BLOG TIME AGAIN!! I've yet to succeed at keeping a blog for an entire experience, but maybe this summer will be the charm. I'm following Che Guevara's Motorcycle Diaries path, so if I'm going to be inspired to write, this ought to be the summer. He kept a diary, so I should too. So here's to recording my adventure through South America as I follow Che and research the role of midwifery in South American society. Hope you enjoy the ride! :D
STOP #1: Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires (called B.A. by everyone) is AMAZING! I love the city! It really reminds me of NYC at times. There is so much to see and so much to do, both during the day and at night. And it really is a city that never sleeps! Great transition from Spain because the lifestyle is so similar :D While the lifestyle hasn’t taken much adapting to, the Spanish definitely has. It is so…different (I shouldn’t say bizarre just because I don’t like it). It took a lot of adjusting to. I’ve gone from one extreme of Spanish to another. In Spain they cut off the final ‘s’ sound of words, spoke with a lisp, and pronounced all their v’s as b’s. Here in Argentina, they don’t really open their mouth when speaking (MAJOR lack of enunciating) and they pronounce all their ‘l’ and ‘y’ sounds as ‘ja.’
How ridiculously confusing this can be is best exemplified by a woman I was talking to who was saying “I already called her.” In Spanish: Yo ya llamo ella. When she spoke, all I heard was ja-jibberish: Jo ja jjamo eja. Umm, come again! I know I understand Spanish- I left Spain confident in my understanding abilities, but when I first got here I had to think so hard. There’s a friend from UNC who’s also here and her family is Colombian. She’s spoken Spanish and been around it all her life and she even said that her first week here she had major difficulties. Glad to know I’m not the only one! Slowly but surely, though, it’s gotten better. I’ve adjusted to the vocabularly differences (such as the use aca instead of aqui, etc) and I’m finally at the point where the ‘ja’ doesn’t completely throw me off. I expect it now, woot woot!
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