Tag Archives: buenos aires

Language Hacking Challenge

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Speaking lots of Spanish at Spanglish
Speaking lots of Spanish at Spanglish

A week without speaking English? Is it possible?

Last week we reviewed the Language Hacking Guide by Benny Lewis from Fluent in 3 Months. Reading the guide changed our attitude to our Spanish learning and we realised we needed to step up our game. In the last week we’ve been doing our own 7 Day Language Hacking Challenge where we’ve tried out many of the techniques in the guide.

These are the main areas we have focused on:

No English!

To learn another language quickly, the Guide advised us to stop speaking our native language so for this week our aim was to speak to each other in Spanish as much as possible and to try not to let conversations revert back to English with other people.

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Photo of the Week: Mass Pillow Fight

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Buenos Aires mass pillow fight

On Easter weekend in Buenos Aires we avoided the churches and instead headed to our first Flash Mob event. Hundreds of porteños (residents of the city) met up at the Planetarium in Palermo for a mass pillow fight. Great fun!

The Never Ending Dinner

by | Published:
27
argentinean-wine

For Erin’s birthday we treated ourselves to a sumptuous meal at Sette Bacco Italian restaurant in Recoleta, Buenos Aires. As soon as we stepped in the door, I felt my wallet lighten considerably. This place was classy.

I was wearing hiking shoes.

Despite that, the Maître d’ was warm and welcoming and seated us in a lovely spot on the roof terrace, perfumed delicately by the rosemary plants dotted about. There were candles everywhere and my napkin was bigger and thicker than my travel towel. Feeling that this place might be very, very expensive (as opposed to just very expensive), I had a surreptitious check of our cash situation.

Not good. Less than A$200.

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Top 10 Foods to Eat in Buenos Aires That Are NOT Steak

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31
Medialunas y Facturas
Medialunas y Facturas

Buenos Aires is the steak capital of the world, so we were a little worried about how we’d get on as vegetarians. Our fears were quickly eased on our first day when Simon sniffed out a local bakery and came back with a pile of sugary doughnuts, sticky medialunas and dulce de leche filled pastries – all for just 7 pesos (about £1).

OK, so it may not make a nutritious, healthy meal but it was gooood.

Things got even better in the coming days as we discovered some wonderful Buenos Aires vegetarian restaurants and some tasty Argentine snacks. These are our top food choices in Buenos Aires for vegetarians or for those just looking for a break from great slabs of beef.

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Cheap & Useful Resources for Learning Spanish

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15
Simon practicing his Nepali with Gopal, our guide in the Himalayas
Simon practicing his Nepali with Gopal, our guide in the Himalayas

In preparation for our South America journey we’ve been learning Spanish for the last six months. As we were saving for our trip we didn’t want to pay out for expensive classes (we’d rather spend the money on lessons here in Buenos Aires) so we used a number of free language learning resources. Most of these tips can apply to all languages, not just Spanish, so if you want to learn a language then why not give these a go?

Pimsleur Language Program

Pimsleur is actually an expensive course to buy, but we borrowed ours from the local library. It’s a comprehensive audio-only course consisting of three levels each with 30 x 30 minute lessons, one per day. It’s very easy to fit the lessons into your life as you can listen to them while you commute to work, do the washing up, or walk the dog.

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