First World White Girl

Gimme A Dop

2012-01-11T07:59:00.004-03:00

You probably know that South Africa produces some of the world’s most delicious wine. Vines have been grown in this area since about 1680 or so, dating back to Jan Van Riebeeck and the first Dutch settlers in the Cape colony. A quick 15-minute ride from our house is the oldest ‘wine farm’ in South Africa. (Wine farm, in case you were wondering, is South African for vineyard). The area, called Constantia (and seen in the photo, albeit not from Van Riebeeck's time), produced such delicious vino that it was the first wine from the new world sent back for the hoi polloi of Europe to enjoy.

The business didn’t stop with the European crème-de-la-crème, although they are still the biggest importers of our local juice. Wine is a big business here: South Africa is the seventh largest wine producer in the world and contributes about US$3 billion to the country’s GDP.

Aside from coining their own name for vineyards, South Africans even created their own wine varietal, Pinotage- a mix of Pinot Noir and Cinsaut grapes. It’s a little sweet for me, but I have enjoyed one or two glasses of the stuff on occasion. You can’t live here and not give it a sip.

To be honest, the real problem is not the Pinotgae, it’s the Savignon Blanc. And the lovely bubbles. And the delicious Shriraz. And the spicy red blends with Cabernet Franc and Merlot. It’s the inescapable fact that you can go into virtually any restaurant around Cape Town and order a fabulous, reasonably priced bottle of wine.

This is even more obvious when you travel around the rest of South Africa and see the lame excuses for wine they serve at restaurants. Johannesburg is cosmopolitan? Not when it comes to your average wine lists. Love the sun of Durban? You won’t love the sub-par wine. After one night out in either of these places, you’ll be begging to be back in Cape Town, drinking fabulous wine.

Considering the history of South Africa and the apartheid government, there is also a disturbing backstory about wine production – namely the “Dop System”. In Afrikaans, a “dop” is an alcoholic drink. Going back as early as the 1800s, those who worked on the wine farms were paid in wine. Sometimes, most or even all of their salaries were paid in drink - hence a system called the "Dop System". While I am sure many of you would not mind part of your salary in wine (in fact, I know it might save some of you quite a bit of cash throughout the year), it has created a disturbingly high incidence of alcoholism, fetal alcohol syndrome (the highest in the world in parts of the Western Cape) and tons of other negative consequences.

Since I don’t want you to have sour grapes about South African wine, I will tell you that the “Dop System” has been outlawed since the 1960’s and the post-apartheid government has been particularly outspoken about getting rid of it. Some say it still persists in areas of the Western Cape. A recent Human Rights Watch report said two farms in the area were giving their workers wine, but the industry has certainly cleaned itself up. Mostly they just exploit workers like any other farming industry in the world.

Apologies for leaving you as bitter as red wine left out too long.

Driving Me to Insanity

2011-12-08T05:26:00.005-03:00

One of life’s necessities since moving to Cape Town is that I have to drive. After living in urbanity for the better chunk of the last 15 years, my driving escapades have been limited to the occasional rental in some far flung locale, the borrowing of a friend’s car or the occasional use of a Zipcar. Hence, I may be a little rusty in the applied vehicular knowledge.

If my rusty driving skills were the sole problem, this thing would be a cakewalk. Pile on the fact that people drive on the other side of the road, you sit on the other side of the car and parking on the sidewalk is not the sign of a drunk or insane person – now you can imagine my own personal hell every time I get behind the wheel.

But alas, I have no choice in the matter. Driving means doing the things I want to do in my life, so now I am a driver.

First, the wrong side of the road thing. At first I thought this would be the killer. But it’s fine as long as you keep shouting left to the left, right to the left to yourself as a reminder to keep you from pulling onto the wrong side of the road when turning. Problem solved. Circles; a tad more challenging but as long as there are other people there, you can just follow along. The only issue was a recent brief foray to the US when I became utterly confused at an empty street corner and had to think hard before deciding which lane to go into. Yikes!

So once I got the hang of the wrong side thing, I noticed all the other things… namely the roads. Ladies and gentlemen, we are not talking the interstate highway system – South Africa has yet to elect their own Dwight Eisenhower. Most roads are as wide as the sidewalk on Broadway near Herald Square but with the ludicrous expectation that two-way traffic will use it. Sure the cars are small, but c’mon! Spending a lot of time in reverse, rather than playing (but feeling) chicken.

Even parking in the driveway can seem like stuffing a sausage into the casing - see photo.

The parking lunacy doesn't end there. While driving last week on a beautiful scenic road (which there are no shortage of), I noticed that they had actually marked little white lines for parking spots on the SIDEWALK – which explains why everyone thinks it is perfectly fine to park pretty much anywhere they want, often leaving pedestrians to walk in the road.

But I have also noticed this flagrant attitude of “Fuck You” that comes from pedestrians. They walk right in front of moving cars, indifferent to the fact that a machine is barreling towards them at 40 miles an hour (will never get that kms thing, sorry). Overall, it's a very tense relationship but can you blame them? I mean the cars park right in your path!

Cars v. pedestrians. Same ‘ole war no matter where you are.

P.S. Haven’t even thought about riding my bike. Scared shitless for that one!

Lattitudes and Attitudes

2011-11-07T12:48:00.004-03:00

Okay everyone... I guess I have some 'splaing to do. It's a long story, one I'll save for a bottle of luscious wine, succulent yummies and good lighting. Until then, I'll just attend to the matter at hand - blogging.

So, I have traded Buenos Aires for Cape Town, South Africa. The only thing they have in common, honestly, is their latitude. Buenos Aires is extremes... loud and Latin, sweaty and screaming, hectic and hungry. It's got a New York attitude replete with yellow and black taxis, culture spilling into the streets, and millions of people squeezed into a 132-story high rise.

Cape Town is the complete opposite.

Think blues. Cerulean seas, ultramarine skies. Mountains peeking over the skylines in any direction you spin. The only truly hectic thing aside from the asshole drivers (this is an upcoming blog post... I mean, they drive ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE ROAD... a topic begging to be deconstructed on this blog) is the wind. Pachamama got the last word in this place - the southern seas whip a wind for several months a year that can be more hectic than Buenos Aires' humanly induced insanity.

