Day 15

Ok, I'm a little behind. But I do have some exciting things to say. Where did I leave off? Last Friday? That is a long time. Well, last Friday we went clothes shopping at San Juan (basically Salta's Target) for our uniforms in the morning. Shirts and pants and skirts and socks and ties. Yawn. I required a nap afterwards. And that was pretty much all we did during the daytime. It's so hot here that, at least, I get tired every time we leave in the morning. Then our day really started around 8, when Maggie left. Mercedes picked up Maggie so she could hang out with Chiara and the boys. Maggie was more nervous than I can say for this. She was going to be at the house of someone she barely knew speaking a language that wasn't hers. But if you have ever met Maggie you already know the end of this story. Maggie suddenly became best friends with Chiara and has since gone over many times. This playdate (as with so many of Maggie's playdates) somehow became a sleepover. Chiara and family live outside of the city in a gated neighborhood (which is, I think, more common here than at home). Friday night (or really, Saturday morning) there was a neighborhood barbecue, so Maggie got to meet (she is so excited!) girls her age. Maggie has since spent hours trying to friend them on facebook. When Maggie and Chiara got back from the barbecue, they completed all the sacred girl-bonding rituals of weird hair-do's and painting fingernails... so, basically, Maggie had a good time.

Meanwhile, outside of girldom, Mom, Dad, and I had gone back downtown for the night. First, we walked down the pedestrian mall, looking at shops. When we had walked the length of it, we saw what looked like an Amerindian tribal dance in the middle of the pedestrian mall. About a dozen people were dancing and chanting with a circle of people around them. They were wearing animal skins and horns and masks (that looked, um, plastic--not what I would have expected) and were dancing to drums and chanting something. One of the youngest dancers--just a toddler--walked over to his mother standing at the edge of the circle and asked for cotton candy. She gave it to him and he kept dancing--full regalia and dance steps and all--with a handful of bright pink cotton candy. I don't think that was part of the dance... (Or maybe I've just never seen an authentic tribal dance). By the time we left the cute dancer and the ped mall he was on, it was 10:30. Despite Dad's protestation that it was too early for dinner ("only tourists eat dinner this early"), Mom and I decided it was time for dinner. Friday night was the night we decided to try a peña, the local version of a nightclub. Well, kind of. Less drinking. More eating. Dancing done by performers with a few volunteers. Brighter lights and quieter music. More traditional music. More touristy. Actually, it wasn't really a nightclub at all. But that was the way it had been described to us. It was fun, but none of our feet ever left the floor. It was dinner with a show. At one a.m. I was exhausted and asking Mom and Dad to go back home and sleep, so we did, even though the show went on later.

Saturday went much more slowly than Friday. At two, we three went to pick up our fourth and were going to go on a day trip North to Jujuy and Humahuaca (pronunciation guide: that's who-WHO-ee and OOM-uh-WAH-kuh). But we got to talking and playing at their big country house, and two quickly became seven. Oh, well. We can go North some other day. Not much happened Saturday night. We ate in. I don't remember what.

Sunday was aptly named. Maggie and I are still bright red from walking around the artisan fair that morning. Needless to say, we now have a large collection of salteño handiwork from every store Mom found interesting (I can't, though, complain about our grape honey; that stuff is delicious). Four siestas later, we met up with Karina and Daniel and they took us to a quebrada (river running through two mountains [yes, as it turns out, Spanish actually does have a word for that. And now you know it.]) where salteños (people from Salta) often visit. The restaurant next to it was called "El Duende de la Quebrada" Karina explained that a duende is a small, ugly, old, mythological person who finds missing things for people in exchange for candy. Mom and I debated for the longest time whether this meant troll or leprechaun. Or a dwarf? Turns out it means goblin. Karina and Daniel next took us to the top of a hill like the one Maggie and I climbed where we could look out over the nighttime city. Spread out below us was a vast array of yellow lights framed by the distant Andes mountains. Pretty. The six of us dined at an Italian restaurant. Mom and Dad and I all got carbonara. Comfort food. After dinner we came home and slept.

Monday was a busy day. It was also, I am excited (/nervous) to point out, my last Monday of Summer vacation. School starts next Monday, the first. In preparation for this, we started our day by going to our school to ask questions and pay. We couldn't pay, because it turns out we need passports to do that (who knew?), but we did meet the priest, and Dad asked him a whole list of questions. I was going to record the list here with answers, but unfortunately Mom threw it away. So here is a partial list of our Q&A:

Q1. Where/when/how do we eat lunch?

A. There is a lunch counter where students can snack during one of their breaks, but school ends at one, so (he didn't actually say this--I'm inferring) students have a larger lunch when they get home.

Q2. Do we need to buy gym uniforms?

A. Yes.

Q3. Do they need to get textbooks?

