a week gone by

A week ago on this night I was drinking wine on the second story of a double decker bus from Buenos Aires to Bariloche. At this time exactly (it is around midnight) they attentive bus attendant was coming around with whiskey and champagne so as to put us to sleep. We were also all watching a very terrible movie starring Will Smith as a heroic single father who, against all odds, became an investment banker. The bus took twenty hours, and we stopped once. It is not like the buses we know. The seats turn into beds and they play American music videos from the 80´s and other films dubbed in spanish. I woke up after a good night of sleep and got to watch the sun rise over the Pampas rushing by.
I arrived in San Carlos de Bariloche the following day (last monday afternoon). it is an alpine town. A man was there with a sign, it had my name on it. I went with him in a little car with the windows shut up tight on account of the wind. I was hot and also very nervous. He took me to my new home. So let me tell you a bit about this new home, where I have spent the last week and will spend the next month:

This place (and I will not name it on account of privacy, internet search stuff) is a sort alpine, Gaucho-themed estancia resort. It is remarkably, breathtakingly beautiful; at the foot of a giant snowcapped peak and rolling verdant mountains intermixed with smaller craggy peaks. We are on the shore of a crystal clear blue lake. There is a a lovely giant garden with lavender and berries (it is rasberry season here). There are horses all around and wild ducks, pheasants and of course many chickens and some stupid dogs and wonderful mouse-catching barn cats. I live in the servants quarters with the girls. The girls are the other workers. If you have ever been to a very nice hotel and wondered who ironed your pillowcase, who turned down the comforter, who vacumed and swept and dusted all the things, that is me and the girls. I am one of the girls.
The guests are very demanding here. They come from all over to have a very contrived experience--horseback rides, boating trips, fishing trips, massages, guided treks, three meals a day, cocktail hour, afternoon tea, todo. The girls, my girls, don´t speak a word of spanish or if they do, it is usually less comprehensible than my spanish, which is saying a lot. The first few days were emotionally and physically draining beyond my greatest fears. So many new words, new names, new rules, new skills. I learned, in spanish, how to set a table with a million forks and knives and glasses. I learned all the words associated with cleaning. I learned that I understand less than I thought I did. More so, I learned so much about the English speaking guests. This is the interesting part of my job: while I am trying to understand what it is that gabi, xime, maria or mani want me to do in the kitchen, I am also fully understanding and thoroughly distracted by the forced conversations of our english speaking dining guests. They come here, pay a lot of money and then sit together at a large table to be served three meals a day, two of which (lunch and dinner) are three courses. Lots of gamey meats and sweet sauces and lots and lots of wine. THey are disgusting a lot of them while others seem deserving of a second look. From now on, you will hear about them if I deem them worthy of your time.
But besides the guests, the girls (some of whom I am befriending in sweet ways), the cleaning, serving, shining of wine glasses and china, the fancy folding of napkins, etc. Besides all of that, I am hiking up in the mountain, swimming in the clear lake, boating, and picking fruits and vegetables from the garden. Today, for example, I hiked high up into the mountain, under a waterfall and then sweaty and tired, dove into the lake for a swim--all this between three course lunch and cocktail hour. I sleep like a rock and the roosters wake me when It is time to wake up.

