vecinos, ruido y oscuridad

This week already seems a bit nuts. It started out with a tormenta gigante that swept through the city on Sunday leaving us without electricity for a day and a half and living our Monday in the 19th century. For us, it was a relatively non-event. I spent the morning cleaning and re-cleaning all the floors of the water that had flooded in from the outside, then washing and re-washing the towels that I had used to clean the floors, then throwing out rotting food from the decorative refrigerator, using the outage as the perfect excuse to defrost our freezer that needs defrosted approximately every two weeks anyway. By early afternoon I was losing to myself at Solitaire, 75 pages into my novel En El Tiempo de Las Mariposas (the most I think I've ever read in Spanish), and wistfully imagining myself a modern day Emily Dickinson, writing by candlelight and composing future masterpieces.

Around 10pm the serious levels of bronca started to set in and the porteños became ornery as porteños are like to do. We thought it would be a perfect opportunity to visit our favorite Almagro restaurant, Carlitos, but we stepped into the street to quite a scene. The moment we stepped outside, we experienced a protest tactic that I had previously only read about in Bad Times in Buenos Aires by Miranda France. It started as a giant banging from a single balcony. It sounded like someone pounding a wooden spoon against a giant metal pot. It grew... to a fever pitch. We scurried away from the noise and on to the bus. 10 minutes later we were safe in the folds of our restaurants watching the bronca unfold on the televisions. All of our neighbors lined up in our usually quiet corner of South Almagro, banging pots, yelling, holding up traffic, and making mischief... all in the name of the government turning their lights back on. Fair enough the day without lights left most of the businesses in our neighborhood paralyzed for a day. In Buenos Aires, a day's earnings are no small potatoes. Ultimately, the neighbors did well taking their protest to the streets as deep into the night, the lights flared back up with a vengeance and now our fridge is running like a champ again.

Despite the ruckus, I dearly cherish our neighborhood and neighbors. The top photo is of our two next door neighbors Estella and her mother Margarita. They sleep Burt and Ernie style in beds 6 inches apart, are constantly force-feeding me empanadas, pickled eggplant, cakes, tartas, and mate (I blame them entirely for my weight-gain), and they call me linda and tell me I speak good Spanish. On this particular evening the stayed out watching tango until 5am (as all good porteños do) and I had to take a picture as Margarita is clearing wearing a wig (this hair came out of nowhere). The first photo is our precious Felipe, el vago, who jumps through our roof every morning like clockwork. He's quite spry for an old kitty.

I am deep into the dark forest of learning the past and conditional usage of the subjunctive. Level 5 Spanish at UBA generally just gives me a headache these days despite wonderful teachers and endlessly entertaining classmates. My favorite is the Brazilian girl who speaks Portuguese the entire time. I expect she is just hoping our professor was dropped on her head as a small child and won't notice. Bright and early on Friday, Heather and Taylor arrive for their whirlwind spin through the city. I am honing up my empanada and panqueque skills for their visit.

The news of the week is that Mary and Roger, my parents who drove me to write great literature (take that how you will), are braving Buenos Aires for a SECOND TIME and coming to visit in July. I feel very loved to have parents that will fly all the way to Latin America to see me. Maybe they are coming to see the glaciers, the penguins, or the falls, but I feel loved anyway. It makes me wonder, how far on the globe I would have to go for no one to follow me there? Is actually possible, in this day and age, to fall off the map? How lucky am I to have a family that will come and see me, no matter how far into the heart of darkness I go? I am, in so many ways, a lucky, lucky girl.