April 03, 2006, 8:08 p.m.
Hola, que tal Pais?
There is a certain newscaster on the news here who begins each broadcast with "Hello, what's up, Country?" I think it's extraordinarily funny. Then he ends with, "Buenas noches, Pais."
OK, biggest news first: WE FOUND AN APARTMENT!!! After a week and a half in language school with Emily, another Rotary scholar, we decided to get a place together. I originally wanted to either live alone or with a native Spanish speaker, but Emily is great - fun, down-to-earth, a libra, and I decided that living with someone I like would make life much less lonely (and less expensive!). So we began looking for furnished places here, since we're only going to be here for a year, but it became quickly apparent that there are very few furnished 2-bedroom places. After several days of looking, we got discouraged. The furnished places were all really ugly or not big enough for the two of us, so we were considering not living together simply because we couldn't find a place. What was frustrating was that there were much nicer apartments for MUCH less money, but unfurnished. Finally, after realizing that the Argentineans have a site like eBay (mercadolibre.com and derebate.com), as well as a magazine called Segunda Mano (Second-hand), we decided it wouldn't be the end of the world to furnish a place, so we started expanding our search to unfurnished places, and we found a **FANTASTIC** one. It is/has:
- PERFECTLY LOCATED: between downtown, where my Uni is, and Palermo, the district with all the cute restaurants and bars, it's in a great part of the city
- very near a big, beautiful park (the best in the city, in my humble opinion - and I'm not just saying that because I live here ;)
- two blocks from our gym
- two and a half blocks from the subway
- one block from bus stops
- very luminoso (light) - so much natural light that we never have to use electricity during the day. This is huge because there are a lot of dark apartments in Bs.As.
- has a big balcony!
- is $500/month (utilities included), in other words, $250/each
Language school was great. I felt like I progressed a lot in my Spanish. I have a good grasp on the subjunctive (at least I can form in all of its forms, even if I don't always know where to put it), and I can use it in many situations. Of course there are a number of times when I get frustrated with it, but I can make myself understood almost all of the time, so I'm not worrying. We also went over la/le/lo, and I feel MUCH better about this.
I have started school! I love my facultad (university). It is efficient, well-run, small, friendly, and focused. I am taking on two classes, one on Wednesday afternoon and one on Thursday morning. My Wednesday class is called International Organizations and International Law, and the professor is excellent. It is an upper-level class with dynamic, interested students and a curriculum which focuses on the power dynamics of an increasingly global world. In other words, states aren't the only ones with power anymore - multinational, international, or transnational organizations also wield power, organizations like Amnesty International, the UN, and Al Quaeda. My other class is a history course, and it is clearly a required course for many of the students. I find the professor to be compelling and interesting, but I think a lot of the kids are freshmen and sophomores who are more interested in their mobile phones than the history of Europe. Last week we covered WWI, which was a good review for me.
Other events:
- I got a stomach bug and was **out of commission** for 4 full days. I could barely move off the couch but was lucky to find a channel that played Scrubs, Grey's Anatomy, West Wing, and Desperate Housewives all in a row. I felt a little guilty watching so much TV in english, but I consoled myself by maintaining that I need some reward for my horrid experience with diarrhea
- a few nights ago, we went to a Spanish (as in, from Spain) tapas restaurant. The food was actually a little revolting - **EXCESSIVE** use of salt - but the flamenco show was great. The dancers were good and the singers and guitar players were truly inspiring.
- We had a PARTY! Emily and I threw a housewarming party and it was incredibly successful! We didn't think anyone was going to come, but seventeen 40's, 9 bottles of wine later, 24 empanadas, and 112 cigarette butts later, we found out how wrong we were. People started showing up around 10pm, and the party went on until 5:30am. I met lots of cool people, including mexican film students, brazilian econ students, a venezuelan girl who worked for the BBC, weird americans (seriously I think one guy was on drugs), a quiet israeli, and a few annoying rotary people. oh, and lots of the native speakers complimented me on my spanish, which was flattering.
- I went to my first AIESEC meeting here, which was great. The president of the local committee here is actually from Germany, but totally, completely, seriously FLUENT. He has **no** problem whatsoever in Spanish, I was *really* impressed. He's been here for 8 months, and I'll be here for 9. If i can speak like him at the end of my time here, I will be very, VERY happy. Anyway the meeting was good; we talked about culture shock and then a few of the Argentinean students described Argentina, the different provinces, etc., and we all chatted for a while. I'm going to try and do some projects with them and make friends that way. I love AIESEC!
- We (me, Emily, and Chris, another scholar we've gotten to know and like) went to the opera! The most famous theater in all of Buenos Aires is Teatro Colón, and it is **beautiful**. It is very European, with enormous orchestra seating and 8 floors of theater boxes, to seat around 3,000 people. Cherubs in gold leaf adorn the walls, chandeliers and old-fashioned lamp-posts create a gilded glow, and marble statues lend ambiance. So we dressed up and had champagne at Chris's apartment before going to the theater and sitting in our box (which really sounds much more romantic than it actually is ... yes, the benches are velvet but if you're not sitting at the actual front of the box, it's sort of uncomfortable to see). We saw La Boheme, and it was splendiferous: the sets were fantastic (snow! just like in The Nutcracker!), the costumes were beautiful, the singing was lovely, and the story moved quite along - I never once was bored or felt sleepy, as I was in Aida, the only other opera I have attended.
