Since I’m now the ripe age of 25, you would think I would be used to being in the adult realm of life. Yet, there are still things that I suddenly realise I can do which completely shake my whole world and fill me with glee. The first time I realised that, as an adult, I could decide to have a takeaway, it absolutely blew my mind. As a child, this is very much something that your parents decide upon (or at least in my family at least), so it was a HUGE thing when I realised I could just go and do it without consulting anyone. Here, something that really thrilled me for a while was my ability to go to the supermarket and buy alcohol and, bizarrely, cleaning products. Both these two have now worn off now and aren’t quite so thrilling, but here comes a new one..
So a little while ago, Nolz treated me to a nice bottle of wine. I am still kitting out my little flat, and it’s not until moments like these, where you realise that things like a corkscrew, don’t just inherently come with a house. The absence of a corkscrew to open said bottle of wine was rather a problem and I concluded that I’d have to wait for Nolz to bring me the corkscrew from his house every time I wanted to crack open the snazzy wine. After a while, it dawned on me that I, myself, could just go out and buy a corkscrew. This was an absolute revelation to me. I had genuinely just assumed that when the occasion may arise for a bottle of wine with a cork in it, I’d have to wait for Nolz to come over and bring said corkscrew. This just seemed a foregone conclusion. Kind of ridiculous really!
After having purchased my corkscrew, I was very excited at this new supremely adult task that was now required of me. Time to crack open that bottle of wine. Oh boy. Who knew that using a corkscrew was so difficult?! Certainly not me. And I now completely understand why them posh places charge a corkage fee. Goodness me, what an effort! Who’s got time for it really? Best to stick to the cheapo wine and avoid the exertion in my opinion.
Well anyways, long story short, one youtube video and many messages back and forward from a very patient and supportive pal (shout out to you Chlo!), we did manage to open the wine bottle! And it was glorious. But a lot of hard work if you ask me…
Unfortunately I don’t have a photo of me standing victoriously with the open wine bottle so I shall leave ya instead with a pic of ya fave gal n guy 😝
P.s. remember – you can still buy my book! To find the link go to the Greater than a Tourist page in my menu and you can have a lil nose.
So I’ve made it to ripe old age of 25. My birthday this year was not quite how I was expecting it to be. Like many, it was a quarantine birthday, since Salta was (supposedly) in complete quarantine until the 4th October (the day after my birthday). Anyways, I’ll give you the juicy stuff about what I got up to!
Woke up early (🙄) and had a nice birthday breakfast with Noly and his rents. Here it’s fairly normal to eat cake for breakfast which is a motion I support wholeheartedly, so the cake eating began 😋 Nolz had got me a cabsha which is my absolute favourite type of cake and Monica had got an apple tart too which was also yum. Had a few presents and a surprise delivery of flowers! Which turned out to be from my sibs! Top effort from my sis who had to download an app from Arg and converse with Noly to work out what it was saying to her in Spanish to order said flowers!
After breakfast we just chilled for a bit before heading out to San Lorenzo to pick up the Empanadas. Was v pleased we were tasked to pick them up as that gave us an excuse to go out. On the way back we stopped by the entrance to Nolys neighbourhood as Marta, Nolys gran, had kindly had cake delivered there! The cake was a beauty. It was interesting driving back with it as it was v creamy and with no box around it so was worried, what with Nolys driving (😉) and the speed bumps I’d get cake to the face! But thankfully we made it to the house with no incident.
After luncheon Nolz and I played a quick game of battleships before logging in to my birthday zoom organised by my sibs. It was super fun! They’d organised a lil quiz, round 1- questions about moi. I confess I didn’t even get some of the answers 😂 round 2- people had sent in anecdotes with me in them and I had to guess who it was! And round 3- they showed a PowerPoint with pictures of me and friends/fam and we had 90 secs to try to recreate the photo 😂 this was particularly hilarious haha. But this was really fun ☺️ nice to see some people from home on my birthday ☺️
After that we popped out for ice cream and a wander in an area where there’s not really anyone around as I was feeling cabin fever and really needed to get out!
Then once we’d just got back, Cristian, Luci and Cami popped round and we had some more empanadas and yet more cake 😋 and I received a couple more presents!
