Thing We Learned in Buenos Aires #2

If there's one thing Argentine people like to do, it's making out.

Not that I know from personal experience, of course, but because they do it everywhere. They do it on street corners, they do it on the Subte, they do it in restaurants (noisily, at that) and they especially love to do it in the park. Some couples choose to do it on the park benches, and others stop mid-stroll to suck face in the middle of the sidewalk.

But here's where it gets awkward: their most favorite activity seems to be doing it lying in the grass. This is the point where the words "doing it" stop simply identifying the act of kissing and instead take on their 3rd grade meaning.

It appears that they come to the park specifically to get as close to public intercourse as they possibly can, and no one bats an eyelash. That's not to say that they're groping and drooling -- in fact most of the time it's all quite tender and sweet -- but I think it's the sheer volume of attached faces that makes it so overwhelming.

Last week Liz and I picked out a nice stretch of grass to sit and read on, and within an hour there were ten lip-locked couples just in the 20'x40' area that we were sitting in. I felt like perhaps we were sitting in the making out section, and someone would surely come to us at any moment and ask us to move along unless we happened to be lesbians and simply taking a break.

My amazement is almost entirely based around the fact that it seems that none of these people were born with an ounce of inhibition -- something that I have plenty of. I'm all for holding hands in public or little hugs and kisses here and there, but all of this park-bound making out that seems to only barely fall short of foreplay is another thing entirely.

Then, of course, there's the romantic side of me. The part that, should I weave through the bodies on the right day, thinks it's the greatest thing ever.

Here, part an early entry from my journal:

People here love each other. Couples wrap themselves in knots on benches and spoon on blankets in the grass. But the kissing and touching is tender, sincere. Not sophomoric and obnoxious. They all at once command attention to their affections and respect for their privacy in these wide open spaces.

I suppose at times it gets a bit absurd, like the couple in the median of a pedestrian street who, as Liz put it, "Must not have been able to make it that far without making out."

Generally speaking, though, it's something like lovely, if a bit heart-wrenching for me. But unlike that typical lovelorn torment, I feel happy rather than sad - glad for these people and how lucky there are to be here in love, lust, or anything else that brought them together for those moments.

So I suppose one can look it it from several angles, and perhaps by the time I leave here it will no longer phase me to lie in the grass, literally surrounded by these doubled forms. But in the end, this will still be my favorite thought on the subject, delivered by Eriks the first day we discovered the phenomenon:

"They'll totally know we're tourists when they see us reading in the park instead of making out."

Beef

I'm just gonna cut to the chase here: the beef is flippin' good. Anyone who knows me and my affinity toward chicken above all other meats will understand why this is such a monumentous announcement, and admit it -- some of you may feel the need to print these words of mine and frame them as a tribute to my entrance into adulthood.

It all started at La Brigada, a parilla restaurant in San Telmo that we had heard was good and so visited one Saturday night. It was packed, which is completely understandable now that we've eaten there...twice.

While I went for some slab of chicken and Liz did some sort of beef, Eriks went directly for the T-bone, and asked for it rare.



As you can see, it was beyond rare. Aside from one dish of "steak and eggs" that the boyfriend had a few months ago, this was the rarest piece of meat I'd ever seen served to a human for consumption. I couldn't believe it. It was disgusting. It was so....red! It was sooooo gooooooood.

Yes, I ate a bite of that meat. I ate more than one bite. And when I went back to my chicken, I tasted nothing. It was the most startling realization I've had in a long time.



I guess now I'm ruined for life. I suppose this means when I eat with my parents upon returning home, the conversation will no longer go like this...

Me: Mom, what's for dinner?
Mom: Steak
Me: And what am I having?
Mom: Leftover pasta/pork roast/chicken/something else we ate two days ago that is not steak

So I may not be all about downing intestines and other midsection innards, but my tastebuds are moving along reasonably enough, allowing me to opt for something other than the grilled cheese wherever we go.... bad for the budget (though not here! Beef is CHEAP!), good for the being a grown-up stuff.

Get Your Reading Pants On: The Recap

So what have we been up to, you ask? A little bit of everything, I say.

More than anything, we've put a lot of wear into our shoes -- individually and together -- exploring our neighborhoods as well as other parts of the city.

Buenos Aires is huge. I'm not saying that just because I come from a tiny patch of non-state called Washington, DC. I mean it's actually humongous. Forty-eight barrios, each quite distinct, make up the fabric of the city, and also make it hard to get a grasp on this place as a whole. But we've made a few rounds, taken the trains, hopped on buses, and have seen why this place is known to be so dynamic.

