Play of the day
Posted: May 22, 2011 Filed under: Mishaps, Plays of the days Leave a commentLast night I enjoyed a very typical Saturday night here in the city of the good winds. Typical, I say, because in true porteño fashion the festivities did not commence until I sat down with a few friends for a late dinner (I ate around midnight) and didn’t end until this morning (at around 5 a.m.). Also typical in that I drank too much Malbec, hence my Sunday resaca. My hangover, thankfully, was mitigated this afternoon by the arrival of two fantastic American companions and the delicious pizza we shared at the famous local joint, El Cuartito.
But back to business: The play of the day is really the mishap of yesterday. My long and alcohol-fueled night was spent at a bar in Palermo called Caracas. There’s a terrace upstairs and a DJ spins dance music while lovely waitstaff serve up delicious Venezuelan treats. The place was packed and a comrade of mine and I whiled away the hours betting on where the folks crowded around, downing cocktails and bobbing heads, hailed from. We’d pick a target, make our guesses, and then introduce ourselves to verify. There were a few hits and a few misses. A guy we were sure was from California turned out to be from Venezuela. We correctly pegged a crowd of Colombians. The very tall, blond American celebrating her birthday was a dead give-away.
One great miss: I spotted what was sure to be a gringo hipster. He was too tall to be a local. The guy also had a mustache and was sporting a hoodie. My guess was Los Angeles and, were I truly a risk-taker, I might have ventured that he shared a flat with his performance-artist girlfriend in Echo Park. But, lo, how wrong I was. We approached and, as it turned out, he was Canadian! A beautiful, tall, Canadian hipster! This fine northern gentlemen even informed me that he’s working on his Great Canadian Novel!! A bildungsroman, no less. Obviously, I swooned. All I’ve ever wanted in life, after all, is a creative type with facial hair who’s citizenship gives him access to socialized medical care. Sure that I’d found, at long last, the love of my life,* I commenced flirtation. I sharpened my wit. I batted my eyes. I even tried a little trick a friend taught me of laughing ever-so-merrily as you place a hand on the fellow’s arm and lean your face into his neck.
It just might have worked, too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids! And when I say kids here, I mean it. Just when I was ready to move in for the proverbial kill my fair northerner and I happened to be discussing stage-of-life matters and (oh woe is my fate) he let slip his age. As it turns out I spent an hour flirting with a teenager, ladies and gentlemen. Nineteen. The man cannot buy me a drink in my own country, with or without his ironic mustache.
That, readers, was my clear cue to gracefully exit the situation. I did, clutching my glass of wine and what was left of my dignity with my wrinkled 30-year-old hands. As I made my departure the weight of a great nostalgia for the long lost days of my youth settled heavily upon my shoulders. Sigh…
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*As those of you who follow this blog already know, the real love of my life is a nameless Argentine repair man. But as the cruel hands of fate plucked him from his proper place in my destiny I am now forced to search for other, lesser loves. Such is the nature of my itinerant life.
Play of the day
Posted: May 12, 2011 Filed under: Plays of the days Leave a comment
Ladies and Gentlemen, the play of the day belongs to one Taos William Moldenhauer! Who is this, you ask? Well, just a bit after the sun rose over the West this fine Thursday morning, the 12th of May, tiny Taos was born. He is my nephew. Itinerant me is an aunt!
This is one day, probably the only day of my life, that I will admit to longing to be in a very different, very far away city: Dallas, Texas. That’s where the little guy is right now with his fantastic parents and glorious grandparents.
Break out the champagne, kids. A brand new sort of wandering has just begun. Welcome to the world, Taos! This big crazy place has no idea what it’s in for!
Play of the day
Posted: May 10, 2011 Filed under: Plays of the days, Wandering in the city Leave a commentThe short and sweet play of the day, folks, was the sighting of a strange, somewhat dishelved old man who I passed on my walk home this afternoon.
He stood, distractedly gazing into the window of a clothing store in Barrio Recoleta. He held a grocery bag and in it I spotted but one item: an old, pink toilet seat.
My insomnia may be deepening my appreciation for the bizarre but it was oh-so-nice to be met in the outside world with a vision not altogether unlike those I might encounter were I to have the pleasure of sleeping, perchance, to dream.
Plays of the days
Posted: May 2, 2011 Filed under: Plays of the days Leave a comment
Oh, my sweet followers, (I wanted to write “oh, my sweet minions,” but I remembered that despite all my efforts, none of you ever do my bidding) my recent plays of the days have been many. I detail the highlights below.
