Saturday, August 21, 2010

Floods and Slang Words

Wednesday morning I learned a new word- inundación. It means flood. Wednesday morning I woke up to the sound of pouring water. Curious as to what it could be, I stepped out of my room to see the entire kitchen filled with water, as the washing machine had started to overflow. My first instinct was to run back into my room, grab the dictionary, and look up the word for flood, because I had no idea how to communicate this to Jesús over the phone. She told me to wake up her son Manuel, so I did, and it was a happy ending, but I wasn’t expecting to learn that word so early in my trip.


Later that afternoon I had my first poetry class. My professor is extremely animated and clearly very passionate, so I think I can guarantee this will be a great class. After that was urban history of Buenos Aires, which already gave me a headache within the first 20 minutes, but will also be very interesting.


Wednesday evening I come home to see a note on the table from Jesús that reads, “I will be back with my friends at 10:30.” I have come to find that Jesús is quite the social butterfly, I figure she’ll have a few friends come over like last week for their usual weekly rummy game, so I go about my business and decide to take a nap before going out. I wake up around 11 to hear so much noise in the apartment. My friends had already grabbed a cab and we’re on their way to pick me up when I came out to say hello/head towards the door and get sucked into the celebration. There were about 25 people there, Jesús’s entire Wednesday acting class, celebrating their acting teacher’s birthday. Jesús proceeds to cut the music and present me to all of her friends, all of whom jump up and nearly throw their wine glasses to welcome me. The first person that comes up to me is this acting teacher, who was my FAVORITE. Like somebody out of a movie. He was wearing some kind of bohemian linen shirt and had an earring, and he threw up his arms as he spoke, as if he could only explain everything he was saying by acting it out. He was so wonderful.


Anyway they sit me down, put wine in my hand, and proceed to chat with me for the next half hour about anything and everything, including school, family, and politics. It was so great, they were not only all very warm and inviting but also very interesting. Needless to say, I missed my cab and met up with my friends later. If I understood correctly, I believe I was invited to sit in on one of his classes in the future, so hopefully that will work out.



Thursday I felt pretty worthless, as I only woke up around 1:30 after having come home at 7am the night before. The only thing I did was go out to a late lunch with friends and later nap and skype with friends in the evening. I really can’t complain though.


Yesterday morning I had class at 9am…absolutely brutal. For some reason I felt that my 3 months of waking up at 6am to intern at Wilson this past spring would somehow translate into me being able to wake up for a 9am class, but surprisingly (or, rather, not surprisingly) it did not. The only good part about class was that we learned a lot of new slang words.


Here are a few of my favorites:


Banana: literally, it means banana (shocker) but in slang it basically translates into “tool,” somebody who thinks he’s really slippery/smooth (like a banana peel I guess?) but is actually a joke of a person.


Borrarse: a verb that means “to erase yourself.” So, if somebody’s bothering you and you want them to get out of your sight, you say “borrate!” You actually just told somebody to erase themselves. That is hilarious.


Salame: yes, it means salami, but in this case it means idiot.


So if you’re feeling really sassy, you can put these 3 together and say something like,


“Borrate, salame. Tu eres una banana.”


“Erase yourself, idiot. You’re a tool.”


There are a few other words like sope and feca that have just had their syllables switch, so in actuality they are peso and café (a dollar and a coffee). Clever, huh?


That afternoon a few of us went to an amazing ice cream shop called Volta. Ice cream in general is incredible here, but Volta is by far the best I’ve had so far. The flavor I chose was Dulce de Leche con Brownie…enough said.

No comments:

Post a Comment