Play of the day
Posted: February 15, 2011 Filed under: Food, Mishaps, Plays of the days, Wandering in the city Leave a comment
Comrades! I spent a fine Sunday afternoon drinking maté and playing chess in the riverside neighborhood known as Puerto Madero. It was hot and sunny and Puerto Madero, particularly the area alongside the nature conservancy, is a good place to be if you can find a spot to sit in the shade at one of the parrillas there, outdoor grills or restaurants where they serve grilled meats. (It’s also a good place to eat a chory-pan, which I indeed did.)
I also purchased my very own maté gourd today in preparation for a brand new stimulant habit (I am already a terrible coffee addict but I feel varying the sort uppers I intake will assure better health). Everybody here has a maté set which includes a gourd, like the one pictured above, with a metal straw whose base serves as a filter and a thermos to keep hot water in. You fill the gourd to the brim with the tea, pour in the water, pass it around among those in attendance, repeat ad infinitum. A single gourd-full of the stuff lasts for several refills of water.
Because we were so near the San Telmo Sunday market, we took a little stroll down Avenida Defensa where I purchased a pair of vintage Argentine cowboy boots. These are exactly like my nearly-dead American cowboy boots. In addition to caffeine, I’m addicted to boots. Good thing leather is cheap in this town.
Now the play of the day to which the title of this post refers is neither my purchases, nor any of my chess moves (my game is improving, but I lost) nor even the fact of enjoying a lovely Sunday afternoon outside. No, the play of the day was not a play I made at all, but rather that of an Argentine dude I saw walking in Plaza Dorego. His was perhaps the greatest rat tail yet spotted in this city so full of them. His head was entirely shaved except for a horizontal strip clinging to the lower back of his skull, a skinny little rectangle of hair. It was more the representation of a rat tail than an actual tail, but absolutely and astoundingly hideous.
I must give proper thanks to one Nicholby Howe for spotting this atrocity. His vigilance in the realm of the rat tail is unmatched.
Musings on dwelling in a language you don't call home
Posted: February 10, 2011 Filed under: Language and text, Mishaps 2 Comments
So I spent last evening chatting with a friend of mine, a local, about American music and culture. We speak only in Spanish, although he is proficient in English so I may occasionally ask him to help me translate a particular word or concept.
Brief aside: I often, when I’m speaking in Spanish, can’t remember the most basic facts about American pop culture. For example, the names of actors or bands escape me. This carries over even to conversations in English with ex-pats. Suddenly, I can see Brad Pitt’s face, I just can’t remember what the hell his name is or any of the titles of the films he’s been in. There’s a lot of “oh that movie, you know, where the guy starts that club with other men where they fight each other?” It’s a thing. The mother tongue, as it turns out, really is a kind of home.
Back on topic: What I find most frustrating about these kinds of exchanges, and indeed this is not particular to my own experience, is that I am not really me when I’m speaking in Spanish. I’m sure something of who I am comes across but I find myself trying to explain, at length and with a stunted vocabulary, what it is I feel about a given subject. But it’s like explaining a joke in a YouTube video to someone who has yet to see it. Something is just completely lost. You can’t narrate who you are. You just are.
There are benefits, of course, to being a foreigner with a capacity (albeit meager) to speak in the language of the locals. You learn a lot of slang and common expressions in the process of trying to communicate. They let you pontificate on the evils of American consumerism (and tend to be, at least here, both surprised and pleased that a real, live American would make such critiques), and they always lie and say you speak such great Spanish. But the exchanges go something like this:
Alli: Capitalism bad! The U.S. has problems.
Porteño: Really? I’ve not heard many Americans laub that critique.
Alli: We exist! We are just not the usuals.
Porteño: It’s difficult to articulate our position because so much of our cinema and music is influenced by American culture, despite our resistance to American cultural hegemony.
Alli: Capitalism bad!*
Speaking this way is a sort of exaggerated version of a bad first date. You have these conversations and then later want to return to explain this or that aspect of your perspective once you’ve thought it over and can actually find (by which I mean look up) the words. Luckily, when you’re dating a country, there’s always tomorrow. I’m pretty sure Argentina, despite my tiresome struggle with its language, will call me in the morning.
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*Caveat: I can’t deny that some of my conversations in English, with other English speakers in the U.S., have progressed, more or less, in exactly the same manner.
