There are few different levels of spanish...

There's survival spanish, work spanish and grocery store spanish.

Survival spanish is pretty easy, Donde esta cervecaria?...Donde esta el bano?...Un cerveca por favor...Donde esta el hospital?

Then there is work spanish, this is made easier by my co-workers english abilities. Where is el bano? Where is the cafe machine? Estamos en al horno con papas.
Notice because my co-works speak such good english I can slide in the spanish words or phrase at random.

The there is grocery store spanish, where I'm guessing they get the least amount of turists and there for don't ever really require an english skills or know how to deal with me when I look at them like I'm nuts. Today I tested the grocery store again...all I wanted was some bare essentials bread, ham for sandwiches, O.J. and a six pack of beer (Quilmes). I headed over there and all was going well...I grabbed a little blue plastic crate thing with a handle and started my shopping adventure...

First stop, bread! Hmm...there are many kinds of bread...this is much more dificult than i thought the bread bags have all kids of words I've never seen before. Crap! I grabbed what seemed to be a multigrain wheat bread...looks great and I could use some grains at this point.

Next stop, ham for sandwiches...I get side tracked by the banana section, I don't know way but bananas sound great. I've probably got scurvy at this point so I could use some fruit. I grab a thing of 4 bananas. On to the ham...wait theres some O.J. but it's in the cold cheese section across form the ham...it says 100% something so it must be good. I grab that...now the ham...there are about 80 different types of ham and I don't understand anything on there other than some have Jamon and others have Cerdo...I grab the ham that says El Familiar, because well it's familiar.

Alright, I want to grab a few beers to have at the joint. Quilmes preferably...well there is definitley a beer isle and there are litres of beer all over the place and then there are the cans and then the small bottles. However, none of these are package i'm looking all over for a 6 pack. So, I grab six individual bottles of quilmes. I think that is weird.

Alright, lets check out...I stand in the "Caja Express" (i think that was it) line, it says something about a maximum of 15 items...so i'm good.

Well, I've been here before so I know the first question is going to be cash or charge...so the girl says something and i wave my cash at her. She looks at me like I'm nuts, but just starts ringing up my items...the individual beer bottles seem to cause a small issue as they start rolling all over the place...then the bananas...she looks at me and says something...i have no idea, i didn't even get one word out of that sentence. I say "Lo siento, no entiendo" and i look at the women behind me and shrug my shoulders and smile. the girl is not happy...she says some to me again...no idea what she just said and she's pointing at the bananas and then the back of the store...i'm guessing I had to do something with the bananas first...so i just say "no problemo, no necessito" she seems to be ok with this and puts the bananas off to the side. I'm checking out the numbers on the machine and notice that my bill is right around 42 pesos, so I hand her 50...easy enough right? No, the girl looks at me and says something else...i didn't understand a word, so i smile and say "No entiendo" and then i look at the lady behind me and smile....she looks at the girl at the checkout shrugs her shoulders and says "No entiende" with that the girl waves her had at me in a nevermind kind of fashion and hands me my change.

I'm just glad the whole thing is over with and I get out of there ASAP! Phew another event I was able to get through...but geez I don't know jack in spanish.

Bruchetta

Shish-kabobas on a grander scale...i just ate 4 filet mignons. I'm going into a protein coma...if you don't here from me in 5 minutes....just wait longer.

Rock Chalk!

I just finished up watching the game on my computer at the apartment. I went to this bar that I knew had all the american sports, it's actually owned by an american. So, I got over there around midnight and the place is packed! Like crazy packed with college kids, or i guess kids way younger than me. I think they have ladies drink free til midnight or something, but it was crawling and very annoying (I'm getting old). I huge out there, painfully, til the end of the first half. Great game...wow.

Alrighty, good night all.

You are in the oven man

So I learned a new phrase: "Esta en el horno"

Which means "You are in the oven" or "You are screwed" lol

I guess when things start to get worse you start to add vegetables to the oven...
"Esta en el horno con papas"

and even worse yet...add your vegetable of choice:
"Esta en el horno con papas y zanahorias"

Just keep adding stuff as it gets worse and worse....lol

I need to check on the 'horno' it doesn't sound exactly right...but it was explained as an 'oven' and horno is the translation of oven. I'll update when I findout exactly what the phrase is...it's still funny.

