Buenos Aires @ MindSay

Because that’s what Buenos Aires means.  If we’re very literal though, it means “good airs.”  But nobody would call a city that.  Come to think of it, “Fair Winds” is rather an unlikely place-name in English, too, but I would have thought the same thing about a place-name like “Eden Prairie, Minnesota.”  THAT place-name, besides being stupid, is also an oxy-moron and a misnomer.  It’s a prairie alright, but a landscape as brown and boring as a prairie could never be an Eden, and I’ll be damned if the original Eden bore the slightest resemblance to a Minnesota prairie, let alone to the ass-ugly plastic and concrete Midwestern suburb that Eden Prairie actually is.  

Moving on. The “good airs” in this city have given me two vicious colds in the span of a month, the first of which lasted nine days, and the second of which is still with me on its fourth day.  I am displeased. 

Nevertheless...

I have already told some among the teeming throng who will be reading this blog (yeah, all two of you, if I’m lucky) that I’m thinking of living outside the U.S. when I grow up.  Yeah, I’m 21 now, but you know what I mean: When I “settle.”  I haven’t picked any more specific location than “outside the U.S.”, but the top candidates are places where most people speak Spanish or Russian.  And after a few weaks, I haven’t ruled out Buenos Aires yet.  It’s lovely and charming.  Yes, the pavement is cracked and uneven in some places, and strewn with dog shit in ALL places (more about that later).  The Subte (short for “Subterráneo”… it’s Buenos Aires’ underground train) is always stuffed full, as are the buses, usually.  The new line they’re constructing for the Subte won’t be nearly enough to solve the crowding problem, it’s that bad. And you technically can’t drink beer outside here like you can in Russia. But I’ve seen people walking in twos and threes sharing a liter bottle of Quilmes, the favorite national brew. And though the winter here is legitimately cold, they have palm trees in the parks.  I also saw two green parrots here.  I told my host family about them and they were like, “Yeah…?”  And I had to explain that where I come from, a green parrot would be an exotic and unusual thing to see in your local park.    

The food’s OK.  Nothing to write home about, but I’m going write home about it anyway: Argentina is famous for beef and wine.  The fame is justified. Go to your liquor store and cop a bottle of imported Malbec (a grape bred here!) from a Mendoza winery if you want to know what I’m talking about.  Selección López is good, but there are lots of bodegas, and they almost all bottle their own on site. And the beef? Yeah, it's yummy.  They'll have steaks on the grill pretty much anywhere you go for lunch, and they're cheap, and they're from grass-fed animals, I'm told, which seems to make a difference.  It's not worth flying all the way here for that, but it's a bonus.

Another common repast is empanadas. Empanadas means “embreadeds”.  Hee hee. Just like you can by “embottled” water (agua embotellada). Oh, Spanish.  

What exactly gets “embreaded” in the process of making an empanada, you ask?

You may have had them before, but if not, they’re basically like little pastries or pies with meat or ham and cheese or spinach and onion or some other kind of filling.  They’re a bit like pirozhki but the “shell” is, predictably, more like bread than pastry, and they’re never sweet and always eaten hot.  Most places that serve empanadas also serve pizza.  Pizza seems to be the Argentines’ excuse for consuming as much melted mozzarella as possible in a single meal.  When I’m not eating in a group and have my choice, I tend to go for the less cheesy options when it comes to pizza, like anchovy, which basically just comes with one little briny fish-corpse per slice laid out over the tomato sauce.  Yum yum.  No, seriously.  

It’s pretty enough here.  Not the marvel St. Petersburg was, but Buenos Aires does its thang.  If you like your buildings tall, Buenos Aires has a lot more of what you need than St. Petersburg, although the high-rises aren’t exactly pretty.  This city has quite a few spectacular, ornate monuments and buildings, but they don’t crowd the city blocks, like in St. Petersburg’s center.  I wasn’t expecting that, and the modern feel has its own charm…

As noted pan-sexualist and breatharian Bryan Billings said of a certain street in Moscow, when contrasting it with St. Petersburg, “It looks like a real city.” On that occasion, Richard Murad replied, without hesitation, “It looks like a real shit-hole.”  But I agreed with Bryan (as I usually did when he and Richard disagreed, though rarely on other occasions), and don’t mind if the city where I’m spending the semester fails to match St. Petersburg’s grandeur. I’m personally glad of the less kitschy feel, especially after having experienced St. Petersburg’s tourist season. Yuck.  Anyway, I’ll post pictures at some point so you can see for yourselves. My friend Morgan who’s in my program lives with his host family in a ritzy twenty-story building, where he can go up on the roof and see the whole city, like the view from the top of Isaakievsky’s, except it’s Buenos Aires, there are other buildings as tall as this one, and Morgan doesn’t charge the viewers admission.  Pretty amazing all the same. 

I have no doubt Richard would describe parts of Buenos Aires as looking like a “shit-hole,” particularly since it also beats St. Petersburg in terms of the amount of literal shit to be found on the pavement. This is another thing Buenos Aires is famous for. The professional dog-walkers regularly promenade like 5 to 12 dogs at the ends of as many leashes, so it's sort of impractical to pause and scoop up all their leavings. I don’t think it’s required by law. 

It's also said to be good luck here to tread in a turd.  Apparently, the luck comes after the fact.  Whatever. Part of "cultural adjustment" in Buenos Aires is keeping one eye on the ground while you stroll around, but they’ll still get ya now and then.  I’ve stepped in dogs’ leavings in the gutter at least twice while crossing streets, because you can’t watch for cars and watch your step at the same time. 

Words to live by. 

Dog-walking isn’t the only everyday chore people get paid to do professionally here.  Almost every grocery store commonly sends orders to people’s homes, if they prefer not to come and do their own shopping.  My host home isn’t one of the ones that orders groceries, but my host mom does pay a cook five nights a week, who also cleans on Thursdays.  This domestic worker shouts all the time, but it’s not because she’s mean or angry, it’s because she’s hard of hearing, and also, I think, a bit of a rustic.  I’ll be like, “Hello Susana, have you seen my glasses?” and she’ll be like “HI!!”  And I’ll ask again, and she’ll be like “WHAT???” She usually gets it the third time, though.  (Don’t worry, I found my glasses like two days later.)  But yeah, you can order pretty much anything at your house… Ice cream, pizza, Chinese food, empanadas.  Everybody delivers and everybody uses the service.   

As for the people?:  They’re OK. My host family is a couple in their late 50’s (maybe 60’s), named Lidia and Jorge, and a daughter named María Inés in her 20’s. They have three more daughters who are married and live with their own families, all of whom I’ve met.  These daughters have nine children among them, whom I’ve also met.  They’re cute I guess, but I don’t care about kids.   

María Inés seems to do all the work around the house that's not done by Susana. She's expected to set the table and serve everybody and get up and get something if anybody wants it and clear up and wash up afterwards. I´m told that's usual here. I feel bad about that, so sometimes when there are dishes in the sink and nobody's around I´ll wash them for her.  If I try to do it while they're around, they'll insist that I let her do it.

I have nothing else to say.  Actually I have plenty else to say, but this blog post has become a bit rambly and amorphous so I'll wrap it up loosely and clumsily here, and figure out where to mention the rest of what I have to say in later posts.  So, Adios.  It's adios, by the way, and not "Ciao," as everybody insists on saying here.  More on Argentine peculiarities in the Spanish language in the next post, too.  Hasta la bye-bye.