One week of classes down, interesting mishap

In the following story, I promise everyone is completely sober, although you might not believe it.

So I´m at the residence with my mixed group of European friends, and the metro is about to close. So I get up to leave, and everyone tells me, "no, stay, we´re all having a good time." My Argentinian friend (Cata) has a double room but no roommate, so she says it´s no problem at all for me to use her extra bed. So, I accept and we all continue talking. I met an American speech pathologist who had a bunch of interesting travel stories, and he and I traded stories for quite a while. So Cata says she´s going to bed, but no hurry, whenever I was ready to go to sleep just go in, room 407, and the bed closer to the door was mine, and she´ll leave the keys in the door. So an hour or two later, I go up the fourth floor, I see the keys she´s talking about, but they´re in room 404. I was pretty sure she said 407, but there were definitely no keys in room 407. So, I walk in, see my empty bed next to the door, and without turning on the lights see curly hair coming out of the covers on the other bed. Also, she´s a very artsy type, and the wall has artsy film posters and a lot of handmade things that were very fitting for her. So, I go to bed.

I wake up, somewhat blury-eyed from sleeping in my contacts, and see an Italian girl standing at the foot of my bed. She waves, and I look around, and realize I am very much not in Cata´s room. So I very hastily explain what happened, and we both laughed quite a bit at the odds of Cata forgetting to leave the keys in the door, the Italian (Danila, of all names) leaving the keys in the door, and the fact that hers was a double room, with the bed near the door unoccupied. Apparently, when she woke up and yawned, I yawned in reply, and she thought, "oh, that´s my room- wait, I don´t have a roommate!" and then got up, got her keys off her desk (that I had put there) and goes downstairs to eat breakfast. I thanked her for not macing me, and she said she figured that if I were going to rob her, I probably wouldn´t have stayed the night.

What are the odds?

I avoided getting ripped off (mom, if you remember the taxi ride in Greece back to the ship, it should sound familiar) by a taxi driver here: My Chilean roommate (Tomas) and I are coming back to the apartment after a big "fiesta para extranjeros" (literally: foreigner party) and the only cash I´ve got left is about the equivalent of $40US. The ATM decided my accent and look weren´t enough to mark me as a foreigner. So, I know what the taxi driver is going to do, and I say, "I´ve only got a larger bill, do you have change?" He says yes, but decides to try his scam anyways. The cab ride was 2900 pesos, and the bill I had was 20,000. So I give him the 20, and magically there´s a 1,000 in his hand. He says, "it´s 2900." And I say, "I can see that, and I gave you 20,000. So, you owe me about 17,000." He waves the 1000 again, and I say "It´s completely impossible that I gave you a 1000. I only had one large bill, and I told you that." So He says "Oh, yes, this is part of your change. And then gives me the 17,000." I figured I´d let him save face and I just said, "Oh, of course, I misunderstood." Meanwhile, Tomas had no idea what was going on, but after I told him that he was trying to rip me off, he realized how the scam works.

As far as my classes go, it seems like I picked pretty good ones going along with my goal of learning business Spanish. After two classes of accounting and one of ethics, I´ve already got a decent amount of vocabulary in those areas. My other two classes, management and Spanish, haven´t started yet.

The apartment is working out great, but it´s really, really cold.