On Monday we went to a drum circle.   This drum circle had a conductor and about 20 different percussion instruments. The conductor would point at target drummers and then signal them by holding up a number of fingers as to the numbers of beats with which he wanted them to interject.Check out the video on YouTube.

Other than the various events i have been attending, I have been trying to learn some more spanish by just asking a lot of questions when we go out with native speakers and practicing with people when I can. Not sounding like an idiot when speaking another language is a daunting task. Taking the next step to speaking intelligently (or as though you are not reading out of a text book) invovles learning things like the subjunctive and conditional tenses, which both have a past tense conjugation as well. Also, learning phrases that are acceptable, or recognizable, is also difficult. For many of the phrases which I were able to roll off my tounge easily when I lived in Spain, are now not recognized as proper spanish.

One interesting fact I realized in asking all of my questions is that whether you are in Spain or Argentina, they both reffer to their particular type of Spanish as Castilian (Castilian Spanish) as opposed to just Spanish. For when I was in Spain, people would correct you when you reffered to the language you were speaking as Spanish, and here in Argentina, when questioning if my some of the things I have learned were said here, my Argentine friend simply said, “no, thats spanish, here is how we say it in Castilian…” -reffering to how it would be said in Argentina. Let me know if anyone has any thoughts on why this may be.

I have a couple of adventures in the pipeline. I will update everyone when I know what I will be doing.