- We successfully made it through a nearly 2-week period of having no gas in our apartment, which meant that not only could we not cook (vanilla crackers for dinner ... welcome to our world), but we couldn't take hot showers. This meant that we were either dirty or gasping in cold water. Don't worry, the gas is back on (apparently there was a gas leak in our building). Now we just have to survive the poison (there's a notice in the elevator that says they're going to fumigate), and fix the sink, which both leaks and doesn't drain properly ...
- I went to a traditional ballet folklorico performance with Mirabai, my American friend here. It was GREAT, much different than the group at Stanford (which frankly, I thought sucked). They did traditional dances from Peru (much more Afro-Caribbean), Argentina (men stomping their feet and imitating riding horses), Mexico (the big foofy skirt dance), and Argentina again (tango!). Then afterwards we went to get something to eat, and my favorite part was a joke that Mirabai told in English, that Javier then translated for Claudio about nuns and leprechauns ... it was a great bicultural moment.
- I got acupuncture twice, had some spiritual epiphanies (among other things I now believe in reincarnation), and my neck is feeling MUCH better. This is a pretty major, major event, but I don't feel like going into detail at present.
- we (Emily and I) went to Tigre, a pretty town an hour outside Bs.As. by train, where we went to an "island", really just part of this giant delta system. it was neat, we laid out in the sun (very nice), had good lunch, read, and relaxed. the biggest and best part of it was that it was QUIET, you could hear the bugs and everything. I find that cities can get overwhelming: the honking and yelling and car alarms and buses and exhaust and dog poo and constant coming and going of people on the street can occasionally add up to exhaustion, so getting out of the city was a welcome repose.
It is officially six weeks that I have been in country, and it has been a whirlwind. I don't really know how else to describe my adjustment period here. Moving into the apartment, while wonderful, was busy and stressful. There were things to buy, people to meet, services to order, stuff to shop for, to call about, to go and fetch, and people to wait for. Period. There are also just a lot of things you need to furnish an apartment, in every sense of the word furnish: we ordered cable & internet, bought a futon, had a fridge delivered, bought linens, dishes, knives, trashcans, called to get our window and sink fixed, bought a dresser, went to get a TV stand, had a table and chairs delivered, bought mattresses and boxsprings, found lamps and a coffee table, and pillows for the futon and a blanket for the living room and patio furniture for the balcony and etc etc etc. More than that though, there was a lot we had to think about and decide. And decisions take mental energy. For example, after an hour and a half of dish shopping - which kinds of plates? How many? Which color do you like? Which dishrack? Will this one fit better or look better? What about silverware? How many pots and pans will we need? Should we get the cheaper ones or spend money on nice ones? What's worth spending money on? - we were exhausted. Emily and I just crashed at the same time. We got to the end of the store and both stood there staring at the price of a ladle, trying to convert it from pesos to dollars. When it took us more than 30 seconds to divide 7 by 3, we knew we had to go. We looked at each other and were like, "We're done. Anything else we need, we can get another day." And I feel like that is the best motto for moving into a new place - poco a poco, little by little, baby steps. Looking back, I feel like I could have taken things a little slower and saved a little stress. A little bit at a time, slowly, I'm learning to take things slower.
Excitingly, I'm also getting ready to dance again. My neck is feeling so much better lately that I think I am going to start taking classes again this week. I've already been taking pilates, and it has been fine, and I'm supposed to go to a gay milonga with Mirabai tonight. I am so excited to start dancing again!!!
In addition I have been attempting to get used to being so far away from Ryan, trying to meet Argentineans to use my Spanish, starting school, struggling with the constant quest to achieve balance between keeping in touch with old friends and making new ones, and readjusting to the culture here. I honestly still feel like I'm recovering, but it's going really well. I treasure quiet moments en casa, like today when I laid out on my balcony and chatted with my dad about economics, or when I clean my room. There is quiet simplicity in putting things in their places, and I find it rejuvenating. It's great to have a neighborhood, the beginnings of a routine, reliable internet, a TV and DVD player, HOT WATER, a dresser, and a little lamp to read by. This is life, and it is wonderful.
Politics:
From Soldiers for the Truth:
Two deploying soldiers and a concerned mother reported Friday afternoon that the U.S. Army appears to be singling out soldiers who have purchased Pinnacle's Dragon Skin Body Armor for special treatment. The soldiers, who are currently staging for combat operations from a secret location, reported that their commander told them if they were wearing Pinnacle Dragon Skin and were killed their beneficiaries might not receive the death benefits from their $400,000 SGLI life insurance policies. The soldiers were ordered to leave their privately purchased body armor at home or face the possibility of both losing their life insurance benefit and facing disciplinary action.
Incredible. Of course this doesn't keep the brass from wearing the stuff:
Currently nine U.S. generals stationed in Afghanistan are reportedly wearing Pinnacle Dragon Skin body armor, according to company spokesman Paul Chopra. Chopra, a retired Army chief warrant officer and 20+-year pilot in the famed 160th "Nightstalkers" Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne), said his company was merely told the generals wanted to "evaluate" the body armor in a combat environment. Chopra said he did not know the names of the general officers wearing the Dragon Skin.
Language spot:
Dictionary.com Word of the Day - dudgeon: a state or fit of intense indignation.
From shirts I have seen Argentineans wear:
Friendly or not, here I come.
The sun does not know that it is a star.
From a poster: (note the dates)
"The Rolling Stones: The Bigger Bang Tour
Bs.As. February 21th and 23th
Don’t be in a hurry to swallow when chewing is pleasant. – Malawi proverb
