transitions

February 8, 2006

Days are starting to pass here now rather than hours. I’m in a strange transition where I wake up at home – or at least some concept of home – rather than each day in some strange place. It seems likely that we will stay in the apartment that we have for some time having struck some sort of deal with the owners so that we don’t have to pay the gringo agency fees. The Casa Rivadavia is a pretty little building. It’s quiet and safe and right in the heart of the city. It lies a just a short walk from the Plaza de Mayo and the Casa Rosada that Madonna made famous to Americans with her lecherous portrayal of Evita – an episode in cinema that most porteños would just as soon forget. From the outside it looks like nothing (an apartment building on a dirty street) and then the big, brown wooden doors swing open to tiled floors, beautiful facades and cozy little apartments. Each day I come home to a building that I’d imagined only, I suppose, in Venice or, if pushed, in the backstreets of Barcelona.

Paul is more and more at his writing now. I think that what makes a writer is nothing more than time and, in a way, money. Writing takes the self-discipline of an Olympian; a quality in Paul that I wish was transplantable. But, if you have that dedication, any schmuck can do it, really. How lucky we are to have been privileged with education and enough money to transplant ourselves to the opposite side of the equator for a while so that lines of latitude and time zones slip away. Shame on all who have been given these gifts and don’t come away with good stories to tell or, worse, the ability to tell them well.

Yesterday was a pequña hazaña (my new favorite castallano term). Our week-long search for bicycles ended in triumph. It’s much harder to find used bicycles in a big city than you’d think. Maybe it’s because the drivers of the colectivós are actually trying to collect diez puntos each time they railroad a bicyclist. My new city cruiser is called la banana (and you only get one guess why) and Paul’s has got to be the closest thing that Buenos Aires has to the Brown-Pride-Root-Beer-Rocket. We had to ride across town during rush hour to get them home from Palermo Viejo (muchos tiendas de ‘retro’) to Microcentro. Always half a block ahead is Paul sneaking around the front wheels of a bus and running red lights like an empanada delivery boy while I putter behind, my heart racing and feeling completely brilliant and lucky as all hell that I make it out alive. Life’s a little slower in Goleta. I hope soon to take la banana for a spin around the ecological reserve near preppy Puerto Madero.

A few nights ago we went to a free concert in one of the great parks in Palermo. The Buenos Aires Art Society (or some such governmental art body) sponsors this free event. Every porteño and his mother was there (take my word for it). Appartently they are all ga-ga for this guy… VINCENTITO! I’ve never heard of him but he must be quite famous because he has lots of adoring fans who will travel miles and sing loud and smoke the mota and listen to his concert for free. It was fun. He sang some American metal ballad in English and as soon as he’d stopped singing it I forgot what song it was. Paul couldn’t remember either. It was nice. The evening is the best time to go out and I’m going to have to work on the program of staying up later and getting up later. I’m still on the in-bed-by-nine-or-really-cranky-in-the-morning program. This is exactly the opposite of the B.A. lifestyle and just another glaring example of why the gringa doesn’t fit in.

Another great experience (can you smell the sarcasm) was the evening that Paul got a hankering for meat. I, being the romantic idealist that I am, got so excited that Paul…PAUL… would want to go out and eat and PAY for dinner that I let him order what he was telling me would be good. Ten minutes later I’m sitting next to a fat-spitting barbeque grill that is sitting on the table. Unidentifiable cuts of meat steaming and spattering away. No salad. No potatoes. No side dish. No beer. MEAT. I eat meat. I’d go so far as to say I love the stuff. But I spent the rest of the meal trying not to vomit on the table. As Paul said: File it under – failed experiences. Paradilla para 2. Needless to say we haven’t been to dinner since and next time I get the idea that my boyfriend is taking me to a nice, quiet, romantic meal I’m going to order the grain of salt that comes with it. When we left the restaurant Paul took heaps and heaps of leftover meat to a family sleeping on the street nearby. The woman starting devouring the food and throwing unidentifiable pieces of cow at her children before it had even properly exchanged hands. I got a nice reminder of what a disgusting snob I can be. As my mother says, “Things are never as good as they seem and they are never as bad as they seem.” I thought my boyfriend acting like a jerk was bad. I have a lot to learn… like I said.

