Catching up

    Hola a todos!  Its been 2 days since I last wrote and so much has happened I don't even know where to begin.  There's a lot to tell, and some other stuff I just kind of want to write that isn't a story, so I'll break this up into 2 or 3 posts.  This post will be long, but trust me, its good.

    Saturday night after I wrote, me and Dave went to a bar called Congo in Palermo, the young, rich, trendy part of the city.  We met with all the other BC students and got to know each other a bit. The bar was very cool, with a big back patio looking like a jungle (Marie would love it).  We got pizza and headed home exhausted around 4am.

    Sunday we woke up late, ate, and headed to Ann Glotzbach's house, she's the resident coordinator for BC.  There we sat with a porteno friend of Ann's (porteno is a citizen of BA) and learned about Argentine customs, traditions, and received advice on every aspect of living here.  We had yerba mate, a common tradition here.  Mate (pronounced mah-tay) is a strong, bitter tea that you drink out of a dried gourd with a metal straw.  There are a lot of rules and customs with drinking it that I don't want to write about, so read the bottom section here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerba_mat%C3%A9


   Afterwards, we went to dinner at an all-you-can-eat restaurant (here called "tenedor libre" or "fork-free") with one of our professors, Sergio Serulnikov, and his wife Silvana, another coordinator for BC.  We sat for 4 hours talking (in Spanish almost all the time except when its just the BC students) about everything imaginable.

I'll continue this in a new post.