1.) I finally made my way, bearing my camera, to Once Libre. The image above comes from among the collection of shots I took. Explore this fabulous B.A. local here. I particularly enjoy the rooftop, despite the very precarious route one must take to get there. You get a good view of the Once neighborhood and, if the day is sunny and warm, it’s a perfect place to share a maté.
2.) I attended a party on Friday night hosted by a number of members of Buenos Aires Libre. I was the only foreigner in attendance and it was absolutely glorious. We talked politics and drank beer and ate homemade pizza. A joy, indeed, and it counts as research! Who knew fieldwork and a pizza party would coincide in this fine metropolis? Oh wait. I did. That’s why I’m doing this.
3.) The weekend was cold and rainy. This may seem like something other than a play of the day, but I’ve been longing for a change in season. I left my windows wide open so that I might wrap myself in my old sweater and sip hot beverages. I doubt the cold front is here to stay, but a girl can hope.
4.) On Saturday evening I stayed up until 6:30 in the morning chatting about abstraction in the global economy. I may sound a bit like a madwomen with the minimal vocabulary I have at my disposal, but I take the evening’s long duration as a success, marking a level of (if not my fluency) my basic competency in the language. Huzzah!
And there, dear minions–uh, I mean, rather, readers–is your update.
Play of the day
Posted: April 24, 2011 Filed under: Food, Plays of the days Leave a commentIn Buenos Aires, as in many mega-metropoleis*, you can get pretty much anything in the world delivered. Liters of beer, cigarettes, groceries, pizza, gelato, even a single cup of hot coffee and a medialuna can be yours in forty-five minutes or less if you’ve got a phone and an address. It’s incredible.
The other fantastic thing about delivery here is that it’s called ‘delivery.’ They do not use a Spanish word for this fine commercial service. Plain ol’ English suffices–almost. The word must be pronounced as it would be in the local tongue. You ask for ‘deh-lee-behr-ee.”
I, dearest readers, finally worked up the courage to order my own delivery the other day. A courageous act, it was, because talking on the phone in Spanish is considerably more difficult than having an exchange face-to-face. When you don’t hear well or don’t understand, it can be a challenge to recover without the aid of facial expressions or emphatic gestures, pointing and the like. (And oh how the porteños love their gestures.)
I gulped. I called. I asked for a ‘deh-lee-behr-ee’ and forty minutes later two liters of beer and a bottle of Malbec arrived. Huzzah! That’s urban magic.
I didn’t actually require these items to be delivered (they were for a dinner party I hosted the following evening and I could have just as easily purchased the booze at the store next door), but hey. Sometimes minor adventures have to be chosen.
So. There you have it. A well played play of the day. Next time I think I’ll order a kilo of mint-chip along with a café con leche. Let’s hope I don’t get used to it. We wouldn’t want to have to change the title of this little blog to ‘Agoraphobic Me’.
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*I realize this is the alternative plural. I chose it because it is awesome. That is all.
Play of the day
Posted: April 18, 2011 Filed under: Plays of the days, Technology, Wandering in the city 1 Comment
I spent a very productive Saturday in a dilapidated building on Puyerredón in barrio Once. It’s a kind of awesome hipster hangout/artspace/greenspace/organization headquarters. Amazing folks, all–as far as I could tell.
I was there visiting a workshop for Buenos Aires Libre. They are a group of technophiles and generally interested parties building their own autonomous network–apart from ye ole interwebs. All who care to participate can put up their own node in the network, or link in, or just generally support as they are able. Among the activities on Saturday was a little how-to demonstration on building your own directional antennae out of recycled materials, a discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of an autonomous network in the urban environment, and the activation of a site specific node.
It was a glorious day for many reasons: One, I was mistaken for a journalist. Two, I showed-up the Canadian fellow who was there (and also writing a thesis) by speaking Spanish–said Canadian didn’t even try to understand or utter a word in the local language. Three, I was invited by a few senior members of the group to help put up a node in one of Buenos Aires’ villas this week. Villas are the porteño equivalent of favelas. They are extremely impoverished neighborhoods lacking in basic infrastructure and, if my experience in this city serves, are generally ignored or avoided by the better-off classes. Even the cab drivers will tell you they’re dangerous and not worth visiting. Without this organization or, at the very least, a local resident to guide me there is no way I could wander in and explore such neighborhoods. I am very much looking forward to this iteration of the BAL (and my own) project.