I don't want to give away everything that's ahead but just lay the marker down and promise to recommit to my first world white girl blogging. So thanks for coming back, lovely to have you.

What's In A Name?

2010-08-19T09:51:00.011-03:00

A couple of weeks ago, NPR (the most fabulous news source that exists in the United States, hands down) had a story about your coffee name. This is the name that people give to themselves at Starbucks when ordering coffee as to be efficient and not have to spell out their name. With a name like Jill, of course, I don’t have this issue. Jill is perky, short, simple, and easy. That is until you get to Latin America. In Buenos Aires, my name would cause bewilderment equivalent to the name Rumpelstilskin anywhere else. So what did I do? Exactly what the chick in the NPR story did – when going to a restaurant and putting my name in, my restaurant alter ego – Julia – came to life.

In the US, for the most part, your name is your name. As that NPR story signifies, people react with shock and awe if you stray too far from your given name. Sure, we’ve got Joseph’s who become Joes, Jennifer’s who become Jennies. But radical departures are seen as just that – radical and inspiring of NPR stories that people talk about.

In Latin America, it is common for people to have a variety of names and naming customs are very different. In the northern parts of South America and in Central America, people often take their mother’s maiden name too. So you can meet a Maria Jamilla Ruiz Perez that is sometimes know as Maria Jamillia Ruiz P.

Another one you will encounter all over LatAm is people being called names that are not even among the litany of legal names they may have. Some of them sound obvious – Lau for Laura, for example. But other times, people use a name that has nothing to do with their other name – like Nacho in place of Guillermo. In Bogota, I even ran in fear from trying to see an apartment when I asked for Maria, only to be told there was no one by that name there. Turns out, Maria was just the name she used on email. Violeta was the name her neighbors knew her by. Me? At first I thought it was a tourist scam (Craiglist, while wonderful sometimes, can also be sketch city regardless of what city you are hunting in) but I eventually realized the naming customs were not what I was used to.

Today, I am just going by Jill and kinda liking it.

Five Things I Miss About Buenos Aires

2010-07-28T09:14:00.005-03:00

I am sure you feel like you need an explanation.

Where have I been? What have I been doing? More importantly, WHERE am I? Well, I am in Washington for the summer, enjoying mi bi-hemisphericality (yes, it is a lifestyle choice).

While enjoying my blazing fast internet speed recently, I read a blog post from blogger Brendan van Son about all the things he won’t miss about South America and my first thought was that I had to agree with many of them. While life in Buenos Aires is different than in many parts of South America (ie you don’t usually have to worry about the lettuce there), there are still a tons of things he mentioned that I found myself agreeing with.

But in my nearly two months back in North America, I also find myself missing a ton of things.

So here it goes... Five things I miss about Buenos Aires:

1. My Friends. Wandering expat and porteños alike, I have an amazing and supportive group of friends in Buenos Aires. It’s not that I don’t love my friends in North America or the rest of the world (I love you all). Maybe it’s about me and the place I was in when I met my BsAs posse – I feel this wonderful connection, this ability to say and be myself unlike I have with many people I know in other parts of the world.

2. The loose concept of time. As one learns quickly in Latin America, time is a different concept in those parts. Latin time is a flexible, adjustable, whim driven concept. Planning? Pshaw! Por que? While at first this drove my type A self insane (getting an invite for a huge party two days before? Whhhatt?) , I have found myself frustrated with my overscheduled life (and the lives of others) since I am back in the north. Scheduling things two to three weeks in advance is the norm. "But hell, I could jet off to Paris in the morning", I think sometimes when putting something on my schedule a month ahead of time. I miss the whimsical nature of deciding today what I want today, instead of focusing on the future in the present.

3. New experiences. I am back in the city where I have lived on and off for more than a decade. Sure, there are new people, new places, new things happening everywhere. The US has changed more in the last two years than in the last two decades, but the changes are merely a raindrop in a storm compared to the rollercoaster life in Latin America. Maybe my standards have changed, maybe I am lazy, but I just feel like it is easier to walk around with my blinders on in a place that feels like an old pair of shoes.

4. Facturas. No, not my bills. Pastries. These are the most delicious, melt in your mouth snacks that induce an immediate gut reaction to run to the gym afterwards. They are sugary sweet and I love and miss them.

5. Speaking Spanish everyday. Some days I adored it as the rrrrr’s rolled from my tongue efforrrtlessly. Other days it was a nightmare – no one understood what the hell I was saying, I felt deaf, dumb and mute as people looked at me like I was a moron. But the struggle was delicious and gave me more confidence and sense of accomplishment than arguing with a Senator and winning.

Ok, now the nostalgia is killing me. Will just have to turn on some tango and read some Julio Cortazár for relief.

Re-entry

2010-06-01T10:11:00.007-03:00

I realize that I haven’t been writing, giving you the delicious tidbits of my expat existence as you sit in your cubicle, daydreaming of escaping to some foreign land and then returning to online shopping or your annoying boss. The big news, folks, is that I have returned to the first world and the remains of my former life. This just means I am back in DC and living in my beautiful, extremely spacious (and extremely expensive) first world apartment replete with every modern convenience known to man. This is not really a permanent move but a strategic moment in the shift of the weather to figure out some stuff. Or for those of you new to the game - it is summer here in the north.

I have been about town a fair amount in the last week for meetings and other stuff, which means that I’ve been running into people left and right. People who look at me and exclaim, “Wow, you look great! How are you?” and then sometimes they ask again, filling up the awkwardness between us when I cannot tell some of them the same (some of you look fabulous, really) because the majority look tired and sallow from too many hours under the florescent lights, fighting the ego laced turf battles that define a large part of Washington life. I can’t decide if they keep saying this because they have nothing to say to me, feeling that I have detached myself too far from the matrix to understand anything or that they are so deeply into the matrix that they cannot even see a glimmer of light from the outside of it. Or maybe it’s true that the last two years of avoiding winter, struggling to find work, and living a life a little less predictable have all agreed with me.

