Ser porteña por seis semanas

Okay, decision made.  After considering the purchase of the Mendoza ticket further over pizza and a little shopping, I decided to change my airline tickets, skip Mendoza, and leave Buenos Aires a little early.  Reasons: {1} I can barely stand to walk down the street here for the cold, and Mendoza is in the foothills of the Andes and is currently covered in several feet of snow.  {2} I don´t quite feel comfortable travelling with Kate and Carlos because I´ve barely seen Kate in two weeks and when I called her yesterday, she made clear to me that she wanted to do her own thing and not feel responsible for me having a good time.  They also initially made plans without me, and even though Carlos has said since then that I´m more than welcome to come, I know I would be accompanying them to vineyards where they would want to wine taste and I would not.  I would go hiking and horseback riding with them, but I´d likely be left with a lot of time on my hands while they did winetasting tours and I´m not sure that I would find someone to spend it with.  Plus, I´d have to come home alone, because they´re continuing to Perú from there.  {3} Money.  I don´t have any.  {4} This way, I have more than three days at my parents´ house to get my things together and move back to Chapel Hill into the new townhouse.  Maybe I´ll get a chance to relax at the pool for a day.  Warmth... 

I emailed the travel agency and asked to switch my tickets to fly out on Thursday evening, meaning that I should get home on Friday morning.  Edit: I heard from the travel agency, and I´ll be leaving at 9:25 on Thursday night, connecting through Dallas, and arriving in Charlotte at 2:40 the following afternoon.  And now that I´m not leaving tomorrow night, I can actually go to the farewell dinner tomorrow at Mario´s Buenos Aires house.

And, okay, {5} home has been looking more and more appealing ever since the end of classes here.

I´ll try to write one more time before I leave with the last of my adventures in Buenos Aires, and look out for another post sometime after I get home containing a website with my photos.  I´m sorry about the delay; I just gave up on getting the time to compile them all and write captions while I´m in the city.  It will be a daylong task, and there are simply too many other entertaining ways to pass my time here.

Yesterday, it snowed in Buenos Aires for the first time since 1918.  I was outside with Carlos, Alison, and Dana when it started, whining about how cold it was.  The snow began mid-whine.  "It´s freezing," I was saying, and then every single one of them looked at the sky, looked at me, and said in chorus, "Literally."  When I got home later, my host mother was beside herself, and the newscasters and taxi drivers didn´t talk about anything else all day.

Global warming, anyone?

On Sunday, I went to the San Telmo fería (the word signifies something between a fair and a market) with Alison and Dana and combed through a plaza full of antiques, everything from tarnished silver, old lace, and stained silk slips to Coke bottles from the 1950s and a whole collection of gramophones.  The illicit glimpse into the lives of people long dead held my interest for a few hours, but I can only spend so much time imagining whose lips touched the rim of a dusty Coke bottle on a first date half a century ago.  It gets a little chilling after a while, so we spent the better part of the day looking through the handicrafts and hippie wares clogging the streets in a six-block radius around the plaza, where street vendors from all over the city migrate on Sundays to take advantage of the tourist trade.  I left with an incense burner made of dried flowers trapped in plastic, a basin meant for floating candles, designed to be suspended from the ceiling with netting, and a silver necklace in the form of a spider web with a spider made of rose stone clinging to the web.  The rose stone is the national stone of Argentina and can´t be found anywhere else in the world.  Entire jewelry stores are devoted to it here, though.  I may have also bought something else that I can´t mention from a long-haired native man decked out in Rasta gear.  Nothing illegal here or in the States, but the sort of thing one might purchase from such a man.  Anyway, the incense burner and the candle basin ought to add a bit of personality to my room this year, something it was lacking last year aside from a few surrealist prints on the walls.  Dalí and two other artists whose names I can´t remember right now.

After all sensation was frozen from our fingers, we headed back to Dana´s house to warm up for a little while and planned to meet again after dinner to find a way to pass the evening, but none of us was willing to face the cold again.  As a result, I stayed in, wrapped in blankets under the space heater, and finished Watership Down, which was far more compelling than I expected a book populated with talking rabbits to be.  I also started Marley & Me, the comically adorable tale of a man and his unruly yellow lab.  I´m about halfway through that now, and I strongly recommend it.

