Drugstore Gaucho

Hello friends, this is Nathan speaking to you from deep within Buenos Aires. First, let me further qualify my recent non-postage with an explanation. I was sick and went to the doctor. From my experience, that works like this: you talk to a guy at a desk that asks you insurance type questions and gives you a form and then you sit and wait for a long period of time until a doctor calls you back and talks to you for about 5 minutes before giving you a slip of paper with the name of a medicine on it. It's all arguably irrelevant as getting medicine does not require a prescription. Then you go to the guy out front who charges you 3o bucks. Not a bad deal. Speaking of good deals, yesterday I have two sirloin steaks for six dollars apiece. They were exquisite. Today I had nine and a half empanadas for lunch. That was unwise. Go with steak. What else have I been up to as of late? I got down to some touristing with some friends in the city center. I took along Silia of blue-haired fame to ...

What has Nathan as of late? Well, mostly he's been sick, so you must excuse his absence. Speaking of absence, Nathan has been informed that his father has given some of his blog address to some of his high school teachers. One Mrs Hunt and one Mr Appier of Spanish and Chemistry class respectively. Welcome to the network honored lady and sir. I wish I could bring good tidings to welcome myself back to the blog, but I'm afraid first and foremost, I have pictures of what I've been eating in the homestay again. If you are an exchange student here or anyone who has been in earshot when the topic of host families has come up, you have already heard of my perennial favorite, the "Bucket o' Carbs in Generic Flavorless White Sauce with Sliced Salsicha AKA Hot Dog".. Yes Ladies and Gent's, I braved the jungly depths of the kitchen with camera in hand so that I could bring you a little closer to my experience. Who says I'm not cut out to be a photo journalist? ...

This is my berimbau.

Well it's true. They do. My food situation here leaves something to be desired. In a country known for its steak, wine and pasta, I still precious little of all three. I see pasta sometimes, but it is uniformly plain and re-heated via steam after its already been boiled. It's soggy, as I'm sure you can imagine. Recently, I was served a dessert that encapsulated so well my dining experience here that when I saw it, I said to myself, I must take a picture of that. I now present to you an exploration in two parts of what I eat routinely. This is a dessert. Actually, it is a combination of two desserts that I am sometimes served on separate occasions. It appeared from my initial scan that the cake had been placed inside the bowl and then the jello was poured on top before both were placed in the fridge. This photo shows you the anti-gravitational property the desert had acquired as a result, as well as house-mate Naír's realization that I might think something was wron...

Yes folks, it´s finally here. The report of my sexual compass-spinning trip to Plop! Here are my manly and stalwart traveling companions. From left to right they are Charly (spelled that way and no other, dammit) myself, Cristian, the dancing fiend from Colombia, Mateos?, Agustina and finally at the bottom, Luz, of plucked-eyebrows renown. These are Luz´s finger nails. Yes, that is his sweater and yes, they do match. I hope that this begins to present to you exactly what level of homosexuality we are working with here in Plop! And sadly, ladies and gentleman, that is as much warming up I can give you, in the photographic sense. From here, we dive into the insanity, the depravity, the misty depths of gender role/identity. I shall, by means of narrative passage, offer you a opportunity to change your mind, as I describe the events that lead to Plop! How did I come to be invited to go to Plop!, a gay club, when I myself am not gay? What provoked me to accept such an offer, especially in...

Do I go with these sorts to a gay night at a club? It's reputed to be raucous. I'm counting votes. Weigh in.

Yes, Cora, get excited. I went to a cosplay fiesta in the Buenos Aires Japanese garden. For those who don't know, Cosplay is technically a Japanese derived from the forced cross-breeding of costume and play that results in a wonky little baby word that they parent words are really quite unsure what to do with. Observe: Generally speaking, people pick a character from an anime show or videogame and try their damndest to look just like them. It was pretty much like the above picture all over this rather large park. People in outrageous costume, general uncertainty when it came to gender. That one with the pink hair is male, for instance. It's has an internet reputation of being hyper-dorky. This is baroque dork. And, of course, like all things in the world, it has an internet fetish life, which is roundly ridiculed by humor website all over the web. The following picture really sums it up for me: On the right is the good of Cosplay and on the left is the... something. I went ther...

The last few days have been action packed. Thursday was my second radio production class, one of my precious classes with Argentinos. My group was to record a script that we threw together the week before. It was sort of in the style of Lady's Man of Saturday Night Live fame. I played an visiting American who was having trouble expressing his feelings to a lady. I was advised to buy her a bikini. Also, a kid who a knew only distantly at this point in the story asked me what I was doing tomorrow. I told him that I was doing nothing cause that's all I ever got to do, and he asked me to join him and some peep to film something. Pending spanish skills, I was fuzzy on the details. There was a lot of downtime as we waited for the the studio to rotate through the other groups and so I got to know some of my classmates better. I met Michelle AKA Michi, yet another Ecuadorian. I found out she does Capoeira and was looking for a location here in BsAs. So we planned to go together on Frid...

I got up early at 8 o'clock, to get to a class that began at 9:40. I failed to spring out of bed and I had to choose breakfast instead of showering today. I got to school around 9:45 to discover that actually that mental note I had made yesterday [You have an early class tomorrow] meant 8 instead of 9:40. Whoops. Attendance is not yet being kept, so not a huge problem, I still had a class at 10:20. I sat greasily in the computer lab burning time, and went to my 10:20 class. Again, as there was the last time I attempted this, it was not in the aula that my horario said it should be in. Chewing on my tongue and trying to make the best of the situation, I decided to see my aconsejora in order to find some new classes to try out before Monday. However, she would not be in till 12. Thwarted yet, again. So, I'd already checked my mail and it was beginning to look like a low-activity day, so I pooled my willpower and walked away from the computer lab and out of the school to look arou...

One, my thing for the late night goth hoe-down, did not come to pass. I am sorry. I was sleepy. Instead, I made mexican salsa with my peruvian-american expat friend. She thinks she is going to go to school here for all of college. Frankly, I am skeptical. If she reads my blog, she may defend herself on the comments page, as that appears to be what people like to do. So what am I taking? First, know that I am following my lifelong commitment to noncommitment and my college-long commitment to overloading. I aim to take seven classes instead of the agreed upon five. Why you ask? Because I'm devious. I came to this country thinking that I would complete approximately half of Spanish major. Ten credits needed for the major and 5 gained from the study abroad. There was some vagary about two of my credits needing to be literature courses and 5 electives other than literature, and I wasn't sure how that'd all mesh with the courses I'm taking here. All I knew is that whatever co...