When in Buenos Aires...

speak like a porteño. And by that I mean saying things like:

• ¡Ciao! - an "adiós" will get you a really weird look, but come on...where do they think we are, Italy?
• dale - is used at the end of nearly every sentence, and none of us knew what the hell people were saying until we realized it basically just means "okay, cool."
• ¿y vos? - the same thing as "and you?" except they just haaaaave to be different and use vos. Vos = tu, but tu ≠ vos. Get it? Yeah, me neither.
• Che - just a way of saying "hey" or "hey you!" Everyone is "Che" in Argentina, and that's also why Ernesto "Che" Guevara got his nickname. When he was in Cuba chilling with Castro he went around calling everyone "che" and they probably thought, "this guy talks like a jackass, let's point out his weirdness", thus giving him his popular name, much like that one red-headed kid you know who is forever referred to as "ginger".

and my personal fave:

• ¡qué bárbaro! - which literally translate to "how barbaric!" but is just their way of saying "that's fucking awesome!"

I'm becoming an avid fan of the piropos (pick-up lines) they use here; in Buenos Aires it is considered a form of art. They get pretty innovative, especially when it comes to catcalling on the street. It's almost enough to make one overlook the fact that the people doing the catcalling are usually old men or construction workers. Nevertheless, it's not everyday in the U.S. that you get called "reina del sol" (sun queen) whilst walking to class, or have a line from a song sung to you from across the street: "un abrazo eterno..." American men: take note.

They don't speak spanish here, they speak castellano... but their own particular version of it. They tend to pick up slang from Britain rather than the U.S. too, so everything I say sounds a little too Mexican to belong in their sophisticated vocab. They also don't always pronounce the "s" at the end of words, therefore "buenas noches" becomes something like "buenoche." I think they're just being lazy.

*Side note: according to Wikipedia, there are about 9,000 words used in the Buenos Aires region that aren't used/understood in any other spanish-speaking area. No wonder I'm so damn confused all the time.