The next day was the day of the historic snowfall - incidentally, also la Día de Independencia - which found Carlos, Alison, Dana, and I en route to La Boca, a course that quickly changed to Café Tortoni, the two-centuries-old café where I saw a tango show a while back and where Borges used to write.  We all ordered hot chocolate and churros, oblong pastries with powdered sugar on top and sometimes with dulce de leche inside.  These didn´t have dulce de leche because they were meant to be dipped in the hot chocolate to soak up the rich chocolate flavor.  It was delicious, and it was fitting, too, because hot chocolate and churros are the traditional Día de Independencia breakfast.  We sat around in the café for four hours, talking about family and friends, politics, Argentinian customs, and, most of all, men.  At least, Alison, Dana, and I talked about men, and Carlos raised objections.  We talked about boyfriends past and present, cultural differences between Argentine and American men, men in clubs, men in bars, men in school, men in bed, men who cheat, men who want to save the world, men with bad haircuts, and men who don´t cut their toenails.  In the process of talking, I discovered that Dana and I have much more in common than I would have guessed.  I wrote her off for the first half of the trip as a mousy little girl who attends an all-female college in the South and starts most of her stories with "one time, in my church..."  I was wrong.  She holds a lot of surprises, and I started to realize that my first and second impressions of her were the same that most people have of me.  Minus the church bit, of course, and the all-girls school.  She´s a sweet girl, a little quiet, but by no means the innocent pushover that I thought she was, and not entirely adverse to making the occasional reckless bid for a good time.  Carlos, meanwhile, also surprised me with his extremely informed passion for Latin American politics and the amount of thought he had given to several of the more complex moral issues that arose in our conversation.  He´s the Ecuadorian national I´ve mentioned a few times who immigrated to the U.S. at age 10 and backpacked down to Argentina before the program.  It turns out that he also backpacked through Europe a few years back and lives in a thirteen-person self-sufficient co-op in Illinois.  I had labeled him as a devil-may-care adventurer around whom parties and good stories naturally develop, but he´s a little more than that.  He´s also infatuated with Dana, and they´re adorable.  We passed a pretty entertaining afternoon at the café, keeping warm, and Dana came home with me for tea afterward.

We all met up again after dinner to watch Los Incorregibles, a brain-dead Argentine comedy which I enjoyed in spite of the ridiculous plot line, merely because the characters were extremely charismatic and I´m also still in that stage where everything sounds funnier in Spanish.  Later, we went to a bar to continue the conversation of the afternoon, and we ran into a group of Egyptian men on a business venture here.  Carlos wanted a cigarette and told Alison to ask one of them, justifying the request on the grounds that Alison is blonde and therefore capable of getting anything she wants from most men in this country.  Sure enough, before we knew it, she and Carlos both had cigarettes and the Egyptians were joining us at our table and paying for Alison´s drink.  They didn´t speak Spanish, and their English was about as shaky as my Spanish, so we didn´t always understand one another, but they were interesting nonetheless.

I haven´t done much today other than take some clothes to the laundry in preparation for leaving tomorrow.  I think I´ll go shopping for a bit this afternoon, and Alison is supposed to be coordinating a salsa outing for tonight.  I´m a little annoyed at the fact that Kate has gone almost entirely missing for the past two weeks, absorbed in the attentions of her Argentine boyfriend.  It makes the idea of going to Mendoza with her and Carlos a little bit awkward, because I feel like she´s been avoiding me.  I´m sure it hasn´t been intentional, but still, I don´t want that trend to continue in Mendoza because interesting as Carlos is, I can´t spend four days with him.  Which is part of the reason that I still haven´t bought my ticket.  I was considering changing my mind and flying out early instead of going to Mendoza, but I´ve decided that the hostels in Mendoza will probably be clogged with single young travellers just like the hostel in Igauzú, in which case I can easily find a group of people to hang out with in the absence of Kate and Carlos.  So why have I still not bought my ticket?  Hmm.  I guess I should do that now.

