a day for love

February 14, 2006

Happy Valentines Day to one and all. In Argentina this is el dia de los enamorados and for such a decidedly Catholic country there is decidedly less emphasis on Saint Valentine and decidedly more emphasis on the frenzied purchasing of chocolates and flowers. Buenos Aires is more like America every day.

On Friday Paul and I took an sweaty, half-hour bus ride from behind the Casa Rosada along the coast to Tierra Santa (the Holy Land), which proclaims itself “The World’s ONLY Religious Theme Park.” There are big wooden gates and a sign outside that states: VISITE JERUSALEN EN BUENOS AIRES TODO EL AÑO or Visit Jerusalem in Buenos Aires all year! Unbelievable. And not a little bit terrifying. It costs us US$3 and we’re in the park which is paved with sand, spattered with faux palm trees, and dotted with life-size statuettes of biblical times. Under the blazing summer sun in the city, I feel like I might as well be out in the desert of the Middle East.

So close your eyes. Picture Disneyland. Now subtract all the obvious fun like rollercoasters and rides. Now replace Mickey Mouse with Jesus. At this point you have got to be coming pretty close to the Tierra Santa Vibe. Walking around you can choose from the variety of shows. Don’t linger to long in “The Creation” or you’ll miss “The Resurrection” which involves and 18 meter Jesus emerging from a hilltop. Don’t worry too much about the view. The Resurrection of Jesus is visible no matter where you are in the park! Paul says that in some ways he’s always been curious to visit the real Holy Land but wasn’t excited about the prospect of never seeing Syria again after going to Israel. He’s pumped. Now he doesn’t have to bother. He’s seen it all for himself. He’s also excited about learning about the bible which I had to do both in public school and in church in Scotland. Chris Rock famously says of the GED: “You mean I can make up four years in 6 hours? Where to I sign up?!” I think Paul more than made up for 27 years of Religious Education in our few hours at Tierra Santa. In the spirit of Christianity, Tierra Santa lets you borrow cameras to use in the park – for free! When you leave you just get charged for the photos.

Highlights include: eating French fries next to a replica of the wailing wall, strolling the streets of Jerusalem where a life-size figure in flogging Jesus who is shackled to a Roman-style column (my lunch is not sitting well), hotdogs for sale next door to the mosque. I have included some photos but really you have to see the place to believe it. One of the last things we do is clamber to the top of the mountain where Jesus is resurrected. From here you can see that Tierra Santa is surrounded by an airport, a driving range, and a waterpark. Good times. I have added some photos to prove I was really in this place. Paul immediately went home and wrote an (brilliant) article about it and sent it off. Neither of us could properly digest the magnitude of what we had seen.
Outside waiting for the bus back into the city, my dad calls our cell phone just to say hello. The evening before I managed to trip on the phone cord and rip phone and cord out of the wall of the apartment rendering all totally useless. He says something about saying hello, “from the Good Land to the Holy Land” and I laugh for some time about it.

On Saturday we take the bikes for a spin down in Puerto Madero. Sandwiched between warehouses that have been converted into multi-million dollar apartment projects is a giant ecological reserve. We cruise around on the bikes. It’s a nice green departure from the city. There are people running, walking, biking, napping on benches, wading in the cocoa colored water on the coast, crisping up in the sun, and generally enjoying the summertime. In parts, the greenery and garden smell remind me of the tropical plants in Hawaii. The ecological reserve is a cool spot which will be made even cooler I’m sure when summer burns off and there are fewer people around. Outside the reserve we eat hamburgers (best hamburgers in the world) and watch a game of pick-up tennis. Paul says he’s never seen such a thing. All around there are markets, volleyball, tennis, bicycles, food stands, dancing, and music. Every door in the city unfolds into a marketplace. You could spend years here missing all the nooks and crannies of the place. It’s like at every turn there is a city within a city within a city like those Russian dolls.

