la americana estupida

here's the breakdown of la familia inchauspe, the family that i am living with:
marcela, the mom
santiago, married with three kids
pepe, engaged
ines, engaged
luis, a law student
biche, an economics student
gonzalo, my age

there's also another american student living here, mitch, so it's a crowded house, but it's a lot of fun. on sunday, everyone came over for empenadas. we were eating and talking about a politically contentious topic, the taxes that the argentine government is trying to put on all of the country's imports and exports. the family has 2 big farms, so they've been talking about this a lot. well, right in the middle of a lot of yelling and hand waving, pepe, blurts out, "well, ana and i are getting married!" everyone paused, and marcela asked, "en serio?", pepe said yes, and everyone jumped up and down and said felicitaciones!

so i was relaying this incident to mitch on monday when we were getting coffee, and he was very excited. we got back to the apartment and were hanging out in the living room with marcela, biche, ines, and mitch asked ines, "so is pepe getting married?" ines's eyes got very big and she said "no, no, no, i'm getting married." my heart started racing. my spanish isn't that great, but is it really THAT bad? how could i have misunderstood the whole situation? weren't they talking about un anillo, a ring? i was mortified. biche asked mitch, "who told you pepe was getting married?", to which i answered, "oh...i guess i didn't understand correctly..." then the subject was dropped.

so last night at dinner, marcela and luis started talking about pepe's wedding. mitch kept looking at me, and then listening to the conversation, and i was just getting more and more confused. finally he asked, "so is pepe getting married or not?" and luis said "oh! yeah!" we relayed what happened on monday and luis said, "oh, that was becuase biche doesn't know yet and pepe wants to tell her himself! so ines just blamed mitch's question on ellen's confusion...biche still doesn't suspect a thing!"

this was a HUGE relief to hear--i'm not a totally stupid american. even if ines did use my "she cant really understand what's happening" status to keep biche unawares. as long as i'm not going crazy!

this picture is me and beth from a walking tour we had of the city. the statue is the monument to the spaniards in palermo.
beso y abrazos!

ps. last night, we toasted to barack obama, and our waiter joined in.