Ciao, and besos.

Winter began in earnest today.  I sat through all of my classes bundled up in my marshmallow coat, shivering, too cold to sleep even as bored as I was during literature.  I miss the central heating at UNC, and I need to buy a scarf and gloves.

Actually, that reminds me of an issue I´ve been meaning to bring up.  In Argentina, public schools, even universities, are all free of cost to students, and private schools are usually more religious than academic, meaning that degrees from them are regarded with some suspicion by potential employers.  Public schools, therefore, are within the reach of almost every citizen, and yet still are not shunned by the best and brightest of them.  Similarly, public medical centers are free of charge, and although they are frequently run down in appearance, I´ve been assured by several professors that they offer the best medical care possible due to a program which requires every new doctor to serve a certain amount of time working in a free public hospital.  Despite these programs and others which owe their origin to a popular socialist philosophy that is virtually non-existent in American politics, Argentina still does not tax at the same rates as the U.S.  The sales tax is only 2%, and there is no income tax, only a property tax.  The result is that the government, while it offers more services, is stretched thinner, and there is no central heating in our university, no toilet paper or soap (we bring our own), few doors which close all the way, no janitors, graffiti absolutely everywhere, broken desks, broken chairs, broken toilets, and little to no technology in the classrooms.  And, you´ll remember, no viable private alternative.  So which is better?  A government which taxes excessively and provides high-quality services to those who can pay or borrow enough (in other words, those who pay most of the taxes), or a government which taxes little yet offers a fair share of what it has to everyone?  I´ve been asking myself that a lot recently, and I don´t have an answer.  I like the equality here, but it´s difficult to get used to always being cold and carrying a wad of toilet paper in my purse.

Okay, philosophical questioning over.  I´ve had a slow couple of days.  I didn´t accomplish much yesterday except another city tour around la Plaza de San Martín with everyone from my study abroad program.  It´s a beautiful part of town that I hadn´t explored much on my own, so although I ignored most of the tour guide´s lecture on the historical development of Baires´ architechtural style, I enjoyed the chance to see and photograph some of the most imposing and elegant old mansions in the city.  They aren´t the oldest buildings; the southern part of the city which I saw on the first tour developed first, but after some sort of plague swept through it (like I said, I wasn´t paying as much attention as I could have been), the elites moved north and built the plaza and the surrounding palaces, most of which have been converted to government buildings, embassies, or apartments now.  The most interesting part of the tour was when we passed by the Israeli embassy, which was bombed in the early 90s.  The new building was built on the same location, incorporating one crumbling wall of the old building, and next to that wall, a tree was planted for each embassy worker who died that day.  It was a sobering sight, but also intriguing.  The new embassy is one quarter memory, just like the city in which it stands.  The past lives on everywhere in Buenos Aires.

Later in the day, Kate and I made a couple of abortive attempts to visit museums only to find that everything around here is closed on Monday.  We had to settle for lunch at McDonald´s (I know, I know, it´s horrible, but I wanted some nasty American food to get the fat buildup back into my arteries for a while) and a trip to the cell phone store to fix my malfunctioning phone.

Today after class, we finally reached el Museo de Arte Moderno in its new location on a day when it wasn´t closed.  It was almost a letdown; our struggle to find and gain entrance to the museum was becoming an epic adventure in itself.  The museum was pretty limited in its scope, probably because it´s a temporary location and some of the pieces were never moved.  More than half of the work displayed was a vast collection of Luis Felipe Noé drawings, paintings, and sculpture.  He was also the only artist there who really impressed me; the others were too abstract for my interests.  Some of them were the lines and squares variety of painter, and one of them had filled an entire exhibition room floor with empty, crinkled beer cans, cups, scraps of paper, and crushed water bottles.  A plaque on the wall explained that it was meant to represent the aftermath of a party and to relate the destruction left by reckless, self-indulgent revelers to the destruction wrought by a careless government in which every politician is only interested in his own gain.  The plaque was an interesting read, but I´m afraid that I didn´t really see the need to destroy a whole room to make the point.

