Iguazu

Nate's birthday party!

Our Palermo apartment

This is what I see when I wake up in the morning. It's a very nice way to wake up. We've been in this second apartment for a few weeks now. It's in Palermo, a neighborhood in the north that's hip and residential.

Polo day

Today we learned how to play polo. Or at least, how not to. We'd seen polo a few weeks ago, a professional game, where crowds of one ton horses would come thundering down the field at 40 miles an hour, with humans leaning from their backs (as if they were attached with adhesive) failing huge hammers. In some ways it looked like a game that might have been played in Valhalla among those confident in their ability to reattach severed limbs at the end of the day: players went flying and horses crashed into one another. But it was also an incredibly delicate game: I saw one player juggle the ball with the head of his mallet for half the length of the field, while riding at an all our gallop. It's a game of fast, delicate, brutality. It's the precision of golf, the speed of bicycle racing, and the destructive power of a monster-truck rally--that, of course and the imitable beauty of horses motion. (And this bellowed by a gravel voiced Hell's Angel: Sunday, sunday, sunday! It's full combat, monster-horse, velodrome, golf classic, madness! Followed by the Electrik Sexx Chickens!) Imagine Jack Nickalaus trying to hit a long drive, while being chased down by a crew of American football players, on horseback, and you get the idea. We left suitably awed. But that was two weeks ago, and by this afternoon I was reasonably confident that I would probably master the sport with the practice of an hour or two. That was because before putting us on horses our guide and teacher took us to a club to watch his 14 year-old nephew play. At the same club we saw two teams squaring off in what looked like the under-ten league and they were still riding at a full gallop, and leaning intrepidly beyond what could reasonably be considered anywhere close to the center of balance. The only reasonable explanation? It must not be all that hard.
Our guide Estani took us to his farm to give it a shot after lunch. "This way," he explained helpfully, "if you die, at least you die full." This remark stirred unfortunate memories: I was not exactly what you might call an accomplished horseman. I'd ridden twice before, and on one of those occasions I had thrown up. But if my confidence ebbed a bit it was more than refilled by the addition of a piece of meat approximately the size of my head, served rare, or jugoso (juicy). Thus fortified, we mounted the especially docile animals that Estani picked and rode out onto his field. After a bit of walking and turning (even cantering) my confidence rose even more. The horse moved almost intuitively, as if it knew what I was thinking. That would turn out the be the high-tide mark for the day, because immediately afterward I was handed a mallet, and things began to spiral downwards. The problem with the mallet is that it fills one hand. The other hand is occupied with the reins, which leaves precisely zero hands for the all important business of holding on. I mentioned that my horse was chosen for it's obedience, but I began to suspect it of a hidden truculent streak as - perhaps sensing my uneasiness - it began more and more frequently to blow and shake it's head downwards, loosening the reins.
Riding this horse reminded me a lot of my oh-so-limited experience of dancing tango with strangers, who, as soon as the felt the cringing, double-clutch nature of my lead, would begin showing the whites of their eyes, as if looking for some way to be rid of me. The communication of motion from one body to another can only be accomplished if it is clear who is leading, and if that person is steady and decisive. Which raises the obvious question? Given that initial failure tends to make me more faltering and tentative how is it that men ever learn to either to ride or to dance? The answer can only be that they muster through, and indeed, Argentine men do seem to be fairly unshakable, even when venturing beyond their depth. If you want to generalize about national character (stipulating of course that all generalizations are false) in this way the Argentines are the opposite of the English who have made embarrassment a form of art (of course the English have also made getting fantastically drunk a form of art as well, perhaps as a sort of embarrassment relief valve - and maybe it's because Argentines seem almost immune to embarrassment that drinking to excess here really is a rarity. A highly informal survey of the three people I asked reveled that the slang words for "drunk" consist of "borracho," and sometimes "pedo" here. While of course in English we have plastered, pie-eyed, pickled, plotzed, and put to bed with a shovel - just to mention the p's... by this measure, we take inebriation more seriously then Eskimos take snow. We literally have hundreds of euphemisms from addlepated to zonked. Even if Argentines have more than my informal survey revealed, it's almost certainly less.)
In any case, though I had had nothing more severe than soda, I was starting to feel a bit quartzed on my horse. We'd entered a vicious feedback loop in which she would interpret my hesitation as a indication that she should take liberties, and I, sensing that my mount was losing faith in me for good reason, would quail further. This sort of thing might not be so bad if you can pretend that the somewhat random meandering is your idea, but it is especially humiliating if you are supposed to do something very specific like chase down and hit a little white ball. After I had trotted off to a remote  corner of the field, a perplexingly subtle tactic, Estani suggested that I ride "A little closer to the ball." I came back, slowly. At a walk, I found I could hit the ball, then follow it and hit it again. This, however, I am sure was entirely the accomplishment of my horse, who clearly knew just how to position herself in relation to the ball, and how to follow it. When I reached the ball again I leaned out over my right stirrup, twisted into a windup, and brought the mallet arcing down. For a moment, I felt a bit like real polo players looked. The ball leapt forward with a satisfying chunk, and, filled with false confidence, I urged my horse forward. She went for it. The gallop was smoother than I had expected, so I did not fall immediately, and I even, as we neared the ball, swung manfully. I manfully missed completely, the mallet passing through empty space with alacrity and carrying me forward with its inertia. I caught myself, not with my legs as I should have, but with the reins, pulling on my poor horse's head. She stopped, wheeled, and then to my horror, rose on her hind legs before swiftly shifting her weight back to the rear. I was calculating what form of descent would break fewest bones when I saw Estani appear directly in front of me. "Bring down the reins," he said. "Lean back." Although I did my best to accomplish these relatively simple tasks I think it was his presence that quieted my horse. When he saw the look on my face, he covered his own, but I'm pretty sure he was laughing.
Meanwhile, Beth was galloping around, smoothly whacking the ball from one end of the cancha to the other.

