I am feeling a lot more at ease now, which is really really nice.
It's been raining all morning here, and in my new apartment we have a tin roof and open balcony so the sound of the rain is incredibly calming.
After waking up, I did 30 minutes of yoga in my room, sat for a 10-minute meditation, and then made super-healthy pancakes inspired by the Uruguayan Olympic Swimmer I lived with the last two weeks (yeah, she's super awesome... made national records in Rio and I got to hang out with her ;) ).
The other day I saw her making what basically appeared to be a giant oatmeal cookie in a frying pan, and I had to ask what it was because it smelled amazing. She told me the ingredients, and I realized it was very similar to the healthy oatmeal pancakes I've tried out in the past, with some differences. She didn't give me exact proportions and, without measuring cups, I've pretty much been estimating everything, but here's the basic recipe:
Ingredients:
2 eggs (juevos)
1 large banana or 2 small bananas (bananas...)
~ 1/2 cup oatmeal (avena)
~ 1 tablespoon chia seeds (semillas de chia)
spice of your choice, to taste-- cinnamon, nutmeg, etc (canela, nuez moscada)
pinch of salt (sal)
sweetener, to taste-- cocoa powder, coconut, etc (cocoa, coco)
To prepare:
1) mash banana in bowl
2) beat in eggs; if you beat in lots of air, you will get slightly fluffier pancakes
3) mix in the rest of the ingredients
4) spray cooking oil or melt butter in pan
5) spoon in mix to make small pancakes or one giant pancake
6) cook until the pancake holds together and is browned on the bottom, then flip and cook the other side
7) serve plain or with fresh fruit, peanut butter, honey, maple syrup, nutella, etc
~makes about 6 small pancakes or 1 ginormous pancake~
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| Oatmeal pancakes on the stove, just about ready to flip |
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| My breakfast this morning: healthy oatmeal pancakes with pasta de mani (peanut butter!!) and té- no, this is DEFINITELY not a traditional Argentine breakfast... I haven't been able to adjust yet to starting the day with just a small medialuna (croissant) and café (coffee) |
Anyways, rewinding a bit:
I found out last Monday that in fact my classes wouldn't start until the next week, Tuesday, April 4th, and at first that was kinda stressful. I'd been waiting anxiously for them to start so that I would have something to do... and suddenly I had more than a week to wait, again.
But I pretty quickly recognized that classes would start when they started, and I had to actually live my life in Argentina in the meantime.
I could have taken a trip this past week-- it would have been great timing, given that I had no obligations for several days-- but I felt like I was still recovering from all the traveling I did to get here, so I decided to stay in Córdoba.
And for the first time in-- months? years?-- I really took a week for myself. I've had time to sleep for 9 hours and also take a siesta in the afternoon (I don't think I've caught up on sleep like this in a very, very long time). I went for runs, tried out an acrotelas (aerial silks) class, went to a zumba class, finished Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler (highly recommend), read several chapters of a book on English Language Teaching that a family friend gave me before I left, checked in with long-distance friends I haven't caught up with in a while, finally started playing the miniseries Michonne (part of The Walking Dead video game series), cooked for myself, had long conversations with my Airbnb host and the other travelers living in our house...
So yeah, I haven't yet traveled all over Argentina, but I had a pretty good week.
The telas class was awesome, but really hard! After contacting the gym, I found that the teacher on Wednesday evenings spoke English-- unfortunately since I'll have night classes I won't be able to continue taking his classes, but it was great for an introduction.
Unlike the mixed aerials class I take in the U.S., this class was just silks. Now silks... they are absolutely gorgeous, but they are not my strong suit in aerial arts. I prefer aerial rope, cuerda lisa, which is clean and simple and exactly what it sounds like: just a single rope hanging from the ceiling. Silks are similar in theory, but they're super bouncy, somehow even harder to grip, and there are multiple strands to deal with (ughh, trying to separate them in the air is so hard), and they are all flowy and I always manage to get them tangled all over me...
So anyways I was kinda struggling toward the beginning. They apparently don't use rosin here to help with grip, so I found myself slipping a lot. Within the first 10 minutes I had managed to make my fingers bleed from gripping too hard, and I had to tape up my hands and readjust the way I was holding the silks. But the teacher was fun and peppy and encouraging, and there were tons of people there of all levels, from absolute beginners to someone who, at the end of the class, did a stunning practice performance for us all. By the end of the class, I had learned a few new techniques and successfully gotten into a hip-key several times (a locked position with the silks wrapped around your thighs and waist), which has always been one of the most difficult basic moves for me.
The following morning, I woke up very sore but still went out to the same gym to try their zumba class. I haven't done much of any zumba since I graduated from college, and it felt sooooo good to zumba again! They even played a song that I knew from before!
So basically this week I have discovered that the keys to staying sane for me no matter where I am:
- daily meditation
- exercise! especially if it involves fresh air
- eating enough and eating well
- drinking tea
- maintaining a balance of alone time and social interaction
Incorporating all of those things into my daily life has made a huge difference in how I feel. Also, after living in the same Airbnb for two weeks, I had started to feel like I had something of a home here... but, like I mentioned, because my first Airbnb was quite far from where I will be teaching, I had to move closer to the city center.
I moved yesterday, Saturday, to my new apartment. I have a gorgeous aqua room with lots of space and natural lighting, and my current housemates include a French student doing a semester here for International Studies and a masters student from outside Buenos Aires who is studying Geology at the university here.
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| New room, viewed from the doorway |
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| New room, viewed from the desk |
I am lucky that the one Argentine person my age in Córdoba that I know lives on the same street, just three blocks down, and yesterday evening after siesta she invited me to walk out to the park with her. (I'll call her Paula here, although that's not her real name, just for privacy's sake)
Uni just started this week, and there was a celebration concert on the campus, so I followed Paula down to the campus and met up with another one of her friends:
University of Córdoba Campus, rock band, perro, and moody skies
Understanding Spanish has gotten easier for me, especially with people who speak slowly and don't have a very strong accent. Younger people tend to speak much faster and use more slang, so it's a lot harder for me to understand when Paula and her friends speak. Trying to listen to them with loud Spanish rock blaring in the background so that I could only catch every few sounds was basically impossible... but I managed to pick out the main topics of their conversation and contribute a couple times, and I'm happy with that.
We weren't feeling the music at the campus concert, so we ended up walking to Barrio Güemes, a chic, artsy neighborhood with an amazing nighttime crafts market and, usually, live music. The band playing at the market was fun and after the first few songs they had everyone in the crowd dancing, myself and my companions included. During the last song of the night, everyone in the crowd put our arms around each other and participated in a Rockette's-style kickline, increasing in tempo until everyone separated and ran around dancing together.
Crowd gathering as live band starts to play at the Paseo de las artes Fería
That's another thing to add to the list of what keeps me sane: dancing. :)
On the walk back home, without music to make it quite so difficult to hear, Paula explained the last 30 years of Argentine politics to me and we both speculated about why our countries had elected extremely conservative presidents right after having fairly liberal ones, finding that the reasons seemed very similar.
I think it's pretty easy to tell from how different this entire post sounds that I'm settling in a little more. The language is still a struggle sometimes, and I still deal with bouts of anxiety and confusion and frustration when small tasks turn out to be way harder than I expect them to be (I don't understand why it is still so hard for me to find and purchase things in supermarkets)... but I feel like I'm finally finding ways to make myself feel more at ease, and I am really enjoying every opportunity to have all kinds of conversations with people from Argentina and from abroad.
"Gotta make a move to a town that's right for me"
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