clubbing

I decided to come back to Buenos Aires for a night before getting on a bus to drive twenty hours down into the mountains. I took the faster ferry back from Uruguay, which though smaller and without entertainment, managed to have a bar and a Duty Free shop. I spent most of the hour ride in the Duty Free shop both because I like Duty Free shops and because this was a particularly exciting one. The boat was moving fast, bumping over waves in its hurry back to Argentina, causing the Toblerone chocolate bars to fall off the shelves and the bottles of Jameson and Kahlua to rattle against one another threating disaster. People had to continually steady themselves against the perfume shelves. No one found it odd. They just went on shopping, tax free.
Though I had been relieved to leave Buenos Aires behind less than a week ago, I could not have been happier to be back, so much like greeting an old friend. It was raining, hot rain, and yet I still felt glad to be sweating amongst all the Porteños on the subway. The city has an energy that is both exhausting and utterly invigorating. I can now understand why the ones with money like to take the weekend away, it is so lovely to come back.
I walked and walked as I am wont to do in the city. I revisted some places I knew and walked on streets I had not previously ventured down. I spent the evening with my friend Leah, (from Denmark) who is still here in the city studying spanish, and Justus, (from Holland) also studying spanish. I got my last traditional meal here of meat and wine, both of which were not disappointing. The consensus was then to go to a ¨club¨that sweet young Justus had heard about from all the Brazilian girls at his school. The club was by the airport. I do not go to clubs and I have certainly never been to one surrounded by landing strips. Upon arrival, it was clear that Pascha (the name of the club) was something special--a giant two story stucco house surrounded by parking lots full of cars, taxis, police, security and then hundreds of young people, waxed, greased, chests pouring out of shirts greeting one another, smoking, exchanging tickets, money, joining lines and making new ones. Everyone knew where to go. There was a sort of beaurocratic order that we failed to work our way through. It involved going through a series of lines, showing the correct identification and then knowing which line to join in order to get in(segregated, as best as I could figure into men, hot single men, women and hot single women.) Security, also with waxed chests greased and exposed, were fierce and unforgiving though friendly with the young women (also with chests exposed)who came to give them cheek kisses over the movable steel security gates. Sweet cherub faced Justus did not have the proper identification and none of us had the proper attire and so we left so much like all the roaring planes overhead, defeated if not better-educated.It was nice to get a brief if distant taste of the Buenos Aires that I had missed out on.

horse girl

I am in Punta del Diablo, Uruguay. It is a small fishing town that once I assume had just white washed thatch rooved houses and a lot of silence. Now the thatched rooved houses are very close together and spreading further than they should. It is not so quiet either, what with big buses always driving down the rutty dirt roads to drop off tourists and backpackers. There is still a certain magic to it, though it was hard for me to adapt to the whole ¨chilled-out¨ vibe that this town both sells and enacts. I am not chilled-out, not in the way that the people here would like me to be. When arriving at a beach, it has always been my practice to venture far from the crowds. This is something that I have been taught and it is something I continue to live by. In this case, it meant walking a very long ways over grassy dunes and shiny with mica volcanic boulders. I was rewarded. The water, the Atlantic, feels so lovely and warm and the air cool with wind. Though pleasant, surely, it is also a very dangerous combination. I awoke this morning with the worst sunburn of my life on the backs of my legs. I had generously applied sunscreen but as the hostel worker informed me, all the gas from the thousands of cows in Uruguay have depleted the ozone and so the sun is stronger here. Who knows if that is true, but today I was quite pink.
I had wanted to ride a horse. I rented one. A bit of a touristy gimmick, surely, but it was what I wanted. The two horse guides (one man, one woman) were lovely, fresh, unkempt and very relieved that I spoke spanish (or some). For the first time, I understood what it is that those horse girls, whom I had hated in my youth, were after. Riding a horse is so much more athletic and engaged than I had imagined. There is this sense of connecting with the animal in a very real way. I loved it.
My horse was pregnant. Her name was Baracha and I think that sometimes she looked sad, like she were preoccupied. We rode down the beach a far ways and then turned into some swampy forests where we let the horses wander around to gnaw at the branches while we drank wine. The mosquitoes were terrible and couldn´t help but think of all those vaccinations I did not get. Full of wine, we called the horses back through the dark and rode them down the shadowy beach. It was easier to gallop after the wine and I felt so happy just like those horse girls with the LisaFrank TrapperKeepers dreamed of feeling. I hope it will not be my last ride.

