A lot has happened in the past week and a half, I thought I would write a blog entry early. I went to my first '15th Birthday Party' and wow is all I can say. Turing 15 is very important to this culture and I am so glad that I was able to experience such an event. To this culture turning 15 is like a right of passage and becoming a women. (17 for boys becoming a man) This birthday party was like a mix between My Super Sweet 16 MTV Show and a wedding. This party probably coasted over 3 thousand dollars. The venue was beautiful, chairs with the bows and matching table cloths, flowers and countless other decorations. Everyone there was dressed as if it was a wedding, black tie formal. There was tables and tables of sweets, cupcakes, tarts and other deserts. The invitation said that it started at 10pm. I got ready with some friends from my class and we left her house around 10:30, welcome to Argentina where it's rare to be on time. There was so much family and friends there to celebrate this big day for Anto. But no Anto. She didn't make her entrance until about 12:00. And her entrance was big. Once she got to the venue a camera crew met her at the door and had a live showing on a projector of her getting out of he car. She was escorted by her father. She was in a beautiful cream dress, hair curled, and make up on. She looked beautiful! Once she arrived a toast was said by every member of her immediate family. Then dinner was served all the family and very close friends that sat at a table but the other friends and classmates had another section for us. We were served empanadas, sandwiches, mini hamburgers, min pizzas, meatballs, and other appetizers. After all the family was done eating there was an hour long slide and video show for Anto from her whole family. It was so obvious how much time and effort they but in to this birthday for her. After the video music started to play and she had her Father Daughter dance, then all the Uncles, and Grandpas. The Mother, Aunts and Grandmothers came up individually and gave her a big hug. After the family was done all of her guy friends got a chance to dance with her and the girls got their hug. There was so much love in the air. After all the more serious stuff was over the up beat music came on and all of her other friends came and danced and had a good time. This party was amazing.
For the past couple of weeks a lot of my friends at school have been asking me so many questions about Halloween so I thought how fun would it be to have a Halloween party. Then they can see how Americans celebrate one of their holidays. I asked my mom if it could be at our house and she said yes. It was perfect I made an event on Facebook with all my friends. But 4 days before the party my mom told me that she now feels uncomfortable about having a Halloween party in her house and how it is bad to God. I wasn't mad in anyway, not going to lie I was slightly frustrated because now I needed to find another place for my party in less than 4 days. In a way I am glad this happened because it gave me a chance to be culturally understanding. In no way do I find Halloween to be bad on God anymore. The roots of this holiday were but now it has been so diluted that now it is just a day out of the year to eat as much candy as you want, dress up crazy, and have fun. One of the other exchange students here offered to do it at her house the day before the party so it all worked out fine. My mom was even willing to donate some mini pizzas to the party, Rosangela and Paulien, the other two exchanged students that helped make this party happen were more excited about it than I was. This was going to be their first Halloween party too. Rosangela was focused on the decorations, we bought orange and blacked table cloths, 20 candles, spider webs. 50 orange balloons, and lights. It truly was a greatly decorated party. We bought cookies, lots of candy, donated pizza, chips, soda, and made a cake. I was surprised how we planned and executed this party in less than 24 hours. We had music and bobbed for apples, and we were going to watch a scary movie but never got around to it. This was so much fun and such a success. So many more people showed up and dressed up than I would have expected. One of my friends Carlo came as a girl! I was so happy everyone was getting in to the spirit.
I am getting to comfortable here which is a good and a bad thing at the same time. I feel it's a great thing that I have am able to feel so comfortable in my life here in Argentina as I would in the USA, but I I need to remember I am in a different country and that I don't have the lessons learned or consequences under my belt that everyone else here have experienced. For example I finally confident enough to walk to the gym by myself with out getting lost or putting my self in harms way. But with me being to comfortable almost put me in great danger. I was walking the way I always do and with out noticing I walked close a house and a protective scary dog tried to bite me and get me away from his home, not thinking a ran away strait in to the street and could have easily been hit by a car. It was one of the scarier things that has ever happened to me. Now for the next couple weeks I will be taking the bus to the gym.
My Spanish, today at school 3 of my friends commented on how it's getting better and that sure was a confidence booster! I still have many mix ups though. Like just the other day Luciana and I were getting ready to go to our Dads house and I asked in Spanish "how many minutes until I need to be ready to go?" and she replied 'ya' and I said in Spanish 'no, that wasn't a yes or no question...how many more minutes?' and she replied 'Ya' I said in Spanish 'Seriously, how many more minutes?!' and she said 'Ya' the lesson learned from this conversation is that 'Ya' also means now. So Luciana was trying to tell me that we need to leave now. Once I finally understood that we laughed about it. Also another funny thing that happened is I got a 10 on my math homework and I was showing Daniela and jokingly bragging about it and said 'estoy inteligente' for those that don't know Spanish estar and ser both mean 'to be' so what I was trying to say was 'I'm smart' but in this case you don't use estar but you use ser the correct way of saying this would be 'soy inteligente' and by me making that mistake defeats the whole purpose of me saying I'm smart hah.
The food, well let's just say I have gained 8 pounds in two months. So obviously it's amazing. This last week my mom and I made lasagna from scratch..well we bought the noodle things for it from the store. But it was so much easier than I thought it would be. I also learned how to make a frozen cake thing that is really good. With every meal here you have fresh bread which is really good but it's so many carbs. I am going to the gym three times a week but you can see it's not keeping up with how good the food is.
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