Of the rat tail
Posted: February 1, 2011 Filed under: Mishaps, Wandering in the city 1 Comment
You’re strolling down the cobblestone streets of Barrio Palermo at, oh, say 3:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning. You manage to dodge a gaggle of drunk German girls stumbling out of one or another of the wholly unbearable dance clubs that speckle the neighborhood. Suddenly, there he is, a vision in horn-rimmed glasses and a pearly-buttoned Western shirt. He is walking towards you, this man, the loveliest Porteño hipster you have ever seen. Thrilled, you make furtive eye contact in the hopes that he will (unlike anyone on the planet, ever) randomly strike up a conversation with you, you poor American girl walking by on your lonesome way home. But, alas! Though he looks in your direction, maybe even returns your coy glance, he passes by without a word. Just as he does you turn to watch him go, a melancholic ache deepening in your black heart. But wait. What’s this? A special little surprise delivered unto you by the gods; a small but priceless consolation for letting the man to whom you were surely fated to wed slip through your fingers. He has a rat tail. Yes, he does. He is but one more Argentine with this most heinous of haircuts.
I cannot now nor will I ever be able to explain why they do this to themselves but oh so many of them do. Porteños love the rat tail. This style is a far, far worse offense to their otherwise dashing good looks and breezy charms than would be the standard L.A. hipster mullet. It is the sort of haircut that can, in fact, induce nausea in a foreign onlooker. But it is heartening to know that if you live and die alone in Buenos Aires, you’ll have avoided ever having run your hands through such a greasy, ugly, disastrous assault on reason and reasonable aesthetics.
Of Argentine cell phones
Posted: January 28, 2011 Filed under: Mishaps, Technology 1 Comment
Take head, oh ye foreigners who dare to enter into the strange world of mobile telecommunication in Buenos Aires!
A few days after my arrival here I went about getting myself a functional cell phone. With the aid of a lovely young Colombian woman and her lovely young American boyfriend we went from Claro to Movistar and then, finally, ended up at Personal. (These are the three most aggressively present carriers in these parts). I purchased, for the ridiculously high price of 60 American bucks, a little LG phone. My own U.S. cell phone didn’t have the bandwidth to work this far South of the equator, apparently, and the folks you can normally pay to hack in and change this couldn’t fix the problem. Price paid and journey over I ran my fingers over the soft white plastic of my new mobile and thought, this will be my connection to the vast social networks whose links crisscross Buenos Aires, my dear port city.
Well, yes and no: First off, it is entirely unclear to me what prefixes to use when calling on said cell phone. I’ve heard different numbers to try from different people. There is apparently no hard and fast rule. “It’s sometimes 15,” people say, or “Try 11 first.” Some say to input the prefix in your contact list with the rest of the number, others say it’s unnecessary.
I have a whopping five contacts in my phone right now, only two of which I have been able to successfully call or send text messages to.
In addition, if one were to dial the Argentine prefix from a U.S. phone and then key in what I believe is my number (this was more difficult to figure out than you’d imagine because I received three text messages from Personal after setting up my phone, all of which claimed that I had a different phone number) you would be roundly informed by an operator–more likely a recording of an operator than an actual, live, human operator–that the number does not exist. Go figure.
I have successfully placed and received calls about as often as my attempts at communication via voice or SMS have failed, inexplicably and entirely. I also have received several voice messages which I cannot access because this bitchy recorded lady keeps telling me to put in my pass code–a code I have never known and that will forever remain shrouded in an impenetrable mystery to me. A friend of mine who has been living in the city for over two years still doesn’t know how to get his messages. TWO YEARS: this is a man with many local friends, mind you, and a reasonable amount of technological know-how.
So, for now, I remain only partially linked in. But I swear there must be a secret because Argentine’s love to talk on their cell phones as much as anybody. Although they do really seem to prefer the walkie-talkie function. Even when they aren’t using it, they treat their phones thusly, moving them from ear to mouth and back again, somewhat haphazardly, throughout their often very loud and animated conversations.
One great perk, which may or may not be specific to Argentine cell phones: each button on my phone, when pressed, sounds like a different key on an old casio keyboard.
Of mosquito colonies and textual laughter
Posted: January 25, 2011 Filed under: Language and text, Mishaps 2 Comments
O.k. readers, particularly those sensitive to crude language, consider this fair warning. The following post contains the occasional expletive.
