So the first couple days in BA have been good. I'm already an old hand with maté, now on the look-out for my own Thermos, bombilla, and maté set. (Jennifer will love the whole set up when I get back. She was a maté fan, before I was.)
I'm optimistic, despite inauspicious beginnings. I got locked out of my homestay in the first three hours. I misunderstood la señora, and thought we were leaving right away. She had told me to get my coat and be ready to leave in a half hour, and then she left to take out the garbage. Left alone, I began to doubt my understanding of her instructions and went downstairs to the ground level of the apartment building in a panic, thinking she had been waiting on me.
She wasn't there, obviously, and later found me at the apartment door sitting on the stairs. She just started laughing. Nothing but my pride was lost, which, in retrospect, has left me no where to go but up.
The bus here is irritating, but not bad. It's not really a stressful place, and porteños, surprisingly, are not a stressed-out people. I'm surprised because the only other comparisons of large population centers I have are San Jose and San Francisco, which, although wonderful each in their own way, are very stressful, intense kinds of places where being busy and over-whelmed is almost a gauge by which to judge how successful you are. Yes, even the "laid-back" West Coast is full of this kind of atmosphere.
I can't say much for BA yet, obviously, but here are general first impressions only, a quick sketch trying to make sense of what I have seen: long lines of people waiting for buses but no one taps their toes or huffs or looks at their watch all that often; waiting rooms of the typical bureaucratic blank faces of a DMV, but people don't nervously shake their legs or even fidget. The pace is brisk, but there is time for maté and café as well as business. In fact, the people I see exhibiting the most impatience are Americans. I will let you think of good reasons why this might be, and I won't hazard any generalizing guesses about Americans and Porteños. When a friend and I went to eat lunch at a café in a part of the city accustomed to extranjeros, the mozo, or waiter, asked if we wanted to the quick menu because, I guess, being American means eating quickly and leaving. We asked him for the normal menu, but it began the process in my mind of trying to figure out out what makes me culturally American.
Still, being a stranger in a strange land, I am tentatively liking BA. The noise, the press of people, the language, and just the strangeness of it all, is utterly draining. I'm not going native anytime soon, but I am settling, like a shaken bottle vinaigrette dressing.
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