Either way, some of these reunions have been a little bit painful. As I walk away, I often think about how lucky I am to have escaped. Now don’t get me wrong – there is another kind of comfort and pleasure that my friends are getting in that other life. Sometimes I wistfully dream of a day when I am not worried about a bank balance that is in a downward spiral that would rival the stock market circa September 2008, where I will live in the next few months, my lack of 401K contributions -- a life somewhat more secure than my somewhat (at times) precarious existence.

Ultimately, security is an illusion most of the time anyway- something we convince ourselves exists as to not feel like daily life is a precipice. Just don’t look down.

Weighty Problem

2010-04-07T08:58:00.005-03:00

Note: Canadians and Europeans (sans Brits) will NOT find this funny. This is for true-blooded gringos who slept through math class in the seventh grade.

So the world here is in metrics. Summer temperatures swelter above 35 degrees, meat comes by the kilo, and car rides are in kilometers. Fine, fine. I am not a complete idiot, as I know that 32 degrees does not mean boots but rather sandals. I did struggle once with a cookie purchase, ordering 500 grams and lamenting afterward how it was just simply too many cookies to eat (ok, not really since I love cookies more than just about anything in the world and I was probably really happy to have that many cookies to eat).

Yes, those of us from the US are more accustomed to ordering illicit drugs in grams than our food.

This problem became a weighty one a few weeks ago when I decided to weigh myself. With a life stuffed with crusty pizzas, crustier empanadas, endless rivers of red wine and a cavity inducing sweet tooth, I could feel my pants cinching my waist like a corset. So I step on the scale before my workout and immediately freak out. What is the conversion again? Since the number was just in double digits, I knew it had to be at a minimum doubled. But then what? Add 5? Or was it really multiply by 3? Shit, shit, shit, I couldn’t remember. All I knew was that this number I did know had no reference for me – it could have been equal to 200 pounds, it could have been equal to 150, I had no idea.

Since I was at the gym while all this went down, I naturally did an extra 20 minutes on the elliptical so I could think about the unsolvable math equation. Or try to help with its unknown outcome. And then I tried through the powers of reasoning to figure it out from the weight machines that litter the gym, some of which have both kilos and pounds. Forget it. I was such a neurotic mess thinking I weighted 200 pounds that I eventually raced home to find out.

I opened my Mac, I checked the little widget and sighed with relief when it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought. One kilo is 2.2 pounds, so it’s a little more than double and if you’ve a first world white girl (or probably any girl for that matter, especially here in Argentina where they sadly have the highest rates of anorexia in the world) you know that every pound counts. Which is why I don’t weigh myself too much – in kilos or pounds.

Photo Courtesy of http://school.discoveryeducation.com/clipart/images/scale.gif

Baubled Beauties

2010-03-30T09:52:00.005-03:00

I’ve talked to you about the ladies of my hood. Some go out at 2o’clock in the afternoon with enough makeup on to rival RuPaul.

It’s not just the makeup, however. Ladies flout about town bedazzled beyond belief with tons of shiny baubles bejeweling their bodies, skyscraper high shoes with acrylic heels (just saw it last week), and skirts with hemlines as short as a sailor’s haircut.

After living here for a while you start to realize that maybe your sense of style changes. No, it doesn’t mean that I have cut my hair into a mullet, but it does mean I keep letting it grow. Nor does it mean that I’ve picked up a pair of hooker heels to wear to Sunday brunch. Instead, it takes on more subtle things, like wearing makeup (which I barely wear anyway) to lunch or always making sure I’ve got on some earrings or a little something to jazz up my outfit when I go out.

Women here also love jewelry. And I always have too, honestly. Even when I lived in DC, I still managed to gather a collection of little bits of glitter and sparkle to bejewel myself with when I felt like it. DC gals are a bit more, well… conservative in their style than many other places I’ve been or even lived.

But here they take it to whole other heights. For example, there is the flower. We’re not talking a flower on a lovely spring day or for an event. No, we’re talking a plastic flower in the hair for a Friday night drink with the gals. A friend from the US who has lived here for a while even sheepishly admitted to me that she has one and has worn it on occasion. We got a nice belly laugh out of that one.

Maybe it is because women like to fix themselves up. Maybe it is because women equate femininity with the stuff that is seen as “womanly” – jewelry, makeup, etc. Maybe it is because gender roles are a bit more rigid here and women are expected and taught to behave as women were traditionally expected to behave and look. Granted, Buenos Aires is one of the more progressive cities in Latin America, but old habits die hard I guess.

Whatever it is, I have to admit I am affected by it. As long as it’s a little jewelry or a touch of makeup to keep me fresh-faced, that’s fine. But if you see me eying any heels with metal tips… please shoot me.

Spicy Accent? NOT!

2010-03-23T09:22:00.001-03:00

I’ve made fun of my own accent in Spanish. Honestly, it isn’t very hard to do. I sound like a chick from the US trying to speak Spanish. Occasionally, I have gotten comments in other parts of Latin America about my Argentine accent, which is a shhh sound for the ll instead of the y-like sound used outside of Argentina and Uruguay. So calle sounds like ca-shh-e. This was problematic in taxis in Colombia too many times, so now most of the time I say ca-y-e.

In English, I have no real accent. I grew up on the east coast, so I definitely talk quickly but there’s nothing else notable about my twang when I chatter away. I remember as a child, I wished for the clipped tones of a British accent, always thinking it much sexier and interesting. I think it even was what made me love Simon LeBon. But I digress.

I’m not alone in my love for the tarty tone of the Brits. Even here in Argentina, people learn British English and it is always pretty funny to hear an Argentine switch into English and sound like Hugh Grant or Elizabeth Hurley.

This has made me realize a sad fact – a US accent just isn’t sexy or interesting. It’s just a plain ‘ol American accent. The kind from the movies or TV, I am told. In fact, I recall when I first started traveling around Latin America I hung out with a couple of Asian chicks. I was always the spokeswoman for the group; mostly because I knew some Spanish and if not, my English was the kind of English that almost anyone could understand. Useful, yes. Sultry and exotic, no.

Sigh. Oh, the plight of the first world white girl traveling the world!

My spirits were lifted about this sad syllabic state by my Spanish tutor when she told me recently that when I travel to Spain, my Argentine-ish accent will be seen as sexy by some Spaniards, like a British accent to my North American ear. For this, I was stoked. Finally, FINALLY, someone may develop a crush on me because of my accent!!