Today Paul got what sounds like a great job teaching English. He will be teaching adult people who already speak English to pronounce and communicate better. His new supervisor told him that these people have a particular concern with phone etiquette and while the idea of Paul Rivas teaching anyone phone etiquette is so unthinkably ironic to me, maybe his students won’t know the difference. I feel a little jealous of the ease with which he is sinking into life here. I feel a little more every day like a housewife that neither cleans, nor cooks, nor gossips about her neighbors. I envy in Paul the ease with which he has found a job and a niche here and will try only to not become the dead weight here for that will surely get me cut loose. Not today, though. I will, at some point, I feel sure, struggle to find some sort of identity here that Paul has already found. When I feel those pangs of fear, stupidity, shame, I need to remember that I am here to learn. I need to ease up on resenting Paul because his Spanish education outweighs mine by over twelve years. We often need to ease up on each other.

Today was spent mostly walking alone while Paul was writing. I walked again out to Palermo and went so far as to order myself a café con leche which was going extremely well until the guy asked me something and one of the words wouldn’t come to me. I had no idea what he was saying. He says it over and over and over. Looking at me, expectantly. I’m raking my brain. It’s blank. He has my coffee. I don’t understand. We are at an impass. Finally, he thrusts the coffee and a plastic spoon in my hand and walks away. CUCHARA! SPOON. THAT was the word. SPOON! I wanted him to come back. I knew it now. I just bend my head, embarrassed and walked outside and threw the spoon into the street. FUCKING SPOON ruined my coffee and my bravery for a good few hours.

To add insult to injury, the next turn brought me directly into my first steaming pile of dogshit. I think I mentioned before that dogshit is absolutely everywhere in the city. There is a law against letting your dogs just go to town on the streets but is not enforced at all and dogshit is absolutely everywhere. I guess you could consider it lucky that it took me a full tell days to be ankle deep in the stuff. I spend the next few blocks scraping and scratching my shoes on the curb and trying not to cry while systematically checking to see if winking, blinking, snapping fingers, or clicking my heels together would take me straight home. WHY am I here again? Paul asked me this morning if I wanted to go home, probably because I’ve been acting like a cranky, PMSing asshole for the last few days. I considered it for a moment. How would it be any easier for me to be home pining for Argentina and Paul than to be here pining for home? I know I have to suck it up and things will get easier but…when?

I needed some culture and practically ran off the Subte to the Plaza de Mayo. Each Thursday the Madres de La Plaza de Mayo hold their protest at 3:30pm in the afternoon. Decades after the Dirty War, these dedicated mothers appear before the government, demanding answers and accountability for their sons that disappeared during that time. It’s really quite moving to see these women (and men), most of whom are now very old, clutching photos of long lost loved ones wanting nothing more than a little truth and justice. How hard it is to realize that they are years into this campaign, that they will probably never get any answers from anyone, that they have become a tourist attraction.

From the Plaza I walked along insane Calle Florida. Life has somehow brought me to Calle Florida each day. It’s a pedestrian only street so you get the feeling of being in gridlock without getting in a car. People walk a million miles an hour in and out of every store you could think of. There is the usual city street traffic of all kinds: musicians, performing artists, and tango dancers. Every third step someone is trying to thrust a flyer into your hand for an all-you-can-eat-buffet or a hooker or a discount phone card.

I stopped to chat with a young argentino who was passing out flyers covered with g-stringed women. He got my attention with, “Miss… miss… how do you say in English?” and pointing to the trash can. I tell him. He squints his eyes. Someone had told him it was a rubbish bin. I said don’t listen to the goddamned English gringos. You listen to this nice American girl. I’m telling you it’s a trash can. He starts rattling off to me. He works for a, “How do you say… whore house?”, he is nineteen, he wants improve his English. You are doing well, I tell him. He tells me the words that people have taught him in the street. “Getting jiggy with it. G’day mate. Let’s kick it. Whassap my nigga?” I’m laughing now. The kid’s charming. If I was a man looking for a good time, I’d go to his whorehouse for sure. He asks if we can get together and I can teach him some English. I say sure. I’m looking forward to the whorehouse castallano slang I can learn from him. You never know when that stuff will come in handy. His name is Italo. We’ll see…