A literary revelation

When we were leaving San Francisco, Mike (who is subletting our apartment) gave me this book, Rayuela (Hopscotch - in translation), by Julio Cortazar. I almost left it behind in LA X: I'd never heard of Cortazar, and the book was large, dense, and lacking in all but the outlines of a narrative structure. But there were certain little moments that kept me going. Even though I didn't like the somewhat nihilistic protagonist very much, I liked the way his mind worked and the fun he had with language (ie Cortazar). I also liked the fact that he was writing about places I was walking through in Buenos Aires. This morning I finished the book - as this usually sunny loft few blocks from Plaza Cortazar was plastered in rain and shaken by donner and blitzen (odd that the Norse/German words for thunder and lightning have now become cute cartoons on spindly legs - but I enjoy the image of these enraged reindeeritos flying into the window).
Here are a couple things I liked from the book:

"Explanation is a well-dressed mistake."
The main character says this -- he's joking around (well, it's hard to tell when he is ever serious) -- all the same I like it because it captures an idea in a few words that Thomas Kuhn spun into a whole book (published the year before actually).

This next one takes a bit more explanation: A character (Traveler) is reading the works of a (fictional I hope) Uruguayan philosopher name Ceferino who has this Utopian vision for reorganizing the world. According to his scheme each country gets 45 national corporations (like the EPA, FBI, FCC, that sort of thing). Number 25 is the National Corporation of Hospitals and Related Houses, and includes, "all hospitals of all types, workshops for repairs and adjustments, houses for the curing of hides, stables for the curing of horses, dental clinics, barber shops, houses for the pruning of plants, houses for the arrangement of intricate legal forms, etc. ...
"There is is," Traveler said. "A break that proves Ceferino's perfect central healthiness ... there's no reason to accept the order of things the way daddy hands them to us. Cefe thinks that the fact that something is being repaired unites a dentist and intricate legal forms; accidents are just as valuable as essences ... But it's pure poetry, boy. Cefe is breaking the mental crust, as somebody or other said, and he's beginning to see the world from a different angle. Of course this is what they call being batty."
Beth helpfully suggested (when I told her about this business with the mental crust) that whenever one is tempted to say "paradigm shift" you should instead say "breaking the mental crust." It's a metaphor you can actually visualize. Incidentally, Kuhn was the one that popularized the term paradigm  and it's shiftiness.