I can’t say it didn’t help to be a particularly anti-capitalist, American woman in the exchanges I had on Saturday. Nor would I say that they weren’t pleased with my (only mildly successful) attempts to use the local dialect. But hey, in field work, one takes the advantages one has access to.
Hopefully all of you, dear readers, will benefit from these newly made connections. The longest-standing member of the organization, who goes by ‘Vampi’ and very much looks the part, advised me to bring, albeit discreetly, a camera to the visit.
So: onward goes the exploration. Wish me luck. Pictures soon if all goes well.
Play of the day
Posted: March 27, 2011 Filed under: Plays of the days, Wandering in the city 1 CommentA play of the other day, really, what follows is the story of the thirty minutes I spent helping a nice, old porteña lady walk to her apartment.
In order to alleviate the terrible suffering caused by a day spent trying to write something to elicit funds from the impoverished California University system I left the building for a walk. It was a holiday so the streets were relatively empty but as I turned a corner I noticed a gang of young men hanging out on a stoop a block ahead. I, despite my striking beauty and stylish manner of dress, don’t get a lot of piropo (or cat calls) here• but during my years of urban travel and residence I have developed the habit of avoiding such groups. I crossed the street so as not to walk through this small crowd of rat-tail sporting boys. Just as I stepped onto the sidewalk on the other side, an old lady asked if I might accompany her a few blocks. She was having considerable trouble walking with her cane and I agreed. When she realized, rather quickly, that I was foreign she looked a little startled but once she could see that I speak Spanish she relaxed, grabbed my arm, and (very, very slowly) off we headed together towards her apartment.
She told me about her grandchildren, about the other foreigners she’d met. She asked me about Obama and lamented the bad deeds of the Bush administration. She complimented me on my Spanish and talked a little about lunfardo. It was a pretty great little break in the day and I can now say, officially, that I’ve helped an old lady cross the street. Several streets, actually. And, better still, that I did it in a foreign city and spoke to her in a language that isn’t my own. Not bad for a day’s work. One question: can I put that in the ‘service’ section of my C.V.?
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*This was the cause of some anxiety a few days ago when the subject of Argentine piropo came up in my Spanish class. The professor was quick to tell us that while foreign women are sometimes offended by the catcalls, porteñas feel ugly or fat if a day goes by that they don’t receive a few objectifying shouts from male passersby. Um, so, how should I feel about the fact that the only men who’ve cat-called me during my time here have been in their late sixties, obese, and very obviously drunk? It has happened a total of three times in the two and a half months I’ve been wandering around Buenos Aires. What, prey tell, could this mean? In order to avoid a potentially disastrous crisis of confidence I choose to believe that the lack of overt, public flirtation directed my way is due entirely to my devastating good looks and general self-confidence. The poor souls are merely intimidated by the spectacular phenomenon that is me.
Play of the day
Posted: March 21, 2011 Filed under: Plays of the days 1 Comment
Yesterday, I spent a fine and extremely lazy Sunday in my apartment. Two American friends came over for a late brunch. I made New Mexican breakfast burritos: yes, real green chile and real cheddar cheese that I made my mother smuggle into the country. While my own didn’t quite match the inimitable breakfast burritos of the Frontier (pictured above and a breakfast mainstay in my hometown), they were delicious.
We passed the afternoon sipping mimosas and chatting in English and so, when night fell and I finally left the house for a little walk, I was a bit startled to remember how far from home I still am. That’s the play of the day, folks: Nothing like walking out into a Buenos Aires night to heighten the contrast between where I’ve been and where I am.
Play of the day
Posted: March 6, 2011 Filed under: Plays of the days, Wandering in the city 1 CommentMy mother and I spent an hour or so this afternoon walking around this famous B.A. cemetery in Recoleta. It’s where the rich of the city have been buried for a long while. The corpse of Evita eventually found its way here, as did that of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and a good handful of other well-known Argentines. It is gorgeous and bizarre and all things great about death and wealth and monument and the city. We spent our time wandering through the the place and talking about (well, predictably) death and dying and funerals and graves. Above are a few of the highlights.
Play of the day
Posted: February 21, 2011 Filed under: Food, Plays of the days 1 CommentHands down play of the day: My lovely Colombian friend Angie batted her eyes and begged the waiter at El Fracés, (you guessed it) a French restaurant in Palermo, to serve us a plate of house-made pâté even though it is a delicacy only offered to the the dinner crowd and we were enjoying a late (5:30 p.m.) lunch. They served it with delicious wheat and walnut bread, a side of marmalade and a handful of arugula. I nearly died a little death from the pleasure of consuming it.
Itinerant Me 