Holy guacamole!

Another tired Saturday. It’s a little rainy and cloudy down here, but that makes it refreshing and a good excuse to hole up in a café, like right now. Right on the corner of Ravignani y Paraguay, where I live, there’s this funky old café that’s called Café-Bar Montecarlo that for the most part plays mellow good music, like Feist right now and has a beautiful old bar decorated in red leather and wood and a camero who wears a suit and a nice selection of whisky, bourbon and gin behind the counter. The tables all have beautifully carved legs and the chairs are those funky old ones made of red leather and wood. Wainscoating halfway up the wall, checkerboard tiled floor, mirrors lining the walls, so I can stare at myself as I write.
My class has been going pretty well; it’s kind of interesting to be able to design lessons, it’s actually pretty fun, though putting the lessons into practice sometimes hits a few bumps in the road. I go to class Mondays-Wednesdays from 10-5 and talk about everything from how to get students motivated to how to explain Conditional 3 to people, which is used to express regret, without making a depressing class. My classmates include 7 American girls, 1 New Zealand girl, one girl from Manchester, an Argentine-Israeli and a kid from Australia. We make quite an interesting bunch on occasion, a music/dance-obsessed, Argentine-culture-seeking group of self designated ex-pats. Half of the kids are staying here after the course is over (yay us!) and the other half is heading back to US or continuing on with their travels shortly after the course finishes.
Thanks to class and the nonstop activity of BsAs in general, I’ve had (present perfect: have/has + the past participle) a nonstop week. In other words, pretty fucking amazing. Last week, I spent time at a plastic Jesus theme park, a Boca game, Brazilian/Argentine drum troupe, milonga close to home, and salsa dancing. Yeah, like I said fucking amazing.
I think the strangest thing I’ve done yet was by far the Jesus theme-park. It’s not like there were rides and roller-coasters that you go on. It’s more like a themed-park where everything is plastic. Even the palm trees are plastic and they grow in Buenos Aires (not plastic palm trees, real palm trees). Everything is like a giant cheap nativity scene. It goes through the creation story, all the Stations of the Cross and Judas betraying Jesus. There are a couple of plastic statues placed randomly about of men who look they are in utter pain or rage, don’t quite know what their deal is. You can file into theaters and watch a plastic reenactment of the nativity. Joseph moves his head up and down a couple of times and there’s a fog machine. Same with the last supper. I got to see Jesus get resurrected… twice. He only gets resurrected up to the waist so I don’t know if it really counts.
Jesus is located right across the street from the most popular club in town right now. This club is open until 10 or 11 am on Sunday mornings. So ideally, you would go rage to techno and do drugs you’ve never heard of at Pachá and then head to see Jesus in the morning. Really, he gets resurrected every hour on the hour, so you don’t have to wait around very long.
I also made myself dinner the other night using the oven. Unfortunately, I still don’t know how to turn the oven on. Es todo ahora. besos