Porteños and Vecinos

Living in Buenos Aires, I want to try to be a Porteno! It comes from the word 'Port' for a person who works/lives in the harbor. In gerenal Portenos means the citizens of the the city.Those Portenos living around me are my 'Vecinos' (= neighbours/neighborhood).The neighborhood here is very quiet,calm and warm. Everyone has holidays here and schools will start their year in beginning of March. Then we will be leaving Buenos Aires and go to the country side. The Vecinos/neighborhood is different than were I live in Sout Africa. In the morning everyone goes with the bus to work and there are hardly any private car to see. Only cars for work eg money for banks or plumbing cars). There is a lot of gravity and advertisement on the walls and houses. Everywhere there are posters of this drink called "Epika". It looks really nice and tasty on the posters. There are lots and lots of posters, but no one sells it and some even don't know what it is at all!!!!

A famous local

Here they mainly eat pizza, pasta and meat. So on the menu of the restaurants there are Pizzas or Asado (braaivlees). In South Africa everyone eats supper at 6 or 7 o'clock, but here they eat supper at 22:00 -also the children.They have markets on Thursday and Sunday where they only sell old stuff eg.(compass, old cutlery etc.......). In San Telmo there is also an inside market where they sell fruit and vegetables and of course meat. (but it smells a lot!!)
Everyone in the parks and in the streets drink from small round wooden mugg's with a metal straw, in which you put special kind of green, dry tea, which you have to let dry for a day and then poor hot water in. You then drink the tea with the metal straw you and fill it up with warm water from a flask.
On every corner of the street there is a police officer standing, but..................

Steven in the trash can.

The homeschooling went really well until one of the students were very naughty!!!!


                                                                


           STOLEN!!!

Reward for stolen phone!!

When we went to a museum/the government museum we had to go through a scanner machine to check our bags if we didn't have weapons and then . . We put our phone and camera in the bag and when it came out of the scanner ........ MY DAD"S IPHONE WAS STOLEN!!!! This was the first time something was stolen of him. Well except when we went to Thailand and his bag of clothes were stolen. But this now was something very valuable so we went to the security/police and there was a very kind manager there who helped us. We checked the videocameras, but could only see the entrance, one step away from where it happened. This was the theory: when my dad put his phone in his side pocket of the bag and put it in the scanner he went to get it on the other side, but it was gone by then. The security said that it would have dropped and someone would have taken it and sold it for money.I guess we will never find out what really did happen?????????????????????????????!!!!

Weird Beard!!!

Walking on the street in Buenos Aires- in the heat- you see many people with piercings and tattoos, many wearing jeans or dark clothes. Strange in this Sunny City. Also many man have beards. The last couple of days I 'investigated' how this is 

possible. Why in comparison with other countries I visited have these man Beards?. 

Vecinos

My Vecinos/neighbors who lives the floor on top of our apartment have a Dad, Mom, son and a daughter, of 18 years. We first met our neighbors when we were hanging our wash to dry on the roof of our building. We saw the mother showering in her bikini like always and her daughter was there too. She could speak English very well and she was a very happy girl. She is studying yo be a journalist to help Argentina and to write about government,she is also studying to be a film producer. She was looking for work to earn money during her summer holidays. She says that her mom works very hard too, but we mostly see her showering or shouting.I have interviewed Analia  (the girl):

1. How do you want to change Argentina by acting?
2. Would you want to move somewhere else?
3. What do you like in Argentina?
4. What do you  dislike in Argentina?

1. Slowly,step by step.The importance 
2. She is born in Uruguay.Has been travelling a bit.She would want to travel more,but would want to live in Moskou.
3. Analia likesthe nature that Argentina has Mountains,a lot of culture,work, country is improving.She says that Argentina has everything!!
4. She dislikes social violence and there is lots of robbery.Bad economic distribution.

For all the dutch people who are following us and cant really understand in English I am also writing it in Dutch  http://blogs.rnw.nl/wereldkids/  my last 2 blogs will and has  been  on wereldkids on the  27 and will be on the 31 January.

