In the Thick of It

I wanted to write about living in a big city, where something is going on all the time and when news happens, it's not only nearby but it affects your life. Megan, perhaps, has experienced this in Washington, D.C., it being, like, the capital of the country, or something like that. Big cities are where stuff happens!

What kind of stuff? Well, let me explain: I live very close to the business and political center of the city, and the bus I take to school everyday passes through the major arteries, none being more important than 9 de Julio, the widest avenue in the world. My bus also goes through Avenida de Mayo, which ends in the Casa Rosada (Argentine equivalent of the White House) and the Plaza de Mayo. The White House is set back from the street, buffered with manicured lawns, lined by fence, aloof, distant. The Casa Rosada, on the other hand, is right there on the street, there is no distance, figurative or actual, from the outside world. I think that's what makes it a very unique and symbolic place in the national imagination.

When Evita made her famous speeches, she did so from the balcony of the Casa Rosada. When there is a big protest, it always ends in the Plaza de Mayo. When Kirchner died, that's where they held his wake. Essentially, if something important is going on in the country, that's where people go.

So here I am, American girl in the Big South American City, the center of it all. How do I know when something big is going down?
I can't find my bus.

Yes, on par with other tried-and-true measuring devices like the ruler or the litmus test, the importance of a protest or demonstration can be gauged by how far away I have to walk to find a bus stop at which a bus actually stops. For example:

• Death of Nestor Kirchner, former president and husband to current Argentine president Cristina Kirchner. I walked 10 blocks in the rain before realizing I should have just taken the Subte.

• Malivinas (Falklands) War Veterans protest happens about once a month, and the bus route doesn't even change.

• Union/Communist militant/Student march on Plaza de Mayo is an interesting case, because it just created enough stand-still traffic that it behooved me to get off the bus and walk home.

Living in Colorado or even the bubble that is Santa Clara, CA, it's easy to forget that news can actually affect your life. Most of the time, it seems that news is something that happens "somewhere else" in the U.S. Here, there is no buffer zone, and if something's happening, I can measure it in footsteps.
--Nicole

One Ring to Rule Them All...porteño edition

We're all eagerly awaiting Jennifer's next post in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres, and it should be forthcoming. She's been really busy and has intermittent access to the Internet, but from everything she sent us thus far, she already has lots of things to tell us and stories a-plenty, never you fear. But on this side of the pond...

My time with the Hat is almost over. Soon, it will be sent off to Washington, D.C., where Megan will have the power, the pleasure, and the responsibility of ownership. Until then, the Hat is still mine, and I am wearing it as I type about this particular adventure.

How do you imagine South American music? Peruvian flute bands?* Well, I don't think you imagined Tengwar**, who describe their sound as EPIC FOLK METAL. (Tengwar, for all our more 'mainstream' readers is the name of the elvish script based on Indian brahmic scripts and created by J.R.R. Tolkein for his Lord of the Rings trilogy). As a card-carrying member of the Mythopoeic Society, stumbling upon this hobbit-loving crowd seemed like fate rather than dumb luck.

It was a Friday night, I had been planning on staying in, but my host-brother was having some old grade-school friends over. I knew if I didn't leave soon one of two terribly socially awkward things would happen: 1) I would stay in my room, typing on my computer all night, while I heard the laughter and conversation outside, only emerging from my room to use bathroom, like some Gollum-like creature. 2) Be introduced to everyone, and then becoming the awkward extranjera who doesn't really understand what's going on in a get-together that was supposed to be only old friends.

Luckily, I have made friends in the program here who took pity on me, and we hastily made plans to meet at a restaurant relatively near all of our residences. It was a German/Irish place (the two are nearly synonmous on this side of the world) and the bottom floor was crowded with porteños so we decided to go upstairs. Where, lo and behold, we came upon a scene that could have at the Renaissance Faire; it was the band setting up for an acoustic show, and they were all dressed like barbarians, furs and boots, the whole shebang. Surprise and more awkwardness ensued as we went back downstairs, unsure of what it was we had just witnessed. Retreat is more or less a safe initial response, although in retrospect, we shouldn't have left.

A half hour later we began to hear the celtic melodies and rhythms coming from upstairs. People were stomping, clapping, and singing and a variety of metalheads were walking up and down the stairs. What was this music? It sounded awesome! We went back upstairs only to be turned away at the top by a waitress who said there was no more room.

What happened next? Torture. To be so close and yet so far from the fantasy geeks of Argentina was almost too much to bear. After the show, I went and talked to one of the roadies who told me that the band sang in English because it was more "celtic" and that they often had performances at this establishment. I could see them again.

