Field day at la estancia

On our last day of international student orientation Friday, we drove out to Capilla del Señor for field day at a tourist ranch. Our field day was spent predominantly indoors, as it was raining and freezing outside, so freezing that I was actually compelled to try coffee for the first time (turns out, it sucks). But it was nonetheless worth the two-hour bus ride to the edge of the Buenos Aires province.

The highlight of the afternoon was the simultaneously occurring lunch and musical performance. Waiters in traditional gaucho costumes brought out four different rounds of chicken, steak and sausage, which even for a kosher boy like me was a sight in itself. We all gave our drink orders and were surprised when our waiter came back with 1.25-liter bottles of Coke and beer for each of us.

During the performance, a burly mustachioed man serenaded us with traditional songs from each Argentine province. Two dancers joined him every so often to demonstrate the dancing from each region, including the marambo and the zamba, each time appropriately costumed.  I thank the Lord I was not chosen to be one of their guest participants during their tango lesson.

The most interesting selection, however, was when he went down the list of all the countries represented by our group and played a folk song or musical standard from each country. How he learned to sing in Dutch, Italian, German, French and Portuguese — with perfect accents — remains a mystery to me. But everyone got their laughs and sing-along moments when he called out their country. France got La Vie en rose, the Germans one of their beloved drinking songs, the USA When the Saints Go Marching In, à la Louie Armstrong.

Following the entertainment we wrapped ourselves up and headed outside to ride the horses we had been promised all week. Shivering and wrapped in a trash-bag poncho, I mounted my horse, who somehow looked more uncomfortable than I. I discovered that riding a horse is a lot like driving a car, if your car shits everywhere and hates you. A rather uneventful but muddy 5-minute stroll around the ranch culminated back at the gate when my animal pulled up under a tree, reached for a branch and took a massive bite, shaking the tree and drenching us with rainwater. Smart horse.


Waiting inside for us was a snack of pastries and fried tortas, as well as cups of mate, which I imagine was not very authentic because it tasted good. 

The bus ride back was sweet and meaningful, as I realized the pre-programmed Bejeweled game on my crappy Argentina phone doesn't cut you off after one level and make you buy the whole thing like in the US. I'm up to level 14. 

Tensing up

I'm sitting in a hostel on my third night in Buenos Aires, and there are a lot of things I should be worried about. Where I'm going to live next week, and which classes I'm going to take during my semester abroad, for example. But I really only have one concern right now, and that's the uncertainty of trying to perfect my Spanish in a dialect I've never heard before. What's making this difficult, among many other things, is the Argentine use of the word vos.


Vos is the informal second person pronoun they don't teach you in Spanish class. Most commonly used in Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, vos almost always replaces the pronoun tu and comes with its own set of conjugations. So instead of a tu eres (you are), Argentinians say vos sos. Instead of tu tienes (you have), they say vos tenés. Having had the pronoun tu ingrained since childhood, I am finding it difficult to learn and use an entirely different tense.


My inability to correctly use vos, along with my general incompetence in Spanish and my use of maps on crowded streets, distinctly marks me as a foreigner. The consequences aren't that serious — they'll still understand you if you say tu — but conquering it is something I still want to do. 


And just because I haven't had a negative experience with the dialect barrier doesn't mean it won't happen. A lot could still go wrong. Specifically, I'm afraid I'm going to seduce an Argentinian supermodel, only to watch her walk when I accidentally use the wrong pronoun. Just playing. I'll be so on my game no one will notice. But on an optimistic note, I can last almost four sentences into a conversation feigning as a native speaker before getting tripped up. And one time, as I was running the usual Spanish monologue in my head, I produced a reflexive pronoun construction naturally, without having to think about it like I usually do. It was nos pagan (They'll pay us). When it happened I spent about 30 seconds reviewing the sentence in disbelief, but it's happened a few times since then and made me feel like I'm on my way to actually learning the language.