So yeah, all in all it was a really lovely day!! I’m really glad that covid has happened in my second year of being in Argentina as I’m more settled here. I think if I’d had a lockdown birthday last year I would have found it hard. I wasn’t much looking forward to it for a while this year but actually I had a really lovely day ☺️ thank you to everyone who made it special and those of you who have sent me cards and bits! I haven’t received them yet but fingers crossed they’ll get through by Christmas! But thank you nonetheless ☺️
Walking down the road with a 3kg watermelon under my arm was not quite what I had been expecting to take place at 2pm on my Thursday afternoon.
You see, as I approached the verduleria, I clocked the watermelon. I even actively thought to myself “ooh, yum! Watermelon!” followed by the thought “but I must not buy any. It would be far too hard to communicate how much I want. I shall just stick to the bananas”. Well, that’s not quite how it happened! It was one of those occasions where you hear someone saying something and then two seconds later you realise it was you saying it.
My problem is, I haven’t yet learnt how to backtrack in Spanish. The man from the fruit/veg shop said what I believed to mean “do you want it in a quarter?” which I wholeheartedly agreed to, and then proceeded to cut it in half and present it to me. I felt at this point like I needed to just follow through, paid for it and was on my way.
Now 3kg of watermelon is quite a lot. Arguably some may say it’s too much for one person. Well, never did I realise quite how much 3kg of watermelon weighs than when I was walking back home with it cradled in my arms like a baby. To make matters worse, for some unfathomable reason, I had chosen to do my errands of fruit buying at 2pm, meaning at this point it was 35°! Although in my defense, I hadn’t expected to be buying a watermelon.
Well, as you might expect, a day that involves this kind of thing is only going to go a certain way and another ridiculous thing happened to me later that night. There will come a point in my retelling of this story that you will absolutely, 100%, know what happened but bare with me till the end.
It was 9pm and I’d been slaving away in the kitchen for the last hour and a half. As mine and Nolys dinner evolved I start feeling smugger and smugger. I had really knocked it out the park with this one. It was going to be the most delicious thing we’d ever eaten and quite probably the best thing I’d ever done in my life. It had really evolved (one of them jobbies where you can just add more and more and all my things I had in the fridge just went perfectly with it and need to be eaten up.) Wonderful! It was basically all ready to be heated up in the oven. Delightful. What a champ I am. I was really pulling out all the stops for this one. “You know what?” I thought to myself, “crazy idea. Ontop of all my slaving away I’m going to peel some carrots and have a nice lil side of vegetables”. (For some reason, carrots just seem like such hard work for me. I’m not quite sure why.) I was also excited to brandish my new peeler and put it to work. I Put the main dish in the oven to be heated and pondered how amazing it’s been that my gas cannister hasn’t run out over the time that I’ve been staying here and decide it must be endless……. (😂😂) start putting the kettle on… start peeling my carrots and… POOOF. Fire goes out. What? Check the oven? Fire dying.. oh.. my endless gas had run out..
Well anyways, thankfully the dinner contained basically everything already cooked, apart from the egg and the cheese so I could put it in the microwave which thankfully I have since the Matus’ have kindly lent me one for the mo! So thankfully it wasn’t a complete disaster and we could eat what I’d slaved over for hours 😂 and of course, watermelon for dessert…
What with COVID, I never feel like I have very much news to tell you of things that have happened or I’ve done recently, but for this blog post I actually have two days specifically to talk about! September seems to be the crazy month in terms of birthdays. Between the Matus’ and my family/friends there are 6 birthdays in the month of September, one of which is Noly’s. Then there’s also mine and Noly’s anniversary. Then in early October it’s my birthday, so usually it’s a very busy time of year! Obviously things were a little different this year, but since I did something slightly different than my normal day-to-day I thought I’d take the chance to write about it.
Wednesday 23rd- mine and Noly’s five year anniversary. First of all, wow, I can’t believe it’s been five years! I don’t want to blow our respective trumpet too much, but think we’ve done pretty good to get to this point, since the first few years of our relationship were mainly long distance. Whilst this was incredibly tough for many reasons, it has also served us well and we have benefited also from learning how to communicate with each other well and really know the other person. Anyways, enough of the deepness, on with what we did!