Gracias amigos

Louisa

When I went in the government building I was lost and went in a the wrong room.

At market

So many stories in the history of Argentina and Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires 20-01-2012,

Walking around for two weeks in Buenos Aires, a couple of things are weird for us. Like everyone has a tattoo and all men have long hair or beards.You have to kiss everyone on the cheek! Its like saying 'hello"! You have to kiss everyone back otherwise its disrespectful, even your tennis teacher,a waitress and a taxi driver. Men meeting up and kissing eachother is very normal in the streets here. When we talk with them in our best Spanish (remember - No one speaks English) often they talk about the history of the country. There are soooooooooo many stories, monuments, buildings, and streetnames and squares named after famous people that we started with a visit to the National museum of History of Argentina (and it happened to be right on the corner of our street in San Telmo!).


HISTORY - NAMES AND DATES.
It is clear when I walk around there are 2 very important dates in the history of Argentina what you find back on street names & monuments all over Buenos Aires:
1)  May Revolution from 18-25Mayo 1810 is the start of the revolution on the famous Plaza, now well know for demonstrations like the ones from the Mothers of the Plaza (see next week's Blog)
2) War of Independence from the Spanish ruling, 1810-1818.


Funny how this story looks like what we just learned in school about the Boston Tea Party and the American Independence. Also Argentina was such a colony with on one side the Royalist who wanted to stay loyal to the King of Spain, the ruler of an area of which Argentina also belonged to. And on the other side there were the Patriots who were not happy with all the taxes and the rules and wanted Independence.
After a war the Patriots finally won and this is when Argentina became Argentina; on 1818


The National Museum of the history of Argentina was interesting. It had many paintings from battles and real things from the time in the past like an old flag, old maps and chairs and pencils and even an old piano which was also seen on one of the old paintings.
Unfortunately there was no explanation in English - only in Spanish language. Anyway, it was nice and Steven liked very much the old guns that were standing outside the museum. He had never seen such weird shapes guns. Oyes, the quards were not nice. They had nothing to do the whole day and when I touched a glass by accident he started yelling at me in Spanish!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 


Not so very long ago Argentina has also 2 well known stories I like to mention. These events you still see and notice in the city, because they were so recent and they still write about it in the papers and on TV. 
The first is the Dirty war (Guerra Sucia 1976-1983) as they call it,  where the military Government Army ruled the country in an extreme violent way. There are still 1000 of people missing and every Thursday the Madres de Plaza de Mayo are protesting for attention that their children are still missing. 
The other one was the period before that of Juan & Evita Peron (1953). At the bottom the presentation I did for school and more details.


Evita  Peron  museum 
Every week - for homeschooling- we get a subject/name which we have to do 'desk research' for. After that we go and do the field research, like visiting a museum or going to see a monument. Then we have to give a presentation about the subject. This week my brother had to present the Inca Empire and culture and my presentation was about Eva (Evita) and Juan Peron.




Eva Duarte Peron & Juan Peron
On July the 26^th 2002, 50 years after Evita’s death, Christina Alvarez Rodriguez introduced the Evita museum in Buenos Aires

The Evita Museum is housed in a beautiful old house/mansion build for the Carabassa family during the first decade of the 20th century.

This building was named a National Historical monument in

1999. The Evita Museum forms part of the of the tourist attraction in the City of Buenos Aires. 

       What we thought about the Evita Peron museum

We thought it was a luxury, big house/museum.There was much to see and to learn. There were many beautiful dresses and hats which Eva Peron owned. There were short original movies that were black and white about when Evita helped Orphans and poor people 
and her foundations was all about helping the poor people of Argentina and getting the right to vote for women. There were also many wonderful paintings of her.When we came in there were flowers for her with candles so everyone still cares and misses Evita and Juan .