These are just some of the bits and pieces of our lives so far:

Vinos y Bodegas

Around two weeks into our trip, we spent the afternoon in Parque Tres Febrero, the large park in Palermo. On our way back to the Subte (metro) later in the evening, we passed the Rural, which is an enormous convention center compound that has room for several major happenings at once, most recently ranging from High School Musical 2 (on ice!) to the open-air "Opera Pampa" to, in the case of that wonderful evening, wine festivals.

Vinos y Bodegas is an annual event centered around Argentine wines. For 25 Pesos (around $8) we were given engraved wine glasses and access to hundreds of cabernets, merlots, chardonnays, champagnes, sparkling wines, and Argentina's Big Deal, malbecs.


Between the three of us we know approximately nothing about wine, but we sure talked like we did, taking notes on each one. Needless to say, the impressiveness of our commentary diminished as the evening progressed, meaning we went from "oaky, with a nice depth of taste" to "it tastes like I just drank fart."

In any case, we had a fantastic night -- something that couldn't have come at a better time, as my own homesick nerves were dying for something big and exciting to happen.

Check out our end-of-evening commentary here!! (And please disregard our doe-eyed tipsiness!)

Café-ing

If one so wanted, it would be possible to spend an entire vacation touring Argentina's abundant cafés. Kind of like Radio Shack, you're never more than 10 minutes from a café here, and more than likely less than a block from one.

As Liz and I are quite fond of tea, croissants, and interesting places to write, we took to the sport of café-ing quickly, often arranging entire days around finding a new one to sit at for hours at a time. Sometimes we got no further than the bakery downstairs, other times we shlepped this way and that perching on the chairs of sidewalk cafés or hiding from the September rain and chill in downtown joints.

My favorite place for reading/writing/doing nothing is Plaza Dorrego, only two blocks from our old apartment. It's very European - a wide, brick plaza full of pigeons and lined on all sides by shops and restaurants. Those restaurants set up their patio tables and chairs out in the plaza itself, so close that it's hard to tell which tables belong to which place. There I spent time writing in my journal, taking pictures of the audacious pigeons that would stomp around my table, reading, and simply soaking everything in.

Since moving across town I've been doing far less café-ing, but I plan to start again. If nothing else, it makes me feel like I've accomplished something with my day, even if that "accomplishment" was engaging in a massive bout of YouTube procrastination and excessive tea-drinking.

Cooking

While not everything here is as cheap as we had expected, food has been a gloriously inexpensive thing to buy. Whether we're out to dinner at $10 per person (including a bottle of wine) or cooking for ourselves, eating is perhaps the least expensive part of living here.

Even so, we do our best to save our pesos for a night or two out a week, the rest of the time relying on ourselves for proper meals. Thankfully, Liz is an excellent cook and I'm getting the hang of mimicking my mom's talents, so we're generally lucky enough to have well-rounded, delicious meals.

I've never had much of a reason to cook for myself - when I lived in a campus apartment my last semester of college, my culinary endeavors rarely extended past scrambled eggs, frozen waffles and grilled cheese. But that's not to say I've never cooked actual food. If you know my mom and know me, you probably also know the epic story of how I cooked Rosh Hashana dinner in England. For everyone's sake, I will not repeat it. I also did that here, a feat I thought impossible considering the 2"x 2" kitchen we had in San Telmo. In any case, now that I'm cooking regularly rather than only in extreme circumstances, I'm growing to really enjoy the time I spend working in the kitchen to get those dishes on the table.

My proudest (if modest) creation so far has been My Beautiful Chicken. Sure, roasting a chicken is a painfully easy thing to do. But this was one fiiiiiiine roast chicken, with skin so perfect and crispy that I feel it warrants its own entry into this blog of Very Important Things.


Tigre

Tigre is a delta town about an hour north of here by train. It's built along the Parana River, the longest after the Amazon, and which leads out to a major delta that hosts thousands of islands and waterways. We had read that it's a favorite day-long getaway for city-goers, so we picked ourselves up one Saturday and got on our way.




Our plan was to rent kayaks and do a tour of the river, which leads to islands covered in sub-tropical vegetation and is supposed to be quite beautiful. Instead, we were so hungry upon our arrival that we decided to comb through the dozens of riverside parillas (grills) to get some lunch.


We had eaten in a parilla before, but never went for the major and more traditional format: the pile of meats. First you decide if you want the parilla for two, four, or six people. Then they grill up an assortment of meats and sausages and serve it all on its own mini-grill right there on your table. It's up to you to figure out what's what, which means navigating your way through ordinary cuts of meat mixed in with intestine, pancreas and blood sausage. Call me a baby, but I stuck with the familiar cuts and the chorizo, as did my dear companions... Aside from all that, though, it was a wonderfully tasty meal, accompanied by a chilled, sweating pitcher of sangria shared between me and Liz. Which brings me to the next step: nap time.