If you know Nolz very well, you probably know that his favourite cake is a cheesecake. Indeed, a very specific type of cheesecake. A nice thin base, a big chunk of the cheesey bit (but it has to be the classic cheesecake, not some kinda later invention with chocolate or nutella or something) and some kinda berry/strawberries etc. Since going out to the shops to buy something isn’t really a possibility right now (because of COVID), I was determined to buy him a cheesecake and get it delivered. Sounds simple right? Wrong. Noly is the person who I always ask to help me with sending messages in Spanish but for obvious reasons couldn’t get him to help me with this particular task! Anyways, with the help of a dear friend from here (shoutout to you Ale!) and many texts asking if my message was okay, as well as the help of Monica, Noly’s mum, the mission was complete! And said cheesecake arrived, which was the first fun thing of the day. Picture below, it was pretty delish!
After the arrival of the cheesecake, Nolz and I went off to the local shop to pick up supplies for later. Now I know I said I couldn’t go out to buy a present for Nolz, but this shop we could get to and was open because it’s a food shop which is the only place to buy things for Noly’s neighbourhood. So anyways, off Nolz went to pick up some supplies. After that we went out for a walk and had some lunch. In the afternoon we went out with our picnic supplies to play a spot of monopoly. However, we weren’t alone. Lola, Noly’s dog, decided that, in fact, this afternoon was to be all about her! And positioned herself right in the middle of the picnic blanket, with her head on the monopoly board for good measure! She seemed incredibly pleased with herself and lay there, wag wag wagging her tail almost constantly. With a little coaxing she did eventually move over a little and allowed us to play haha.
Surprisingly, I actually won! My track record with Monopoly is not so good and I confess that Noly is usually the winner, but not this time! After Noly’s (monopoly) destruction, thereby followed a brief interlude whilst Nolz was a uni class and me doing a few bits and bobs that I needed to do as well, before we finished the day with a game on the switch which, again, surprisingly, I won!
So yeah, there we have it! That’s what we did for our five years this year. Not quite what I was expecting, but it was a really lovely day together!
Friday 25th – Noly’s 23rd birthday, woop! Another very lovely, chilled day. The day started with a birthday rendition to Noly with his rents and I and then a nice long snooze on Noly’s part. Later we had a yummy lunch and ate some of Moni’s famous chocotorta which was delish, as per! Nolz and I then played a game I bought for Nolz for his birthday on the switch and followed it up with another dose of a game online which was fun! Kinda like mafia but played online 🙂 Then dinner and a bit of chilling together to end the day.
Last thing to say, my usual plug, I wrote a book! If you wanna have a little nose or even a cheeky purchase, click on the Greater than a tourist- Salta menu at the top of the page and you’ll find the link 🙂
Hello lovely reader. I realise I’ve gone a bit radio silent on you in recent days so just a lil post from me to reassure you that I’m still here and everything’s okay!
If I’m honest, I’ve just been plodding along and don’t have all that much to tell you. A not very fun development in my life is that I’ve started to get migraines with aura. Aura is like, warning signs that you get prior to the migraine. Currently tracking them to see if we can identify any triggers to them and in future will go to the doctor to see about treatment to them if they keep happening. My suspicion is that a big trigger for me is screen time as my day to day involves a lot of screens and far too much zoom 😂
Other than that there’s not all too much to tell you. Cases are on the up here in Argentina and even in Salta, the province and city centre where I am, we’re getting more and more cases. There are a lot of rumours and talk about returning to phase 1 of lockdown which would mean obligatory quarantine and nothing open except supermarkets. I’m really hoping that doesn’t happen not just for my sake but also for people here, many people can’t work from home and will have already been financially hit from the two/three months of phase 1 we’ve already had. On the other hand, it seems that hospitals and healthcare in general are close to getting overwhelmed by so many cases so perhaps it would help with that.. hard to know what’s best really but I suspect there will be an update on it on Sunday and we will see if any decisions have been made.
Anyways, that’s all from me really! I will try not to go silent for quite so long in future but it’s difficult when there’s not really any news to impart 😂
To finish, I shall leave you with a picture I took the other day when Nolz, me and the dog went for a little wander in San Lorenzo and were befriended by another doggo
As I’m sitting down to write this it strikes me that I don’t actually have a tremendous amount of big news to fill you in on. After my recent five minutes of fame I feel that perhaps returning to the normalities of my life may be a bit of a let down for you, my avid reader, but heyho! Such is life.
