Parrillas y Porteños

Monday night Pablo invited the whole crew out to his place to swim in his pool.  There's something entirely godly about having a pool when the weather gets as hot as it does here.  When I mentioned the possibility of swimming to the other students in my house, the reactions were immediately unanimously in favor of it.  Pablo has suddenly become a very popular guy.  Anyway, we spent the night hanging out, chatting with his brother and friend, drinking cervesa and talking about how we were going to go swimming soon.  When we finally did get down to the pool, however, it was somewhere around midnight and it suddenly wasn't as hot as it had been earlier that day.  Only Marc, Laurence and I had the balls to swim around for a while.  The water was actually unbelievably cold considering it's size and the eternal heat here.

Tuesday night turned out to be a total blast.  One of Tamara's professors planned a parilla

(otherwise known as a bar-b-que) at his house, and invited a bunch of people.  By some stroke of luck, I was included and we all went out to a house party bbq.  The art of the parrilla is especially practiced here in BsAs, and we all appreciated the choripans.  

A choripan is basically the Argentine interpretation of the hamburger.  There's bread (the only kind of bread I've seen for the last 3 weeks - I'm starting to think they only have one kind), tomatoes, lettuce, some kind of sauce (either mayo or bbq sauce) and a chorizo (which is essentially a really fatty sausage cut open and dripping with sweet yumminess).  The word pan means "bread", choripan basically means "chorizo on bread".  They were infinitely yummy, and watching the porteños at work grilling them was hilarious.

We met a couple new people that were quite interesting too.  I was pleasantly surprised to meet Adan, an American from Buffalo, NY, who has been living and working in BsAs now for over a year.  Danny, Andrew, Leslie... those of you interested in the possibility of one day living in BsAs, with a non-black-market job, Adam is living proof that it can be done.  On top of that, he was obviously ridiculously fluent in spanish (ugh, I'm jealous).  And don't worry, Andrew, the only time he said anything to me in English was when he was trying to explain the name for the dust that a tango dancer kicks up when she does dance flairs.  I've managed to forget what it's called, but apparently there's a boliche here with the same name.

The rest of the week was pretty tame.  Wednesday and Thursday night I spent in, studying like a total dork.  I even did a few extra translations for my teachers (who got a huge kick out of them) and downloaded and watched a mexican mini-series.  Yeah... let's just say, even though I couldn't understand it all, I understand why the reputation of spanish soap operas is what it is.

Last night we went out to a boliche in Recolleta.  Since last night was pretty much the last night a lot of us had together, we wanted to make it a good one.  Today Leslie is leaving for NYC, a bunch of the Brazileros are going back home, and Tamara, Marc, and I are getting ready to go to Mendoza for 2 weeks.  Ugh - I'm going to have to figure out how to fit my stuff into my backpack... I doubt it'll be possible considering the ungodly amount of stuff I have purchased in the last three weeks.