Otra cosa mariposa....

So today was my first "real" day in Buenos Aires. First of all, I feel right at home as I slept until about 1 this afternoon to find that everyone else in the house didn't get up until 3 or so....porteños (people from Buenos Aires) stay up very late and sleep in. Afterwards I talked to Nicki and Dani, two other students staying here. Nicki is from New Orleans and has been here since September. She was teaching English but now she is looking for a job. Dani is from Venezuela and is taking classes, but not at the same school as me. After planning our night, we left about 7:00 for the movie theatre to see "Locura de amor en Las Vegas" (What Happens in Vegas) which was actually a good movie (the movies here are in English with Spanish subtitles, just fyi). Before that we walked through and open air market and went to an ice cream place. Ice cream is a huge thing here, there are places everywhere and nearly all of them deliver. The one we went to had about 50 or so flavors to choose from, it was great. After which we want to the movie, which as I already said, was pretty good. Later we headed home. However, this night was extremely important for me because I got to chat with two students that have been here for a while (and one even spoke English!). I learned how to use the bus and just some general things to do and/or watch out for. Know I feel like I can get where I need to go and back just fine. It was an amazing feeling to ask important questions (i.e. how do I use the bus) in English to an English speaker as there was no "I think I understood what they said" afterwards. The title of this post comes from the name of a store. Earlier, Nicki and I saw the store's sign while waiting on Dani as she used the ATM. Then we had a conversation about it's meaning. Dani told us it can mean just about anything, but this was a good 20 minute conversation and, if nothing else, made for an interesting title (otra cosa mariposa literally means "other thing butterfly"; it's used to change the subject or when talking about something and another topic comes up that you don't want to elaborate on -i.e. "that's another story"-). Tomorrow school starts, I'll fill you in on that later.

A word about Argentine Spanish...
It is by far the most difficult part of this trip. It's been a long time since I've had to concentrate so much on someone's words to understand them, even in Spanish. In all honesty, if you just sit back and listen it doesn't sound like Spanish, it sounds a lot like Italian because of the intonation patterns and such. First and foremost, they pronounce everything in a radically different form. For example, in Mexico you'd hear "Me llamo" (where "ll" = "y") but here it's "Me llamo" (where "ll" = "sh"). While that might not seem like a huge difference, it seems that every other word is pronounced like this, so it takes a minute to hear "me shamo" and think in my head "me llamo." Furtheremore, it's a very harsh "sh" sound; I knew of this pronunciation difference before I got here but I didn't know it would be so harsh. Second, they have their own verb form in Argentina - the wonderful "vos" (you). In most places they'd use "tu" or "usted" but here it's nearly always vos. I can understand this form but have no clue how to use it, or conjugate it for that matter (hopefully this will change with school). Lastly, there is a different set of vocabulary. For example, when I headed out to explore the city yesterday Adrianna (my "mom") said, "Si tomas [she used the vos form but I don't know it so I'm writing the tu form] algo en la calle, llevas tu mochilla en frente." To me this means, if you drink something (alcoholic) in the street be sure to put your backpack in front of you. Yeah, here "tomar" means to drink but in Mexico "tomar" means to drink (alcohol); here to drink alcohol is "chupar" which has a different meaning in Mexico.....a very sexual meaning so it's very weird for me to hear people use it in daily conversation. I've deciphered accents before (Adela's Spanish accent, Sara Maria's Puerto Rican accent, the Mexican accent, etc) but this one has me largely dumbfounded. While I'm sure I'll understand it much better over the next couple of days, I'm about 99.9% sure I will not be incorporating "sh" or "vos" into my Spanish....it's just too weird for me.