Actually, that being said I do have one piece of news. One of my best chums from home recently got engaged and is, covid permitting, getting married sometime next summer & has asked me to be a bridesmaid. The day she asked me if she could call me to ask me something I was inexplicably nervous all afternoon, even though I suspected, and hoped she’d be asking me to be a bridesmaid. (Speaking of being inexplicably nervous, group games always get to me too man! Recently at the church youth group we were playing splat (classic) and my heart was going BOOM BOOM BOOM constantly as I was riddled with nerves. The ridiculous thing is that I am, and always have been, rather good at splat so despite hating every second of it, I can’t quite bring myself to not fully throw myself into it & often end up in the final. Yet I really do hate it with a passion 😂) So yes, I am SUPER buzzing and, all being well, it looks like I might be home for a month or so next year folks!
This whole bridesmaid/hen do thing is really rather fun but quite possibly the most distracting thing EVER as I find myself pondering it at all times of the day and researching when I really should be doing other things, not least of all these things being sleeping. I found myself in rather a cycle the other night when I would think about the hen do and then my mind would start drifting to the wedding, to preparing with said bride to be, her walking down the aisle etc, would start getting emosh and then try to distract myself with hen do planning and then the cycle would continue haha.
For those of you reading my blog posts here in Argentina or in other countries, I should just mention that my observation of hen dos are that they’re a MUCH bigger thing in my home culture than they are here in Argentina, but I will potentially go into this more another time.
Something else to fill you in on is that I did my first ever preach in Spanish! It was NOT on a Sunday thank goodness (that I genuinely wouldn’t be able to cope with because of language and high stress sitchu) & was jointly shared with Nolz, but we were asked if we could do the Saturday eve youth group talk. This was a coupla weeks ago now. It’s funny because if all that happened with the interviewy stuff hadn’t happened then this would have been pretty major news! As it is, I’m getting to it now haha.
It’s sometimes difficult for me to assess how something has gone down when I speak for an extended amount of time in Spanish. In this case, I had written out a script with Noly’s help of course, but I felt rather limited with my handle of the language and would have loved to be able to express myself more freely and completely but anyways, Nolz was also speaking so we had a tag team type of effort.
We spoke on the topic of rest and God’s purpose of the sabbath. When I was thinking beforehand on what I felt God maybe wanted us to talk on I felt a whole load of things come to mind on this topic and felt quite like this was the topic God wanted us to talk about. Then the day or so after I was listening to a Christian podcast (The Real Life Podcast, check it out if you fancy!) which happened to go into this topic so it just felt right.
Despite having it all written down I was still somewhat nervous to begin with. Typically, I thought we had material for maybe 15-20 mins but we were at the front for nearly an hour! Have always been an over-planner haha.
Another thing that happened recently at youth group which I don’t think I’ve gone into is that I gave a bit of a speech the other day! Twas the first youth group back after total lockdown and Cristian was asking for what we’d learnt or experienced over the lockdown and I felt like sharing my testimony of God’s faithfulness to me of late. Giving a long speech in a foreign language and being centre of attention for an extended amount of time is really quite a challenge for me and my voice was super shaky (Nolz said I sounded like I was going to burst into tears any second) but I managed it! Despite it being littered with errors haha.
Other than that, life’s just ticking along. Went out for dinner with Nolz for the first time in a while last week which was lush! We had to all be leaving the restaurant by 23:40 since places here have to be closed by midnight so was quite impressed that we got there at 23h and the food came and we finished before we had to leave.
Oh another thing actually, is that I’ve been getting headaches for about the last week 😔 I suspect it’s due to lack of sleep as I had quite a run of days when I didn’t get 8 hours sleep so I’m still recovering from that, but it’s not particularly very fun! So if you’re someone who prays, please be praying for me and my headaches. It’s also not helped by the fact that my day to day involves a lot of screen time…
The last thing I was gonna mention is that it seems like someone nearby me has recently picked up playing the piano as the other night I was drifting off to sleep with the sounds of a piano floating through my window which was really rather lovely! That, or someone nearby me was playing classical music really loudly haha. But it was really rather idyllic! It hasn’t happened again but I’m hoping it will!
Well pals, I shall leave it there for today. The observant among you may have noticed I now have a page on this blog for my book that I’ve written if you want to have a little nose or maybe a cheeky purchase and come to see me sometime in Salta. I shall also put the link in this blog post too in case you’re interested, so click here if you fancy a look! And if you do get a copy, let me know! It’s rather fun knowing people have it.
So if you read my last blog post, you may remember that I mentioned I’d be having a live radio interview with CNN Salta about my book and other bits and bobs.
Well, I had it last night! This time round I was super nervous but I was assured the questions would be easy and if I struggled, I could talk in English. Noly was beside me for moral support as well as to be a translator if I needed him to be.
