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.