things are getting pretty interesting.

hola again! two posts in two days. first time that's happened i think. woohooo.

But i feel like i must address the turn of events that have occurred in Buenos Aires over the past five days.

First: Sunday was the election here. Cristina Kirchner has been the president here since the election of 2007, and the president before her was her husband, Nestor, who only stayed on for one term and gave support to his wife during the election. Her popularity, due to a variety of reasons, is in the twenties now which is really bad. These are midterm elections in which only members of the Congress and not the President compete. As a result of Sundays vote, the President's party, who had a majority of both houses of their congress, lost a lot. Now, the other party has a majority or maybe plurality of the lower house and her party lost tons of seats in the upper house. Anyways, to top it all off, her husband, the ex-president, was running for a seat to represent Buenos Aires, but he lost by like three points to his opponent, which everyone has said has destroyed his plan to come back to run for president (for his second term) in 2011.

But during the elections the government told everyone who was voting (because voting is mandatory here) to wear masks when they go to the polls. At some point in teh past week, Buenos Aires declared a state of emergency.

On my way to my UCA final yesterday, I saw a great amount of people wearing masks and I started thinking, why is everyone wearing masks now, gripe (flu) has been around forever. but then i found out that apparently it's gotten worse in buenos aires/argentina - not to worry for my trip to brasil, provided they let me in- and that more people are now worried about getting it in Argentina. America has had many many more cases of the gripe. And, so many of those people wearing the masks had no problems with touching the poles and hte seats in the Subway system, so i really do not think that a mask is really going to give them that much protection. I don't really believe that a mask gives that much protection from this anyways, or that this flu is actually as huge of a problem here as they make it out to be.

But anyways, last night I started hearing all these rumors about schools being shut down in Buenos Aires, and I was wondering what would happen to us. Keep in mind that I've finished four of my five classes and my last class is not a direct enrollment, I have to give a short presentation in my Spanish language class on Monday for my final. But now the University that houses htat class as well as all the other universities are shut down. As of this afternoon. Which is really crazy! Anyways I should be getting information on how to do this last presentation pretty soon, but theres another catch. Apparently GUMail is shut down for this weekend, which doesnt really affect most students who are on summer break, but unfortunately, my gumail is the main one for most of my abroad activities, so if i get important emails about whats going on for the program here, i might have problems actually receiving them! What a week!

In really good news, I got the results of my econ/history exam from yesterday! I got a 10, which is the highest grade that you can get here, so i'm really excited!