We all decided that we were feeling pretty slow, what with full bellies and the fact that we were out until 4am the night before, so we wandered further along the river, found a nice grassy spot in the sun, and I promptly fell asleep. Liz and Eriks played cribbage and read, and in no time the sun was slipping away and it was time to head home.

We missed a lot of stuff that day -- the open-air market and the outlying islands being the biggest. No worries, though. The trip cost about $3.30 Pesos, or about $1. We'll be back there soon.

Konga

Where to begin with Konga?? Well, it was a drag cabaret that we got free tickets to through a Catholic priest. Go figure.

When we accepted the tickets to the show, we were told it was a cabaret of sorts, but were given no other information. So, all gussied up for our night at the theater, Liz, Eriks and I met with the visiting parents of a friend of Eriks, along with their travel companions, one of whom was the priest.

Walking up the stairs, presumably to our balcony seats, the reality of it all became clear. Through breaks in the wall between the stairs and the room we were about to enter, I saw painted men draped in sequins, feathered and bejeweled headdresses exploding from their tops. A man in a hot pink suit and full makeup greeted us at the door, handing us dry beans and ushering us to our seats.

The seating was a pattern of small tables and chairs that allowed for a T-shaped runway leading from two back entrances up to the stage. While people were still arriving, taking their seats and giving their cocktail orders to the lone server, the performers pranced around, taking pictures with people and dancing with each other. Some were dressed as men, or not dressed, as was the case with one muscley little man in plastic gladiator armor, cheeky little bottoms and a masquerade mask. On the stage one queen spun a wheel of destiny on which patrons were to bet their beans, and in the back of the room sat the lone female of the group, looking much like a witch and telling fortunes.

The show itself was a funky mishmash of lip-synced show tunes, interpretive dance and strange re-enactments of movies we'd never seen or heard of. The number of costume changes was incredible, and while at times the acts were cheesy and/or downright strange, it was all-around pretty entertaining.

My take by the end of the night?

You haven't lived until you've watched a drag queen on point doing his rendition of Swan Lake while sitting next to a Catholic priest.

Conclusion!

That's kind of a wrap-up of the bigger happenings and doings, though there is plenty more to tell. I've been bursting with things to say, but I couldn't move on until I got you all caught up!

Now that you are, I'll be sure to drop some new notes in here soon. Until then, ciao!

Living

Our first apartment was adorable for a minute. It was in San Telmo, one of the older parts of the city, and one that makes clear why this place is considered the Paris of South America. The buildings are tall and slim with ornate wooden doors, iron balconies and deco sculpture. An indoor market full of butchers, veggie stands and cheese men stood across the street, and San Telmo's famous weekend flea was only two blocks away.


It was a lovely place to begin -- deep in the belly of Argentine tradition and history, not to mention directly above a bakery (!) -- but the charm wore off steadily through the month. We lived on a busy bus route, and our balcony doors did little to muffle the whistles and squeaks of their air brakes. Our "quaint" (read: small) kitchen was prone to flooding and our hot water heater was less than reliable. There was construction going on above us 6 days a week, which meant our entire apartment was perpetually filthy, both from tracking dirt from the hallway and the little bits of ceiling that would fall from the hammering and drilling.

Perhaps the trickiest thing to deal with, however, was the layout. The apartment was a funny, somewhat linear deal. When you walked in, you were in the midst of the dining room and living room area. Around to the right was Liz's and my bedroom, which was an awkward extention of the living room and had only matchstick blinds to separate it from that common space. Now comes the thorny part: to get to the bathroom, the kitchen and Eriks's's's's bedroom, you had to walk through our bedroom. So between essentially living in a hallway and not even having four proper walls, our patience had really worn thin.

We only committed to a month there, so between doing our tourist walks and lounging in cafes, a solid two weeks of email after email to real estate agents and Craigslisters was spent in search of a new place to live.

Now we're in a funky little apartment on the top floor of a building on the border of Palermo Viejo/Soho. It has two actual bedrooms, (ours with a great view of the sunset,) a larger kitchen, a proper dining room and a loooovely patio that gets lots of sun to help Liz's newly planted herbs grow. It's also in an area that is much more clean, safe and quiet. It's actually very much like my own Capitol Hill, with small tree-lined streets everywhere. It's a totally walkable community, with the grocery store a 15 minute walk from our door, lots of shops and restaurants within minutes as well, and blessedly close to a Subte stop. I think we're all a lot more comfortable and content with this place. When my next Hill Rag column comes out, you can read about how I'm working to make it (and Buenos Aires) like home!

