"Mi madre says NO!"

Friday started out quite normal and ended with a cultural experience I had not been expecting! In 318 we had a big ten-minute oral presentation that counted as our fourth and final test grade and I stayed up really late Thursday night preparing for it. All of my preparation paid off though when, despite having to go first, I still did much better than my last big oral presentation! After class I came home, took a little siesta, and went to get pesos to go back to the stores that I had been at the night before. As promised, I went back to the store owned by my new friend and bought the things that I had fallen in love with. We chatted again for a while about when I was leaving and my trip back home, and she even took the time to specially box up my stuff so it won’t get messed up in the airplane. I said good-bye and started to head back home not sure of what I was going to do that night when I got a text message from Mary, one of the other girls in the group, asking me if I wanted to go to the opera. I replied with sure, why not! So I went home and got ready and at 9:15 I met a group of girls from our program outside of the big (and beautiful) Teatro del Libertador in the middle of town to see the Argentine opera called “Lin Calel.” They had told me not to buy a ticket because they already had one for me, so I just assumed that they had been by earlier and bought them all together. However, when I met up with them I found out that Mary’s host mom had had a ticket for a box seat! So not only did I get to go to my first opera while I was Argentina, I got to watch it from awesome seats! We only encountered a small difficulty at the door when the man taking the tickets told us that the ticket only admitted four people into the theater; however, Mary was quite persistent and replied con mucho fuerte, "Mi madre says NO!" Although this response became the joke of the night among the five of us, she got the point across to the man and everything worked out fine. When we got there the box definitely had a chair for each of the five of us, and it was fun feeling like we were in our own little area. The opera itself was really cool; the story was about an Incan princess, Lin Calel, and her arranged marriage that she didn’t want. In the end she ended up with the man she was in love with and was queen of all the Andes. Some of the stuff that happened in between we weren’t too clear on, but overall we could understand what was going on. I guess even if you know the language operas are sometimes difficult to understand because of the way they’re sung, so the words were projected up above the stage. This definitely helped us follow along even though it was another night of Spanish speed-reading. But it was definitely a good time and something that I’m extremely glad I got to experience! The singing was pretty, the costumes were awesome, and there was a lot of cool stage choreography. Also, if you are reading this and would like to hear it, remember to ask me next time we see each other about our favorite line from the opera; we’ve all been randomly busting it out since we left the theater Friday night. J The opera ended around 11:00 and we all decided to walk to Caseratto to get helado. I got my first cono doble, which are probably the most ridiculous things I’ve ever seen. It’s a little difficult to describe, but I got a picture so if anyone would like to see this Argentine favorite don’t worry! We sat at the ice cream place and just hung out and talked for over an hour and it was so much fun! We talked about our host families, random cultural differences that we have noticed here, and anything else that would randomly come up. As we were about to leave the girls mentioned that they were thinking about going to go to a smaller town a little outside of Córdoba called Carlos Paz Saturday morning and invited me to go with them. I decided to take them up on it and went home to get a little bit of sleep before I had to wake up for our spontaneous adventure.