A. Their teachers will tell them what they need on the first day.

There were more questions than this, but I don't really remember them. But I will tell you all I now know about our school. School starts at 8, but on the first day, we will have to be there at 7:50 for the beginning-of-the-year assembly. We have (as in Minnesota) seven classes every day, but unlike in Minnesota, they change by days of the week. Classes for Maggie and I include (this is from vague memory, so I'll probably be very wrong) Argentine history, mathematics, Spanish, English, philosophy, religion (!), gym, computer something-or-other, and economics. The first two classes are 40 minutes long, followed by a 15-minute break (there's no break between the first two classes, so I don't really understand how we are supposed to walk from one room to another), then two more 40-minute classes (again, no break between them), then a 10-minute break, then two 40-minute classes, then a 5-minute break, then one 30-minute class. That ends at 1:00, and then our school day is over. I (and my entire grade-track--we have all our classes together), however, have an early-morning class on Tuesdays at 7, and no 7th hour. I haven't seen much of the school, only the courtyard off of which are the two school entrances and the director's office. I haven't paid much attention to it, though. It has some kind of sports court (basketball, maybe?). Most of the times we've gone in, the courtyard was filled with uniformed summer school kids. At the end of each school year, everyone takes a test, and if they fail it, they have to take summer school. If they fail summer school, they have to retake the year. I won't have to take that test, but the strictness makes me anxious!

Back to our Monday. We went shopping in San Juan for school uniforms, for the umpteenth time. We also went looking for thread and a needle (and when salteños say "a needle", they mean it; we bought a single needle) to sew our school seals onto our uniforms and ended up in a toy store where we bought a present for Adriano for his fourth birthday tomorrow. We also bought school supplies (in the most minimal sense of the word--a notebook and pencils), and ate downtown. Mom and I decided to find out the difference between an hamburguesa (hamburger) and a lomito (also hamburger), so we ordered one of each. An hamburguesa, as it turns out, is an American-style hamburger, while a lomito looks as if it was a hamburger that has been rolled out with a rolling pin to make it much skinnier and shaped like a large oval and is served on flatbread. Making either of these "completo" means adding ham, cheese, tomato, lettuce, and mayonnaise.

Came home, napped, Maggie went out with Chia

ra. Dad and I both got our hair cut. I got mine cut especially short for school starting (there are hair requirements, app-hair-ently), but better than that, Dad shaved off his beard! This is the first time any of the three of us have ever seen Dad without a big beard. Dad picked up Maggie, and then we had dinner at home.

Tuesday, we returned to school and paid, this time with passports (I don't remember the figure, but school was incredibly cheap). Then we went to San Juan (how many times is this now? we're spending our whole lives in this store) and bought gym clothes and guardapolvos (lab coats, but literally, dust-guards) for our uniforms. Our uniforms are now complete. Thank God. Tuesday night when Mercedes, Chiara, and Pablo came to pick Maggie up, Mercedes invited me, too. I accepted, wishing I had hidden in my bedroom to avoid the awkwardness of going to the mall. We first went to Chiara's doctor and waited in the car while she went in, then we went to the mall. Chiara immediately took Maggie to buy some jewelry and Pablo went to McDonald's (the only one is Salta), leaving Mercedes and I to awkwardly make and not make conversation while we waited for them. It wasn't that bad the whole time, though. We didn't split up again. We went looking for a present for Adriano, then had a snack in a sandwich shop, and finally went to a movie (an American one [Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief], which unfortunately for Maggie and I, was dubbed, not subtitled. That was OK, though; we understood the great majority of it [I think I understand much more Spanish when I know the context rather than when it's question out of the blue--that way I can fill in what the person must have said]). When we got home, Dad offered dinner, but Pablo couldn't be convinced into it. So we ate steak and hamburgers by ourselves.

And that leads me to today. Like so many other blog days, I don't have much to say about today because you just read my day's work. But who knows. It's only 4:30. I might do something really exciting tonight.

In the meantime, I have nothing planned for the whole afternoon. And if you just read through every little detail of my life the past week, I must have your undivided attention. So I'll tell you about our house. Our house is on the corner of Avenida Los Molles and Los Juncos (not really sure what those mean, but every other street in our neighborhood is named after a tree, so those are probably both trees). The inside is T-shaped. At the point of the T is a cabinet where we keep all our stuff. On the left side of the T is the dining room table and the kitchen. Leading off the kitchen is a roofless gallery to the laundry room. On the right side of the T is the living room with a TV. Our door is on this side, too. We have a gate, which we are supposed to keep locked along with our door (it has an intercom system, too) and sometimes do (we live in a safe neighborhood, but salteños are very cautious [house-locking-wise; seat-belting-wise--not at all]). At the base of the T are our rooms and bathrooms. Dad, for what reason I have no idea, decided that Maggie should get the big room with the trundle bed and I should get the room with the toddler-sized table and flowery bedframe. Otherwise, the bedrooms are very ordinary. The bathrooms, however, are not. Firstly, because the sink is outside the actual bathroom in its own little nook. And secondly, because we have a crazy-looking little toilet-thing used to clean yourself after using the normal-looking toilet. A bidet, it is called. I haven't tried it. On top of the T is a porch and and garden and garage all enclosed by a wall. The garage is cool-looking. It's not completely enclosed like US garages. It's just a part of the porch/garden that's paved for a car and has stairs up to it (we live at the foot of a big hill, remember, so it's not flat here). We have a tile roof, like all of Salta, and no up or downstairs. So, that's about it for our house. Tune in next week--or, hopefully, sooner--to "Under the Andes". Only on Blogspot.