Ciao for now...

Thing We Learned in Buenos Aires #1

I'm throwing this in early because Liz and Eriks have each covered it in their own way in their own blogs (see links to the right) and I fear there would be great imbalance if my own take on the events was not thrown into the ring.

This is an account of our first major lesson in Grocery Shopping 101, as told to mother and boyfriend in an email last month:

Dear Mommy and Mel,

It seems that in Argentina they have a thing for putting milk in their juice, which we discovered last week when we bought orange juice and it came out milky and similar to melted cremesicle.

A day or two later, Eriks went to buy milk and found that it's difficult to find in a normal jug. You have to have it in either the boxes of it that sit on the shelf unrefrigerated, which wasn't so strange as we've seen plenty in Europe, or you have to have it in a bag. BAGS OF MILK! It doesn't even make sense! How do you close it?? Who is drinking that much milk all at once? And they sit in the bottom bin like sad sacks of weirdness. Luckily Eriks did find a normal 1/2 gallon of milk, only it apparently was so thick that by the end of his meal of cereal he said "Well, I guess the next time I want milk I may as well just buy yogurt."

This morning was the best, though. Liz woke up feeling inclined to make us all French toast. When she came back from the store, she brought with her a box of apple juice, as she couldn't find any orange sans milk. She assured us all that she had spent a ridiculous amount of time making sure that she was, in fact, buying juice.
Except it wasn't apple juice.
It was apple juice flavored milk. Not even apple juice with milk. Milk with apple juice.
And while it did smell like apple juice, and it did look like milk (which is all weird enough,) it tasted like apple candy.
And just to make sure that we got as much nutrition as possible, it included fish oil for our daily dose of Omega-3.
So now we call it several combinations of apple/milk/juice/fish, the last and grossest being apple flavored fish milk.
Gross.

The end.

I honestly can't explain the sheer panic I feel when I think to myself "man, I could really go for some orange juice right now."


Update, October 14:

I went on a quest for milk and failed as miserably as the other two.

After what felt like hours staring at all of the boxes and baggies, trying to decipher which was yogurt-like, which had fruit and/or fish, etcetera, I decided upon the most non-threatening one in the whole milk area. It said "Infantil" and had a picture of Mickey Mouse. It boasted that it was fortified with extra calcium, vitamin C, and other things that would help a growing girl. How could I possibly be going wrong here?

I was going wrong here.

I got the bag home, poured it into a pitcher (Ah ha! Those milk bags are a pitcher-selling racket!) and took a sip. Mickey, that squeaky rodent, betrayed me. This was the sweetest milk I'd ever tasted! It was much like the leftover milk in a bowl of Frosted Flakes, except minus the Frosted Flakes. I'd be lying if I said that particular leftover milk is not totally delicious, but generally speaking I don't think bracing oneself for an oncoming sugar coma is the best way to start out a day.

As it turns out, the next ingredient after "leche" on the back of the bag is indeed "azucar," which means that until that damn pitcher is gone I'll have to limit my daily milk intake to four tablespoons, unless all my plans change and I feel like gaining 20 pounds and sprawling comatose on our couch for the rest of my time here.

Or, you know, I could throw it out. Oh dad, I know. Waste not, want not. I still don't know exactly what that means, but I guess I'm gonna drink the milk.

Sigh.

The Beginning

I.

Leaving wasn't easy. There were some obvious reasons. The only child leaving the safety of life at home, the girl leaving the boy behind. And there were reasons I didn't expect and couldn't identify.

I brought a leather-bound journal with me. It has that oh-so-sophisticated leather string to hold the front flap closed, and four folds of yellowish paper held together by string. I have intentions for this journal, dreams of making it fat with taped-in ticket stubs and letting it be stained with tea and worn with life, toted from park to café, woods to shore.

This is an excerpt from my first entry:


September 4, 2007

My dad said I'm lucky in life.
I got the airport wrong and we had to make a mad dash to Dulles about 45 minutes earlier than we had expected to leave. No traffic, 30 minutes in the middle of the afternoon. Lucky.
When we arrived, there was no line to check in. Both bags came in under 50 pounds and the security line was virtually nonexistant. Lucky.
I waded through the Euro kids and families and businessmen, heart pounding and tears drowning my eyes.
I kept thinking, People do this all the time. But don't they have parents? Boyfriends and girlfriends? People to miss and cry over in the airport?
I was the only person I saw crying. I couldn't stop the whole way to the gate.
What am I afraid of? I don't rally know. Yes, this is huge, but it's so amazing, and I truly am lucky to have the chance to do this. I'm lucky to have a mom who tells me she's proud of me just before I have to walk away. Lucky to have the ability to come right back home, and lucky to have people there who would be happy either way. And lucky to have such a beautiful friend waiting for me at my next stop.
I am a very lucky girl. There is no doubt.