Noé was something else, though.  His work was completely mad.  Walking through rooms full of it made my head ache because I felt as though he had torn open his mind and let a lifetime of his confused, undigested, unresolved thoughts explode everywhere in full vividness and color.  I couldn´t comprehend it all; there wasn´t room for all of my thoughts and all of his.  I could have looked at each one of his drawings for an hour.  They are hopelessly crowded with words and images, sentence fragments competing with fantasy beasts and horribly disfigured humans in ink blots or splashes of watercolor.  None of it is particularly hopeful.  One drawing, of a man bearing a tattered flag and attempting to ride a bucking hippopotamous, was entitled ´Monumento al Idealismo (Monument to Idealism).´  Another, a complicated mass of abstract female shapes being assailed by various disgusting and misshapen men, was labeled ´Con Las Mejores Intenciones (With the Best Intentions).´  A bit cynical, yes?  There were others which represented the brutal conquest of the Americas, and one piece full of countless figures musing about love, whether or not it truly exists, and its purposes, if it is necessary at all.  There was no resolution in the piece about love, nor, in fact, in most of them.  One pointed out that humanism is considered a goal to work toward, but should not be, because humanity is something that cannot be avoided and is savage at its core.  The painting was of men and dragons forming part of one another.  I am quite confident that Noé, given his art, must be (or must have been?  I´m not sure) insane, but he was nonetheless intriguing.

Kenton: Some of his ink drawings actually reminded me of things I´ve seen in your sketchbook.  I´m not sure that you would like him, but you´d probably at least find him interesting.

At any rate, it´s time for me to go eat dinner and do some reading for my classes tomorrow.  I´ve got a salsa lesson tomorrow evening, too, which I´m really looking forward to, especially since it´s supposed to be considerably easier to grasp than the tango.  Ciao!

P.S.  Someone who smokes: How much does a pack of Marlboro cigarettes cost in the U.S.?  I´m curious because I noticed at the store today that they´re only $3.60 here, which is $1.20 U.S.  I thought they were way more expensive than that, and it doesn´t make sense to me that American cigarettes in Argentina should be so cheap.

It´s been an interesting weekend.  Nothing really turned out as I expected it to, but then, this is Argentina, and I probably should have realized that I´m still too much of a stranger to have expectations.

By the time I finally got myself in gear yesterday and Kate made her way to my apartment, it was almost 5:00, too late to try to get to the Museo de Arte Moderno.  Every time I think I have public transportation figured out here, something happens and delays my plans by at least an hour.  In this case, Kate got hopelessly lost due to inadequate research into where exactly the bus she got on was scheduled to go next.  We ended up going to the Centro Cultural Recoleta instead because it was close enough to my house to walk.  All I knew before we left was that it was an art gallery of sorts with a variety of exhibition rooms showcasing the work of various popular local artists.  I was expecting black-and-white photos of lonely people sipping tea, streetscape paintings in vivid colors, and maybe a little modern art of the sort that involves lines and squares and is titled with some dramatic monosyllable like "Death."  I was so wrong.  We had absolutely no idea what we were walking into when we entered the first exhibition room and saw the walls hung with photos of artistic political protests coordinated by el Grupo Escombros.  There was a recreation of the pietá in a shantytown on the outskirts of Baires, powerfully questioning the discord between Argentina´s Catholic past and the poverty that continues in its streets.  There was a collection of black-and-white photos of bodies and blindfolded men walking off the edge of a staircase into nothing, in memory of the military dictatorship of the 70s.  There was a monument to an anonymous dog found abandoned and dead somewhere, asserting that animals have rights too.  There was a photo of a field of disappointed dreams, written on sheets and strung on clotheslines.  It was the most emotionally powerful collection of art that I remember having seen.