Eat your heart out, Keira Knightly! As I am sure that’s why all those boys love her.

Stick This

2010-03-18T15:47:00.013-03:00

It seems fitting to write about this now with what is happening in the states. And while it is not specifically Argentina related, it does have a shit-ton to do with living outside the US and being a first world white girl wandering the world. Beware people: this is a healthcare rant.

I am preparing for my summer in the North, which is likely to include some time in the US, Europe and even a dash of Canada for a dear friend’s wedding. The bottom line is that I need to make sure I have health insurance to take care of me everywhere. I mean, one never knows what can happen and as a US citizen, I am sadly all too aware of the financial cost of just one little incident.

I have asked around, I have searched the internet. I have been on the phone with people in the UK, in the US, even here in Argentina. And this is the sad fact – if I want any coverage in the United States at all for any real period of time, I basically have to pay more than double the premiums. Double!

This problem is unique to those of us from the U.S (my other English speaking first world friends don’t have this problem) where health care costs FOUR TIMES more than anywhere else in the world.

This whole thing reminds me about something that is always on my mind when non-Americans talk about life in the U.S. , which is that there is truly a price for a first-world life, isn’t there? It cost four times more to save your life in an emergency.

Anyway, it is stressing me out beyond belief. And pissing me off. The rest of the fricking world doesn’t put up with this shit. Now for all you fascists who want to rave and bitch about health care that is government run (and I know you are out there), c’mon. The reality is that we will never have a fully government implemented system in the US – there’s just too much money to be made. But what can work is some kind of public-private effort, like you see in most places in the world. Here in Argentina, I have private insurance that is modestly priced by my distorted U.S. standards. The funny part is that all of my friends from other parts of the world complain about how expensive it is!

Here in the Paris of the South, where the health care system seems ok (note, this is based on what I have heard and I can only speak about Buenos Aires, as I imagine it is different outside of the capital) there are two systems – a public one and a private one. While the private one is pretty glam (private rooms in the hospital for example) and the public one less so (old buildings, lots of waiting), there is basic care available for everyone. And if you do have something terrible happen, you are not likely to lose your home, all of your savings and be pushed into bankruptcy.

Anyway, I have no idea if what Congress is plotting and planning will solve the problem. After living and working in DC for over a decade, I am certainly skeptical of a politician’s grip on the real life of most people. And while my life is far from an average one, I am now burdened by what has unfortunately become an entirely average problem in the United States– the obscene cost of health care.

Careful Where You Shake Your Milkshake

2010-03-16T10:58:00.011-03:00

In Argentina, there is no shortage of hot dudes. Tall and buff, short and stocky, muscled, skinny, curly haired, long-haired, no haired – they’ve got it all here, ladies. And the men love the chicas. Maybe there’s something in the water, maybe it’s in the famously succulent beef, but whatever it is, you can pretty much guarantee that when you walk down the street, the boys will be in the yard to check out your milkshake.

While all you first world white girls out there are thinking, shit, I am on the next plane, think again girls. With these admiring glances also comes a whole slew of cultural games that one has to be prepared for, particularly the omission of vital information like being married, having children or living with your significant other.

For example, it is common for men not to wear a wedding ring even if they are, in fact, married. I recently met a hunky guy who chased me around for an entire evening only to find out he was married when he friended me on Facebook, his page replete with photos of his wife and children.

Besides the fact that most North American men would wear a wedding ring if they were married, they also probably would at some point reference the ‘ole ball and chain. But not here – you could go out to a party or club on a Saturday night (which here means sometime around 4 am) and spend the night being pursued by a man who has a wife and kids that he kissed goodbye after dinner around 1 am to come out on the prowl.

When I mentioned that I wanted to write something on my blog about this, horror stories quickly piled up from my girlfriends – Argentine and North American alike.

Among my faves:

- The man who dated my friend for a few weeks one summer and when she wanted to see his house he got super nervous. Why? When she got there, there were photos of his wife and kid who were off at the beach for the summer!

- Another friend’s boss revealed that among his 10 closest friends, seven of them had double families! WTF?

Someone remarked to me how ironic it was that a culture that values family so much would be willing to tolerate this violation of “family values”. But maybe that’s the point – could it be that they don’t see one night or even a regular sexual relationship as a violation? Are they just such master compartmentalizers that it doesn’t seem like they are bringing pain onto anyone or even risking their families?

I will never understand it. All I can do is chalk it up to the fine Latin art of not saying what you’re saying while you sort of say it. There, I said it. Or did I?

Cross Post

2010-03-16T10:12:00.001-03:00

My dear readers, I just did a post for a lovely blog called Unpaved South America about traveling via bicycle here in BsAs. Check it out!

Seasonal Disconnect

2010-03-01T15:16:00.004-03:00

Today is the first day of school. Yes, on March 1st, kids begin school here in Argentina. As I walked along to the gym this morning, I could see the excitement in their eyes as they strolled along hand in hand with their mothers or walked along in their freshly pressed uniforms along the tree lined streets of my barrio.

This realization this morning threw me for a loop. It’s summer, isn’t it? I mean, I come here to enjoy the sun and the heat. Could it really be the southern world equivalent of the end of summer?

It’s only March! I want more!

This is something I always struggle with – I never really know what time of year it is in that seasonal sense here in the Southern Hemisphere. In the last few weeks, we have had outrageous rains that have inundated neighborhoods all over town. I was on a bus the other week that got diverted because people were rioting in the streets because they had gone two days with no power. Nice. This brought about some cooler weather that left everyone asking if summer was already over. I blamed the cold (as everyone did) on all of the rain, but I think I may be wrong.

It really started to hit me last night as a friend and I rode out bikes home at about 8 pm, the city was already enveloped in that inky black darkness that comes with days that are shorter, winds that are brisker.

If you know me, you know my thoughts on this. I am a seasonal nomad, so even the slightest idea of cold weather is enough to get me checking out Travelocity. But yes, it is true. March is September in my Northern oriented internal clock, with the first day of fall being March 20th.

Anyway, it appears that summer is over. The children were not the first sign, they were the final sign.

Adios.

