Rainy BA 

Welcome friends and new readers from American Writers & Artists Institute!

Today is a rare rainy day here in Buenos Aires, a good day to reflect on what we’ve been doing and to bring you AWAI’ers up to speed…

We’ve been here two months and we’ve gotten pretty comfortable with things. Our business down here is starting to come together. Speaking of writers, we just hired one the other day, an unusual woman… unusual in that she’s been a longtime reader of our company’s publications… which gives her more understanding than most about who we are and what we do… and it also probably means that she’s one of those semi-nutty, introverted, odd-ball people who are always difficult to work with, but we’re used to that… :)

Her job will be to write a daily email newsletter in spanish about world markets and issues that interest the Latin American investor.

The big problem with this whole endeavor is that your editor, to his embarrassment, does not speak, read, or write competently in spanish… And during our two months here, to our greater embarrassement, we’ve made very little progress in our Castellano (Argentine spanish) skills. (We had to get rid of our spanish teacher when she couldn’t jive her schedule with ours…)

We’ve been preoccupied with the nitty-gritty of getting things started here… But the validity of that excuse may be fading.

Some of our family will be visiting soon and I’m sure they’ll expect us to be somewhat immersed in BA society… but they’ll find that we’re generally clueless as to what’s going on… Of course, the same was probably true in the US too…

Anyway, we’ll have to change our schedule and our priorities to make real progress in the adopted-tongue. But that’s something we’re determined, sooner or later, to do.

In the meantime we look forward to writing to you in the mother-tongue about the whole process… and keeping you updated on the goings on way south of the border…