, and even live bands.

Afterward, we met up with the rest of the Sol group to watch the movie Up in a cinema close to the Ricoleta cemetery and it was great. The movie theater alone was three stories, and the movie was muy lindo (catch term for anything good in BA, even better than Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious). Went out for a nice dinner and went back home for some Z’s.

Saturday
We went to the gaucho (cowboy) ranch today!!! It was increbily fun to see a totally different lifestyle, just 2 hours outside BA.

We went for a carriage ride, ate BBQ (I just ate enough meat to last me a year) while we watched a performance of "countryside" dancing. We also watched the gauchos play carrera de sortijas. The gaucho races full speed and tries to get a ring dangling from a clip by sticking a stick through the ring’s hole. We got to ride on horseback, which I haven’t done since I was young. Turns, out I’m allergic to horses because my eyes were burning after so much horse-loving. The whole experience was totally worth it, though.

Sunday
Today was election day, and since voting is obligatory in Argentina, I went with Susana to watch her cast her vote. She was done in less than 15 minutes. I spent the rest of the day re-touring BA (the cemetery and garden) with Ashley and her friends from Chile. We also went into the open-air market where they sold everything from matés to CD’s to jewelry. I walked to the theater to meet the Sol group and we watch a very odd play called “Aire”. In synopsis, it was clowns playing with air in different ways: bubbles, leaf-blowers, balloons, straws. You name it, they did it. Crazy clowns.