La comida

Buenos tardes! I´ve been getting some questions about the food and I am sad to report that it is not as grand as I had thought it would be. I´ve had a few good meals out. Empanadas are good (i´ve had cheese and onion empanadas), but my host mother does not have very good meal choices. I had a weird lunch yesterday. It was rice, with two fried eggs on top. It was weird, but good once you broke the egg yoke over everything and poured a lot of salt on it. Last night, was the weirdest of all though. It started out well: homemade mashed potatoes. Then, she gave me two hot dogs with it!!! Two hot dogs and mashed potatoes! I thought Argentina was famous for its ¨bife¨?? Today for lunch, I had boiled chicken with a lot of PEAS, carrots, onions, and some awful green olives. I ate most of it, except the olives. She asked me if I wanted more instant pea ´sopa¨ but I kindly declined. Hopefully, when I go back to the apartment, she will offer me tostados and cafe (which is what I have for breakfast every morning). At around 5, I usually have a snack, or everyone does in Argentina. Now, don´t get me wrong, I´m not starving, but I guess my expectations were too high about the food. If it weren´t for bananas and dulce de leche, I might be starving though.
I´ve found that it is 10X easier to talk to Liliana (my host mother) in spanish than it is to talk to my friends. we rarely talk to each other in spanish, and if we do it´s ugly sounding spanglish. Friend lingo is much harder to translate than proper, descriptive spanish. I was able to carry on a conversation in Spanish with Liliana about politics today during lunch. It turned out to be quite interesting. The presidential elections for Argentina are in October (or september, no se) and President Kirchner´s term is up, but his wife is running. I dont´really think anyone likes her, but she´s running. So, I compared her to Hilary Clinton and asked Liliana if she knew who she was and she said she did, but she didn´t think anyone liked her either, haha. Liliana reads a lot, and she knew about Obama too. She like Bill Clinton though. And when I asked her if it bothered her that he´d had such a public scandal, she said No because he was a good president the rest of the time and that was all that mattered. I thought it was a good insight, and it was definitely interesting to know someone else´s perspective. I think the US has an obsession with people´s personal lives and that a lot of other countries focus on more important aspects like policy, international relations, the economy, etc. .. Hmmm, what a novel idea?
Hasta luego!