Entering the building I felt all very intimidated. It was, obviously, very radio-y and profesh. We got there and they were doing a phone interview with some kind of important person about covid. Then off they went to an ad break etc and we were ushered in. In the interview they asked me a whole load of random things, but they started with the usual. Tell us about your book, where are you from, what are you up to in Argentina, how come you came here, what did you know about Argentina & Salta before you came etc. Then, they threw in some curveballs which I wasn’t quite expecting! Tell us about your experience of living abroad during an epidemic, before you came did you have any pre-conceptions about Argentinians, what with the Falklands and all, in what ways is Argentina different from your country economically speaking, socially speaking etc. Those kind of questions! They also asked Noly a few bits and bobs too, including whether we’d ever received any bad treatment as a couple what with me being from England, which was an interesting question! (And no, we haven’t if you’re wondering). So yeah, there were some big questions in there to try and answer on the fly! Plus the radio interviewer was a veeery rapid speaker (I suppose that comes with the territory) so I think I did well to keep up with what he was saying really!
Generally, I felt I expressed myself okay but not as well as on the TV interview, but Noly said it was great! So perhaps that’s just my impression because I was nervous and also got a bit stuck on one of the first questions when I was trying to explain something.
Well, there you have it! As far as I know, this was my last radio/tv interview situation for the moment haha! It’s quite funny though thinking about it, because when I was here on my gap year I actually did both of these things with team Argentina. Thank goodness my Spanish has improved since then! I remember last time being asked what sports I like (terrible question for me. I’m very sporty in the least). I panicked and said “me gusta el tennis”, which means “I like tennis”, at which point all the team looked at me baffled like, do you?! (Which, no, I do not). They then asked me if there was any particular player from England I supported at which point I squeaked “no!” which earned me another baffled look from my team as they mouthed “ANDY MURRAY GIRL, TALK ABOUT ANDY MURRAY” hahaha.
As per, here comes my pitch about my book… If you fancy having a nose or a cheeky little purchase click here. If you buy it through clicking the link in my blog I get some commission from it ya see.
If you’re interested in seeing my live radio interview you can find it on facebook here.
If you’re here in Salta, you may be able to guess where this blog post is going fairly quickly, but for those of you at home who haven’t heard the local news in Salta, bare with me if it seems like this post is throwing out random deets that don’t seem to be anything important. I’ll get to my point I promise!
So recently here, it was the winter holidays. Since this meant I actually had more than about 5 mins of spare time, I decided to get my haircut for the first time since February. With some trepidation, I went alone (for the first time in Argentina) to get my hair cut. If you’ve known me for a while you’ll probably know I’m not a fan of getting my haircut. My life goal is to have long hair, so anything that impedes this can be, at best, sad or at worst, traumatic.
Anyways, getting my haircut here actually tends to make me feel a bit of a goddess, since they always marvel at my hair. Here it’s very rare to have naturally “blonde” hair, so they always exclaim “is this your natural hair colour??! There’s no dye in it??! Really?!” which is always amusing and makes me feel v smug about my hair.
Well, I managed to express what I wanted and was actually quite pleased with the result!
Fast forward 5 days and I had my TV interview with the head of tourism which was all fun and games and exciting and great! Nolz and I returned to his house all full of beans and excitement from the morning. (Noly said he felt v proud of me, watching from the sidelines and said he felt like the equivalent of the ministers wife who supports from the side whilst the hubs is the one (generally) doing the stuff 😂) After an hour or two, however, this came to an unexpected end. As it was rumoured that one of the hairdresser’s from the hairdresser’s that I’d been to had tested positive for coronavirus.
Anyhow, the long and the short of it is that he wasn’t there when I was there and had been in quarantine for 12 days before I went to the hairdresser’s. But, because there was a small risk that his colleagues may have picked it up, Noly and I had to go into isolation and have the test to see if we had covid ((which, spoiler alert so noone worries, came back negative). After four days of self isolation we were advised by doctors that in fact we didn’t need to self isolate since the test came back as negative, we had no symptoms and the risk was low as we hadn’t had direct contact etc)
The test was really horrid. I was expecting a nice gentle little swab but no. I’m quite glad I can understand way more Spanish now otherwise I would have wondered what on earth was going on.