We stroll Avenida Corrientes later with its Broadway lights and sounds. We eat dinner and a completely delicious and entirely deserted Korean restaurant. The place is very sad. We are the only customers. The food is not cheap but it’s pretty damn good. Is it a bad time? A bad day? The restaurant Bi Won will certainly not live long like this. The restaurant business seems a fickle one in Buenos Aires.

Sunday we strolled down to San Telmo just in time to see the markets closing down for the evening. It was a bummer to miss the bustling Sunday markets but San Telmo is a bevy of cool old building facades and streets folding over buildings that fold over hallways into a maze of back door things to see and do. We find a café with WiFi and I put it on my checklist to come and download ‘Lost’ episodes here. We find a British Pub that serves fish and chips. We have a seat in a park to take a look at a church with a rooftop like the Taj Majal and on one side and a group of Capoiera (sp?) dancers with drums and voices and on the other side of us we are listening to a man sing Bo Diddley in Spanish. The sounds of the city are pretty amazing. San Telmo is cool and begs to be explored further.

Yesterday we took the subway up to Chinatown. Chinatown in Buenos Aires is a couple of blocks of restaurants and Chinese shops. We had read in the Lonely Planet Buenos Aires that if you blink you could miss it, and they are not kidding. We head up there because the book says that it livens up for Chinese New Year and is worth checking out and goes on to state that Chinese New Year, 2006 will be observed on February 13th. When we get there, the place is dead. There are maybe 2 out of the 6 or 8 restaurants open and a few tables on the street selling Buddhas and those waving cat toys. Paul inquires about the festivities for Chinese New Years. They were two weeks ago. The book is now affectionately and exclusively referred to as, “el pinche Lonely Planet”.

It’s one of those days where I’m so hot and exhausted and drained that walking just feels like dragging a corpse around. I think that just every few days or so things build up to the point that I’m paralyzed by the weather. It seems equally difficult for Paul to be around me when I feel like that as it is for me to feel like that. A Scottish girl in South America is a completely unnatural thing. He tells me kindly that it is painful for him to move so slowly. Paul started training at one of the teaching academies this morning which will continue for the next week or so. He has a class to teach tonight directly after his training so I can spend the day at my own pace, without holding anyone back or being a burden and that feels good. As the summer melts away things will get easier I think.

When I was at my limit of fatigue and hunger and thirst, it was 7:30pm in Palermo Viejo (a ritzy, rhetro, cobblestoned neighborhood). 7:30 in the evening is just too early for dinner for a porteño with all the eateries around opening at 8 or 8:30. We stumble into Bar 6, the only place we find open and eat the best meal that the city has offered so far (empanadas are always excluded since they now fit their own category). We sit and talk for hours upstairs in a building that looks like an old airplane hanger that’s been remodeled into this chic, fancy bar. I get some of my life back just in time to go to bed and wake up at the crack of dawn to see Paul off to his teacher’s training.

So as I sit here writing this I am waiting for the cleaners who need to be let into the ultra-secure building. I was feeling nervous last night about more forced interaction but I stumbled my way through a conversation with Martín this morning (the son of the owner of our apartment) and successfully answered the doorbell to the delivery man when he arrived with a package for Paul. In seems insane to write this that these things would chill me with fear to my very core but it’s the truth. I am terrified to do things. Paul is constantly pushing me to do more but if we are together and I try to say something, he unconsciously talks over me so that whoever we’re talking to knows at least one of us speaks Spanish… properly. The intimidation level of tiny interactions has not melted yet. I am casually looking for informal Spanish classes and promising to study my Spanish book at least one hour per day. Paul says I am getting better at the 2 Spanish tenses that I know. Then he tells me there are 16 to learn. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. There’s still a long road ahead. When I feel homesick though there are movies in English, instant messenger at the internet store, iced coffee in Palermo, and parents at the end of a phone. I know I’ll be fine so those of you with money on less than a month are going to be sorely disappointed.

Paul stepped in a giant, steaming pile of dogshit yesterday. I tried not to laugh but it sort of slipped out. I don’t feel quite so alone anymore.