What a stressful week!  My professors must have had a meeting over the weekend and came to the consensus that this week each of them would give me a trillion pages of reading.  Mariano’s reading was so confusing and had all these complicated Spanish terms so I didn’t sleep at all Tuesday night because I was on Spanishdict.com and translate.google.com making failed attempts to figure out what the reading was saying about Juan Domingo Perón and populism in Latin America.

I know I bring up Mariano A LOT in this blog, but this anecdote is completely necessary.  I know everyone in his classes were thinking it, but I’m just gonna come out and say it:  WHAT IN FRESH HELL WAS MARIANO WEARING ON WEDNESDAY!? He is extremely well-dressed so you can imagine how distressed I was when he came to class wearing a light blue button up shirt tucked into baggy peacock blue pants and these massive untied Nike kicks.  WAY TO THROW OFF MY ENTIRE DAY, MARIANO.  After class he told me that I shouldn’t be afraid to participate more and I wanted to say, “Mariano, no puedo pensar cuando te pones pantalones tan feos.  Chau.”  But instead I just did some weird giggle/cackle combination and was like, “Claro, claro.”  What a missed opportunity.

This week we had a huge Mate y Truco celebration.  Mate is a traditional Argentine tea-like drink.  You put the yerba mate—the tea portion of the drink—in a special cup with hot water and you pass it around with your friends and one cup lasts for hours because you keep pouring hot water in it.  Truco is a popular Argentine card game with  a bunch of signs you try to secretly show your partner like winking, raising your eyebrows, and making kissy faces in order to let them know which cards you have.  I think that a repressed Argentine couple were flirting and then the girl’s dangerously Catholic mother was like, “WHY ARE YOU WINKING AND MAKING KISSY FACES AT THIS BOY, YOU’LL BURN IN HELL, CHILD! REPENT YOUR SINS BEFORE THE EYES OF GOD!” and the girl was like, “Uhh…we’re just…uhh…playing cards?” and voila! Truco was born.  Ben and I were partners and our combination of kissy and winky faces were top-notch because we won!  GO TEAM!

Pedro teaching us about Mate:


Argentine pastries and Mate TO THE DOME:

However, the best part of the entire night was when Arielle and I ran off with the medialunas that they were serving with the mate.  Medialunas are Argentine croissants and I’m basically in a serious relationship with them.   I hope that when I’m married I’ll love my husband as much as I love medialunas.  Anyway, we were supposed to wait until Kate and Pedro (our student activity advisors) talked about how to make mate, but Arielle dared me to walk up and take some medialunas so I had to bust out my Aladdin moves once more.  I slyly walked by the table, grabbed three and hid them in my shirt and was like, “Arielle, VAMOS, VAMOS!”  and we ran out and walked around the block and ate them.  It was magical.      

Arielle and I before we fled with the medialunas.  We were too quick for the camera’s focus but you can see how happy we are at the prospect of medialunas:


I also got a package from my mom and it is hands-down the funniest parcel I’ve ever gotten.  She sent me underwear (some have smiley faces on them, others are Valentine’s Day themed), those things you clip onto your bra straps so that they don’t show when you’re wearing tank tops (she says that only girls who are trashy and desperate for attention show their bra straps), and a picture of her and my dad.  MOM, WHY ARE YOU ALWAYS INADVERTENTLY HILARIOUS?!