Day 5: Getting the slang of it

It's a good thing that the apartment was empty this morning as I watched my fifth lesson of Bueno, entonces I was laughing out loud like a crazy person! Maybe I just woke up in a good mood, but David's random musings on Apartheid (sorry, you'll have to watch to class yourself to see how that could possibly fit into a Spanish lesson) just cracked me up. Plus I loved the slang we learned - definitely going to surprise people with that this week - hope I don't get into trouble with anything inappropriate!

But back to yesterday, just to mention something a bit more sincere. I was meeting a new friend for lunch (was fifteen minutes late when I went in the wrong direction from the Obelisk - despite clutching a map!) and noticed that she didn't look all that cheery. I remembered one of my new phrases from lesson four and said, "Te veo preoccupado". Well, I think she was so surprised, and grateful that I had tried to say it in Spanish, that she told me all about how hard it is to find work in Argentina at the moment, and how her parents had lost their house in the last crisis, and how difficult it is for young people in Buenos Aires to be in their twenties and have to live at home, and how travel is a distant dream for most of them...

It struck me that this is why I want to learn Spanish - not to pick up guys or impress the tango teacher or be able to read the Latin version of Cosmo, but to connect with other people my age here. To understand what life is like and to be able to explain a bit about my own life. I'm really hoping that I will make some friendships here that will last a long time, and learning Spanish is the first step towards that. So thanks, Bueno Entonces...

P.S I was also able to make her laugh afterwards with my terrible pronunciation of "Tu mama es una rompepelotas" (your mum is a ballbreaker!)