Patagonia

We recently went to Puerto Madryn, in Patagonia. It is very cold there, unlike Buenos Aires. The best thing that we did was to go on a long bus ride to see different parts of it. While we were riding through Peninsula Valdez, on the way we saw many sheep and many guanacos. At the first stop, we saw a beach full of sea lions and elephant seals. Then we went a bit further and what we saw was my favorite thing, which was penguins. Many penguins. The picture above is of one of the penguins. The type of penguin is a Magellanic Penguin. At the next stop we saw a beach with more sea lions and elephant seals, and it had a ton of seaweed on it. Then we had lunch, and after that we went on a whale watch to see Southern Right Whales. Southern Right Whales are really endangered. We went on the boat ride, and at first we didn't really see anything. But then one whale with its mother came right next to the boat. One of the characteristics of the Southern Right Whales is that they are very curious. It was great. The whales were trying to impress us by doing tricks and spraying us with their blowholes. Then we went home.

That was mainly what we did. The hotel where we were staying had a heated pool, which we went to a lot. Also, we found very cool shells on the beach.

We are going to get on a bus to Iguazu tonight. It will take us about as much time to get there as it took us to get to Patagonia: close to 20 hours. The bus has chairs that can bend all the way back or only part of the way back, to make a bed. Iguazu is a place that has a ton of waterfalls. It is right next to Brazil and Paraguay. We are very excited to go there.

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.

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!

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.

First playdate!!!

So I had my first playdate on Sunday!!! We didn't invite them over, they invited us over...to our house. As you can see from the picture, we had a good time. He is one of my good friends at school that I see a lot even though he is in fifth grade. His name is Matias. Along with him came his sister Celeste, who happens to be good friends with both me and Aviva. They also brought along (we didn't even know they would) their little sister Antonela. Antonela is more or less close to Ruthie's age (she is in second grade) so they played together, Matias is in fifth grade so he played with me, and Celeste is in my class in fourth grade, and she is ten, but only older than Aviva by a tiny bit. We played some things all together, including using modeling clay, and then we sort of split up into three groups, so it became everyone with their best friend. Matias and I had a good time playing marbles, and Matias is one of the best marbles players so it was fun playing with him (even though I was doing better than him).

It seems that they don't want to invite us to their house. Anyway, I find that reasonable because they have seven brothers and sisters. They are pretty much mine and Aviva's best friends in school. They invited themselves to come back later this week, and I'm happy about that but it would be fun to see what their house is like also. One of my other good friends in school also invited me over but we don't have an official plan yet.

Today in Ruthie's school was her birthday party. We left early from our school to go set up for the birthday. The way it works in the kindergarten is that you bring balloons and goodie bags for everyone, and you also bring a cake and soda and usually a snack like potato chips. The kids seem to like it, except they are used to store-bought cake with a ton of frosting and words, so no one ate the cake that my mom made, which was actually very tasty.

School (again)

Sorry I haven't been blogging for a while. A lot of the time that I wasn't doing something and should have been blogging, I was actually thinking of stuff to blog about.

I actually had a terrible week at school. I have a few reasons:

1. One kid named Orlando was the smartest in the class, and he is mean to me because I got two "excelente" grades and two "sobresaliente" grades. Sobresaliente is the best grade you can get. Orlando makes fun of how I pronounce Spanish words. The teachers still love him because he is smart, and that makes me really mad.

2. One kid teases me and hurts me a lot because he loves Aviva, and he is mad that Aviva doesn't love him. His name is Damian. He writes Aviva love notes, and draws her pictures (he is actually good at drawing Japanese manga characters). Aviva ignores him and sometimes answers him with a light kick. Since my classroom is next to his, and we are in the same grade, and I am Aviva's brother, he gets back at me instead of Aviva, because he likes Aviva and so he's not about to hurt her.

3. Not only does Damian tease me, he also says really mean things about my mom, whom he has never even seen in his life (my mom corrected me on the "whom"). I really don't think we should tell you what he said.