And it went on.  Another exhibition room was full of photographs of the naked and scarred bodies of victims of government inaction in a neighborhood where power lines caused cancer and death in almost every house on the main street.  Another held drawings of women - some naked, some veiled, some of every race, all vulnerable and frightened.  In the middle of the room stood a wall where people had written, in a mix of Spanish and English, statistics about domestic violence in Latin America and the United States.  The most dangerous place for a woman in the U.S. is in her own home.  Did you know that?  And one in four women in the U.S. has been physically abused by a boyfriend or spouse.  There was one drawing of a wide-eyed little girl next to a field of bodies.  "What will befall her?" it asked.  There was a room full of photographs of scorched earth from senseless land clearing in the pampas.  Rural families were pictured in front of white sheets on their farms, symbolizing the disappearance of their livelihoods.  I was close to tears more than once in the Centro Cultural.  I´ve said it before, but it´s applicable here once again: everything is political in Buenos Aires.  Politics are inseparable from art.  I think it´s a result of the military dictatorship, but people here seem to question everything.  Political leaders are never given the benefit of the doubt.  The mothers of the desaparecidos still haven´t left the Plaza de Mayo; instead, their white scarves are painted on the sidewalk there, right in front of the Casa Rosada.  Protest is a national symbol.  I love it.  I love that people in this country care about making it a better place for everyone, and don´t turn their heads from the truth, but ruthlessly pursue it.  Americans have had peace for too long.  We have forgotten that our government is a government of the people only as long as we continue taking action to make it do what is right.  I wish I could export this attitude.

So that was my first wildly incorrect expectation of the day.  The club was the second.  After the Centro Cultural, Kate and I walked back to my apartment a bit more quietly, images of scars and hungry children burned into our minds, and ordered pizza for dinner while we watched The Terminal on TV with Spanish subtitles.  It was a good movie, by the way.  We were both a little sick; I have a nasty cold and she´s on a preventative drug for malaria that makes her dizzy every time she takes it.  So we sat around eating pizza, chatting, and relaxing before going out, and I kind of wish we had called it a night at that point.  I had planned to go to Mint, though, and when I make plans, I can be a bit obstinate about following through with them even if I don´t really feel like it anymore.  Besides, we only have one or two more weekends here since we´re using most of the weekends to travel.  I didn´t want to lose the opportunity to experience what I had heard was one of the wildest clubs in Baires, so I dragged myself up and got ready to go around 2:30.  Clubs don´t open here until 1:30, and most don´t get going until 3:00.  We were right on time.  As our taxi driver explained to us on the way, in Buenos Aires, people believe that it is much easier to get up in the morning if you never go to bed at night.

Let me take a moment to explain what I was expecting before I tell you how Mint actually was.  In the United States, clubs are not a place to chat and meet people.  They are a place where you go, a little tipsy, to get infinitely drunker off the energy of a writhing mass of bodies on the dance floor.  The music is more often than not rap or hip-hop, the sort of music that begs girls to dance dirty and men to pull them by their waists into a grinding position without asking permission first.  They are an escape.  You don´t have to look at your dance partner; he is just the body behind you, moving in time with you and the music to make you forget everything else.  You don´t even know his name.  At least, you shouldn´t.  I´m kind of bad about turning around, saying a few irrelevant words, and dancing face to face because it´s more erotic if less sexual.  This is a problem, though, because I always make him think I want to have sex with him, and then I have to escape from someone trying to get me to leave with him, or at least extract my phone number from me.

Now, I knew Mint wasn´t going to be playing rap or hip-hop.  It isn´t popular here.  I was expecting techno.  Wrong.  I got a strange and unpredictable combination of music running the gambit from Guns n´Roses to Madonna and Shakira to popular local rock groups.  A lot of it wasn´t particularly meant for dancing.  Other than that, I was pretty much expecting the American clubbing experience on a grander scale and in Spanish where necessary.  Some of it was there; I was with a group of friends, the music was throbbing in my lungs, the air was filled with smoke, and the bar dispensed vodka and orange juice, or vodka con naranja, exactly as often as I wanted it to.  But the people were all wrong.  The girls were dancing in circles, completely unmolested by men who were either doing to same or standing against the walls, watching.  When couples danced, they danced face to face, and they chatted and barely touched.  No one pulled me into him, away from my circle of friends, without asking.  And no one asked.  Apparently, it´s considered disrespectful for them to do either.  The women have to invite them, which is a precarious thing to do, because it puts the woman in the forward position, and the man inevitably thinks she is interested in more than just dancing.  Plus, I´m not too good at asking, and I really didn´t feel like talking.  I had come prepared to lose myself in the crowd and not have to think too much about anything.  The result was that, one by one, my friends struck up conversations with men and ended up dancing with them, and I felt lost and very, very alone.  I talked to a few people, but I didn´t really want to meet them.  I just wanted to dance, and when I was the last one left in what had been my circle, I got my coat, called a taxi, and left.  It was 5:30 in the morning, and I was leaving early.  People were still pouring in the door.

