A Big Day in the North

Hello again. I´m sitting in a really small internet cafe in Posadas, probably for the first time of many! I´m really lucky, this is just across the street from my homestay. So! I got here yesterday afternoon on the flight from BA. The in-flight meal wasn´t up to my usual standard, but it was ok! Oli and I were picked up by Norma, who is the mother of Veronica, my in-country coordinator. She took my to my homestay first. My homestay mother is called Cuca, she is an Argentine granny and very sweet, but she talks 19 to the dozen and it´s very hard indeed to understand what she´s talking about! I did catch a couple of her amusing stories, though - see the end! She changed subject so rapidly that at times I find myself struggling to keep up. I catch the odd word, say "lawyer" and think I´ve got a hook on what she´s saying and then the next thing I´ll understand is "she fell and hurt her head". To make matters worse, the noise from the road outside is so loud that entire chunks of conversation are lost to the traffic! The best comparison is the Fast Show´s Rowley Birkin QC, but as Cuca is an elderly, churchgoing lady I doubt that I will hear her utter "but I was very, very, drunk." I´m not sure I would understand if it she did, anyway!

So, Posadas is very different to BA. It´s not westernised at all and is pretty run down. It seems cool in a different way, though. Last night I didn´t do anything, just got an early night (I know, on a Friday! It was 2am GMT when I hit the sack though, fairly respectable!). Before that, Veronica came round and explained what was going on. 2 of the volunteers hadn´t taken the plane and no one had heard from them. We were supposed to be getting our orientation this morning at 11, but because these girls hadn´t come, it has been delayed until sunday. I was a bit miffed as I was hoping to meet up with Oli again and the other guy he´s staying with, Jonny. Turns out they got invited to a barbecue at the local rugby club, but the gits didn´t invite me! I met them this afternoon though and laid it on thick!

So they went out and hit the town and I got some kip. This morning I chatted to Cuca over breakfast and managed to grasp a bit more of what she said, but she has a very strong accent and I still don´t really know what is going on. The girl I am supposed to be sharing with has turned up, she should be ther now. Apparently she speaks no Spanish, though so I am not looking forward to being translator!

Oli and Jonny are staying with Cuca´s daughter in law and her 2 sons, they are apparently a bunch of "party animals" so I feel a bit like I´m missing out! They phoned this morning and asked me to come over and watch the England match with them, and after a bit of work I managed to convince them to come and get me, because I didn´t fancy being a lone female in a strange town! It´s funny, the first Saturday I was in Lyon I got dragged along to watch the England-Germany game. Why does this keep happening to me? They walked along and we went into town. It was dead due to being siesta time! We found a bar and watched the match - I said I was supporting Israel, of course, even though Oli´s dad had already texted him the result! Not much else to say about that!

The boys were being typically laddish and going on about the Argentine girls, and while they were in a sports shop I found Posadas´ answer to Claire´s Accessories. Inside, there were some girls discussing the lack of good-looking men in Posadas and the shop assistant said that men weren´t good for anything! I was laughing along with them, and so they gave me a discount! Sexism pays!

Right, I better head off, it´s almost tea time (7,30) and Sile, the other girl, must have arrived by now. My final thought for this entry is this: if you had told me when I first started learning Spanish ("me llamo Sarah. Vivo en Edimburgo") that 13 years later I would be in a house on the border with Paraguay, listening to an elderly Argentine lady´s story about stumbling mistakenly on a nudist beach, I could never have believed it. And yet here I am.

Hasta luego.