I thought I would share a humorous anecdote about something that happened in my preparations for this trip. On Monday, the day before I left, Alyssa and I got on couchsurfing and began to look for people whose icons had the coffee cup, indicating that they didn't have a place for people to stay (which I don't think I would in S. America anyways), but they'd meet for a drink or to show you around.
We found a couple interesting and safe looking people, so I wrote them both the same, short message telling them when I'd be in town, a couple things I want to try, and asking if they were free if they'd want to hang out.
Later that night I saw I'd gotten a response and excitedly opened my message from this guy and began reading it aloud to Lyss and Deo. It went as follow (italics are mine):
"i'd say great timing brianna!i just got slightly more free from my job and waited 2months and still couldnt try tango. i wanted to takeclasses this week.i'll take you to the coolest milonga(places where youdance tango, wiki search it so you will learn thesecret eye codes) we can have dinner, mate, and then we go to this place.its gonna be 10 pesos per hour, something like 3$."
When I got to the word 'mate', I stopped reading and stared in shock. Lyss grabbed the laptop, and upon reading it herself began to yell that she'd known this 'couchsurfing' was super-dangerous. I racked my brain for ways to salvage the awkward situation - I figured I could write him and ask if he was okay with just dancing meanwhile insisting to Lyss and Deo that this guy was foreign - he surely just didn't understand what he was saying. Deo pointed out that the English up until there seemed pretty competent.
Lyss went to dictionary.com to see if there was some unusual usage for that word we just didn't know when one result came up with the words 'south america' in it and it jogged my brain. I remembered that in my original message to this guy, I'd told him one of my goals was to try 'máte', a famous Argentinian tea. Suddenly it all made sense and this guy went from being a creeper to even nicer than before. And it was especially ridiculous of me because I hadn't even included accent marks in my original message either. Jajaja, no?
And that brings me to now, Wednesday evening, waiting for me two new friends from the shuttle, Phoebe from Colorado and Rob from Brisbane, to arrive so we can meet up with Arash.
Rob and I did a short walk through the city earlier in search of lunch and so far it is very Latin American - it has kioskos clogging the sidewalks, 'tiendas' selling all varieties of barrets and candy, and girls in skimpy tops (it's HOT here), but it differs from the only other Latin American capital that I really know - San Jose - in that it's beautiful. There's lots of huge, ornate buildings and many parks with regal fountains and statues. I'll report more later. Más luego!
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