Mystery solved...

Trip to the pharmacy

I just walked into a pharmacy because I successfully cleaned up my toenails by taking pills for six months (at some gastric expense) and I wanted to see if there was an anti-fungal paint I could use to prevent a relapse. I was able to explain what I was looking for by saying that I had "mushrooms." Again, the guy was so nice. Apparently you can't buy anything for that here over the counter -- unlike the US where they are quite happy to sell you any number of snake oils.

A few select moments from the past days

1. We are walking down the street and Beth, who has a physical reaction to certain species of poop etc. cringes away from a suspicious looking pile then sighs in relief. "There's nothing better then realizing that what you think is last night's puke is just someone's discarded mate," she says.

2. We are walking around the Feria at Mataderos when we come across a man with a grubby white llama and a sign that reads: "Vende llama que llama." We puzzle over this for a while. Is this a sale of a llama that makes telephone calls (llamar)? And Beth, being bold, and determined to use her Castellano asks the fellow:
(Translated)
What does it mean, llama que llama?
I am selling my llama.
Is it a llama that talks?
No no no! (big grin revealing more gaps than teeth) This... is a llama. It, is an animal.
Right, claro.
Where are you from?
The United States.
You don't have llamas in your country?
(Me chiming in - excited to use the word I learned the night before) Yes, a little, but only for pets (mascotas!)
Well, I'm selling my llama. It is a good llama.
(Beth) Well, good luck.
Perhaps - Beth muses - the translation is something like: "Llama -- what a llama!"

3. We go swing dancing - it is incredibly fun. The teacher has just visited San Francisco and danced at the place where we were going a few blocks from our house. He knows Nathan Diaz, one of our teachers back home.

4. I eat the most amazing gnocchi I have ever had, with eggplant and tomato, in this tiny packed restaurant run by a group of young skaters. The chef is my age and wears a "I'd rather be fishing" trucker cap.

An email from one of my Language Exchange partners

FromPablo Bustamante to me

Wood !! Beth, I think what you can´t undertend me but, is very wood !!! congratulation.. I talk very much Argentino language! you know..
See your later ok?

Un beso .

Beautiful weather!

The last couple of days have been glorious: Pure blue skies, sun that's never more than pleasantly warm, and light breezes. It's spring! At least for the moment. I think it's because I couldn't stand the cold any longer and went out and bought a heavy wool sweater. That will do it.
Beth's social outreach is yielding huge benefits for me: The other day we had a Svenja (German) and Pablo (Porteno) people over for dinner, and Beth made this amazing succulent roast chicken (with carmelized fennel), and apple crumble for postre. All that with out measuring cups or familiar ingredients. Svenja and Pablo are lovely and funny. Pablo is about as good in English as I am in Spanish so we were alternating languages for the slower menfolk (nevermind that neither is native for Svenja).
Last night, after writing, I met Beth at Vos (where we have taken Spanish classes) and watched the totally wrenching "Chronicle of an Escape" about prisoners in the dirty war. Made me angry all over again that my own government has been taking people into custody based on hearsay evidence and torturing them (there really is no other word for it).

Tango toes

This glowing couple are the winners of the 2010 Tango Mundial. They are the best tango dancers in the world. Shes 29 and hes 18. Theyre from Buenos Aires.

When Nate and I ventured to our first tango event last night -- a beginners class in a community center that seemed better suited for wrestling mats than high heeled shoes -- who had showed up to guest teach the class? The best tango dancers in the world. Though I left the lesson with permanent dents in the toes of my flats, getting to watch this pair glide together across the floor demonstrating, uh -- well, to be honest, I have no idea exactly what they were demonstrating. Triple axles? -- was absolutely worth the toe pain and my 2 dance partners who tactfully moved on to the next partner as quickly as possible.