Now, having told you what to expect, let us commence with the cursing: SHIT! What I thought was a small, avant-garde gnat commune in the corner of my bedroom turns out to be an imperialist army of mosquitos. I woke up today looking like someone suffering from one of those 19th Century diseases that kills your social life quickly and you slowly. Luckily, my social life here is minimal so I just appear afflicted when I buy my entrance tickets to museums or my groceries. And the folks selling that stuff have, thus far, made no obvious attempts to distance themselves from me. Although, I may not be in the best position to gauge such gestures, considering it is quite common for anyone to look at me with that peculiar “don’t you dare come hither” stare. Fucking mosquitos.
And, in unrelated news, I’ve just discovered the following glorious phenomenon: If a porteño is instant messaging another porteño, or anyone, really, and wants to indicate laughter the following text is used: “Ja ja ja.” Oh my! So splendid a transliteration of “ha ha ha” (which is itself, I suppose, a transliteration) I have never seen. And that it appears totally normal to them to write “ja ja ja” and totally normal to me to write “ha ha ha” makes it all the more jubilant.
That, my dears, is all I have for now. Wish me luck sleeping under the constant threat of attack by those colonialist jerks.
Of apartments, tuna-fish and the Guia T
Posted: January 22, 2011 Filed under: Food, Mishaps, Wandering in the city 2 CommentsLadies and gentlemen, I have an apartment! Yes, a little studio in Recoleta (which is the Beverly Hills of Buenos Aires. Not my first choice given my deep commitment to proletarian aims, but after a week of searching I had to take what I could get). It’s a studio. Spartan but lovely, with hardwood floors and a tiny kitchen with a two-burner electric stove. It has a bathtub and lots of natural light–its two greatest selling points. I am paying a bit over a third more than what a Porteño* would to live here. This is the cause of some frustration, but I have accepted the cost as one of many that come with outsider status. And it is still half what my rent was in Los Angeles. Pictures of my fine domicile will follow once I figure out how to say “I’d like a card reader for my digital camera” in Spanish without sounding like an idiot. I imagine it would sound something like the following sentence if I try today: “Hello. I am looking for a thing that I can use to take out photos from this card that exists in my camera so that I can put them on my computer. Do you understand me?” Serviceable, but so awfully clunky.
I moved in today and shortly thereafter walked a block down my street to the CarreFour grocery store. I purchased the following: six eggs, one loaf of wheat bread, one large bottle of water, butter, mayonnaise, mustard, two peaches, a bottle of cheap Malbec and a can of tuna-fish. (The tuna was by far the worst decision I’ve made here thus far, excluding perhaps the canned mushroom sandwich I ordered two days ago. Yes, that’s right, canned mushroom sandwich. With canned asparagus and crappy cheese. ‘Fracaso total’, as they say. It was, in my defense, an attempt to avoid yet one more disastrous jamón y queso concoction. God they love ham and cheese here. They make lasagna with it, sandwiches, empanadas, pizza…everything).
And now, dear readers, I am sitting comfortably at my table sipping from a mug of wine, writing this little post and attempting to decipher the Guia T. The ingenious Guia T is the guide to the complex bus infrastructure in the city. Buses, unlike the ‘subte’ (short for subterráneo), run all night and from my neighborhood, they are by far the superior form of transportation to any other section of town. You find where you are in the city and then where you want to go and see what bus numbers correspond to both. The guide comes as a little booklet “de bolsillo” and a new addition is put out every year. Every other page has a map of one section of the city divided into 24 squares, corresponding to 24 squares of bus numbers on the page preceding it. My problem: I have absolutely no idea which direction the busses should be headed when I catch them. None. My cardinal directions are always bad but have moved from bad to non-existent during my time in Buenos Aires. Luckily, a friend of mine gave me a spectacular compass before I left. I’ll have to keep it around my neck to have any chance. Another fun fact about the buses here: When you hop on at a stop, you don’t tell the driver where you are going, you tell him how much you want to pay. I have yet to meet anyone who can tell me exactly how one decides how to gauge the appropriate cost. The consensus seems to be to just say 1 peso and 20 centavos and assume this will serve you well.
Its nine now, so still a good hour before the porteño dinner hour. That’s how long I’m giving myself to figure out how to get from Recoleta to Palermo, a barrio I would liken to L.A.’s Silverlake. Wish me luck.
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*’Porteños/as are Buenos Aires residents.
Itinerant Me 