Día del Niño and the Start of Classes

Last weekend was el Dia del Niño in Argentina. Argentina has a couple of other holidays the U.S. doesn't have such as Día del amigo y Día de la mujer. I like these holidays. Día del Niño is a day to celebrate the children in your life. To me, this holiday seems a little strange because virtually every day adults are giving to children. And, everyone is a child. Not everyone is a mother or a father, but everyone was born at some point. Regardless, it's a day to spend with family and a day to give gifts and a day to eat food. I spent the holiday with my host family and their extended family.

I gave the three kids I was spending the day with three triple chocolate alfajores. Alfajores are delicious crumbly cookies and I've eaten many, usually I go for the dulce de leche flavor. The kids were very excited and the one pictured below opened his up immediately and ate the entire cookie. I was not expecting a gift for Dia del Nino, buy my host mom gave me soaps that smell like peaches and have built in massage knobs. I was glad to be a kid again.

We ate spinach and ricotta filled ravioli with incredible meat sauce. Large chunks of meat that had been sitting in the sauce. Bread. and an ice cream cake. The ice cream cake had pink ice cream which I thought would be strawberry flavored. It was bubble gum.

Following a relaxing and fulfilling weekend, life became hectic with the start of classes. I'm trying to take a literature course at the local, public university. So I went to Literatura Argentina I for a couple of days, but the colonial Spanish proved to be too difficult. I went to a new class yesterday called Literatura Hispanomericana II and I think this will work much better with my level of Spanish. This literature class will probably be my only truly difficult course as I'll be taking two courses with the program and a dance class. I'm very excited to read contemporary Latin American authors. I've been pretty disorganized when it comes to arriving to class on time/on the right day. It's not completely my fault, though. The hours seem to change without my knowledge. I'm trying to adopt the chill, Argentinian vibe with this whole process.

Caprese torte for lunch. Sun dried tomatoes and mozarella in a crust.

When host mom is away, I will take selfies while eating torte.

An interesting lunch of canned tuna in my spaghetti...

I was walking to class when I received a text saying it was cancelled. I bought a dulce de leche chocolate bar and watched The Office instead.