Tango is strange. Nate and I decided that it is the opposite of swing dancing. Its a free form dance with few dictated steps, and even limited relationship with the music, but it requires a poise and posture that people take years to master. Partners lean in together, chest the chest, and often forehead to forehead. The woman can (or so they tell me) follow the mans lead so precisely with this kind of contact that it appears as though the steps are choreographed. Nate had a lovely partner, a patient woman in her 60s, with large busoms who kept pulling him in, saying, "Contacto! Contacto!"

Nate and I are not sure how we will proceed with this new activity. One response: Nate stayed up late finding swing dancing classes in Buenos Aires.

Settling into a routine

It's starting to feel like home here - routine is helpful for me in getting anything done. But I keep mixing it up. Today, despite the cold and rain (it's been pouring, I suppose these are the equivalent of March showers) I got up early, wrapped myself up with my sleeping bag and wrote while Beth went off to school. After an hour alternating between freezing (but alert), and warm (but dozy) - I walked across the street to Clasico for a coffee. I threw caution to the wind and instead of asking for a chico, went for grande. In short order the world assumed a bright and cheery new patina. Writing became ridiculously easy - the coffee was delicious! The rain was beautiful! The people were friendly!
The people really are friendly though. Last night a perfect stranger started talking with me as we waited for our empanadas to warm up - he didn't seem to mind the fact that I could only say about 4 broken phrases (one of which is - lo siento, mi Castellano no es bueno). It seems like the perfect place to learn the language though: Everyone wants to chat, a lot of people don't speak any English, and they don't seem to mind that their barrio is overrun with foreigners.

Photos of our apartment

Settling in

Although someone disabused Nate's pocket of our camera on the subway last week, we still have been constantly amazed by how nice people are here. There's a sort of warmth that is evident in lots of small ways constantly. Everyone -- men, women, old friends, people you just met -- kiss on one cheek in greeting. I'm not used to this yet, and I still extend my hand when I meet someone, though this is starting to feel a bit rude at this point. The subways are horrendously packed at some times of day, but people still squeeze together to let one more person on. Yesterday we stopped into a local parilla, which is a temple of hot, dripping grilled meat of all sorts, and an old man who struck up a conversation invited us over to his house for a cup of coffee. We didn't go, but still, that was awesome.

There are plenty of other reminders that we're not in the US anymore:
1. It's not clear who has right of way at intersections, but it's definitely not the pedestrian.
2. Take the dog for a walk. Encourage the dog to lay a robust, glistening poo in the middle of the sidewalk. Continue to walk.*
3. I wanted to make chocolate chip cookies for a party we're going to tonight. I managed to find baking soda (bicarbonato de sodio) at the spice stall in the market, but baking powder? "Yes, uh, I'm looking for a white powder chemical to make big the cake, and is like baking soda, but not exactly the same thing. Have this you?" No go. Also a no go on brown sugar. So I will try brownies instead.

* This calls for vigilance on the part of the pedestrian. These healthy looking fresh turds have also taken over my subconscious, and have appeared in my dreams pretty much every night.

We find an apartment (quizas)

First, breakfast: I discover that medialunes go well with dulce de leche:

Note that most of the spreading surface has already disappeared. We walk through San Telmo - beautiful buildings, trash bags (all ripped open and picked apart), diesel fumes, tiny sidewalks, graffiti, a poverty and luxury mashup.

I kept pointing out the pretty buildings - I know it's not hip but I love all the classical ornaments. "You just like anything that looks like Paris," Beth said. Okay, guilty. I wanted to take pictures of some of the impressive stuff near La Plaza de Mayo but Beth focused on me instead.

No, not Blue Steel. I call this look: Pensive Tungsten.

We found a Spanish school that a friend had recommended and were quickly gaslighted into signing up for a one week intensive. They were very nice and it will certainly do me good. When I ask about how to say, use the WiFi the literal translation is usually something like: "How is it that the orderly's signal is sounding? Sparking is badness?" Also downtown: unbelievably bad traffic across what seemed like 15 lanes, honking like 10,000 geese all caught in the same net. And many big buildings. This is a huge city. Beth found an architectural idea that spoke to her:

Not Parisian.