Mas Money

2010-02-17T13:44:00.009-03:00

I have written in the past about the moneda situation (since resolved) here in Buenos Aires. That is not the only problem. Money in general is a huge problem – especially if you are of the peso earning persuasion.

For those who earn pesos, they have to manage a couple of things, most importantly the exchange rate between the dollar and the peso. You wonder why people in Argentina have to worry about a currency that is legal tender 5,000 miles away? Well, because things like houses are priced in dollars. So this means that if you want to buy a house here, you have to borrow dollars. But you earn pesos. Oh and did I mention that the peso is constantly losing value against the dollar? When I first arrived here, the exchange rate was 3.50 pesos to the dollar. And now, 15 months later, it is 3.85 to the dollar. For me, this is seemingly a good deal. But for the peso peeps, it kinda sucks.

While this all may seem like a great deal for me, it really isn’t as lovely as it sounds. Inflation eats everyone alive here, regardless of one’s currency status. Last month, inflation was eight percent. As for last year, there’s some debate - the government of Krazy Kristina (aka Presidenta Cristina Kirchner) says it was eight percent, private economist say more like 15-18 percent. What does that mean for real? It means that every time I go buy something, it costs more. For me, with my dollar driven life, it’s like a pinch of salt. But if your money is worth less and less every month, it’s like a shovelful of shit.

The reasons why are complex and I would never profess to being an economist: It has to do with the Argentine government keeping the peso low to encourage investment by foreigners. It has to do with trying to keep the cost of exports low so someone will buy them. It has to do with the huge amounts of foreign currency the government needs to pay its huge debts. It has to do with the amount of money the government prints. It has to do with a taxation system that is insane, antiquated and easy to avoid. Whatever the reasons, the result is the same: it is harder and harder for everyone but the very rich to afford life in Argentina.

For many people, this roller coaster economy is better than it was. There is a deep history of economic instability and inflation insanity here. During the economic crisis, the rates of inflation were so outrageous that the prices in the grocery stores used to change every hour. Fellow blogger Buenos Aires Photographer has a beautiful posting (with photos) that can give you some of the backstory.

So while my friends freezing their tuchases off up north may be bitching about things, it’s for sure not as wacked as here … if that’s any consolation.

Photo from: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/ce/5pesos.jpg

A Kiss is Just a Kiss

2010-02-01T13:28:00.009-03:00

You probably know that people kiss hello and goodbye here in BsAs. I like the kiss, something that is somehow more emotive and warmer than just a simple, clammy handshake. Of course, this means when you are leaving a party it can take forever and a day to kiss everyone goodbye, but I digress.

Anyway, I bring up the kiss for two reasons… one is because I always struggle with what to do when I meet fellow Americans. Do I kiss them? Of I do I just say hello with a feeble wave or even WORSE, a limp halfhearted handshake?

I have fallen on the side of the kiss route, mostly because I am a when-in-Rome-kinda-gal, which hasn’t always served me but at least I am consistent!

The other reason why I mention the kiss is that often men will kiss each other in greeting too. Just a peck on the cheek to say hello. And no, this is not just the gay men, I promise! I have seen old men kiss hello, the guys at the gym kiss hello, buddies meeting for lunch in a busy café. Even reader Emily commented about how this is part of work culture as well.

Of course, I was super-curious about this custom. I asked and poked around a bit and it seems this male kissing phenomena is unique to Argentina in Latin America. You may find it in other cultures, including in the Middle East and of course, Italy. Even in some parts of the former Soviet Union you can find men who will embrace with a little kiss. But Brazil? No. In Colombia – forget about it. Colombians don’t really kiss hello for the most part, it is more of handshake type of society even for the chicks. NB: Reader Yonas H comments that in Portugal, men in fact, do kiss.

What’s so interesting about the dude kiss is that machismo level of Argentine society. Many of these men who are kissing their dude friends hello are cut from the cloth of some of the most macho men en el mundo. Argentine society can sometimes be a retro throwback – at a party, the women and men can usually been seen gathered in gender specific groups, something out of a sweet 16. I’ve talked incessantly about the level of sexism here, so I don’t need to remind you, my loyal readers about this or why it would seem a tad peculiar to have dudes showing some affection to other dudes.

I will say though, that maybe because there’s so much kissing everywhere, maybe the kiss doesn’t mean as much as it would to a gringa, yanqui or whatever you want to call us cooler blooded northern folk. After all, a kiss is just a kiss. Even if you get them from different people all day long.

Beso!

Caca- Segundo Capitulo

2010-01-28T15:09:00.002-03:00

So I have already bitched and bitched about the poo poo problem on the streets of Buenos Aires – no one picks up their dog shit. Boo and hoo. Every day walking on the street is akin to a field of landmines, watching your every step as though it could be the last (well, for that pair of shoes anyway).

I thought I had all my caca issues under control. Remain vigilant, especially in the morning (what creature doesn’t drop a load between the hours of 8 and 11am?). But this week, they got me.

Of course I don’t realize it when it happens. I arrive at my slightly snooty gym (there is a snootier one a block away) and head for the elliptical. I get on and start moving, putting my ipod on and enjoying my new gym mix. And then, it beings - a musty, gaggy, repulsive, treacherous and disgusting stench. At first, I look around. Could it be the guy two machines over, sweating a tad piggishly as he huffs and puffs to nowhere? Or the woman striding with purpose up an imaginary hill? Yes, it must her. How gross I think, imaging what in the world she must have done to herself (or not done to herself) to bring such a foul odor onto all of us.

Before too long, the smell faded and I continue my sweatfest. I strolled over to the weights – arms, back, chest, those little triceps all get their due. Wiped out, I collapsed onto a mat to stretch a bit and then, it starts again. That tang, that vicious olfactory assault that had nearly killed me an hour earlier. I frantically looked around for Lady Reek, but she was nowhere to be found.

This could mean only one thing – I was Lady Reek.

Shit (literally)! I quickly look down to my lovely Adidas Supernovas (the only shoe for me, I love them) and sandwiched in the little cavities of the bottom of my sneaker is shit, shit and shit.

Shit!

