Martes: Rain, shine, being alive

School week diary, day two:

7:30 Miraculously wake up despite having set my alarm to the wrong time. Get up, decide to wear my ugh-it’s-Tuesday outfit (maximum comfort and messy hair coverage), get ready to go. Have a delightful mug of tea and a couple of tostadas (toast.)

8:15 Get on the subte. It’s not as hideously claustrophobic as it usually is at this hour. I close my eyes and focus on the movement of the train. It’s amazing what you can appreciate if you become conscious of it: the steady forward motion, the breeze that comes in through the windows as the train pulls into each station.

8:45 Get off the subte. Notice the torrential rain that has begun to pour from the sky. Brace myself to hate it, to complain about it once I’m inside...but then decide to try to enjoy it for once. I have no umbrella. I get soaked on my way to class. I feel alive! It feels amazing. I can’t stop smiling.

9:00 Spanish language class begins. There’s just a few of us, and the professor, Cruz, is great – very smart and sharply funny. She’s an actress, and as such, full of expression and energy. I’ve learned a lot from her grammar-wise (oh, grammar) and I love talking with her about theater. In class today, we read, we write, we talk, we get off track.

10:15 Ten-minute break. Zoé and I have our usual water-cooler chat. Patricio, my academic advisor, knows all of the details of my personal life by now, whether he likes it or not – his desk is right there.

Class continues. More of the same. I make use of the multiple dictionaries I carry around with me (one Spanish-English and one Spanish-Spanish) and we start reading our second book.

12:00 Class ends. Jimmy and I go in search of food that won’t kill us. We run into his friends Jamie and Ashley, and the four of us end up at California Burrito...something. CBC, in any case. The burritos are yummy! 80% of the customers are tall, smiling blond people. 10% are tall, unsmiling blond people. I creep around the latter 10% to see if I’ve finally found the only other Finns in Argentina. Sadly, the search is still going.

We have some lovely lunch conversations about siblings and insects, but the SAME SONG has been playing on repeat since we got to the restaurant, so we need to peace out for our own sanity.

I buy myself an alfajor for dessert, get back on the subte, get back to Caballito (my ’hood) pretty quick. I pick up my laundry on my way home. (Continuity from yesterday!) Now I have clean clothes. Hooray!

I bum around, take a shower. Coming out of the bathroom, I see light shining through the living room windows – it has stopped raining and is now a beautiful day! In keeping with my Conexión Creativa way of life, I decide to meditate and do breathing exercises in the sun for a bit. It feels wonderful. Almost as good as an orange massage – well, not quite, but in any case, I’m feeling very Zen and one with the Universe.

I write a few pages in my journal, in Spanish as always. I’ve been writing in Spanish for five weeks now, it helps a lot!

17:30 I go to Disco (the supermarket down the street) to buy apples and granola. I come home and eat apples and granola.

18:30 I skype with my dear Hilary Tandy for a good long while and watch the sunset through her Vassar dorm-room window. Lovely!

20:15 The apples and granola haven’t held me over – I cave in and eat an early dinner of leftovers. Tomorrow, Catalina comes to cook, I’m excited to dine on her creations for the rest of the week!

20:45 Start writing this entry. It’s still super early, but it’s been an early kind of day.

All in all, a very tranqui Tuesday. Lots of lovely inner moments and eurekas. A surprising number of words came out of this day!

Off to do some homework (it does exist, I swear.) Stay tuned for Wednesday!

Besos y abrazos :)

Isa

Word of the day: tranqui – adj. Calm. Short for “tranquilo/a.” Used a lot to describe positive moods. Kind of like “chill.”

Lunes: Oranges and Articulations

School week diary, day one:

9:25 Alarm goes off. I hit the snooze button a lot. Get out of bed, get dressed, etc. Eat a little breakfast. Bring laundry to laundry place down the block, owned by a friendly middle-aged Japanese couple. Hop on the subte, travel less than 10 minutes to school.

11:00 Conexión Creativa. We “share.” We dance around and shake each other’s hair out. We give full-body massages using oranges – this is DIVINE and I want to start and end and spend every day doing this. We end class by talking about the experience of the orange massage, what images appeared to us while we were being massaged, etc.

Buy a piece of tarta from a panadería around the block (I live off of tarta). Sit in the lobby of the building reading my book and chatting with classmates passing through.

