the schlep is on

Buenos Aires de mi corazón. It's been a few weeks on the road with surprisingly little looking back. I am missing my neighbor Margarita's empanadas. I am missing a place that feels like home and a bed that feels like mine. I miss my girls that made me feel I had a family wherever I landed. I am happy to be on the road again and feeling that every day is a new adventure. I am wondering when I will see the streets of Buenos Aires again and whether I'll see them again. I am reeling that my last sights of the city were from the back of a cab, lights on Corrientes ablaze, muddied with tears.

We are blogging over at the thebigschlep about some of the adventures of our overland journey from Buenos Aires to Santa Barbara so please go and read it. In the meantime this page will be mildly out of commission save for future reflections. Thanks one and all for visiting.

are you being served?

Winding down to take off time in Buenos Aires means a flurry of visiting new places as well as a rush to try to revisit all the old favorites. My continued non-smoking campaign is taking me on daily long walks to new and old corners of the Capital Federal, and mostly in search of food. Last weekend was a major stockpiling at Carlito's Tuesday was a stop in Barrio Chino for spicy fried noodles and soup, and yesterday it was a trip to Rocket Bar and Bistro downtown just a few blocks from the Casa Rivadavia, our first home in Buenos Aires where we found an old friend (pictured here) behind the bar.

For me, one of the most enjoyable thing about living in a city is finding the city secrets. In London where the mighty pound can slash through a credit card limit in the blink of an eye, I felt a huge sense of victory when I found an amazing hole-in-the-wall pasta take-out with dishes to die for at prices you wouldn't believe. Although the cuisine here in general is much cheaper and generally yummy, it's relatively unvaried and there is a beaten path of over-stuffed gringos wherever you go. When you find interesting, ethnic, spicy, or creative food here at reasonable prices that are accessible and tourist-free, you gotta jump on it. Why is it that when you leave a city, you miss the food the most? Usually when I think of home I think of family, Mexican food, and swimming in the ocean... in that order.

¡Que coman!

Maybe it's the chilly winter weather, maybe it's the fact that I am working out regularly again, maybe it's the fact that my panza has grown to a panzota over the last year, maybe it's the blurbs I am writing about food over at One Sorry Blog, who knows what it is exactly? But I have food on the brain. Good, fresh, wholesome, nourishing, home cooked food on the brain. I sit here now with Mexican rice and Chipotle chicken (thanks, Bubba Ray) and love life, love winter, love delicious plates of hot food. So without further ado, here are some of my favorite people doing some of my favorite things. I wish you all good soups and stews this winter or good salads and smoothies if the sun is shining where you are. I have to remind myself to be thankful for one of life's most essential luxuries.

when good gringos go bad

Heather and Taylor joined us in the middle of Friday morning's thunderstorm. I promptly spent a day tromping around the city in wet socks and shoes (which I am convinced is responsible for my fever chills and scratchy throat this morning) and feeling like I was in high school all over again. They have spent most of the weekend on the Sarah Howell tour of Buenos Aires and celebrating Sarah's birthday in proper worldly style - with food and friends.



Paul and I did our very best to entertain by whisking the group to Carlitos, a Peruvian restaurant in the heart of Almagro. We ordered up a Peruvian favorite, Papa a la Huancaina, and giant plates of rotisserie chicken, french fries, and fresh salads. We ate ourselves sick until our final dish arrived an hour after we ordered it, and an hour after we were assured that the waiter forgot about it.



I had to include the photo of what was left of the table after Taylor, Sarah, and Paul were finished with the beef noodle dish. This, my friends, is what happens when typically good, well-mannered gringos are confronted with piles and piles of delicious Peruvian delicacies.

Empanaditas

My one and only, Paul Rivas, has started a blog just to bite me! After a year of various blog jokes, he has thrown in the towel and decided to see for himself what all the fuss is about. Like I told him, he'll be on MySpace in no time. Check him out at One Sorry Blog - great domain, and not just a clever name. It is indeed, pretty sorry.

The thing that will make his blog work better than mine ever has or ever will is his total dedication to sloth. Within 24 hours of setting up his own blog, he realized he could never maintain it on his own and has since recruited all sorts of weirdos to contribute on a regular basis. The result will be a sort of e-zine on a variety of topics. I decided to help him out and write a gringa's guide to cooking for him. You can check out my first rant about the wonder that is the empanada by clicking this link.

I hope you continue to check out One Sorry Blog, as well as mine which doesn't have as much going for it, or a cool name but is written with love. And I hope people reading sack up and leave more comments! Tell me how much I suck - I need to hear it once in a while.

me da bronca

Maria France writes in Bad Times in Buenos Aires, “That morning I had nipped out to buy a pair [of tights], not yet having learned that in Argentina nothing could be nipped our for; even fast food was slow. I had ended up in a special hosiery boutique looking on as a beautiful and disdainful woman produced individual pairs of tights in different shades and deniers from tiny drawers. The tights were expensive and they were already leg-shaped, which I found a fascinating novelty, but when I got my pair out of the packet at home, the exuded a forceful scent of Parma violets. There was nothing to be done about it now; I resigned myself to an evening spent apologizing for my legs.”

How true it is. I spent the good part of a year feeling like an American consumerist slut longing for my bygone days whipping through the SuperTarget in Oxnard buying everything I needed under one roof and throwing countless more items in my cart for good measure. What’s an extra $50 in crap you don’t need when you get everything you do need simultaneously?

It’s true that nothing in Buenos Aires can be nipped out for. Invariably, if you live in Buenos Aires there is a chino, or Chinese owned grocery store, down the block for emergencies, but you can’t shop there for everything you need and they give you candy instead of change because of the ever-mythical moneda crisis. The big supermarket is usually 10 blocks away. The big supermarket is where you can find all your groceries and they have groovy names like Disco, Eki, Coto, and Norte which give a false sense of shopping time fun. Going to the supermarket in Buenos Aires generally takes no less than 2 hours and you can get everything there provided they still have bread, milk, and other items that are constantly missing from the shelves for a plethora of vague reasons. Invariably there is one person in line in front of you with a cart full of meat. I have never figured out who these people are feeding. Are they buying a thousand pesos worth of meat for a restaurant? Are they raising lions and tigers in their backyard? It’s still a mystery but the one person in line in front of me adds one hour to my supermarket experience every week. Then I have to wait while the only-one-step-from-comatose-sleep checker wipes the conveyer belt with a bloody rag where the meat juice has been running everywhere. Tasty. Yup, really get my apples right in the blood. Nice.

BA does have its version of the SuperTarget in the form of the Jumbo and French-owned Carrefour – two stores where you can get everything from peanut butter to canned jalapeños. These are generally miles away and require a half day-long investment in you precious city time. Chinatown has everything exotic too but most people don’t live anywhere near there.

There are other options. The best bread comes from the bakery and the tastiest fruit comes from the bolivianos faithfully littered around the city every couple of blocks. The best meat comes from the butcher shop and… so on. Combine this with the chino and you almost have everything you need for good eating in Argentina. Now, however, you have at least 4 stores on your list and another several hours invested. Make no mistake, the meat is the best in the world.

I just try to use this as explanation for why my blog goes neglected for long periods of time, why I generally haven’t spoken to my family for weeks at a time, why I am always behind in my workload, and why the women of Wysteria Lane have no idea what desperate really means. Call me on my cell phone. I have hours free everyday in the line at the super.