I leave in embarrassment (after all, I was Lady Reek to everyone else) and when I get to the street, I begin scraping my shoe wildly against the sidewalk, like an animal with a bad itch. But the shit is just caked in after 45 minutes of cardio pounding.

Pissed off, I walk home. I take off my shoes outside the front door, carry them inside and stick them on the patio, leaving the smell for my neighbors to enjoy. What the hell did this dog eat?

I avoiding going to the gym yesterday because I just didn’t want to deal with my shitty shoes. But today, feeling brave, I put on rubber gloves, grabbed the paper towels and held my nose. Done and done, shit-free run.

Knowing What Matters

2010-01-08T11:50:00.004-03:00

I have been in the US for the holidays and for a little business time, doing my usual east coast lap from Ft. Lauderdale to NYC to DC. It’s a familiar route at this point in my life that’s spread around across two continents, two time zones and two languages.

Before I embark on these multi-week schleps, I try to organize coffees, meetings, lunches, cocktails, dinners, chats, gym dates or whatever to catch up with people, organize more work, get some gossip or even get some love (love has many forms, you filthy freakshow).

As you can imagine, this is not only time consuming trying to organize all these type-A people’s schedules (No, I can’t do Wednesday, I have my shrink or well, if the lawyers get back to me, I won’t be able to do 3pm – that kind of shit), but it’s just nuts to actually follow through and do EVERY SINGLE THING you overcommitted yourself to when you were sitting in the summertime and chilling out. But inevitably after three weeks of dragging your ass through the winter, a cold starts to bud, digits are perpetually frozen and a you have a stump speech on what’s been going on that would make an incumbent senator a little jealous.

Truthfully, it’s all lovely: all the friends, all the festivities, all the food, all the memoires. Everyone is happy to see you; you are happy to see them. But there are other people, the people who you once imbibed with countless glasses of fancy wine and canapés who don’t return your calls or your emails. The people who you thought were friends that once you unplugged from the matrix, no longer want anything to do with you. I don’t have tons of these types but there are some people who have mysteriously disappeared from the universe. Hmmm.

When I first started doing these east coast tours and I didn’t hear back from these ghosts, I felt sort of bad. What happened to my friends? Then I realized that these people were never my friends – they were part of the transactional life that has overtaken life in the big city. And now that I can only regale folks with tales of my wacky Argentine life or third world wanderings, I don’t have something they think of as valuable.

The good news is that people I never thought of as particularly close have also come out of the woodwork, becoming good friends even when I am far away. These people have served as inspiration and support and I am more grateful than ever for them.

I no longer feel bad about these spirits that have disappeared. And I don’t even bother sending those emails anymore, I just enjoy my wonderful, amazing North American friends.

Sweet Sounds

2009-12-17T12:31:00.009-03:00

Have we talked about noise? This city is a sonata, beginning with the gentle whirring of a saw around 8:30 am. It usually builds to include a chorus of dog barks, a baseline of gruffly cars without mufflers, the evening’s delivery boys with their puny motorcycles chirping and finally to the crescendo of high school boys high on cheap beer clapping and singing at 3 am virtually every night of the week.

Sounds like it must be hard to sleep, huh?

Anyway, this gives you a sense of the daily life of sound in BsAs. So you can imagine what happens when’s there’s really something to yell about. Dude, you don’t want to be there. It’s something along the lines of a Kiss concert without earplugs. Ok, maybe a little dramatic…

So it was not really surprising the other weekend at Masa Critica when one of our masa ended up in a little fender bender with a taxi, that all hell broke loose. We were riding along, the masa growing into a group of well over 100 cyclists. Cruising through the fancypants neighborhood of Recoleta, the group was like a web covering Calle Callo. When we got to the bottom of the hill, there was already something going down, a rolly polly taxi driver screaming at a hippie dippie kid.

Traffic was starting to pile up, as the fracas was in the middle lane. The group of bikers had pulled into a gas station, people were chatting, smoking, sharing food and drink. Bellowing cars begged their impatience to get the hell out of the way. The cops showed up. The crowd warmed up. And the clapping commenced.

Of course, there were words to go with the clapping. “Bici, si. Taxista, no.” keeping with the rhythm of the rhyme as the argument with the taxista, the police and the kid kept going. The voices thundered together, the clapping adding force to the message of the masa. At one point someone held up the bike to egg the crowd on, the back tire deformed by the force of the taxi. We roared.

Another policeman came and the crowd got louder – “Bici, si. Taxista, no.” The honking continued, the chant too, until our hands were red and our voices hoarse from screaming.

After an hour or so, it got resolved. I have no idea what the resolution was exactly. Satisfied, we stopped screaming, got back on our bicis and headed south.

P.S. Thanks to my wonderful friend and writer Sharon Haywood for the inspiration for this post!

Bathroom Cultural Alert

2009-12-11T11:39:00.004-03:00

The other night, I went to see one of my most favorite singers in the world, Concha Buika. Think Erykah Badu and Nina Simone rolled into one tiny woman from Mallorca, with a family from Equatorial Guinea – the only African country where the predominant language is Spanish

The girl is fly. She dresses and looks like Badu, emits that amazing air of power a la Badu too. But the voice. That voice – a creamy dream with a range that will knock your socks off. She’s kinda jazzy, but girl ain’t afraid to bring in beautiful Cuban rhythms, hip rocking drumbeats or dramatic flamenco.

Divine. Here’s a little clip.

Before we went into the show, a friend and I ran to the bathroom. Of course, in true woman form, there was a line. We waited patiently, as the line moved at a decent clip. The bathroom was your typical post-modern public outhouse, with stale green walls and an antiseptic vibe. I noticed out of the corner of my eye there was a woman selling your usual bathroom fodder, including little squares of TP.

My friend leans in and whispers, do you think its drip dry? I look around and see that no one else is buying paper. Well, I respond, when I am in a place where the custom isn’t clear, I usually look at what other people are doing to get a sense of the system.

We opt for the gamble. My friend, who enters the bathroom ahead of me, yells out to me in disgust, “So much for when in Rome…”

My Sparrows

2009-12-07T18:41:00.000-03:00

Sorry for the slack gang. I have been in work mode, holiday planning mode and party mode as spring and a trip back north for the holidays is creeping upon me. This has given me little time to reflect on my life here, sadly.

