I have six hours of class on Monday, seven on Tuesday, and three on Wednesday. That's more than I ever have at Yale, where even with a five-class course load last semester I only was in the classroom for 10 hours a week. But I still feel like I have way more free time here, which is partly because my weekend starts Wednesday night. (It's also partly because I don't spend five hours a night in the Yale Daily News building.)
Anyway, this last weekend started Wednesday night with "Peluquería Día." After class, I went over to Molly's house, where she, Veronica and I tried ourselves mechas, or highlights, in various shades of red, blue and purple. We bought the wrong kind of dye, but Molly's 24-year old host "mom" — whose rainbow-color highlights change with her mood — came home in the middle of the process and showed us her stash of permanent hair paint. I now have a fuschia skunk stripe on the underside of my ponytail. Some other friends came over towards the end of the process, and we made breakfast for dinner, drank wine, and watched Juno as our hair dried.
Thursday I barely left my house all day, having gotten home late the night before. Around nine I went out to dinner with Melinda and her cousin at a norteño restaurant in Palermo, where I had a delicious cazuela, or beef stew, that probably contained about a third of a cow. I left at eleven to meet some other friends at a bar. We went from the bar to a club a few blocks away from my house, and six hours and two new phone numbers later, I walked back home as the newsstands were putting out the morning paper. (Don't worry, Mom — I was going to go on a date with a guy I met, but it didn't end up working out.)
Friday I woke up at noon, went for a run, made chili for a potluck at my friend Beth's house, and then went back to sleep until five. I got to Beth's around seven and ate a freakishly early dinner. We ordered ice cream for dessert and talked awhile, but most of us were tired from the night before, and Karen, Logan and I left at around ten for the three-odd mile walk back to our houses. We all live just off Santa Fe, one of the biggest streets in Buenos Aires.
Earlier in the week, Karen and Daniel had somehow found out that a foundation called ALAS was sponsoring a huge free concert on Saturday, and stood in line to get tickets. Daniel gave me his extra one, so on Saturday I woke up, went for a run, and then met up with my friends to go — along with an estimated 130,000 other people — to Costanera Sur, a huge field in an ecological reserve by the water where the concert was being held. The concert was supposed to start at 2:30, so we got there on time for an American concert, around three. Except we're in Argentina, so the first act didn't come on until four, and Shakira, the headliner, performed at 9:30.
At one point Molly and I got so antsy and hungry that we left to go find food that wasn't a superpancho (hot dog — essentially all that was available) even though we weren't sure we'd be able to get back in. When we got back and handed the man at the gate our ticket stubs, he just looked at us, laughed, and said, "You're not from around here, are you?" But he let us in anyway. And when we got back, Jorge Drexler was playing, who's my favorite new music I've found here (I'm going to a concert of his next Friday). Paulina Rubio, Alejandro Sanz, and Calle 13, a Puerto Rican reggaeton band, also played, and Shakira did a duet with Mercedes Sosa. I didn't know a lot of the music, which made parts of the eight hours I spent at the concert seem incredibly long, but when Shakira sang "Hips Don't Lie" with a fake Wyclef Jean, I almost died. I had a moment where I got really sad because as long as I live, I'm never going to be her.
Today I had lunch with my host mom and her friend, and we talked for two hours — about Argentina, the United States, boyfriends, smoking laws, you name it. Ever since then I've been successfully not working. Now I'm going to go make myself dinner and continue the pattern.
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