Conversation Exchange Partner Number 3

There is a cute little empanada joint across the street from my building. There is a cute little elderly couple that works there and when you order empanadas to go the woman wraps them up like little Christmas presents. After I got home from my conversation exchange last night I was too tired to even think about dinner, so I ate empanadas and drank wine and fell asleep on the sofa watching Bill Clinton at the Democratic Convention.

My conversation exchange was good. My partner number 3's name is Raul. Leo is another one I might meet next week. Raul is 40 years old and teaches English here. He was one of the best exchanges so far. I think we evenly split our time between English and Spanish. First we spoke Spanish for a while and then I suggested we switch to English and then we alternated between the two. He actually spoke a lot of Spanish to me, which I thought was great. Unlike my other partners, I don't think he feels totally confident speaking English, or else, he was thinking about the fact that I needed to speak Spanish. Either way, it worked for me.

We spoke about a lot of things, some getting to know you kind of stuff and then we moved on to more interesting and varied topics. He asked me about some US cultural things, like if you can use the word "black" to refer to Black people, and I asked him about, of course, conchettas. According to Luis, there is no difference between conchetta and cheta. He also explained that the word comes from a certain female body part - 'la concha' (concha is a shell, so if you aren't familiar with the word, you can try to figure it out). He also added that conchettas don't work and spend their husband's money (a little sexist?) - the women we saw at the Alvear Palace Hotel were definitely conchetta!

Some interesting things I learned from Raul.

He told me that British English is dominant here, and he is one of the few teachers who teaches American English. He said the textbooks, tapes, dictionaries, etc., are all British English. When he did his teacher training and had to take exams, his answers were marked wrong if he used American English.

The other thing he talked about, reluctantly, was the peso crash of 2001. He said he lost 15,000 US Dollars that he had in the bank. He was saving for a trip to the US so he could take a course in English. He said despite his best efforts, even trying to sue the bank, he was not able to get his money back. He told me that now he does not keep his money in the bank. Most people either keep it at home, spend it, invest it in real estate, or a new trend is that people go to Uruguay and open bank accounts there. I often wonder if our system could fail like the Argentine system did. We actually experienced this on smaller scales with Enron stealing all of California's budget surplus and Halliburton stealing all of our federal surplus. What is different is that unlike Argentinos who were out in the streets banging pots and pans, Americans just change the channel on their TVs and go back to being unconscious about what is happening. In the end though, I think everyone gets screwed equally. Raul told me that there were a lot of people who committed suicide after the peso crash because they lost their life savings, and there were others who died because they were saving up for medical operations. I don't know the full extent of the damage, and I guess I never will because it is a trauma that people are reluctant to talk about. I wonder if this is one of the reasons why Buenos Aires has the highest number of psychoanalysts per capita in the world! There seems to be a lot of trauma inflicted on the people here, and it seems like it is not going to stop (rising gas prices, food prices, farm protests, crime, etc...)

I'm enjoying these conversation exchanges. It is amazing the responses I am geting to my ad. I have a few more partners I have still not met. Leo, is a theater teacher who is in my neighborhood, and I am looking forward to meeting him because he said he doesn't speak a lot of Spanish. And one other guy, Javier, wrote me. He is a personal trainer, but I don't know what part of the city he lives in. It might be hard for us to meet.

I didn't like having go walk all the way over to Once to meet Raul, but once I met him I realized it was worth it. So on Wednesdays, I'll get a lot of exercise walking to and from school in the morning and walking to and from meeting Raul in the evening. In total, that's about 90 minutes of walking. I think I can justify having six empanadas and two glasses of wine for dinner!