A few weeks ago I got to meet the Ambassador of the United States, Vilma Martinez, along with about 15 other recipients of the scholarship that I got. It was really cool because she said she had read each of our essays and knew a little bit about each of us. She told us about what she does, how she got to where she is and we got to ask her questions also. And she gave us tips and advice about things that she had learned along the way about life. It was fun because I ended up sitting right next to her in the room. :)
Afterwards we got to tour the Palace where she lives which is just down the street. The Palace is beautiful! It was funny because when we were in there, among all the different rooms that we saw we saw a dining room which they told us was the small dining room. The room was big and the table sat about 12 or 15 people. I thought that dining room was big and I was scared to see how big the "big dining room" was! As it turns out the big dining room is almost like a hall and the table seats about 60 people, and the area rug underneath the table requires 12 people to lift! The Palace actually made me feel like i was in the Von Trapp family home in The Sound of Music.
A couple weeks later i went back yo the US Embassy and got to vote for the election in November. I was happy about that because I thought that coming down here I was not going to be able to participate in the election. That was a fun event because there're a lot of American citizens there and there was music and food and it was just a great time, and participating in the elections a great privilege. It was amazing how many Argentines knew that we were voting that day. As the voting day was getting closer, A lot of my teachers and friends that are Argentinian were asking/telling me that I need to make sure I vote because the American vote affects the whole world. I thought it was an interesting point and concern that they were saying, but it's true.
On another note, I went to another fair in a different part of town where they celebrate the Argentinian cowboy culture. It was fun because there was a lot of dancing, music and food and different things for sale. One of the interesting things that my friend Danielle and I tried was popcorn-covered strawberries! Afterward Danielle and I got on the bus to go home when we realized we got on the wrong bus and wound up about 15 miles outside of the city at this place called Tigre. I had been wanting to come to Tigre for a while so that was actually kind of ironic that we ended up there because we were talking about it earlier in the day making plans to go in the future. It's a beautiful place to go because you're outside of the city and it's where the river delta is and there's a lot of houses along the riverbanks. These houses are unique in that there are all connected by boat and you're able to take tours through the rivers.
School is going well, there's a lot of projects coming up most of which are speeches and papers which are keeping me busy, but all in all it's going great. I can't believe it's already the 12th week of the semester, and here there's only 15 weeks in a semester, so time is flying!
Anyway that's all for now, And I promise I will try not to neglect writing in here! :)