I vacillate widely between total contentment in a new place and aching for home. Today is one of those days that I passed mostly pining for my mother and my cat. Two evenings ago we strolled along the sanitary, newly paved streets of Puerto Madero looking for restaurants and cafes that boasted WIFI (broadband internet) services and I chided myself a little for the small pang of excitement I felt over maybe having the ability to use my laptop to download missed episodes of ‘Lost’. What do I have to be homesick for when I can get epanadas 24 hours a day and a pack of cigarettes for US$1.00? I haven’t seen a Starbucks yet but there is a McDonald’s on every corner. Inside each McDonald’s is a McCafe that sells espresso and breakfast cakes and suddenly the reason for the Starbucks-free zone is clear. McCafe got here first. There is Chinese, German, British, Spanish, French and, least of all, Argentinean cuisine. With a cell phone, computer, a blog, email, and people that love me tracking where I go, am I every really gone? With all of these things attaching me lovingly to home, why do I feel so far away? Am I not really only present from wherever I log on?

I have attached some photos of the concert, the mothers, bicycles. Enjoy.

Pico and Paris

February 3, 2006

Paul is downstairs singing Esperando, a song by Café Tacuba, which he tried tirelessly to teach me as we hiked down the mule trail to visit the leper colony in Moloka’i. The 40-second song is full of important words like portón and colectivo that I’m trying to keep from shaking around in my mind so much. I feel like I forget five Spanish words for every one that I remember but my little sister, Julie, reminded me this morning that, “you are learning way more than you think.” I am trying to keep her words in my mind when I become frustrated.

The humidity was 72 percent today and I think I lost a third of my body weight in sweating. I felt all day like liquid was just pouring out of my pores faster than I could ever replace it. Yes, I’m a hot-weather wimp because I’m Scottish but California lifestyle has made my senses snooty about the cold too and I am becoming every day a little more convinced that if it’s not a balmy 72 degrees and dry, then I’ll likely have trouble adapting. Such are the toils of immigration and naturalization.

I’ve been feeling a bit weary and worn. Pico Iyer also writes in The Global Soul (talking of pubs and whorehouses and wee hour activities in Hong Kong), “I didn’t have the heart for much more of this, and as the night wore on, I knew the smiles would grow more plaintive, the ones that said, Be kind to me, please, and I’ll take good care of you bouncing against the one that said, How ever did my need bring me here?” I felt all of that today. Paul and I breakfasted in a café that appeared transplanted from the Champs Elyseé in Paris. There are times when I feel I could blink my eyes and be as easily in London or Paris. The Bar de Julio Café was wallpapered with records and old photos of canciones, none of whom I recognized. It’s pretty humbling to feel like you could be in Europe by the sight and smell of a place and realize you know absolutely nothing about its history. I drank a café con leche and ate a sandwich on a croissant while I learned that one of the singers on the wall, Carlos Gardel, was the most famous tango singer in all of Argentina. I tried to memorize his face. I added to my checklist: learn more about Argentine history. It’s right under: Climb Mount Everest. Each day I learn a little more about all that I have yet to learn.

Ten minutes later we are in the barrio Recoleta. The streets are quiet and I’m struggling to find a piece of trash where I’m usually stepping around dog shit and McDonald’s wrappers. The people are white and speak English. We walk past the Fendi store and through the shopping mall. The prices are amazing low even for Dolce and Gabana due to the weak Peso, but the store clerks still look at my Converse like I don’t belong there and I’m thinking maybe things would be different if these women got a chance to check out a town overrun by Blue Bee.

The purpose of the stroll through Recoleta is to visit the famous Cementerio where Eva Péron lies. It’s the smallest, most exclusive cemetery in the city. Even Juan Péron didn’t make the cut. In the small amount of traveling I have done, I have found cemeteries to be one of the coolest, most inexpensive ways to see the art and history of a city. The cemetery in Recoleta is no different and while it is no small potatoes to see the grave of Evita, the great thing about the day is getting to see gold and marble strewn amongst tumble-down crypts and moss-covered stones; tiny, creepy pathways and photographs of loved ones long gone.

I just started reading Chasing Ché, a book about a motorcycle trip in search of the Guevara legend by an inimitable gringo named Patrick Symmes. I bought it for Paul on his last birthday and only had to wait 8 months for him to finish it. I recommend it as an introduction both to Ché and an introduction to all the reasons motorcycles are silly and too much trouble. He visits not the cemetary in Recoleta but another, smaller, poorer cemetary in Buenos Aires. He says of the experience, “Inside the wall was the Avellaneda Municipal Cemetary, and we walked through. It was huge, but without the glamour of Recoleta where the upper classes buried their dead in elaborate, fantastical crypts that imitated Egyptian pyramide and Roman temples and Greek oracles, as if the dead were now simply confined to smaller versions of the lives they had just left.”