We walked (and walked) to check out the locations of various potential apartments. Then, near the end of the day I got an email from an agent indicating that our top choice so far was available. I'm going to the office first thing in the morning to try and lock it down. It may still fall through, so I won't say anything yet, but it looks pretty nice - tiny but lovely. Shouldn't get my hopes up, I hear these sometimes fail.
The sun fell as we were walking through a quieter neighborhood, and it gilded the houses with chilly golden light. It's winter here, though it's warming up - and there is that smell of plant life beginning to stir. We took the subway back to la Plaza de Mayo and caught a free concert of tango music. I was going to upload a bit but it took forever then had an error. Grr.

Loads of photos

I've never been a photog - especially on vacations, but having an audience makes it a little more interesting. So let's start at the beginning:

 That's breakfast - cafe con leche y medialunes, i.e. mini croissants. They come in sets of two or three, and they seem to often have some kind of flavoring which varies - haven't figured that out yet. Not the little chocolates: All coffees seem to come with some nice little token like this. After that we decided to get to know the city by executing a classic tourist mission: Visit the Recoleta Cemetery and find the Evita's tomb. We knew we were close when we saw the Hard Rock Cafe (the ubiquitous symbol for an obligatory tourist stop.)

Necropolis: Crazy optical illusion, eh? Beth is actually strapped and hoisted up that wall (okay fine, I was just too lazy to rotate).

Interesting place to wander around. The idea that a family would persist in one place forever to keep up (and fill up) the tombs is a little mind-boggling in this peregrine age. My favorites were the ones build by friends or collaborators - because it seems to indicate such powerful and unusual love. I expect familial love - along with self-interest (that is, I maintain this tomb-keeping tradition because it reflects on my good name), but to spend a small fortune and make repairs every year for a friend? That's special.
We walked around Recoleta, a neighborhood with lots of swanky high rises, trees, private schools, and parks (basically the upper east side). I was fascinated by the size of the knockers. Really - here's a picture:

Actually, this one was in Palermo (another neighborhood), the ones in Recoleta are even bigger - ridiculously big. My hypothesis (name a topic and I'll give you a hypothesis) is that the bigger the knocker the bigger the implied house (got to knock really loud so that Jeeves can hear at his quarters midway through the mansion), so in areas where real estate confers status, it pays to bolt a big daddy to your door (that's based on no facts whatsoever).
Okay back to the important stuff:

Note how lovingly Beth gazes upon el lomo.

This was at a place called Federal near our place in San Telmo. Beth ordered a "salad" consisting of (and this is all true), raw onion, tuna fish, instant rice, and an egg. That's it. Surprisingly, that little culinary experiment didn't turn out too well - but she loved her Sprite which seems to have more flavor here. Fortunately, my steak was enough for us both.

Not quite as delicious as the night before but still amazing grass-fed beef. And those are papas rejillas. FYI: salsa golf = thousand island.

Quick morning note

(Nate) We are heading out today to look at an apartment, and a Spanish language school, and maybe find something to see here

(Beth) Hour 5 in Buenos Aires, and we already have happy bellies full of grilled steak and french fries.  Can someone please remind me why all the tofu and chard at home? We are staying with a couple who rent out a couple of rooms in their home in the old part of the city, San Telmo.  They have been very kind to us.  He is Canadian and she is Mexican.  They recently rescued Marco, a stray dog who is sleeping on the floor right now, with frequent spasms like he's chasing a rabbit in a dream.  He has an ear infection, but he still seems very satisfied with his boring new life.  They offered us coins for the bus, heated up the hot tub on the roof, and invited us to a Brazilian drumming performance tonight.  We took them up on the hot tub, but not the drums.  I am happy to have someone with local knowledge to help us out.
      We don't stick out here.  I even saw a guy taller than Nate.  Though one street merchant did yell out as we passed, "Hola!  Amigos!  ...  (H)ar--ry--Po--tter!"  At us?  Not sure.  Nate does have a boyish charm.

The "before" picture. In the taxi after 24 hours of travel. What will we look like after?

Items to research:
1. Trotsky.  He's so hot here.  We saw a young woman putting up a poster for the upcoming anniversary of his assassination, and in one of the only conversations we've had with a native porteno, "trotskyite" came up a few times.