Bird feeders...

I saw a new meaning of bird feeders this weekend.

On my adventure to aquire a power adapter I saw the craziest site. This little old lady was out feeding the pigons, however instead of having a peice of bread and tearing off little bits and feeding this pigeons in an orderly manor. She had a giant bag of what looked like torn off peices of bread and she started pouring out the peices into a pack of pigeons (maybe 100...maybe more its hard to count pigeons). The pigeons go into a frenzy that I can only describe as a shark like feeding frenzy and now this woman is trying to excape by lifting the bag over her head. But this doesn't seem to bother the pigeons because they have wings and they start to use them. They fly up and start grabbing at the bag and the food and now she is in a swarm of pigeons. Until she drops the bag on the ground and backs up. And the pigeons proceed to destroy to the bag.

The best part is that everyone is walking along like nothing is going on and I'm at first worried then I got a little chuckle out of it...but geez it was nuts! I will now bring my camera everywhere incase something like this happens again.

Spanish to English to Spanish

I decided to try out my new vocabulary in a meeting today. We were talking about some application junk and I ask a memeber of the team roughly "Do we ever return all the values?" but in my broken spanish.

It took him a second to to respond and he was looking up at the ceiling processing...it seemed like he had to take whatever I said and translate each word into english so that he could then figure out exactly what I actually ment in spanish. I called him out on it and we all enjoyed a good laugh.

Anyway, so far the guys enjoy my little attempts at spanglish and are happy to correct me and help me out with the right word...i hope it keeps up. Once the pressure increases and the timeline comes close it might not be as funny.

Mmmm...empinadas

so simple...so great and you can eat like 12 in one sitting!

Apparently I know the map better...

I walked out last night to grab a quick bite to eat it was like 10 so people were actually around.

I walked to the corner and stopped to wait for the white lightguy to appear meaning it's safe to cross the street. This guy maybe a little bit younger than me turns to me and says something...blah blah blah Santa Fe...I say "eh...eh...lo sciento..Santa Fe?" and he points down one street and says "Santa Fe o " and points down the street in the other direction and says "Santa Fe? Donde Santa Fe?" ah...no I'm catching on...which direction is Avineda Santa Fe??? Well buddy it's you lucky day, because just yesterday I got lost looking for Santa Fe, so I'm pretty sure I know where this street is. So, I point down the street in teh direction of Santa Fe and say "Derecho es Santa Fe"...I'm on fire! So, then he says something else that ended in Santa Fe...now i'm totally lost. He repeats himself and makes a slicing bread motion on his hand and counts 4 o 5...ah how many blocks away? Ok again I know this because after I got lost looking for Santa Fe I closely examined the map so this wouldn't happen again..."Si, es cuatro o cinco avinedas"...finally this guy catches on and says "You are not from here? De donde?" to which I say "Chicago" and he says "You're not from here and you know the city better than me and I've lived here all my life".

Awesome...I feel good. All in all it took about ten minutes for me to tell the guy "It's that way about 5 blocks". Hopefully, I can cut that in half by the end of the trip.

Mi Domicilio

Lol...uh I should have stead in the Shareton and collected points. But here's the gist of my situation:

Here's my kitchen and living room. I had to knock down a wall that seperated them and I think it really opened up the place:

Here's the newly remodeled kitchen complete with granite counter tops and 18 inch formica cabinets:

Eh..the picture upload takes way too long...I'll post the others later. But the point is, I have a small apartment...yada yada yada.

Oh, but there is a Starbucks downstairs so that makes everything better.

Hola que tal?

So, I'm here andi wanted to have a place to post some stuff about my little trip and yes the title is the extent of my spanglish...I'm working on it I actually had a nice lesson today over lunch.

Yo puedo tomar un accituna.

tomar means to take and also to drink..interesting little word tomar...anyway.

I'm hanging in there and I'll try to catch up on my fun little experiences trying to navigate BA with a lack of spanish knowledge and a bad case of lactose intolerance.