I started my volunteer class where I will be volunteering for a center that aspires to enrich the lives on families in at risk neighbors by educating the children and their mothers. I´m going to be working in a computer lab translating their website to English, but they said I could always take a break and play with the children and of course talk to them. I´m involved in a program that pairs me with a Uruguayan student where we speak both English and Spanish to each other and, also, I´m working on possibly going to the mini English school a few doors down from my apartment and seeing if I can volunteer there every now and then. So, I´m trying to get involved in the community and hopefully next semester I can get more involved in my school as an intern in the international program. *crosses fingers*
What do I eat? I think this is a very important question as I have brought this up in previous blog posts and tend to be a very picky eater. Oh, goodness, I am still working on that one. I´m not really a fan of Uruguayan food. I´ll order it in resturants but I´ll adjust the condiments and such to make it more of an American meal. For example, chivitos are huge here and they are pretty much just like hamburgers with less meat and tons of strange toppings. I just get the meat, lettuce, tomato, mayo and viola an American version of a chivito a.k.a. a hamburger. It´s cheating I know... but I do what I can to make things edible. I´m still cooking a lot of my own food which means I take three main foods and rotate them. It´s really sad. The foods are pasta with homemade tomato sauce, stir fry with just vegetables and rice, and eggs in a basket (toast with a whole in the middle where you put the egg that you fry) and variations of bread and eggs. I don´t know how to cook much, obviously, and I am actively learning how to cook more things. They do have plenty of pizza here so I do eat that about once a week. Yeaaah.
After the last paragraph a really good question to ask is am I losing weight? Oh yeah, buddy. I think I´ve lost almost two pants sizes already. I think it´s a combination of walking and not buying meat to make my foods less expensive. Usually this is a good thing but I´m probably going to have to start buying new clothes pretty soon. I will be contacting the bank called my parents when that happens. (Hahaha if they read this then I´m kidding but I´m not) But clothes are fairly cheap here if you know where to get them, like in all places. I would be able to dress much more like a Uruguayan, finally, since all I brought with me are t-shirts with English. It´s the only thing that keeps me from blending in when I´m walking down the street. I´m actually kind of surprised by how many people assume I am from Uruguay when I´m just walking along. I´ve had several people ask me for the time and holding one way conversations with me looking like they fully expect me to understand every word. I´m sure as it gets colder and I cover up my shirts with my jackets I´ll blend in even more.
How´s my Spanish? It´s getting much better with all this practice I´m getting. I can conjugate faster and now I can even put the indirect and direct object pronouns (me, te, se, le, lo, etc.) in front of the verb. So, saying things like ¿me entiendes? and te dije que NO los he lavado are easier now. We still speak too much English. It´s hard to committ to speaking Spanish all the time when you´re around English speakers whose Spanish isn´t much better than yours. I´m going to improve this, though, by volunteering in places where I can speak to more Uruguayans.
How´s my English? It´s worsening by the day. I tend to spell things the Spanish way by default these days, so ´nation´ becomes nación and ´professor´ becomes profesor. The spellings are so close, though. And my Spanish professor wanted me to rewrite a part of my paper in English so she could understand it. Hah, then halfway through rewriting it in English I started to write in Spanish. I´m just getting the two languages mixed up a lot now. I´ll say chau instead of bye and ¿cómo se llama? instead of ´what is it called?´. My Spanglish is improving considerably as well. I can go from a conversation in English right to a conversation in Spanish much faster which I seriously strugged with when I first arrived here.
I went to a fútbol game about two weeks ago. It. was. insane. The game was nearby in Parque Batlle so Lorrenía and me were able to walk to it. It was C.N.F (Uruguayan national team) against Peñarol. I am a Peñarol simply because they have the craziest fans I have ever seen. From the other side of the park we could here them chanting before the game even started! The colors of Peñarol are yellow and black in a stripe pattern and somehow the three major sections of Peñarol managed to sit so that everyone on the top and bottom had yellow balloons and the people in the middle had black balloons. There was a percusion section in the middle of the Peñarol side that played the entire game. They threw up confetti when the team took the field and started to light fireworks and flares (those are allowed in stadiums here!). Complete madness. There were bomb squad people there and riot control. It wasn´t even that big of a game. I´m definitely going to make sure I go to another fútbol game. Corbin, a student from my university who is studying in Chile this semester, might come to Montevideo in June and we´re going to try to make it to a world cup game.
PDA is rampant here. I don´t have enough fingers and toes to count how many times I have seen people shamelessly making out in public. It´s what they do here. Children live with their parents until they marry usually so they only place to have to hang out with their significant other is in public.
Random: Hayley was on the bus and a random guy from California who was on the bus too called her out for being North American. She was kind of mad that she was so obvious. I smiled cheekily.
I am definitely going to stay here for another semester. I thought about going back for maybe a night before I realized I would be very disappointed with myself. So, I will probably graduate in the summer instead of the spring because of one class but that´s okay with me. I love being here and surrounded by the culture and always being able to learn something different about the language everyday. Did you know they use these <<>> to symbolize quotation marks? All those years I´ve been reading Spanish texts and I did not know that. Blew my mind.
Lesson: It offends people some Americas when you refer to the United States as America. There are two Americas and it´s pretty ignorant and biased to assume the US is the America. So, I now refer to it as mi país (my country), los Estados Unidos (EEUU), Estados Unidos de América (EUA) [their version of United States of America (USA)], or Norte América.
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