14:30 Voz y Canto. We warm up our voices and practice the ridiculous duet we’ve been learning, then move on to the monologs – Romeo and Juliet in Spanish. I perform the monolog in front of the class for the first time since reading it out loud on the first day. Since then I’ve memorized it and worked hard – they were impressed! It was a nice feeling. The professor points out that I articulate better because I’m still learning the language, and tells the rest of the class to listen to me as an example. Heh heh. Gold star on my forehead...but for real, it’s nice to (a) see the results of my efforts and (b) have an advantage, for once, as a yanqui* in a class full of native speakers. Some of the girls talk to me at the end about how much my Spanish has improved – they’re shocked! Progress √

16:20 Peace out. Buy some candy from a kiosco and catch the subte home.

Chill at home for a bit, facebook e-mail blog yada yada while the cat takes a nap on my bed.

18:30 Take the colectivo downtown to la escuela de espectadores (“spectators’ school” for theater-goers). Listen to Dubatti, my fave, interview the director of Estado de ira, which I really really wanna see. I haven’t been to the theater in SO LONG!

21:00 Class ends. I get to chat with Robyn for a second, who’s back from a wild weekend in Mendoza and needs to recover. And then she needs to tell me all about it. I peace out on the colectivo and read on the way home.

21:45 Arrive home, super hungry. Host sis and her friend are studying hard. I heat up some dinner, eat, realize how boring my blog post is going to be. And now here I am, writing it.

It was really a lovely lunes! The weather is nice and both classes were great. I’m also realizing how lucky I am to be surrounded by crazy theater people all the time, it’s really wonderful. I’ve got love for non-theater-types, too, of course, but school is so much more fun when it’s a nuthouse.

Tomorrow you get my Tuesday.

Besos!

Isa

Word of the day: yanqui - n. or adj. Person from the United States. Comes from the English word "yankee," but is pronounced JAHN-kee.

Conexión Creativa

Based on my blog content, one might assume that I actually live in a theater, with occasional trips to boliches and super swanky McDonald’s. But I actually spend a fair amount of my time in classrooms. You know, learning stuff and whatnot.

So I thought I’d do something new and spotlight one of my classes on el blog (I call this “el blog” when speaking in Spanish. With a Spanish "o". I take Spanglish very seriously).

I start my Mondays with Conexión Creativa (translation: – you guessed it – Creative Connection) at USal’s School of Dramatic Arts. I wasn’t originally enrolled in the class, but decided to give it a try during shopping period, and now it’s safe to say I’m in love.

I’ve been exposed to some pretty hippie-dippie stuff in my life. Progressive schools, organic food, folk music, etc. I know what WOOFing is and hope to give it a try some day. Gender-neutral bathrooms don’t faze me in the least. I went to Prometheus Camp in Finland where we skinny-dipped and made meditative sculptures that represented our personal idea of what “time” is, for Pete’s sake.

Hey, this is a fun list! I could keep going, but in the interest of your sanity, dear readers, I’ll stop and get to the point. Conexión Creativa is an extremely hippie-dippie, touchy-feely, find-your-spirit-animal-and-become-a-vegan kind of “class.” I say “class” entre comillas because it’s really more like having art therapy sessions once a week with a group of thirty of your peers. In fact, it is exactly that. And each time I go, the more convinced I am that every theater student – if not every artist/person ever – should have this as part of their training/life.

The professor is a small woman in her late 50s with a constant, genuine smile and a powerful, mellow voice. She says things like, “You are a flower with four petals. Beautiful energy emanates from your center, from the bellybutton.” (Except in Spanish, of course – I’m learning to speak hippie in Spanish, it’s nice!) She has a team of mostly silent, extremely chill people who come with her and make the magic happen. It's pretty ridiculous, but also wonderful.

I’m finding it hard to explain what happens in this class. We do a lot of different things. We chat. We listen to earthy music. We close our eyes. We move. We paint. We play like children. Last time we were each handed a lump of clay and were supposed to transfer our body heat to it, then march outside with it with our eyes half-closed to bask in the sun and sculpt.

I can imagine more than one person rolling their eyes at this. “This is your CLASS?” You ask with disbelief and mild to moderate distaste. “You’re getting CREDIT for this?”

I understand why you might feel that way, but I assure you, as pre-kindergarten as it may sound, Conexión Creativa is hard work. Somewhere between the tickling, the shouting, and the clay-pounding, this class really gets to people. It’s all about going deeper, accessing something we’re not allowed to access most of the time, discovering truths about yourself you had no idea existed. “Confronting the beast,” says the professor. So far, at least five or six people have cried each session – last week, I was the first! There’s nothing like tearing and snotting (that should be a word) in front of thirty people you hardly know. At the very least, now they know I'm human, and I think everyone speaks the universal language of unintelligible sobs equally well.