cambio.

"Things change but they don't change that much."

I butchered that quote, but it came from the guest lecturer who took my art class on a tour of el Museo Nacional del Bellas Artes yesterday. He was showing us a sculpture that symbolized the torture that occurred in Buenos Aires during the 1930s and related it to the recent news that Guantanamo Bay is going to be closed. It's been 80 years, but has the world really changed that much in some aspects? Power and torture are still being misused.

Anyway, that quote seems to apply to my entire Argentine experience overall. I walk down these hot, dusty streets every day..and I really don't feel all that different. I thought that this trip would be this drastic upheaval of everything familiar in my life, but it doesn't feel like it. It hasn't really hit me that I'm in this foreign country..I just go about my day and feel normal. The atmosphere I'm in has changed, but humans everywhere are similar.

I adjusted ridiculously quickly. I didn't really have jet lag and following their schedule came so naturally. I eat dinner at midnight and it seems silly to eat it at any other time. People start getting ready to go out around 11. I exist on about 5 hours of sleep a night (on a good night) and in America, I'd be dying, but once again, it feels perfectly natural here.

I think I have verbal diarrhea. I can't stop talking. I tested into the Spanish class I wanted to, and spend 2 hours every day strictly speaking this beautiful, beautiful language. I'm picking it up again faster than I thought I would and get more confident every day. I've turned into that girl in class, the one I usually don't like, the one who raises her hand and asks a question every 5 seconds, usually about something not pertinent to what we're talking about. My teacher told me I have 'mucha energia.' I am choosing to take this as a compliment. My spanish is improving by leaps and bounds. The first day I was here, I could barely order a sandwich and now I can have entire conversations with people.

An old man in the park yesterday asked me how to pronounce a word (he obviously knew a spanish genius when he saw one) and I ended up having a 30 minute conversation with him. Diamantis, a 5'4" Greek-Canadian with an affinity for straw hats has absolutely nothing in common with me, but we talked and talked. He told me about how disappointed he is in his son and we talked about gelato and we talked about the implications that any sort of failure by Obama will have for blacks everywhere and so on and so forth. When I had to go to class, he offered me his phone number, address and his son's email address in case I lost the piece of paper with his address on it (No, I don't see the logic in this either). I now have a 60something year old friend named Diamantis to stay with if I ever go to British Columbia.

A little Argentinian girl in the same park gave me a high five, and last night we went to an American bar where I thought it would be a fantastic idea to try to talk to the locals who were there. Between their broken English and my broken Spanish, conversation flows. These are the things that make me happier than any beautiful buildings or cheap wine: genuine human interactions. It amazes me how people from such different backgrounds can reach across language barriers and communicate with each other. Everyone's different, but they're really not that different.

If things have changed from America, they've only changed for the better. I am happy here. So very very happy.