5 portions a day

I just came back from the green grocers with 3 bags of fruit and vegetables and it only cost me 16 pesos! That is less than 3 pounds! And this is what I bought:

1 kilo of eating oranges
1 kilo of apples
4 bananas
1 red pepper
2 small cucumbers
1/4 kilo of cherry tomatoes
A rather large bunch of brocolli
3 large pears

Isn't that impressive! Like I said all for less than 3 pounds, £2.75 to be exact! What can you get in england for that price?! Nothing! I love this country! Now I have the small task of eating all of these fruit and vegetables... Did I forget to mention that it was all for me!

Estancia Santa Maura

Right this is the place I went to with some friends over the bank holiday weekend that we had here. We went horse riding, lasso throwing and cow milking!

Puerto Madryn

Hey guys, well i promised photos, so here they are! The 4 above are from Puerto madryn, which is where I went whale watching. My photos of whales aren't very good, as they aren't animals that stay still for that long! Seals on the other hand just lie there posing! They sleep and look cute! The other picture of animals are guanacos, a type of llama.

Remember me?

Ok, I realise that I am rubbish and that I have sent no emails recently, or written any blog posts or even been on msn messenger very much. And I am sorry! Really! Please forgive me! Its mad here you see, there is always so much going on and i don't have a reliable connection at home (as it isn't my connection and I am ´borrowing´other people's wireless!) so writing emails is therefore very very difficult as I have found that they just get deleted when I disconnect. Now I hope you will be able to forgive me for being so rubbish at basic cross-atlantic communication. Because I really am! Now I am going to try and update you all on what I have been upto in the past month or so!

• Puerto Madryn: Some of you know that I went to see the whales in Puerto Madryn. And the selas and the guanacos ( a type of lama) and the austriches. It was really good fun, and I met lots of lovely people there of various nationalities. I went and walked along the beach lots and decided that i really love the sea, its so pretty and unpredictable. And I took lots of photos of the animals, which I will post when I bring my memory stick with me to an internet cafe, promise! I also went diving here, which was great fun, but really really cold! I couldn´t feel my toes when I got out of the water, and even after a hot shower it was so cold!
• San Andres: This is the university that i go to here. It is a private university which means that everyone who goes there is very well off in argentinian terms. I have been to some of their flats, and they all have maids and so on! But they are all lovely! The university is titchy, which is good because it means that you get to know most people really quickly. And that you see those people all the time around campus.
• Intercambio students: There are 40 of us from all over the world, a huge proportion of which speak fluent english and/or french. Well actually all of them do, so that means that i have been speaking a lot more of these languages than I should! We tend to go out as big groups of exchange students and its great fun.
• Classes: I have finally chosen my subjects: Financial maths, human resources and spanish for foreigners. None of them are overly difficult, and I have mondays off! Woooo! Thats a long weekend every week, which should make it easier to go travelling into the argentine wilderness! But yeah, my classes haven't been difficult, the fact that they are in spanish really isn't a problem, although it can be difficult to understand students when they start to speak in class. They speak really quickly and use lots of lunfardo, which is the porteños' (person who lives in BA) slang.
• Nights out: Going out here is incredible, argentinians go to a bar for a drink at 11 ish and then go onto a nightclub at 2ish, which makes for a very confused bodyclock! I seem to spend most weekends sleeping and then going out and then sleeping some more! Siestas are very much required for me to last through the night, as I usually get home at 6.30ish!
• Santa maura ranch: A couple of weekends ago I went to an estancia, still in Buenos Aires Province, but 3 hours away from the capital federal. Thats the time it takes for a trip from London to Bath but for an argentinian thats just a jump, a hop and a skip away from the city! It was great fun, we went horse riding every day, gaucho style! (gauchos are like argentinian cowboys, they ride by holding onto the reins with just the one hand leaving the other free to throw their lasso at bulls!), we did some lasso throwing...at spades! You may laugh, but it was still incredibly difficult. We milked some cows, apparently, should I milk a couple more cows for a couple more days, i would be an expert milkmaid! The lady was very impressed because it is supposed to be a difficult skill to pick up, so there you go should I ever envisage a change of career...!
• El teatro Colón: I went to see Messias at the theater the other day. It was my first time at a classical music concert, there was an orquestra and everything! heeh, obviously! And the soprano lady was wearing the prettiest dress in the world, it was greeny blue metallic type material, and was lovely! The man playing the funny looking drums was funny, he kept caressing them and listening to them and turning these dial things, I didn't realise it could be quite so compicated! I really want to see Swan lake which is playing there throughout september, but I haven't organised any tickets yet.
• Shakira: On the other end of the cultural spectrum I am going to see Shakira with a load of exchange friends in november which should be fun! I had best start learning the words to her songs in spanish!

Tonight I am going to eat in a sweedish restaurant which serves a lot of vodka apparently! I will tell you about it if I remember the evening... And then we are going to a club somewhere! Who knows where!