In a day I’ve roamed from a sidewalk café in Paris back to the snooty streets of Santa Barbara through the dusty remains of Buenos Aires and I’ve barely walked three miles. ¡Qué incredible ciudad!

first impressions

February 2, 2006

It’s Thursday and I have been sweating in Buenos Aires since Monday morning. We arrived in the early afternoon and the weather is as temperamental as I have been feeling. Each day it’s every variety of warm, summer weather. We awake to humid downpours that feel like hot sky showers, the kind of rain that I have only ever experienced in the sticky morning on the North Coast of Maui. In the afternoon the heat is dry and the sun can be blistering. It took less that 24 hours for my gringa skin to redden. When it’s not too hot here it is just beautiful. My first sight from the taxi was a giant wall with graffiti that read: FUERRA BUSH! Something about reading that made me feel more at home than I’d felt for a long time in Santa Barbara.

I think it just feels beautiful to be back in the city where there is always something or someone new to look at. Our apartment is one block for the famous Avenida 9 de Julio (a 16 lane cluster-fuck spectacle of gridlock madness). Most of those interested have seen our apartment at and the inside is exactly as expected. I am writing this from the tiny upstairs desk area that will be home to our excrement of thoughts from Argentina. The photos of the exterior, however, do not do justice to the building. The intricately tiled floors are scrubbed daily; there is an elevator that looks a century old. There are friendly, elderly neighbors and snooty young porteñas who will only grudgingly greet you in the afternoon.

Over the past few years my opinion of the work of Pico Iyer has gravitated from adoration to fanatical. In honor of what will likely be the longest and certainly the most challenging trip of my life, I decided to revisit The Global Soul which was a pretty good decision on my part if I do say so myself. One of the first things I read off the plane was a reminiscence of his childhood that, “I think I intuited, even then, that the airport was the spiritual center of the double life: you get on as one person and get off as another.” Pico always writes in such beautifully accessible terms. In so many ways in only a few days I feel simultaneously like a completely different person and so much more remarkably sure of my own self that I have ever been.

For the most part we have just been walking around the city, trying to familiarize ourselves with our own neighborhood and, as quickly as possible, shake the taboo of being touristas. We have ventured on the Collectivo and Subte, neither of which caused robbery, harm, or death which I consider a small victory. For the most part, Paul has been the eyes and ears of the operation as I struggle both with the language (let’s see how far we can stretch that City College semester, shall we?) and the accent of the porteños which is quite different from the pride you feel ordering carne asada tacos on Chapala Street.

Things are fantastically difficult at times. We have been turned away from, what seems like, every bank in Buenos Aires, as we do not have residency. Not a problem as modern technology makes it easy to access our American accounts from here (¡Viva Internet!). We have our current apartment for one month and are sure now that we are being charged tourist prices and that we can find something better or at least get a better deal on our current place. I think the uncertainty is what makes things difficult. Paul has had patron saintly patience with what feels like constant fretting on my part. I know everything will work out well. Please remember, dear friends, I am writing this following three days at the Argentinean Embassy, American Embassy, on the phone with pinche Cingular, being turned away from banks and half-heartedly looking for a place to spend the next year of my life. It’s just different. When faced with nothing familiar, different can be scary.

And wonderful. My legs ache and ache from walking so far and so fast (Paul walks at least twice my speed). We have done some classics. Highlights include the best meat and coffee in the world. They really are not kidding about those things. Prices are so low that I find myself counting, and re-counting my money in total disbelief at how much I still have. Paul and I are constantly reminding each other that we need to make it last as long as possible but every time we spend $2 each on a meal that consists of more food than either of us can eat we walk away shaking our heads. Life is walks down tiny cobbled streets, past the Casa Rosada, and people just swarming so much my head spins. I hope to spend more time writing (clearly, I need the practice) and dive into the full time tourist business while carrying a camera small enough to look like a little less like a gringa.

From here my Spanish will improve, my English will get worse, my knowledge of the city will become immense…and the world a little smaller. This is an endless spectacle for any thinking of visiting.