A Year of Summer: 2012

The Family.

who knew "going to the carnaval" actually meant "getting spray repeatedly in the face with foam"

just playing some cards. i'm probably losing..

dad's new love: asado

It seems that keeping a blog up to date isn't one of my strongest point; something that has apparently been noted by a number of people, most importantly by my mother. For the last few weeks every skype conversation included at some point, "Have you updated your blog yet Lara? A lot of people are asking about it" . So in an effort to please the masses and get my mother off my back, I am writing this blog summarizing everything that has happened in the last 3 months.

For the last 3 months I have been enjoying my first summer vacation of 2012. You would think that being on summer vacation would mean that I would have more time to blog, but the fact is vacations make you lazy and it seemed like every time I tried to write something I would end up on Facebook (a problem almost every single teenager can empathize with). I suppose the first event that I should mention is Christmas. Unlike many Canadian exchange students to the southern hemisphere, I am fairly used to warm Christmases. A couple of years in Mexico and a trip to New Zealand over the holidays have made a palm tree seem like a perfectly acceptable substitute to a pine. However here, like in Canada, they put up and decorate a pine tree although they are generally a little smaller and a lot faker. As the big day got closer and closer the weather started to get colder and colder. I'm not kidding, the 23rd was rainy and gross and by the 24th I was freezing. I spent the evening of the 24th with my host family, some of their friends, enormous quantities of food and a huge ass parka. Santa was nice enough to bring me a pair of blue flipflops and my mummy had planted a pair of Xmas socks in my suitcase before I even left Canada. Afterwards I headed off to celebrate with my friends ;)... Next up; New Year's. Pretty much was the exact same as Christmas without Santa and the parka (thank god). Once again copious amounts of food, I swear it's like these people never eat.

Unfortunately, the next couple of events aren't quite as cheerful nor food focused. The 4th of January quickly rolled around after New Year's which meant we (all my friends and I) piled into a little bus to accompany Josefina to the airport. She's now been to France for over 2 months and doing awesome, but we all miss her a lot :(. On the way home from the airport the second less-then-happy-event occurred. My boyfriend's father died. We were about 3 hours away from Los Toldos when it happened and as you can imagine it was a pretty solemn trip home. In retrospect it wasn't really a surprise that he died, he had been in and out of the hospital in the 5 previous days but in all honesty it shocked me when I found out he'd actually died. I have absolutely no experience with death. I'm lucky enough to have all my grandparents and all my other family members. I guess I'd convinced myself that yes people get sick but they'll always get better. So this was an enormous wake up call to say the least. I got back to Los Toldos around 12am that night and went straight to the funeral home. I was there until 9am, at which point we went to the church and then the cemetery. I've got to say, going to an Argentinian funeral was not something I expected to experience.

The next few weeks passed, full of intense heat and numerous hours poolside. Sleeping until noon became the norm and saying out until 3am was just expected. Then, Beardsell family was reunited (actually that's a lie, Goosey got left behind, as did Humphrey :( ). Mum, Dad and Tess rolled into Los Toldos around 10:30pm on January 18th (the bus was late obviously). I was there to pick them up along with Jesus and my friends. I made them empenadas because I am SUCH AN AMAZING DAUGHTER. We hung out in LT for 5 days (I think), spending lots of time poolside and recovering from intense heat and then took a night bus to Mendoza. The trip was 12 hours but all at night so it went by pretty fast. The apartment parents rented in Mendoza was awesome. Super pretty and only a 15 minute walk into town. I think I can say that we all really enjoyed our time in Mendoza. The town is really pretty and quite a lot bigger than LT (obviously haha). Mum, Dad and I rented bikes one day and went to visit all the wineries. Well in all honesty we didn't go into a single one, apparently Mum and Dad have done enough wine tastings in their lives and it was stinking hot so we stopped for a beer instead haha. We rented a car for a couple of days and went up into the Andes (la cordillera). We rented a cute little cabana in this weird town that seemed to be completely void of people, although the owner of the cabanas told us that it fills up on the weekends. We were there two nights. I was sick (obviously). It really sucked. We went for a drive in the mountains; ended up in Chile. Ooooops. It was all good though because we didn't actually cross just went into some weird no man's land. I ended up walking across the border since I had to renew my visa so it worked out pretty well. Then we went back to Mendoza (I'm still sick as a dog), stayed another night and then went to spend a night at the house of people we met back in the Mexico days. They have been traveling for some insane amount of time like 19 years and finally decided to settle down in about an hour outside of the city of Mendoza. From there we went back to Mendoza and caught another night bus to Los Toldos. The fam stayed another night in LT and then caught the bus to Buenos Aires and then the plane home. It was definitely great to see them, I finally got a mummy-hug :). It was definitely sort of weird to see my whole family here in Los Toldos. But a good weird :).

Since then, I have mostly just been here in LT. I went to the beach for a few days with my family, which was good but the weather was a little chilly. Oh the weather has been extremely bipolar. It is currently hot and humid, but it's been cold, windy, warm, rainy.. everything. Sooner or later it'll start snowing.. And now I have once again started going to school. This year I am going to the Escuela Normal, in the economics stream. I start classes at 7 or 730 and get out at 12 or 1. Yesterday was my first day since my counselor forgot to sign me up for school and then the teachers went on strike, but it looks like I'm going to have a full 5 day week next week. Ugh, que feo. We had two hours of English yesterday; the teacher asked everyone who studies English outside of school to raise their hand... I didn't know what to do, so I raised my hand. I think I'm going to like school a lot more this year, well I trying to convince myself that anyways.

Well that's about it. Mummy I hope you're happy.