According to Sheri: Yankees de Mierda

Otro blog de la columnista estrella de YaVeremos.
Proximamente: el club de fans de Sheri.

Yankees de Mierda

My "editor" told me that my next blogging assignment is to write about "stupid things that Americans do here in Argentina." Now, I'm not sure if he realizes that I am the queen of doing stupid things no matter what country I'm in, this being said, clearly I have done my share of stupid things here in Argentina. So I'm wracking my brain trying to think of things in general that we (gringos/yankees) do here that probably seems stupid to Argentineans.

There are a couple of really obvious stupid things that yankees do when they are come to Argentina, like as eat a McDonald's or pay entirely too much for the artesan stuff at Plaza Francia just because its obvious they are foreigners with money.
Another thing that Yankees who have been here for a while tend to do when they speak the language is pick up on the slang. When you are learning a new language you are like a baby all over again, you basically just start to copy what you hear and use it in situations where you've heard it used before. Sometimes foreigners don't know exactly what some words mean, but they use them anyway just because they hear them used so often. A priceless example happened just the other day when I was trying to say in Spanish that I had a good time somewhere. I have heard the phrase "me cago de risa" numeras times when people are saying that something was fun or that they had a really good time. I just so happened to choose to say this phrase for the first time in my "Spanish for foreigners" class. After I said it the professor, who is very cool and laid back, just laughed really hard. Later I found out that although I had used the slang correctly, the exact translation for "me cago de risa" is "I shit myself laughing".

Well, its a good thing I'm not much of a lady anyway, otherwise I would have been extremely embarrassed.

My advice to fellow yankees in Argentina: Save the McDonald's for when you are drunk at 4am back in the states and there is nothing else open, and save the slang for your native language, cause you're never going to sound cool or even normal when speaking foreign language anyway.