So I slept until noon again and told my host family and the other girls that I´d had a great time, but it wasn´t really true, and I don´t think I´ll be going to an Argentine club again.  Today was a bit better; Kate and I just walked over to the big arts and crafts fair that takes place every Saturday and Sunday a few blocks from my apartment and spent the afternoon there, combing through paintings, jewelry, knitted shawls and sweaters, t-shirts and magnets directed at the tourist crowd, and a surprising number sticks of incense, incense holders, pipes, bongs, and other hippie gear.  There was a field in the middle of all the booths where a large group of teenagers, hippies, dogs, small children, and tourists was gathered to watch a concert put on by a group with bongos and a harmonica.  There was way too much food and there were swings and see-saws that I regretted being too old to use.  Lastly, there were two paintings that I fell in love with, but one was $200 U.S., and the other was $300 U.S.  These quantities sound even worse multiplied by three and measured in pesos, and I had to leave them behind.

Anyway, now I´m in the locutorio down the street from my apartment, writing this, listening to Spanish pop and screaming kids playing a computer game in which the younger one apparently keeps dying.  I´m about to go home, eat dinner, take more Sudafed, do a bit of reading, and go to bed early.  Tomorrow I´m going on another city tour with the whole group, and I might get up in time to go to one or two of the other art museums I want to see in Buenos Aires.  Love from the Southern Hemisphere.

Long day yesterday.  It´s 2:45 in the afternoon here, and I´ve just begun functioning enough to get out of the apartment and walk a block to the internet cafe.

It started with four hours of sleep before classes as usual, after which Kate and I decided to go to el Museo de las Bellas Artes de San Telmo.  We thought we´d stay for a couple of hours and then split up so I could buy something cute to wear and she could go running before our tango lesson.  Well, maybe it was a good plan, but it didn´t quite work out that way.  Long story short, due to a variety of transportation complications, it took us more than an hour to get there, and when we finally arrived, it was closed for renovations.  We walked into a store across the street to ask if the owner knew when it was reopening, and the owner directed us to the new location on Corrientes near the Plaza de Mayo.  We figured it would take another twenty minutes to walk all the way back there, but by this point, we were determined not to have wasted our time, so we started walking.  Well, we walked for maybe 45 minutes, and we still weren´t terribly close to the museum.  We ended up buying roasted peanuts from a roadside vendor, going shopping together for cute outfits on la Calle Florida, one of the big pedestrain streets here, throwing up our hands, and going home.  It was the most frustrating afternoon I´ve had here yet.

At least the outfit was cute, though, and after I cleaned myself up for the tango lesson at 10:00, my host mother and her forty-year-old daughter, María Inés, who lives with us periodically, both pretended to faint when I walked into the kitchen to tell them I was leaving.  The lesson was fun, and I wasn´t too bad at it, either, but we only learned the basic steps and I can´t imagine ever reaching the level of the instructors.  There were five professional couples there to show off their skills before we started, and it was amazing to watch them.  The footwork is so intricate and tangled in the tango, and it´s such an elegant and emotional dance.  The best part was really just watching them.  It was a fun place, too - a cultural center in Palermo with a bar downstairs and an expansive dance floor crowded with locals and tourists alike.  I met Argentinians, Irish and English tourists, one Russian, and a few Americans, too, who hadn´t come with our group.   Everyone was dancing the salsa when we got there, and after the lesson was over, the floor filled up again with couples dancing the tango, some of whom had just learned, others who were experts.  I stayed for a while to watch, a little too tired to dance, and then I left with three other girls from our program to go to a bar that one of them had heard about from her host mother´s daughter.