So yeah, it was such a weird series of events. A huuuuge high and then a sudden unexpected low followed by some days of self isolation in my flat. The most ridiculous thing, was that if me and Nolz had been positive, the minister of tourism for Salta would have had to go into self isolation. How embarrassing that would have been!!!
All in all though, it was quite well timed would you believe it with the whole interview sitch. The first day of self isolation I was on a big high post-interview as my blog views spiked massively and there were tonnes of articles uploaded online about me n my book and I was getting loads of messages and adds on social media etc! Then it was the weekend which I anticipated could be a bit hard but actually was okay and then my normal week started where I’m kept quite busy anyways.
Well anyways, just to reiterate I am very much fine and well and being careful with everything.
The other thing to tell you, is that I have been contacted by CNN Salta (who are part of CNN from Amercia!) who want to do a radio interview with me. Ha!! How crazy is that. It amused me greatly because the lady who messaged me said that the minister of tourism passed her my number. It’s just so funny that the minister of tourism for Salta has my number 😂 so yeah, I’m having a live radio interview on Monday which is just nuts but also super exciting and fun!
It’s a bit of a shame I don’t get royalties from my book (tho I do get a percentage of the sales if you buy through the links in my blog! Click here to have a nose) but just the fact of writing a book and having the book published is super cool, even without all this stuff! And these interviews and bits will undoubtedly help me and open doors so I’m super happy with how everything’s progressed!
So if you follow me on instagram or facebook, you may have picked up on the fact that something cool happened in the life of me yesterday! Before I get into it I would just like to clarify to all of you, and any new readers that are now reading my humble blog offerings, that the title I have written is very much tongue in cheek and I’d like to think that I’m not super big headed. Although I admit that I am feeling just a little bit famous right now.
To give you some back story, I recently wrote a travel guide in a series called Greater than a tourist on Salta. The idea of this series is that you have to have lived in the place you’re going to write about for more than 4 months and you have to give 50+ tips on how to have a holiday there where people will see the real place, not just that which is shown to the tourists. This was published on amazon in May and is available on digital devices and paperback (still gives me a thrill to say that!). Unfortunately I don’t get any royalties although if you buy through the links attached here then I should get a small percentage.
Anyways, word of my book got through to the minister of tourism for Salta and before I knew it there was an interview set up with him! When I admitted to Javier (my boyfriends dad) that I was a little nervous at having to speak in Spanish in an interview that was going to be on TV he assured me it wasn’t going to be filmed which I’m ever so glad he did or else I’m sure I probably would have had no sleep and heart palpitations haha.
After getting suited and booted, me and Nolz (acting in official translator capacity if needed) were ushered into Mario Peña(the minister of tourism in Salta)’s office to have an interview prior to the TV interview, where I explained the book series and the areas that I’ve written about in my book (cultural things to be aware of, food and drink that people have to try, places to visit etc) as well as the minister himself telling me about some projects they’re working on currently (apparently Argentina has about 700 different species of birds! Who knew?) and aspects of tourism that perhaps they’d like to improve on. I actually managed quite well with the Spanish and understood the majority of what was said. It passed me by slightly at the time because I was concentrating so much on everything that was going on but it was even suggested that perhaps, if I wanted to do a second book (!!!) they could take me to some places in Salta and help me with some further writing. I’m really excited about potentially doing this!! I absolutely love writing and I’ve been thinking recently, even before the interview, that perhaps I could try and do some bits in tourism since I would be able to visit some cool places as well as having something to offer in terms of being a native speaker who’s slowly getting more of a grasp with Spanish too. Or whether perhaps I could get involved in some more writing in my spare time.
Then without further ado in came the TV crew! I had a few minutes before we went live (lol what is my life that I’ve just written this sentence!) so had a lil chat with the interviewer which I was immeasurably grateful for since I knew the vague direction of where the interview would be going and thus thought I’d be okay to answer okay! Which I did more or less! I did make some mistakes but nothing (I don’t think and people have assured me) that would hinder people understanding what I was saying. In fact everyone who I’ve spoken to said I spoke well and they were proud of me! And to be honest, I’m quite proud of myself too, haha. I’ve watched it back and whilst it’s weird seeing myself speaking on TV in a different language, I didn’t really make any howlers mistakes wise, though looking back there are some bits I could have added to my answers. The funniest thing was, that as I was sitting there my phone kept buzzing away in my pocket. Afterwards I came out and looked at my phone and I had a whole load of messages from people who had seen me on the TV and were congratulating me haha.
