Fondue and Maratons

Someone asked me today what my favorite Argentine word is so far. I'd have to say "amigovio". its a combo of two words - amigo and novio (boyfriend). an amigovio is a "friend with benefits" or a friend who as bob eubanks would say - that you also make whoppee with on occasion. this is an important word to know if you are single in buenos aires.

i've posted a few shots of a ladies dinner party i attended recently. made friends with three lovely english speaking women - two brits and an american who've been here 6+ months and speak what sounds to me like fluent spanish. Anne-marie invited us to her place for a meat fondue party. what you see is beef (lomo is the cut), pork and chorizo. it was delicious. she bought the meat from a butcher across the street. i think the cow died like two hours earlier. katherine (pictured with me) is british but has been traveling south america and malasia for some time now. she got a job here in market research without any formal language training but picked it up somehow. the woman in the dark hair pictured is lorena, the sister of Anne-marie's argentine boyfriend Pedro -he's her novio not amigovio. 80 percent of the conversation was in spanish. i listened a lot. last friday night Emily had us to her house for dinner and also invited one of her argentine friends Silvana who works at a Jewish deli in the morning and in the afternoons is a shrink. its been written about a lot but in my experience so far - its true, argentines love psychotherapy. its socially acceptable too so it comes up in conversation when you don't even know someone that well. She's also a tango dancer and teacher of salsa. we ended the evening with an impromptu salsa lesson. sunday morning was my earliest so far in BA. I went to my first argentine "maraton" with a new friend Emily (another brit). ok, not as impressive as it sounds. a maraton is a running race of any distance. the sunday race was about 4 miles so nothing too strenous. hundreds of portenos were there and they lit fireworks at the start. ok a bit over the top for 4 miles but i liked it.