I wasn´t planning to stay out too late - a revision from my earlier plans, but I had decided to save clubbing for another night when I´d had more of a chance to rest first.  Well, I got home a little after 4:00.  So much for that idea.  The bar was different from anywhere I´ve ever been before.  Clearly designed by someone who had seen too many American 1920s crime dramas, it was hidden behind an unmarked door and had no name except for 787 Ave. Thames, its street address.  The security guard was standing unobtrusively outside, and told us to be quiet and stay close to the door while we waited to get in, becuase the people who live upstairs have a habit of throwing water over their balcony when the bar underneath gets too loud.  After four other people left, we were allowed inside.  It was a charming place, furnished with couches and multiple fireplaces.  We were the only tourists because the bar is completely off the map, so we squeezed in with a group of about ten Argentine men on a couple of sofas, drank apple martinis, and chatted and flirted as well as we could in a combination of languages.  One of them had lived in California and another was a Harvard student from Argentina, so they spoke English better than the others.  We mostly spoke Spanish, though, and it was not only great practice, but a lot of fun.  It turns out that they all knew one another from a rugby team that´s playing in Belgrano this Sunday, and we´re considering going to watch the game.  Oh, and if you´ve heard that Argentina guys are extraordinarily smooth, it´s mostly true.  Every single one of them was a shameless flirt, and when I leaned over to whisper something in one of their ears, he turned his head ever so slightly and kissed me before I even knew what was happening.  I didn´t really mind, by which I mean that he wasn´t all that bad, but when he asked for my number, I told him I didn´t have a phone.  :) It´s nice how I can actually pull that lie off as a tourist here.

Anyway, I finally called a taxi to get home around 3:30, and the taxi driver turned out to be one of the best parts of the night all by himself.  He kept up a constant chatter on the way back to my apartment and told me that 40,000 of Baire´s residents are American in origen (don´t count on that; I don´t know if it´s actually true), and that I should stay here and not go back home.  He also told me that on a scale of one to ten, my Spanish was a nine, which is the best compliment anyone can possibly give me here.  It was a good night, but today I´m going to try to build up a little more energy and go to the Mint, a well-known club that supposedly contains one of Buenos Aires´ most hyperactive dance floors.  First I´m heading out with Kate to try again with the museam (wish me luck), and eventually get dinner somewhere.  More shopping will probably be in order as well since I´m lacking clothes that are suitable for going out unless I want to wear the same outfit I wore yesterday.

Ciao for now!

Have you ever noticed that you miss the strangest people when you aren´t at home?  The ones who you rarely see, but who you still know are always close if you need them?  Suddenly, when you aren´t at home anymore, you miss them quite a lot.

If you´re reading this, chances are I miss you.

I´m sitting in an internet café on Ave. Las Heras, a block from my house, and someone is speaking English next to me.  It´s such a harsh language, and it´s annoying the crap out of me.  I seem to be turning Argentine in this way.  In other ways, too.  The fact that there are two dogs wandering around inside the café is in no way strange to me.  There are dogs everywhere here - in shops, on the street, in groups of twenty being led by dog-walkers, even (once) on the bus.  I saw a black man today, too, and I was completely shocked.  Baires is an extremely white city, and I´ve been here for long enough now that black people, hip-hop music, overweight people, baggy clothing, sweatshirts, and countless over American standards are becoming as strange to me as to the locals.  Almost everyone here is thin, and I´ve internalized the local fashions enough that anything other than a sweater and form-fitting jeans or a nicely tailored suit strikes me as odd.  It´s strange to see younger men with short hair, too; almost all of them have hair that falls in a perfectly groomed cascade at least partway over their ears and to the nape of their necks.  I have to admit that there aren´t many people in Baires that wouldn´t stand out from the crowd in America as exceptionally well-put-together and unusually attractive.  Still, though, I was a bit taken aback to pass a store earlier which boasted "Talles para los gordos ¡supergordos! (Sizes for superfat fat people!)"  No euphemisms here for the less perfect among us, I guess. 