Pink House
The pink house is in Buenos Aires in the middle of the city situated on Plaza de Mayo. It is the national government building. During the past 100 years all the protests and introduction of new presidents took place in front of this building. This building is also famous because of the speeches of Juan Peron and the last speech of Evita Peron before she died of cancer at the age of 33.

Gracias

Loes

My presention you find is you click on :

http://www.slideshare.net/Loesjelindiwe/juan-peron-biographydocx-11216793

Country of Tango

2012-01-10 We are in the country of the tango.....ARGENTINA, South America.

The language here is Spanish and we can understand some of it since we took Spanish classes from Clara our 'profesora' in Cape Town. We are staying in Buenos Aries the capital of the country for three months. On our arrival, on 28th December 2011 in the late afternoon we took a taxi to our apartment in San Telmo. We had a fight in our best Spanish with our rental company who wanted cash for a month and a lot of surprising extra costs. Quite strange, because we had pre-paid for two weeks and by mail we agreed to pay the outstanding amount after the 1st week. After picking up our suitcases wanting to leave they finally agreed. We were very tired -after leaving Cape Town four a clock in the morning and a flight of 11 hours from Jo burg to Buenos Aires(BA)- and fell asleep immediately. The next day the ladies of the family checked the appartment and found so so (like 4 different plates, some lights not working - dirty kitchen en not enough towels. But the 'contracting manager' said, good price and locations. We decided to stay till the end of the month to get to know San Telmo - this old and special part of Buenos Aires. Next month we want to move to an other area named Recoleta.

The area SanTelmo is a small cosy place in Buenos Aires where Tango and the market are the main attactions beside the many old buildings and small streets.


In the morning we had breakfast in a coffee shop around the corner, what became the "office of my father" because of the good ''cortados'' (small cappuccino). When I went with my dad I ordered a hot chocolate, but I got hot milk in a glass with a chocolate on the side. I asked where my hot chocolate was and he laughed and said in half Spanish half English that you dip the dark chocolate in the hot milk an stir. It was very good!. The next day while interneting in the cafe a skype message came up. "Hi Jaap/Germaine, when are you leaving and which country are you going first, regards from Buenos Aires, Herman" !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!What a suprise our friend Herman who is a pilot for KLM was in Buenos Aires, 30 minutes walk from our apartment. We met and had a great lunch with him before he flew back to Amsterdam.

The next day was already 31st of December and there were parties in different areas. We decide to go to Plaza Dorrego - a square around the corner with many restaurants and bars. Everytime a performance started with live music, Tango dancing (see pictures) and singing. At midnight the place was lit by fireworks and every one said Feliz Ano Nueve!

We had a weekend to look around Buenos aires and see the diffent areas by foot in a very hot weather (like always every day it seems).
My parents found the town not improved in over the past 10-15 years when they came here for their work. It is more dirty and many roads and pavements are broken and not well handled. If you compare this with South Africa than our government should get a compliment if you compare with 10-15 years ago.

Nearly nobody speaks English (good for our Spanish) and you do not see or hear a lot of tourists. Maybe because it is expensive here.
 
                                                  


                                    School
Steven and I could not wait for the 11th January and have started homeschooling on the 1st already. We start our school at 8:30 until 13:00. We have a roaster which shows us what subjects we have everyday.

We have our school in our apartment, my moms is our teacher and she wears a hat and glasses and then she looks like a teacher an not a mom.
We are taking the school very seriously and when one of us don't behave we have to .................

                                                                 Sport 
Steven is since last Wednesday official player of the Club Atletico San telmo Soccer and is training twice a week below a bridge of one of the highways which runs through San Telmo. Wednesday he has training and on Saturday an hour which he trains and plays matches.

On Miercoles and Viernes we both go to tennis classes with Sebastian (who speaks a little English) for an hour at the Darling Tennis club a kind of private club with pool and restaurant. We train with 6 other local kids and hope we also learn a little Spanish from them.

The coming week we will be changing our layout!!!

Thank you for reading,keep following us
Writen by Louisa
Pictures taken by Jaap& Steven
Editor,Germaine