I never thought to find celtic/metal/punk in ARGENTINA, a country that has not had as much British immigration as, say, Canada and the U.S. There is a bagpipe and celtic music tradition in Northern Spain, but the band here had a distinct fantasy flare, namely Tolkienian. I'm surprised to find a Tolkien fan base of non-English speakers here, even an Argentine Tolkien Association (ATA), mostly because Tolkien's medium and expertise was in the English language. He wrote the epic and his stories with the intent of using as many Anglo-Saxon derived words as he could. I am extremely curious about how well that attention to detail was translated into Spanish, and if the fan base grew up from around the LOTR films, the ex-pat community, fantasy fans, or the metalheads.

The existence of Tengwar reassures me. I have been having difficulty finding sci-fi and fantasy books here, in Spanish or English, and the stuff that is here, like Asimov collections and Dragonlance, is not exactly representative of the state of the art. I will definitely be exploring this subject more and at least buying their new album as soon as it comes out, if only because I missed out on the Ren Faire this year!

--Nicole
*Click here for South Park clip about Peruvian flute bands.
**Tengwar's Myspace site

How do we know you're really in BA?

PICTURE TIME!

Here is my propaganda for the People's Farm Collective of the Estancia. ¡Viva la Revolución!

I'm not turning into a communist here in the homeland of Che Guevara, but it is weird to be in a place where "socialist" is not a dirty word. People here aren't as sure as Americans that democracy is a close buddy of capitalism, and there is a firm belief that anyone in power is corrupt. If they have gotten power, they did it through an underhanded way and they, as a representative of the government, are trying to screw you as an individual. It's a very livable kind of mistrust, and by livable, I mean it's a basic assumption about the world that subtly colors everything. It is, of course, is not true for everyone, but it's strong enough to make me pause to remind myself of it when I hear someone comment on politics.

Here I am at La Bombonera, the stadium for the Boca Juniors futbol team, which in BA is one of the two big teams, the other being River Plate.

Yeah, I don't know anything about futbol. Futbol is kind of fun to watch, but I take my dad's view on it: You can watch for 2 hours and have nothing happen and have it all decided by 1 penalty kick. Luckily, I really don't have to be into futbol because it's more of a guy thing, so no one really expects me to know anything. All I have to know is who Maradona is and what he's doing (or not, since he's no longer coaching the Argentina team).

We went on a day trip/pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Lujan, a town outside of the capital where the Virgin, miraculously, wanted to stay. At first, it was kind of boring because a church is a church, and since we didn't feel like taking back gallon jugs of the miraculous Lujan holy water, there wasn't much for us to do. In the late afternoon, however, a cultural festival that was part of the year-long activities sponsored by the government for the bicentennial celebration began in the plaza. They really like drums in BA, and high schools had crazy sequined costumes, giant flags, and drum lines. The guys would play the drums, and the girls would dance behind. The whole procession moved very slowly through the plaza, and it was led by this large man in the picture. All he had was a yellow sign that said "Cultura." We had NO idea what was going on, and it was bizarre, frustrating, fun, bewildering, and a textbook case of culture shock.

(A sequin Goku makes an unexpected appearance in Lujan. The drum groups had a penchant for putting sequined cartoons onto their fringed polyester costumes.)

--Nicole

P.S. > Congratulations, Megan!

I am a Salad Dressing

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.

I'm ready for my close-up, Señor DeMille.

I got bored on the flight to Houston and started ripping out ads from Sky Mall, like this Brobdingnagian Sports Chair or the Street Strider (which is just one synonym away from Street Walker): One is for men compensating for something and other is on par with a Segway but with the exponentially worse addition of physical activity that makes you want to tell them "Just get a bike." But I have left America...

Two cities and 15 hours later, several of the other students in the program met the academic program people at the airport, and they herded us into the atrium to order taxis. When I walked out of the customs area there were television cameras everywhere, and I thought to myself, "I know I'm a big deal, but not television worthy at the moment. I wonder if they heard of our blog?" Alas, this blog is not famous yet, and I paused for second to observe the futbol team that had just walked out. The cameras were there for them, but on the other hand, I was already rubbing elbows with Argentine footballers. Welcome to Buenos Aires.

My host mother is an adorable little woman who bakes cakes, and talks to me all the time. I get about 40% of it, but the constant bombardment is the dictionary definition of immersion. The soft "j" sound, especially in common words like "calle" and "ella" is harder to get used to, but I'll probably be speaking like a porteña soon enough.

We spent the evening with her friend and her American student from the East Coast, sharing maté and talking about all sorts of topics from politics to pizza. Whenever we got stuck on a word or concept (trying explaining what a McGriddle or a guido is in Spanish), the internet was there to save the day. Thank God for technology and wi-fi.

I'm realizing that my Spanish is bad, but it's functional. I lack the discipline to just speak slowly and say things correctly because I want so badly to contribute to the conversation. The result is tons of errores imperdonables and garbled sentences that are more along the lines of "Me Tarzan. You Jane."

And it's also winter here. It'll be above 32 degrees F or 4 degrees C tomorrow. Bienvenido a la Ciudad.

--Nicole

P.S. Props to Megan for figuring out how to subscribe via email. It works now!