I was invited to a party put on by some of my neighbors. Vintners, horse breeders, ranchers, farmers, and the like. An interesting group. Rich, sophisticated, the local upper crust; I'd only met perhaps a third of them before that evening. It turns out that most of them get together weekly, at one estancia or another, and have an exotic asado cum drinking party. I served as this week's center of attention and entertainment.

It was different from similar parties I've been to in Buenos Aires in that everyone here was speaking Spanish, with a smattering of English. In BA, the conversation at a dinner table is typically multilingual—Spanish, English, French, German, and Italian can all be used.

People were patient with me, understanding that Americans, among their other faults, generally lack linguistic sophistication. My French (now rusty and affreux) is still better than my Spanish, mainly because I went to school for a year in Switzerland. My German is even worse, even though the 500 basic English words are all German cognates.