4. My teacher, Maestro Eduardo, not only is mean and yells a lot, but during class he is always:

a. yelling at someone

b. sipping his mate, which is a disgusting drink they have in Argentina, that's like extra bitter tea that you drink with a straw

c. this is what he does most of the time: talks on his cell phone and paces around the room while he is talking. He even does this in the middle of tests. He does texting too, during class. I never thought any teacher would ever do that.

d. the way most of the teachers teach is by reading in their teacher's manual what they should write on the blackboard (or in my case the green board), and then instead of explaining it in the teacher's own words, the teacher just writes it on the board for us to copy, and thinks we will learn it fully that way. The teacher never thinks of stuff by himself, he just copies it from the teacher's manual. While we are copying it, we usually hear the familiar sound of our teacher's phone ringing, and he picks it up to have a conversation.

5. For the first time, someone invited me to their house!! It was Ernesto, the first person I became friends with, who is not really my friend now, just a little bit. I didn't get to go to his house in the end, because Ruthie had accidentally lost her notebook at school, which made my mom late to pick me up, and Ernesto had already gone home (he thought that my mom might take a really long time). I was sad about that. Anyway, someone else invited himself over to my house, and he is about to come over in half an hour, with his sister who is also my friend and Aviva's friend, so we'll see how that goes. I'll try to get a picture of us.

6. One kid, se llama Jesús, never does his work and doesn't have the workbook. So when we are in social studies he comes over to my desk, which is the closest to him, and starts annoying me. I asked him why he doesn't have the workbook and he said, "no tengo plata!" which means "I don't have any money." Then I asked him, "tu mama tiene plata?" and he said "no!" and I said "tu papa tiene plata?" and he said, "no!" This is the same in music, where he doesn't have a recorder, which is all we play in music. We have the same conversation about the "plata" in music. "Plata" means money, or silver.

7. Aviva's English teacher got made at me for talking to some kids whose parents are apparently criminals, or something... She told me not to talk to that girl because she is a thief, not only because her parents are thieves. I was wondering about that.

8. Until a few days ago, I didn't have my pencil case, which meant I didn't have any pencils, scissors, calculator, white-out, eraser, pencil sharpener. I know someone stole it, because they returned my pencil case menos sus rellenos (minus its fillings!) -- just an empty case. They also returned one of my pencils from Amherst, which they had colored blue and ripped off the paint. I was mad about that.

See you next time!

P.S. I hope this post didn't make you sad! I'll have another blog post after my playdate, to see if it goes well or if it doesn't.

My latest report

Okay, so at the end of my last blog post I said that they showed some Argentine guy's game instead of Venus Williams, just because he was from Argentina -- but he turned out to be the U.S. Open Champion! As I've walked past some stores I've seen tennis rackets advertised by mentioning Del Potro's name. Before the finals started, I thought that Federer (who's number one in the world) would beat Del Potro in three sets, because Del Potro is only sixth. After Del Potro lost the first set, I didn't change my mind. Then after he won the second set, I was happy, but I still thought that Federer was going to win. Federer won the third set and I thought it was over. But Del Potro won the fourth set. By the fifth set, I was not sure who was going to win. Then I had to go to bed. When Del Potro had won 5 games in the last set, and Federer had won only 2, I was allowed to come out to watch and see if Del Potro would win. Federer got the next 3 points to make it a deuce, and then they hit it back and forth and Del Potro got the advantage. Then on the last point they were hitting it back and forth but Del Potro made Federer hit it out, and we were so happy that Del Potro won.

Apart from that, sorry I haven't been blogging lately, I guess I've just been too busy. A lot of the time we go to the park, which is one of the few places in Buenos Aires that has grass. The only thing we don't like about the park is that there is a ton of dog poop in it, even in the part that has signs all over saying "no dogs allowed." One of the most common things that they sell on the street are huge tennis balls, which aren't too expensive. We got one, and that is the ball we use when we play at the park. We play spud and soccer a lot with that ball. We also play two square.

Talking about lunch in school, every person thinks that the food we bring is weird. The food that they thought was the most weird was when we brought in guacamole. People crowded around and asked us what it is, and they just stared at it. They thought it looked disgusting, but when they tried it, they liked it. They had never ever heard of it before. Everyone thought that was so weird. Today (Tuesday) we brought in some raw green beans, and to our surprise, no one knew what they were! We let people try them, and before they ate them, they were looking at them and examining them. They did eat them and they liked them too.

That's all for now. I'll try to blog more this week.