uruguay

I left Bueno Aires this morning. Took a humbling bus ride to the port. Humbling in that I rode half way around the city it seemed before realizing I had passed the port miles ago. I got to see new neighborhoods, see all the people getting on and off. Lucky I had left two hours, I got on just as the boat was about to depart. Stepping onto the ferry, I thought I had stepped into the lobby of the Marriot or some equivalent, mirrored surfaces, fake trees all around, little bars and concessions counters here and there, a waxed floor. I spent most of the trip on deck, watching Buenos Aires disappear on the horizon. And strangely, for all the endless wonderful things I can say about the city and all my awe and admiration, I felt somehow glad to see it go. The wind whipping around felt deserved.
Then there was the enternainer on board. Hair sleak with grease, he sang some tango-opera type show tunes on the shiny waxed dance floor below a large pyramid skylight. The speakers were turned up way high causing the whole boat to shake with his baratone. The passengers, veiwing from the balcony above and the ground floor below all seemed to enjoy the show. It was a very full transportation experience.
I met Belen on the boat as well. She is from Paraguay, on vacation. She is a doctor in training and has a love of life that is both admirable and exhausting. She and I joined together to explore the historic town of Colonia for the day. The "old town", though lovely, is like all others in the sense that it is filled with tourists taking pictures, taking pictures of one another, and taking pictures of themselves. Belen seemed to take endless pleasure in offering to take pictures of tourist families. She loved it, every picture as much as the next. And it was my job, in turn, to take her picture on every street corner, vista or the like. She was really something special. She spoke english but we spoke in spanish, so that I might learn. It was more than kind of her to humor me. I know that she will make a very wonderful doctor.

last day

Today was my last day of class. I am glad of it. German Peter is making me crazy. He is having an extremely difficult time with the imperfect vs. indefinite. Today he scolded dear Marta, with her free-spirited teaching style, and told her that she ought to give us a list of clear rules for the past tense. He is taking tango lessons and comes to class each day to proudly report that he is improving.
Instead of more school I am going to Uruguay starting monday. Being my first real travel plans, I am nervous. My doubts come to life most concerning hostel accomodations. The hostels that get good reviews are the ones that supply some version of a 24hr party. I am not very much fun, I don´t think. I don´t want the party. I suppose I am still figuring out what it is that I do want in an accomodation, but I don´t think it is the party. The photos are most detering for me: subjects always sunburnt, always gathered around plastic patio furniture, always with plastic cups. I am excited nevertheless, as this is the beach part of my trip. I am going to ride a horse on the beach I think, I don´t care how much it costs.

When I arrived home from school today, Elsa was there with her nephew. He has down syndrome, and Elsa cares for him sometimes. I sat with them in Elsa´s cool dark living room listening to Michael Jackson. Her Nephew was shirtless, and wearing several rosary bead strands around his neck and tremendously thick glasses. He asked me many questions which I did not understand and Elsa would repeat them for me slowly and clearly. I in turn would answer back to her nephew-a sort of three way conversation. It was surreal. Perhaps the most striking thing was how normal it was for me to be unable to understand a word of what he was saying. He was just like the rest of them, incomprehensible. I suppose it is all relative.
I really like Elsa. I like how she goes around with her blouse unbuttoned and her lacy bra and wrinkly stomach exposed. I also like the way she carries her little radio around with her all about the apartment. I am going to miss her and I flatter myself that she will miss me.

american pride

Very quickly. Yesterday I went to see the Andy Warhol exhibit the Americans at the modern art museum (MALBA), located in the ritzy Palermo Botanico neighborhood.
The show was what it is--I think this was my third time seeing it. However, my heart swelled with a powerful mixture of acute homesickness and raw pride. I felt this funny sense of ownership, not so much over the soup cans as I did over the images of Nancy Reagan. These are my people, I thought. It is really something to experience images of your own country from abroad.
Afterwards I went to a traditional Parilla with Lea (my friend from Denmark) and several other new friends from Holland. Parillas are an Argentinian staple-restaurants serving mainly meat and pasta. The main part though is the barbequed meat, so much meat. We ordered a Parillada completa which was recommended for 3. Served on small charcoaly grills on a wooden block, the parillada contains every cut of beef along with blood sausage and chicken and I think pork sausage. It was my first time with blood sausage. The taste, unlike the texture was quite lovely.I don´t know what is not to like about the taste of blood. There were four of us, and we could not finish. The couple to our left had no problem devouring the same portion.This was at around midnight, the time when most people eat or start to eat. I suppose it is how they can eat nothing but sugary bread in the morning.

