CARNAVAL

The man in the white is my salsa teacher, Ariel!

My daddio recently informed me that it´s Marti Gras up there in the motherland. Here we don´t celebrate that (it´s no New Orleans, folks) but there is CARNAVAL, which is really huge in Brasil and in Corrientes Capital, the city over the bridge. They claim themselves the federal capital of Carnaval, although most of the peopel you ask here will tell you that 10 years ago, they comparsas were even BIGGER, the dancers even SEXIER and the joda... inexplicable.

I went for the last night of carnaval (it goes on from the end of Jan to the end of Feb) with Graciela, my third host mom, her boyfriend, and a friend of hers. I was going to go with Juampi and his sister, but that fell though on account of him having a Y-chromosome and my host father being strict. That´s okay though because I really wanted to go. I really wanted to have the experience of being there- carnaval in South America isn´t something I would have been happy about missing.

CARNAVAL was excellent. The people were so excited, and the dancers were absoluely amazing. Everyone was spraying foam (they call it snow) so we all got soaked.

At first, I really didn´t know where to look. All of the dancers were incredibly good looking (at least in the body department), recklessly close to nakedness and moved so well. It made me want to go to the gym and to dance classes every day :P There were also groups of little girls dancing, it was crazy how well some of them already knew how to dance, they just grow up with it, I guess.

There were lots of men there who obviously went to oogle the ladies. There were two me in the bleachers in front of us (there was the lane for the dancers in the center) who spent the ENTIRE night (22:30-06:30) leaning over the enge of the rail and asing the dancers to kiss them. They were both kind of large and not very handsome, but by the end of the night their faces were covered in red lipstick kisses.

I wanted to take pictures, I really did, but my camera ran out of battery during the first comparsa and that was that. Luckily, tucorrientes.com took a ton of fotos, and so I´m taking some from the illustrious website (which you sure can visit if you want more pictures of the ladies) and posting them here so you all can get a taste of the excitement!

A word about the outfits. They are all handmade of tailor made but the dancers or their families. No one pays you to be in carnaval, not even in the drum section. No one pays you to make your costume and if you want to dance, you certanily don´t complain about the fact that you have to get a new outfits EVERY YEAR. People spend thousands of pesos making thos things, buying the feathers, gluing the beads... God knows how they get the unsupported, side-strappless thong bottoms to stay on, and I sure don´t want to find out.

Okay, I really do, but that´ll be a story for another post.

New Family!

Gee, I guess it really has been a long time since I posted anything!
I spend the holidays with my first family... we had big parties for both Christmas and New Years, which was a lot of clean fun. Most of the kdis here actually go out dancing on both those holidays. Yes, my friends, underage children go out and party on Christmas Night. I was okay with staying in.
Then I switched families! My new familiy lives about 25 quadras from my old house in an entierly different neighborhood. I am now only 5 blocks from the center of town, but everything is pretty peaceful here, relatively speaking.
We have some crazy neighbors. The man to the left of our house leaves his garbage in our parking space and the woman to the right finds it necessary to peep out from behind her door whenever she hears us getting the car out to go somewhere... City living?
At first, I didn´t actually spend much time in the house, which is very beautifully decorated with the many souvenirs that my mom brought back from her trip to India when Fede was there on exchange.
I moved in one night, and the very next day we went off to visit family in Tucuman. It was a whirlwind trip in which we visited the majority of the many landmarks in the Argentinian capital of independence, San Miguel de Tucuman.
When we got home, we visited some family in Corrientes, the city across the bridge, and then went off to Paso de la Patria, a vacation town in provincial Corrientes where my family has a house.
For my host mom, Cheli, Paso is the ultimae vacation spot. I am sure that she could spend a while mothe there with nothing to do other than hang out in the pool, watch TV and enjoy Paso, and she would never get bored.
I, on the other hand, got a little bored after the first week and a half, but luckily found some of the boys from my class on the beach and spent some time getting to know them. They cooked me asado one night, we hung out on the beach fishing under the stars and another night we all went out to dance (all the dance clubs from Resistencia move to Paso for the summer). My mom was alittle worried about letting me go out, but the boys came to pick me up and bought me coke since I wasn´t allowed to drink and walked me home as the sun came up. And I had a very nice time.
I cam home from Paso a week early becasue Helena, my friend from Switzerland, had finished her year and was heading home. The eschange girls and I went to her house at 5 on wednesday and stayed for her going away party, and then Ellie and I spent the night there, to see her off the next morning. It was very emotional to leave her there on the step, but men, it was so great to be there with her and see how much she had accomplished in her year. There she was, speaking perfect Argentine Spanish, laughing with all the wonderful friends she had made. Her host family fell in love with her (they drove her all the way to Buenos Aires to see her off) and she had success in tango, in tennis, and in school. Really, I can´t think of a better way to end my year than with a group of people that have come to mean so much to me and I hope that I gain (and give) as much here as she did.