But since it’s the end of the year, which is a time for broad reflection and thanks for everything, I keep coming back to a story about a lovely little necklace that represents my journey of the last 18 months.

My favorite shop in Washington is called Nana and is owned by a dear friend Jackie Flanagan. (Everyone in DC, go and go immediately!) She has the cutest stuff known to humankind in her beautiful U Street boutique, including lovely jewelry by a designer called Pieces of a Girl.

Years ago, I bought myself a lovely little necklace of a sparrow. I always got compliments on it, as it is delicate and beautiful and looks nice with almost anything. I wore it all the time and even bought a few for some dear friends.

I have had my sparrow with me constantly, a reminder of the people that are far from me physically but not emotionally. They are all my dear friends in DC and throughout the world that have helped me get to right now. And for them, I am grateful. Especially my friend Jackie, as she is an example in my life of how one can achieve something with hard work and a desire to succeed.

Sparrows are tiny little birds that are found in almost every part of the world. The great thing about a sparrow is that they are free to come and go wherever they want, only constrained by the extremes of temperature. Because their tribe is everywhere, they are able to find their own group of fellow sparrows wherever they end up.

My own little sparrow flew with me from Washington to Buenos Aires, from La Paz to Cape Town and all the way back to the US. Sometime earlier this year, it broke. I held onto the chain and my little bird as they continued around with me through the US and Colombia. I finally brought my sparrow in to Jackie in the late summer when I was back in DC for a while and she vowed to get it fixed for me.

On my last full day in town, I went over to Nana to say goodbye to Jackie. Things had been crazy at the store and while everything looked beautiful and ready for fall, she hadn’t had the time to get my sparrow fixed. She wanted to just give me a new one, but she didn’t want me to continue traveling without my first sparrow, the one that had been all of those places and had experienced all those things with me.

So now, I have a necklace with two sparrows. The sparrow from the first part of this great adventure and now, a shiny new one for the next part.

Thanks

2009-11-27T11:15:00.001-03:00

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday in the world because it is a holiday that is about food, not gifts. Thanksgiving is a memory of people and shared experience, not about spending money because of a societal obligation. Because of this, I had no idea what kind of experience I was going to have living in a place where my roots are just starting to take hold.

We went Thanksgiving shopping on Tuesday, my friend Mary and I scoured the giant megastore for cranberries, turkey, green beans, and the ever necessary, bricks of butter. Success on the butter and the beans. Well, the turkey too – we scored these little girl turkeys from Brazil, pavitas, and we grabbed two of them from the nearly empty giant freezer. The cranberries were sadly never found and tangy plum marmalade was subbed in its’ place.

When I arrived at Mary’s on Thursday, I had already been living in cognitive dissonance. Always in two worlds, it was more severe on this day – life hummed as it always does in my physical space, while half a world away existed some other reality that is also my own. But it was different. Thanksgiving is about the people you love and there were many people who were in that world far, far away. Normally I spend Thanksgiving with my dear friend Marc. I even wrote a poem about it last year, closing my eyes to imagine his day of thanks at the same moment as mine. I remember feeling the distance of half a world on that day.

But this year, something was different. I walked into Mary’s house to a hurricane of cooking. Mary, an incredible cook, had prepared beautiful green beans worthy of a Gourmet photo spread and pale yellow potatoes au gratin laced with cream and cheese. I ran out to get some wine and when I came back, the smell of the pavitas filled the kitchen. Darkness had come and with that, a drop in the temperature that made it feel closer to a slightly bleak northern world November than a crisp Argentine spring evening.

Before too long the guests began to arrive. Argentines, a Cuban, a Brazilian. Only one-third of us had celebrated Thanksgiving before, so it was a treat for many of the newbies. As we were piling our plates with food, we had to show the newbies where the most delicious stuffing was (inside the bird of course), explain the plum marmalade on the table.

It was a joyous occasion – in English, Spanish and even a little Portuguese. When asked about what she was thankful for, our host put it perfectly – “I am thankful for yesterday for becoming today and today for becoming tomorrow.”

Me too.

Sweet Calesitas

2009-11-18T11:29:00.000-03:00

Two weeks ago, my friend Nestor dragged me to the outer reaches of Buenos Aires to attend a birthday party in a barrio called Liniers. We took a bus along Avenieda Rivadavia, which he told me was the longest road on earth and after this bus ride I think I believe him. Finally, we hopped off at a quiet corner with a lush park tucked between two sleepy streets. Quiet? Sleepy? Were we in Buenos Aires? What kind of party was this?

Truth be told, it was 5 pm, which is really when the town just begins to wake up.

As we circled the corner, I heard what I came for. The high-pitched screams of children. The retort of parents who begged their offspring for voices an octave lower as they all yelled over the high-pitched kids music. And then, I saw it. The street was stuffed full of children, parents, grandparents, even great grandparents all celebrating the 90th birthday party of Don Luis, the man who operates the oldest calesita (merry-go-round) in Buenos Aires. His particular merry-go-round, was built in 1920 and has been bringing squeals of delight to the kids in the ‘hood for close to a century.

Don Luis’ merry-go-round is one of 55 scattered through the neighborhoods of BA, with nearly one in every ‘hood. With wooden carved horses, carriages and trains painted in faded pink, purple and gold, they quickly leave you with the impression of another epoch. The city has embarked on effort to save these little jems of history that conjure up happy images for young and old alike, going into far flung neighborhoods to reconstruct and rescue piece of the city’s strong European history.

“Three generations of my family came here, including me,” a wrinkled woman of the barrio told me. She was in her early 90s, her husband 97. That was what made this party so remarkable – the mixture of generations who all were united to celebrate what was, is or will be part of their collective memory. It was a symbol of community that is too often forgotten in an age of video games, Facebook and television.

There was an award for Don Luis from the city, for his dedication to the community. He spoke briefly, with pride about the challenges throughout time to keep the calesita running. “Today all the children of Argentina can enjoy the most fun and healthy diversion we have,” he declared, beaming with joy as the throngs of children and adults alike clamored to kiss and hug him on his special day.