school

I am taking classes in the center of the city, at one of the millions of language schools all around. The teachers are all enthusiastic, waving their arms all around and opening their mouths so wide even to say the simplest of words. I have three teachers.
Marta is the morning teacher. Thin, pale, with dark flying-around hair an expressive sharp-featured face and an explosive personality. She always wears these flowy dresses and sometimes looks very sad. I very much like her and I fancy that she likes me the best of all the students. She once said that her father is passionate about indigenous cultures and it really endeared me to her. I like to think of her having dinner at her father´s apartment surrounded by artifacts and heavy books about the Mayans.
Marciel is the afternoon teacher. Probably in his fifties, Marciel is not bad looking. He needs reading glasses only sometimes and has kind eyes that seem to deeply consider the questions of his students. His only real remarkable trait is that when he gets talking fast, a single line of white froth spittle appears in the perfect center of his lower lip. For this, I like him. They are both good teachers, refuse to speak any English and rattle on as if we understand them always. They especially like to talk about politics or media. Class is usually started by reading newspaper headlines.
Claudia is my private teacher. Small, boyish and very dark, almost black kind eyes. She has a tiny, somewhat strained voice, as if her throat is constricted. She is nothing like the other two teachers. She is quiet and private and shares little about herself, accept that she lives with her boyfriend who does not cook at all and thus she must cook everyday, though she hates it. She chooses funny times to break into English, as if she wants me to really understand a particular point. This was one of those times, and breaking out of her rapid Spanish she said carefully, "we no eat delicious food at our house." It made her laugh and so I laughed too. She has a strange ability to make me very nervous--I never know where to put my hands, my eyes, my feet. This is good, I think; if I can learn under these nervous conditions, then I am prepared for anything.


Then there are the students. There are many of them, always milling about the water dispenser in various combinations. I have three others in my class. First there is Peter: sixty years of age, Swiss German, obsessive in all he does-notes, punctuality, pronunciation, etc. He fits all of the stereotypes of his nation´s people. He has a little sack of neatly sharpened colored pencils, so as to color-code his notes and highlight roots and endings of verbs. He also has a neatly trimmed moustache (which I noticed he has trimmed more than once in the last couple of weeks), a balding head and ruddy complexion. His pronunciation is mechanical and utterly infuriating.
Andy: 20 years old, German and very proud to be so (a fact which he as declared to our class, which made everyone look at the ground). He is thick, pasty, doughy. Dresses like frat boy and brags about his capacity for beer. He is smug, full of rolling eyes and heavy sighs. He fiddles quite a lot with his MP3 player and likes to make superlative statements such as, ¨"Oktoberfest es el mas grande fiesta el todo mundo." The teacher had to argue that Carnivale was, but Andy sat proud, eyes unblinking beneath the brim of his trucker cap.
Laia: Norwegian, blonde, fair, and avoids eyecontact (except with andy). Her age is unknown, though I guess 35 or so. It is difficult to tell especially since she and Andy are very buddy buddy--always taking their breaks together and looking at eachother across the table. She is sweet, timid, but seems utterly interested in my eagerness to speak of our common ancestors. She speaks Spanish with a lovely accent--rapidly and with funny lilts and trills. It makes me wish I were Norwegian learning Spanish. Nevertheless, she is really struggling with direct and indirect object pronouns. I quite like her.

I understand that my descriptions seem cruel and joyless. I assure you they are not. I spend many hours with them each day. The six hours of class makes my head spin, and it doesn´t stop spinning as I try to sleep. My dreams these nights are full of people from home and my classmates along with this ever present stressful feeling of searching for a word.
But despite what it seems, with all my criticism and nervous sleep, I am indeed having a `good´time. `good´in the sense that it is what I wanted- the learning, the exploring, the meeting of new things, words, food and people every moment. I will later write about some of the fun times, but for now certain characters need to be developed as they will not be part of my life for much longer. I will say though that Elsa and I are becoming closer all the time. She irons while I eat my breakfast in the morning and some nights she drinks Fernet Branca with me before bedtime. She takes it the same as I do, just with soda water, not with coca-cola as is the custom of her country people. Her daughter is having trouble with her pregnancy and so Elsa is very worried. When I returned home this evening she was researching diseases on Wikipedia. Motherhood, it seems, and its relationship with the internet is a cross cultural phenomenon.

