To start off, I made a little map so that everyone can see where I have been and where I'm going.
So now you can kind of see that I basically went from one end of the country to the other in the space of a week between my trip to Bariloche and Iguazu.
This week, I've mostly just been relaxing. On Friday night, I had a meeting with my language partner Marcelo. We meet about once a week and I practice my Spanish with him and he practices his English with me. I still don't have a picture of us hanging out yet, but one will come in a future post. We went and got some dinner at the Burger Joint (delicious hamburgers!) and then went and met some of my other friends for ice cream. On Saturday, I went to la Fiesta de las Colectividades, which was basically a big culture fair celebrating lots of the different cultures that are present in the city. There were lots of different countries present (although not the U.S.) and they all had food from there cultures and other stuff they were selling. There were also some pretty neat performances of cultural dances/music and such. That night, Patrick, Stephen, and I went to Benihana's for dinner. It was basically the same, delicious food that it is in the U.S. (although the meat was better if you ask me), but it was WAY cheaper. Between the 3 of us, we spent less that $50USD for the whole dinner (including drinks). It was awesome!
On Sunday, I went to an artisan fair in the neighborhood of San Telmo. I was kind of disappointed in the fair, because it was mostly antiques that weren't very interesting to me. However, I found one stand who had some old Argentine money that they were selling. Being the money/currency collector that I am, I stopped and sorted through the money for about half an hour before buying some neat old Argentine currency! It was pretty exciting for me. Tuesday was another adventure when Stephen and I had to go to migraciones (immigrations) to get our permanent visas. We had tried to go on Friday around 3pm assuming that the office would close around 5. We found out that the office we had to go to closes at around 1pm, so we had to go fairly early on Tuesday to make sure we could get our visas before the office closed. But I am now officially an Argentine resident! Woohoo!
That's about all the news for now. I'm headed to Uruguay tomorrow afternoon with Costa and Stephen, so I'll post a blog from that adventure when I can! Love to everyone reading this!
-Ryan
