Language classes, voluntary work and scams

I had my third day of language classes today. It costs $200 a week, my professor is EXCELLENT, the lessons are entirely in spanish and it is astonishing the amount we have covered in just three days. I think I will stay in Buenos Aires for the next two weeks at least in order to get my spanish up to a passable level.

Yo aprendo espanol por habler con los personas de sur de america. Yo quiesera estudio por dos semanas. Por cena hoy, como arroz y carne. Yo gusto mucho a aprender l'espanol!

I also signed up to an organisation called LIFE today as a volunteer. Their website is http://www.lifeargentina.org/ . One of my friends had a good experience with them so I went along to an induction earlier today and it looks fantastic.

Buenos Aires is a mixed city, there are some very rich areas but also some areas in abject poverty. Some of the kids living in the poverty stricken outskirts don't have any opportunities for education and many are starved of attention because their parents don't care, or are drug addicts or have ten other kids, or whatever. LIFE provides some basic education and love and care for some of these kids. I've never had much of a chance to teach and interact with children before and I feel I would have a lot to offer given the chance so I am very excited to be starting with them tomorrow afternoon after my spanish class.

I am currently surfing on the couch of a guy named Eduardo, he is a REALLY chill dude, totally cool, he's studying pretty hard for his exams at the moment but he is happy to give me his keys etc and we get on well, I can speak in spanish with him too.

I had an interesting experience tonight. I went to the cinema to meet another couchsurfer but we must have mixed up our communications because I couldn't find her. I figured that was fine and I'd just have a wander around Buenos Aires at night and take in some of the city. So after about half an hour of wandering through bustling streets full of street sellers, neon lights, throngs of people, crossing the 16 lane wide Avenida de Julio and avoiding stepping in the dog shit that seems to be EVERYWHERE, I saw a small dingy looking bar labelled solely as "Irish Pub". I thought, great maybe I can get a guiness and wandered in to have a look.

I immediately got a really uneasy feeling about the place, inside there was nobody except a HUGE bouncer in the corner with a shaved head and a couple of not very attractive looking girls at the bar. The place was dark with a disco ball hanging and some bad music playing. One of the girls walked up to me straight away, grabbed me by the arm and led me to a seat.

Now two of my missions I set myself for this trip are "live in the moment" and "push your comfort zone" so despite a lot of misgivings, I stayed. Frankly my guess at the time was that the place was a brothel and I'd never been in one before. Now I would never pay for sex, it violates one of my core values (on a more practical note I doubt I could afford it even if I DID want to bang some nasty skank in a dodgy bar in Bs As) but I am a very curious person and I was intrigued to see what was going on, and what would happen if I rode it out. The girl started rubbing my leg and trying to get me to talk to her. I grabbed the opportunity to practice my spanish so I busted out some extremely broken sentences explaining that I was a tourist and asking her how long she had worked there. I was joined by another girl who sat on my right, then a fat woman with a face like a squashed toad brought a tray of drinks to the table and gave the girls some yellow looking things and put a coke in front of me.

So I attempted to talk to the girls for about ten minutes being very careful not to touch the coke. I kept an eye on the bouncer but he had his head on his chest and seemed to be asleep. The girls were smashing back their drinks at a rate of knots, at this point I still thought I might be in a brothel and so I kept trying to ask the girls how long they'd been working and what they did, they were very reluctant to tell me, I figured this was just due to my bad spanish and not making myself understood properly but then the toad woman came back and planted herself squarely in front of me. Suddenly I was looking at a drinks bill that had more zeros than bill gate's annual paycheck and everything became crystal clear. I glanced at the bouncer and sure enough he had got up and was slowly walking over towards us. Time slowed down for me a little at this point, I decided it was probably a good time to leave so I took out a wadge of low value pesos I had in my pocket in case of robbery (about 17 pesos in total I think), slammed it on the table, elbowed toad woman out of the way and bolted the hell out of there.

17 pesos for that kind of experience is pretty cheap I think. Wonder how many people have fallen for that little scam and not got out of there in time before being forced to pay hundreds of pesos for "drinks"? Mental note for the future: pushing your comfort zone is all well and good but follow your gut if you feel uneasy about something.