Puerto Madero

Today in class we had a different teacher who will be coming every Wednesday and Friday. He’s from Argentina but he goes to graduate school at NYU. which is pretty cool. He’s a lot easier to understand than our girl teacher, and he makes the class go by a lot faster. During our first break, Carolyn, Kylie, and I went and grabbed a coffee and then during our second “lunch” break we discovered a bakery about two doors down from our school. It’s literally the best bakery ever, with all types of cakes, sweet breads, candies, and fancy sweet things covered in dulce de leche (like a caramel-type of thing, but Argentinians are obsessed with it and put it on everything). I had a croissant type of thing with a stick sweet coating on the top of it. It was more bread-like than croissant, and it’s called a media luna. It was amazing. We played taboo in Spanish the last thirty minutes of class, which reminds of of playing catch phrase my senior year of high school in Spanish; it was so much fun!!

After class Kylie, Carolyn, Alex, and I went to grab a bite to eat ( I had a torta, which is like a keesh filled with ham and cheese), and then Carolyn and I walked around. We didn’t really have a plan of where to go, but we ended up going to Puerto Madero, which is by a river and where the Argentina navy is. We got there when the sun was slowly going down, and found a really open field with cool buildings in the background to do cartwheels, handstands, and take pictures in. We walked across a bridge designed by the famous architect Santiago Calatrava. When I saw it, I realized that it was the exact same bridge that I passed by every night when I studied abroad in Sevilla, Spain about 3 years ago (designed by the same architect), which is extremely cool!!
After walking around, we found a taxi and took it to the residencia where we were having a cinema and movie night with the program. We learned how to make and drink mate (accent on the E and is pronounced maw-tay), which is a type of herb with a type of caffeine that is as important to Argentinians as coffee is to Costa Ricans. We ate endless beef and ham and cheese empenadas and had a traditional dulce de leche dessert. We started to watch a really good Argentinian movie about two guys who went around robbing people in Buenos Aires, but then we were invited out with some of the residencia people. We went to Palermo Soho, which is a big place for young people to go out and went to a bar called Sugar, and it was really fun!