we found an apartment(s)!

we are finally out of the hostel. we found a sweet place, 3 bedrooms, wifi, great neighborhood (palermo viejo), complete with a new gay landlord and a beautiful outdoor roof patio! and sarah's already guilted him into buying us some new wine glasses, so we're happy. but it's occupied until december 16, so we had to move into another apartment in the meantime, which is not our favorite, but we're so pleased to be able to cook, and we've found hours of entertainment watching the security camera view of the front door (always live on channel cinco) and playing with the bidet. (in case you want to learn more on the subject, we found this very informative: http://www.wikihow.com/Use-a-Bidet ) anyhow, we can now receive mail! i know you've all been waiting patiently for this moment. make it count.

Scalabrini Ortiz 1136
2do "D"
C1414DNY
Ciudad de Buenos Aires
Argentina


love you

Las Tres

The nicknames we have received as a threesome since starting our travels (we love them all):

Tres Hermanas - la escuela de la montaña

Tres Mosqueteras - PLQ in Xela

Las Davidson  (and this refers to all three of us or just one at a time, we were always las davidson) - Garden House Hostel

Twisted Bitches - our new apartment and in general

La Pelicula

This is the film that we created to say thank you and goodbye to our wonderful language school (PLQ) in Guatemala. It is the tradition for graduating students to present something. Typically they will stand up and say thank you, tell a story or recite a poem. But since we like to believe we are cooler than everyone else we took this as a challenge. We spent two weeks working on our "proyecto secreto" and everyone was looking forward to something clever and funny from Las Tres Mosqueteras. Of course, two hours before the big event all the power in Xela went out. The only other thing we had prepared to communicate our gratitude and sum up our entire five weeks of study at PLQ was an intro to the movie. Here it is in it's entirety:

Sarah: Primero, nos gustaria decir Muchas Gracias a todos.

Andrea: Hemos hecho una pelicula para ustedes.

Gabby: Entonces, por favor, vamos a la sala de cine.

Needless to say nobody was impressed and we were depressed. But, a few hours later after dinner had been served, the beer had run out and people were just getting ready to leave the power came back on...Sarah immediately ordered Carlos, the director of the school, to herd everyone into the theatre "como vacas". Of course, the people loved it.

Disfruta!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLlkSUfpCfk

-Gabby, Andrea, y Sarah

Vamos Vamos Vamos River Plate

We went to a futbol (soccer) game here in BsAs; we got to watch River Plate (or the River Plates?) play los Huricanes. We were picked up, and of course kissed, by our guide Matias.  Dinner was included, it was grilled sausages or hamburgers at a vendor outside the stadium.  This was pretty great as far as I was concerned, it was made even better watching Andrea enjoy her burger.

The cheer that the crowd was singing during the whole first half when River Plate had not scored was this (as transcribed by our guide Matias, because of course we made him write down the words, he is just lucky we didn't ask him to write down all the words to every song they were singing):

jugadores, la concha de su madre, haber si ponen huevos que no juegan con nadie!!!

I will leave the translation to you all who speak Spanish.

¿De Donde Son?

Almost everytime I tell someone I´m from Hawaii, they do a little cheesy hula dance and I love it.

unas fotos para ustedes

sarah in our hostel

we love these purple trees! they're everywhere


pedis!

our first meal in Bs As. we're quite pleased that medialunas are everywhere too

how sweet is our hostel?

First Impressions

We arrived in Buenos Aires at 5:15 a.m. on November 5th, 2008. We were greeted by two quite good-looking Argentinean boys* who helped us to our taxi. As we were driving, the city was all lit up, active but quiet, pristine, beautiful and topped off by the news from our driver that Obama had won. I would call it a near perfect moment.

One of the first things we did when we arrived in the main part of town was to go get pedicures. Now, I usually could care less about the state of my feet, I'm really not that girl, but even I could see that after two months in Guatemala, they were terrifying and something had to be done. Once this matter was taken care of and we could breathe a little easier, we turned our attention to more important things (almost), like finding an apartment. We found several ones that we liked and have appointments to go see them through next tuesday. We are even playing with idea of getting separate rooms as a way to meet more people and learn faster.

The spanish here is a world apart from that of Guatemala, or I think anywhere. It sounds a bit like Italian to us. For the double 'l' sound, like in 'me llamo', they use somewhere between a 'sh' and a 'j', so it becomes 'me shjamo'. A lot of words are different too. Butter is 'manteca', not 'mantequilla'. It's weird but cool. 

We are staying at a really amazing hostel that is nothing like a hostel at all. Its being cleaned constantly, there are activities everyday (last night was "Emparty"-an empanada party), the staff is awesome, and there is art everywhere. During the day we walk a lot, sometimes just blindly to see what we find and sometimes with a map. Today we stumbled upon a theatre, where we bought tickets to go see the opera "The Marriage of Figaro" (Las Bodas de Figaro), and the most amazing ice cream shop ever where we bought banana split, chocolate chip and a really fancy chocolate that starts with an "N" but I can't remember exactly what the name was.

We also have been needing to take naps around 4 or 5 in the afternoon, we're probably still a bit jet-lagged, and take great relish in filling up our water bottles from the tap (we still can't figure out how to order this in restaurants though). 

Buenos Aires is a lovely city. It reminds Andrea of New York and Sarah found parts that remind her of Denver. You will all love it when you come and visit us. 

Tally of cheek kisses so far: 5 each

*NOTE: Everyone in Argentina is good-looking. And tall. It makes no sense.

Fiambre

The traditional meal for El Dia de los Muertos (November 1) here in Guatemala is called fiambre. As it has been described to me it is a mix of pretty much every vegetable known to man thrown together and cooked, similar to stir fry. (The vegetarians have been looking forward to trying this for like a month.) They also include pretty much every different kind of meat you can think of, ground beef, sausages, lunch meat strips (I think I even found a piece of a hot dog in mine). Then they throw in some eggs and cheese for kicks. Everything turns bright pink because there are beets involved. One thing they failed to mention was that most of the vegetables are not fresh but pickled, and I suspect there are leftovers thrown in there, because hey, who will know the difference?

I thought I had escaped having to eat this on November 1st because I didn´t eat meals with my family that day, however, they were kind enough to save me some leftovers and serve it to me cold the next day for breakfast. Now, I have eaten some very questionable things here in Guatemala for the sake of not offending my family, but this was too much. It was the only thing so far that has required me to be totally honest with my family because the idea of eating an entire plateful was more than I could handle.

It has basically driven us to leave the country. We are on our way to Guatemala City today and tomorrow we are flying to Argentina.

-Love and Besos