Even as I´m becoming more Argentine in some ways, I´ve been running into the language barrier hard for the past two days.  Last night, I went to a really nice gym (read: a lot more expensive than I thought it would be) called Megatlón to get a one-month membership, and although registration went smoothly enough, I encountered problems as soon as I started working out.  I went upstairs to the "spinning" area, a room full of bicycles, and about five minutes into my workout, a man dressed in a sweat suit with a clipboard said something to me.  I said, "¿Cómo?"  He said something again.  I said, "Más despacio, por favor.  Soy una estudiante extranjera y no tengo fluidez. (More slowly, please.  I´m a foreign student and I´m not fluent.)"  He tried English, then, upon hearing my accent, but his English was more unintelligible than his Spanish.  I gathered something about a class from all of this, and that I had to take off my headphones when the class started.  That was about all.  There was nothing to do but smile, nod, and continue to work out.  Everything was fine for the next twenty minutes, but then the room started to fill up quite rapidly.  I was almost finished, so I didn´t pay it much mind, figuring that the class was probably going to start in fifteen minutes or so.  Then, without warning, the instructor turned the lights out, turned on some really obnoxious techno music, and started giving orders.  I was stuck in the middle of an excersize class with only five minutes left of my planned thirty minutes on the bike, but I felt that it would be rude to leave in the middle of the class.  As a result, my legs are killing me today.  I biked at an intense pace for forty minutes longer than I had intended.  It was also a particularly unfortunate time to forget my water bottle.

The lava-rap (lavadero rápido, or laundromat) was fun today, too.  I wanted to stay and do my laundry myself, but I was completely unable to get this point across at the front counter, so I gave up and told them that I would just come back tomorrow.  Sometimes I can´t express the simplest ideas here; I know the words, but my accent distorts some of them so much that I´m impossible to understand.  If I don´t know more than one way to say something, sometimes there isn´t any option but giving up and saying something else instead.

Classes are still going well; all of my professors have gotten easier to understand already, and the short stories I´ve been reading for the literature class have been pretty uniformly entertaining and thought-provoking.  History has been fun, too, surprisingly; the history books here are from a different world than the history books I´ve read in the U.S.  At least two of the historians we´re reading write from a sort of collective Argentine experience, using the pronoun "we," as in, "We gained our independence," and personalizing the story of Argentina´s history.  It´s much more fun to read history written this way, because it seems like an epic tale of adventure, tragedy, and heroism - totally different from the dry, factual accounts given by most American historians.  Even my language class was interesting today; we read Argentine newspapers and analyzed their political affiliations.  Argentine politics is absolutely fascinating to me because there are so many more parties, and the acceptable ideologies and ideas are much more numerous and diverse than in America.  The rest of the class was probably annoyed at me for asking so many questions, but I couldn´t help it.  I´m a poli major for a reason.  Anyway, Democrats and Republicans are both conservative in this society and would probably form a center-right alliance if they existed here.  It´s strange to think about.

I went to the zoo today with Kate before the study abroad coordinators took us all out to a nice dinner at Los Inmortales, a high-end pizza place just about fifteen blocks from my apartment.  Italian food is big here because Italian immigrants have had such a profound impact on the culture.  Everything - the appearance of the people, their food, their slang, their accent - is tinged with Italian.  Anyway, the pizza was fabulous, but the zoo was better.  A lot of the animals were species I had never seen before, unique to South America and impossible to find in American zoos.  Some of them were running wild within the zoo walls, too - strange South American hares with skinny Dalí-esque legs, short ears, and wide faces like capybaras, small beaver-like creatures with brown bodies, white mustaches, webbed feet, and long, thin tails, and emus and other bizarre birds.  Some of the cat species, a lot of the birds, and some of the monkeys were varieties I had never seen.  There was one beautiful cat that looked like a jaguar, but it was smaller and had a gorgeous, fluffy tail that was as thick as its face was wide and longer than its body.  I took pictures, and as soon as I can get to an electronics store to buy a cable to download pictures from my camera, I´ll post them, along with the pictures from the ranch and the tour.

Tomorrow I have a tango class in the evening, and I´m planning to hit some of the trendier clubs in Palermo afterward.  Should be a good time.  For now, ciao!  Love from Baires!