Sunday, October 25, 2009

Girlfriends

To my friends at Wildwood who read my blog, and everybody else: I took this picture of the rose that I picked for my lovely girlfriend... Which I don't have!!!

To those people who are reading my blog right now, who are saying to themselves "what the heck is Jonah talking about?": I'm talking about the fact that everyone at Wildwood (my school) thinks that I have a girlfriend here. I've gotten about 4 or 5 emails from my friends, saying "do you have a girlfiend?" I have no idea who started this "Jonah has a girlfriend in Argentina" thing, but I'm not too happy about it.

I don't know why, but if you ask almost any other boy in the school here in Buenos Aires, they will say that yes, they do have a girlfriend. Here that's just another thing that people will brag about or tease other people about. Everyone always brags to me that they have a girlfriend, and that it's really weird that I don't.

Here's a funny conversation that I had with my (now not so much of a) friend Ernesto. He came up to me and said, "no quiero ser el novio de Paz ahora," which means, "I don't want to be Paz's boyfriend now." I said, "porque?" which means why. He said, "porque tengo una novia en Alemania," which means "I have a girlfriend in Germany." Then I said, "es simpatica?" which means, "is she nice?" and he thought for a moment. Then he said "hmmm...no tiene personalidad, pero ella es MUY hermosa." That means "she doesn't have a personality, but she is VERY beautiful." I think that's what a lot of people would say about their girlfriends here. Also, none of the girls that people like are that smart. The boys aren't so smart either, so I guess it kind of works out.

This picture of the rose is actually a picture of one of the many roses in the very large rose garden very near to our house. We went there yesterday.


Saturday, October 17, 2009

I'm sorry :(
















To start off, before my blog post, let me just say to all my fans that I'm sorry I have not been blogging lately. The main reason is because my cousins have been over!! My cousins are from Atlanta, Georgia, and if you didn't know already, their names are Mia, Hannah, and Sam. Their parents are Cindy and Mark. They stayed with us for a week. We have been going to very cool places, like Feria de Mataderos, which is a very big outdoor market in the neighborhood called Mataderos. There are many, many booths with people that do different things, from selling clocks to making mate cups. There was also live music. Our favorite thing there was very cheap crystals and rocks for sale. I got a quartz piece, and an amethyst. Overall, it was very fun seeing everything and buying a lot of stuff.

Their family (not including ours) went to la pampa, to see Argentine cowboys called gauchos. La pampa is the word for grassy plains, a couple of hours away from the city. While they did that, we went to an art museum in Buenos Aires that had paintings by famous people including Monet, Rembrandt, and Picasso.

We also went to Tigre with their family, which is a town in Buenos Aires province. We took a bus, and then a train to get there, and then we got on a boat to ride down the river. We got to see big houses on wooden stilts so that when it flooded, the houses wouldn't get flooded too. I liked it there, but the boat was 100% tourists. The only problem was that the ocean was super littered in Tigre.

The main thing we did, as you can see in the three pictures above that I took, is that we went to...URUGUAY!!! It was very fun there. We went to a pretty old town, on a boat that took an hour from Buenos Aires. The town is called Colonia, and it looks like a colonial town. There are a lot of beaches and a lot of people on the streets selling a lot of rocks, including amethyst, the national rock of Uruguay. We had a very good pasta lunch in Uruguay (that doesn't change), and we walked on the beach and found a whole lot of beach glass. It was fun being in Uruguay. I want to go back there another time, because it is very nice there.

My cousins left tonight (Saturday), and we gave them a big, sad goodbye. Now they are on their way back to Atlanta. I hope this blog post informed you on what I did during the time that I haven't been blogging, and please tell me if you like the pictures that I took. Bye for now!



Saturday, October 3, 2009

Marbles

I thought I should write a blog post about one of the very important things in my Argentina life: marbles. The game of marbles is definitely the most popular game to play at recess. Almost no one plays marbles where you just play for fun and don't take the other person's marbles if you win. If people get a marble that looks really cool, they often trade it for more than one marble that aren't too cool, so that they can have more marbles. Every time the bell rings for a short ten-minute recess, about 5 people in the class yell "ulti!" which is short for ultimo, which means last. They want to be last in marbles because then you have an advantage. The reason people want so much to be last is because if you go first, you have no chance of hitting a marble because there are no marbles out, and if you go second, you only have one marble to try and hit, and you probably won't hit it. But if you go third, you have two marbles to hit, so if you accidentally miss the marble you were aiming for, you might hit the other one. People do whatever they can to win, because they want to win marbles from other people. One example is that if they shoot their marble and it ends up close to the other marble, they roll it back a little so that it will be a further distance to hit the marble. They do this to make it harder for their opponent. That is not allowed, but it sort of is allowed, because everyone does it (including me). The most respected kids in the school are the kids who are really good at marbles. My friend Matias is one of the best marbles players, even though when I played with him I did better.

The rules for the small marbles games that people play are: the first person shoots their marble. Then the second and third and any other players shoot their marbles and try to hit someone else's marble (usually at recess there are two or three people playing a game together). Some people play where you get to put your marble a hand's length closer to the other person's marble before you shoot, and other people play where you can't do that. Then if you hit the person's marble, you get to keep it. But not everyone plays this way, some people play where you have to hit their marble two or three times instead of one time, before you can keep their marble. That is all I have to say about marbles.