Thursday, June 18

Today I started my day with bananas for breakfast, one of my favorite fruits I rarely get the pleasure of eating back in the states. We arrived at the school and for the first two hours, since we had no activities, we didn’t do anything. We just sat in the gym and cafeteria on our phones with nothing to do for two hours, which wasn’t the most enjoyable thing in the world. Afterwards we finally grouped up and left to head to our graffiti tour. We took the train from the school to a nearby neighborhood called Pallermo which was where our tour would begin. However before our tour began the others and I decided to spend some time at an empty playground roughly 50 feet away from our starting point and it was a fantastic experience being able to be a kid again swinging on swings for a solid 5 minutes. After our playground excursion, the tour finally began and after it had concluded I can confidently say that this was my favorite tour in all of Argentina thus far. We learned a lot about many different artistic designs/styles and we got to see dozens of different and unique pieces that had some truly amazing stories attached to them. Here I’ve left the graffiti I found the most interesting whether based on their design, artist, style or story/significance. One of my personal favorite ones is the Messi mural and the cultural significance and impact it has on Buenos Aires and more specifically all of the grandmothers of Argentina. And a very special moment for me was learning that our tour guide, named Juan, is an actor that mainly does acting for the stage but is in the process of finalizing a short film that he wrote. And throughout the tour we would have pockets of time to talk about our respective interest and experiences as an actor and it was a set of very productive conversations in which I took a lot of helpful information from that and I do wish I had more time to learn about his experiences and any wisdom he could share but in the time we had I walked away thankful and happy that I learned some new things I hadn’t learned previously. After our trip we all went to a restaurant to have lunch. I personally got a ribeye steak with fries and it was up to par with the top tier quality of food in Argentina. After our restaurant stop we headed back to the school under the assumption we would have free time but, controversially, we had an English class visit added to our schedule. So we visited the 7th grade English class and played some games with them so we all could know more about each other. They asked us questions, we played games like two truths and a lie, one word sentence starters, (essentially where everyone receives one transition word and they are to create a sentence with that word and the group’s purpose is to create a coherent story with the transition words provided and the sentences they created on the spot, it's similar to improv.) and we did some drawing activity to end the class. Lastly we had to do service at a nursing home and our service was to help the senior citizens play Bingo using common Spanish idioms and numbers. And overall the service, although short, was a great experience, from what I heard from the others they enjoyed being able to engage with the people despite the difficulties that were presented in the language barrier. And to close off the long day of events we all returned to our respective homes with our host brothers, and I was able to rest for the remainder of the night allowing myself to read some of the many screenplays I’ve written before I finally fell asleep. 

-Aiden F.