The Earth was quakin'

Hola todos.  As I'm sure you know, there was a massive earthquake in Chile super early this morning.  It hit a huge part of Argentina, but luckily not BA.  I read that its tied for the 5th largest quake in Chile since 1900.  Everything here is fine, although Svetlana's layover in Santiago, Chile turned into a 15 hour emergency stop in Iquique, Chile- a town on the coast of Chile just a bit north of the Atacama Desert, the driest desert in the world.  She told me all she could see outside the airport was gigantic sand dunes.  Luckily she's on a flight directly to BA now, she'll be landing around 1am.  I'm sticking around waiting at the house for her.

So I figured I would post while my friends are out partying.  Tito, my homestay dad, is 70 years old and very conservative, so when I asked him if it would be ok if Svetlana stays in the extra bedroom downstairs, he got super angry and told me to find a hostel.  Awesome. Thanks for sticking to the Argentine stereotype of being super hospitable, Tito.  We move into our apartment tomorrow, I really cant wait.  Me and Dave are pretty fed up with Tito's stubbornness, the inability to eat what we want when we want, the inability to have some friends over, and the other restrictions you have when youre a 20 year old staying as a guest in an older conservative couple's home.  These things plus our new apartment is incredible :)

Anyway, Wednesday we went to that huge after-office party that we went to a couple weeks ago.  It was super fun.  Thursday we had to go to migrations for visa stuff, then we went back to that super cool park I posted a picture of earlier.  Then at night we went to another dance club with a ton of friends.

Yesterday we had orientation for exchange students.  A solid half the class is from the States, and about 90% of the Americans are from Boston.  Pretty funny.  There's a group at the school called Accion Social, a club that does some after school tutoring and mentoring programs for poor communities near Tigre, as well as some work like helping small businesses get off the ground and doing economic analysis around the city.  Since I cant play rugby here Im going to do that, I think.

Last night and today have been an invasion of BC in BA.  Some girls from my BC group met about 10 guys that had graduated from BC in May and moved down here about a month ago.  In about a week or 2 theyre all taking off in different directions to travel South America for some time, ranging between 2 months and 7 months (and one guy not planning on leaving).  One guy is actually from Huntington, about 3 minutes down the road from me.  Again, "small world" is not just a phrase.  The guys invited us to their apartment last night, where we hung out and talked BC and traveling all night.  They were real cool.

Today we went to the zoo.  It seemed like a good idea but the truth is, zoos are sooooo depressing.  The zoo was very poorly kept and the areas all of the animals had were super small.  We saw one penguin swimming back and forth with his beak against the glass for about 5 minutes.  Malcolm looked at me and asked "Can you imagine spending everyday of your life going back and forth against a piece of glass just looking for a crack to get out of?" It was real sad.

On a happier note, after the zoo, Malcolm, Hannah, and I went to a cafe where I found real turkey!!!  I looked at the menu and found "pavita" on a sandwich, the three of us were pumped because its impossible to find turkey here.  After the cafe we went to a yoga class.  This yoga class is taught by a girl who also graduated from BC in May.  We got there and it was 5 of us from my BC group, all of the BC guys from last night, a guy from UMASS, and a few girls from Union College in NY.  Out of about 20 people in the class, one wasnt from the US and only 3 or 4 werent from Boston.  Even funnier than that, I did yoga.  It was sooo hard.  I was sweating and shaking after about 10 minutes, and when we laid in the dark at the end, I fell asleep.

When I got home, we were having asado for dinner.  Asado is seriously the most delicious thing ever.

Another post soon to come!