Since then, I’ve been riding a wave of hilarity and bewilderment over the events of yesterday. I’ve had over 30 adds on social media, various private messages pinged over to me and a hearty number of people reading this blog, who have been directed to it through the governments news page who uploaded a post about my book and el tribuno which is a newspaper here, who also uploaded an online article. So I wanted to say, if you’re new to reading my blog posts, welcome and it’s great to have you!!
Well anyways, since the excitement of yesterday I’m feeling somewhat worn out. I think it’s time for me to settle down with some chocolate or perhaps a hot chocolate (I’ve finally worked out how to make an approximate equivalent to hot chocolate here!! That’s almost equally exciting as this whole TV schebazzle. Well, perhaps not quite, but it’s definitely up there), a film and a little nap. I shall leave you with a photo from yesterday and the link to the video incase you want to see me with my Spanish in action!
It’s quite funny looking at the proclamations I made when I was younger of what I said I would and wouldn’t do. Many things I said I would never, under any conditions, do. Predictably, I have now done all of these things I declared I wouldn’t do. Some at quite a frequency! God definitely has a sense of humour. Here are some of the things.
1. I said I’d never go outside of Europe. If you know me well, you may know I have a bit of a thing about vaccines and blood. Noly says he thinks I have a phobia which I initially instantly refused to believe but now (begrudgingly) I’m wondering if he might be right. I hate getting vaccines (which was my reason for not wanting to go further afield) and I cannae watch them happening in films or TVs. Even just thinking about them now is making me a bit twitchy.
2. Along similar lines (in terms of travel), I said I’d never go on an aeroplane on my own. By now I must have done at least 18 flights on my own (individual ones I’m talking about since I’ve come to Arg at least 6 times on my own (I think more times but I cant be bothered to work it out) over the last 5 years and there’s always three planes involved in these journeys).
This one really is funny looking back. When I was younger I could not comprehend what was going on at airports. They seemed completely baffling to me. How on earth did the adults know where we were going, what we needed to do and when and how on earth did we suddenly end up on a plane going to a foreign country? There seemed to be no rush for ages and then all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, we were inexplicably rushing somewhere to do something.
I think me being the baby of the family never helped since I never had to work it out myself and just blindly followed. I remember being completely bewildered when team arg (woop, shout out team Argentina 2k15) were navigating the airport’s that some of them seemed to actually know what they were doing.
Now I can see that it’s super easy and I’m not sure why I was so baffled 😂
3. Living alone. I never explicitly said I wouldn’t do this but I just never imagined I would. I always assumed I’d live with friends.
4. Similarly, living abroad! I could never have guessed that I would live, for any period of time, abroad in a different culture and language. When I first came to Arg on my gap year with Latin link, in the lead up to coming out here I had such itchy feet. I just really felt that I wanted to get out of my hometime Binfield for a while. Just didn’t know it would then lead to me spending the next 5 years (thus far!) living between the two countries!
5. Learning and speaking Spanish. Again, never said I wouldn’t but after learning French at GCSE I didn’t particularly have a yearning to learn another language and didn’t feel that I was especially gifted at languages (though I was in the gifted and talented scheme for French supposedly 😏). Now that I can communicate and get by, I really enjoy trying to speak Spanish. I enjoy the mistakes and what I most enjoy is trying to learn slang to slip into conversation, though it takes bravery to try and attempt to use it 😂
Those are all of mine but one from Nolz. He remembers, clearly, going to a Christian camp and they were talking about love and relationships etc. He said the speaker said “and then you know, you might find love with someone from a different country than yours”, to which he was inwardly like, pfft, what rubbish. Yet here we are!
So yeah! Those are all the things I said I would never do and since have ended up doing. Needless to say, now I’m rather careful with the things I proclaim I’m not gonna do..!
p.s. if you haven’t noticed me banging on about it, I recently wrote a guidebook for Salta! In fact it’s more than a guidebook (if I do say so myself), as well as having suggestions of places to go and food to eat whilst in Salta, there’s also tips on the culture here and various other nuggets of useful information. I find cultural differences endlessly fascinating! So even if you’re not intending to come to Salta any time soon, you might still find it interesting. Anyhows, if you’re interested you can buy it through amazon. Unfortunately I don’t get royalties from it but I do get a percentage of sales if you click on the following links to buy it so I shall put them here in case anyone is interested:
Nadia's Adventures 