a late start

My original plan was to start a blog so as to reflect on my experiences and inform those who might be so interested to know of my whereabouts. I had a lot of original plans--all these sweet ideas about how things would be. I had something very ambitious in mind. In the last week and a half, the ambitious ideas I had for some very comprehensive blog got swept away, and I had agreed to abandon the idea entirely. Now it is back, in a humbler form. I will do what I can to relay my experiences in a way that is hopefully helpful for me and perhaps interesting or informative. That said, I need to get up to date on where I am, what I am doing, etc. I will try to make this brief.

I arrived in Buenos Aires in the afternoon of the 27th of January--so swelteringly hot and the light so bright. The homestay that I had previously arranged dissapointed. I arrived at the apartment building and spent a good twenty minutes walking up and down these rickety stairs, finding that none of the doors had numbers. I could hear the activity of the families within, clinking their plates and changing the channels. This made me feel very alone. Turns out I was in the servants stairwell and the sweating doorman finally led me to the right place. Silvana was the mother of the house, Natasha the daughter (age 21). Silvana was warm, with big leathery arms and a strong bitter scent. Natasha was kind to me, though I think she was dissappointed by my humble atire. The room which I was going to pay good money for was already occupied, by one, maybe two Brazilians who had their clubbing clothes strewn about in such a way as to say, there is no more room here for you. I was to sleep on one of the beds, though not sure which. The one Brazilian sat around the steaming room watching a game show on her computer and Natasha and her friend Frederico chainsmoked in the kitchen. It was not so bad, I could have kept it, made friends with the Brazilians and Natasha and surely Silvana. Instead I made up some very broken excuse about how I actually had a friend who lived here that I didn´t know about before and I was going with her. I left and used the one connection I had in the city--girlfriend of a friend´s brother, Mary. She so kindly let me stay at her apartment for two nights while I went searching for a place to stay. I found a decent hostel, and there I met Leah, a lovely Danish girl who, like me, is here on her own to learn spanish. She and I have become fast friends--actually my only friend. It is nice to have one at least. After a few days Leah moved into a dormitory, and I into the apartment of a little old woman by the name of Elsa. Elsa is a dear woman with a tiny high voice and funny things all around her shady, cool apartment. She sometimes has friends over and they drink beer and smoke cigarettes on the balcony. I think that Elsa thinks I am quite lonely and sad because when I told her that I was going out with a ´friend´she acted much too happy and told me that it was not good for me to be so alone all the time. She has a point, but I have in fact been enjoying much of the time alone, especially in exploring the city, which is an inexhaustive task. Elsa speaks to me in rapid spanish and then will occasionally throw in a few words of english. Although I prefer her to speak Spanish so that I might learn, the way she pronounces english words makes me feel sort of warm and silly. I only hope I sound half as charming as I am struggling with her language, though I doubt it.
In the days I go to school and explore the city. I will talk about school later, as there are some characters there that deserve a bit of development. As for exploring the city, that is not something I can accurately relay. The city lends itself very much to just walking endlessly and aimlessly. Elsa´s apartment is in the shady and family oriented neighborhood of Palermo botanico. Nearby is Palermo viejo, split into Palermo SoHo and Palermo Hollywood. These places are very hip and desirable for a young, often elite crowd. My school is in the microcentre--a nasty twenty minute subway ride away. Nasty because we are like sardines in the subway cars, hot air blowing our hair into one anothers gasping mouths. It is the most unpleasant part of my day. That, and then walking through the swarming streets at lunchtime. It is incredible to always be around so many bodies and though I am fascinated by it, often thrilled, it is in the end just very exhausting. I have now walked through at least part of most of the neighborhoods in inner Buenos Aires, though rarely walking the same streets twice. The city is an incredible mix of first and third world urbanism--most all of it old. I could go on. But in brief, the city has certainly captured and maintained my attention, despite the fact that it renders me feeble.