II.

The first flight ended up going by quickly. Just a hop down to Atlanta, where I would meet up with Liz. Celebratory margaritas and mojitos were savored in the last TGIFriday's we'd be seeing in a long time (or so we thought...shocker!) On the flight we were blessed with an empty seat between us, meaning more stretching out room for the 11 hours of flight time we would endure.

(Click here to see our first video.)

And what did we learn in our time of confinement?

As cute as the novelty of Harry Potter Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans may be, going through and eating them one by one is not as fun a game as it may sound. If you choose to ignore that warning, at least make sure not to eat "pickle" and "dirt" back to back, because it really does taste like you just ate a really dirty pickle.

III.

The Buenos Aires airport is the easiest airport in the entire world. It took no more than 20 minutes to get from the airplane through baggage and customs and out to the general hallways of the airport at large. And it only took that long because of a mercifully short wait to have our passports stamped. Amazing.

A two hour wait for Eriks to get in included realizing we had flown down with the entire Argentine basketball team (click here for video 2) and my first interaction in Spanish (needed change for a 20 peso bill.)

IV.

By the end of the very long day, I was glad I was here. It was hard to leave, but it was the right thing to do. I knew it when I tucked myself into the bed, for that moment content with having no idea what was coming next.

Introduction

Why Buenos Aires?

There is a panic that sets in just after graduation from college that tends to elicit two particular reactions among those it strikes. I fall quite squarely within one of those categories. Rather than opting for grad school, where I could continue to loaf around between classes and the dining hall, I've gone ahead and signed up for a months-long excursion abroad on the pretense that it will change my life and give me direction.

In reality, every move one makes is life-changing. And to be honest, I have no more direction now that I've been here a month than when I came. But I suppose as long as I'm sleeping until noon in another country rather than in my parents' basement, it's something to be commended. Right?

Well in any case, I'm here, and I took a certain path toward my arrival:

After months of abstract schemes involving places like Thailand, the south of France and good old Florida, a nudge from a certain friend sent me headlong into a plan to head to Argentina. Her motives were as elementary as mine: to go somewhere new and write. After a few discussions and a bit of research, it seemed that for a long-term stay fueled by only a few months' savings, Buenos Aires was the most logical destination.

Who I'm Here WIth

I packed up and moved in with two friends made the last time I escaped across borders. Liz and Eriks were both part of a program that sent American students over to Oxford University for three months of lectures, tutorials, reading and papers. Also involved were late-night visits to interesting food vendors, unapologetic banana-throwing, frantic 5am paper-writing, whirlwind jaunts to London/Paris/Wales/etc and soccer in our dorm rooms at 4am.

Liz and I were roommates and quickly became best friends despite the fact that she originally feared that I was mentally imbalanced because of my affinity toward Creedence Clearwater Revival and I feared that she was going to try to introduce me to Jesus (both long stories, clearly.)

Eriks was the guy with the S on the end of a perfectly good non-S name who was growing his hair out for Locks of Love and frequently wore (and still wears) a bright pink shirt that says Snak Club. We three were part of a wonderful group of seven friends, and it seemed only natural to invite him along on our more grown-up, less lecture-infused journey.

What's Happening?

We all have return flights out of Buenos Aires for various points in the future. Eriks in mid-April, me a week later and Liz in mid-May.

It was a huge gamble to come to a city we'd never visited in a country -- continent, even -- that was unfamiliar to us all. So it comes as no big surprise (to me, at least) that our plans are all up in the air. I'm currently thinking of taking off somewhere on my own in January, and the other two are considering moving somewhere outside of the city for the rest of the trip after that. My reasons and theirs will surely be covered in later posts.

For the time being, we're surviving. Some days are spent wandering the streets of the different BsAs barrios, others in cafés sipping tea and doing writing exercises with Liz, and others being absolute slugs searching for TV shows in English while wasting time on YouTube and gorging on cheap cookies.

So I guess we ended up running towards life, after all. Sure we're technically jobless and our [laughably low] rent allows us to stay that way, but we've still bitten off a big chunk of the real thing. At the end of the day, it's a pretty good time.