There was a torta (cake) of course, a 90-kilo purple behemoth, in honor of Don Luis’s age. It was extra sweet, with dulce du leche and nuts sandwiched in between a moist yellow cake and the crowd pushed with ferocity to get near the table underneath a jacaranda tree to grab a slice.

Soon the crowd was energized, maybe from the sugar, maybe from the celebratory vibe. Kids climbed onto the merry-go-round, making life-long friends, making temporary enemies, loving their sisters, hating their brothers, with parents snapping pictures furiously in the golden spring afternoon. Either way, it was simply a beautiful sight.

To see more pics, go to my flickr site. Also, be sure to check out the special cultural programs the city has going until the end of the year at calesitas throughout the city.

Finding My Masa

2009-11-11T09:02:00.000-03:00

A little over a week ago, I had the good fortune of going to Masa Critica here in BsAs. For those of you who don’t speak bicycle, Masa Critica or Critical Mass is the only day a month when cyclists ride in a massive pack. For one day, we are stronger than the mighty car, able to control the roads simply by virtue of the fact that there’s so damn many of us.

It was a cloudy spring day, the sunshine fighting as hard as a cyclist in Buenos Aires traffic to come out. We took the train down to the Retiro train station and on the ride I made a new friend, Julian who was also holding onto his bike as we bumped along. Julian asked me if we were going to Masa Critica. Yes, we were, I responded and Julian joined me and my friend and a journalist from a local paper while we rode along the widest road in the world, Avenieda de 9 de Julio to arrive at Obelisco.

When we arrived, there was a small crew of bikers. My favorite part of Critical Mass everywhere (I have been in DC, San Fran and now BsAs) is the diversity of the attendees. Here there were young and old, the heavily spandexed, the heavily hipstered and everything in between. There was a bike gang with shirts emblazoned with a bike and lightening lettering proclaiming so. A family with their nine-year old who was enjoying his second Masa Critica. I even saw a fixie!

In true Argentine fashion, we started tardy. But before we began, there was a moment where we gathered to hold our bikes up in the air and chant “Masa Critica”. I loved it, because it made me feel bonded to these fellow misfits in our love of the bike.

We hit the streets, cruising down Avenida de Julio. The cars were pissed and just got more pissed as we took over the roads. Along the route, there was the sound of horns as loud as thunder, yells as forceful as a slap and raw anger that we were in the way. I never really felt scared because I knew that the masa would protect the masa.

We continued, weaving through the barrios of the city, getting more comments than a teenage girl in a short skirt. “Que raro” or “How strange” was a common one I heard murmured among the crowds who were walking down the sleepy Sunday streets.

Raro. Hmm… To me, I felt at home, home with the guy that had the bike that towered 10 feet high. At home with the punky girl who had a death to cars sign that hung on the ass end of her bike. No matter where in the world you are, you can find your own masa.

Comments Revised

2009-11-03T10:23:00.001-03:00

I recently did an interview with a fellow blogger in Argentina and among her questions was one about the cultural differences between how men treat women here versus how women are treated in the U.S. I made some smartass reply about how the male flattery is sort of charming here and that I don’t let it bother me too much.

Well, I spoke too soon.

The other night I was coming home from dinner around midnight. The bus was stuffed with people just starting their night, the smell of too much cologne and freshly washed hair temporarily overpowering the odor of the bus fumes. There was a guy who was drunk, crazy, unstable, who knows what exactly and itching for someone to talk to. With a mullet straight from 1977, disheveled clothes, and a bag that looked like he has fished it out of a garbage can somewhere uptown, I considered he might be homeless.

Two stops after me, a young woman dressed in painted on jeans, a powder white jacket and a tiara (and no, she was not a drag queen) got onboard. Homeless mullet began to try talking to her, but not in a nice way. He began saying nasty things to her and just generally being a pain in the ass. And no one did anything.

Tiara left, he got worse. Two young girls got on, no more than 16 years old, with heavily lined eyes and shorts that were perhaps half an inch more than your standard issue Daisy Dukes. The minute these girls boarded the bus, mullet man was like a wolf going for two little cublets. The bus settled into an uncomfortable silence as mullet man made disparaging comments about girls with the budding bodies of women, but the maturity of munchkin sized maidens.

They stuck together and scampered off for a seat right in front, next to the bus driver. I wanted to yell out, to curse, to scream at this fucker. But I also did not know how mullet man would react. I was a coward, unable to pull the words in Spanish from my gut.

There were two boys who were nervously gigging at mullet man’s demeaning diatribe and to them, I shot daggers. They couldn’t even look me in the eye and stopped with their girlish giggles before too long.

Finally, mullet man got off on the edge of Palermo and we were all free from his sexist terrorism. But this incident changed my mind about the “charming flattery”. Fuck that – it’s the sweet nothings that paved the way for the mullet man to act with impunity and yes, it does bother me.

To this end, my own Spanish homework is now my fuck you, leave her alone speech. Will share soon.

Flora of the 'Hood

2009-10-28T09:30:00.001-03:00

I am finally almost settled into my lovely newish neighborhood, just a hop, skip and a jump from where I used to live. It’s a little more glam, with lots of yuppie type dudes driving shiny new Volkswagens with preppy sweaters lazily tossed over their shoulders. The woman are a bit more catlike than my other ‘hood, slinking around in skintight denim and hooker-height boots, decorated with vampy nighttime makeup even during daylight.

Despite the different varieties of flora and fauna, it’s a relatively nice neighborhood and I am enjoying it. There are nice little shops to browse, a wide choice of verdulerías to buy my veggies, my fave gym close-by. As in my other barrio, there’s also a telo or sex hotel within a couple a blocks should I need one.

Yes, gringos, a sex hotel. Here in Argentina (and other parts of Latin America), there are hotels where you can go to have sex. This is mostly because many people live at home until they are married or into their 20’s, unlike us who are thrown out on our asses days after turning 18. I have yet to try one, but I have heard they can run the gamut, from mirrored walls to lovely romantic spots. Some of them even have “menus” where you can order toys and other appetizers to help get in the mood.

Not sure what fare is offered at La Fusta, my neighborhood sex stop. But in the parking garage, they have a large white statue of a woman with her legs invitingly open and a flower at her most fertile spot with a light that is always on.

The place is ironically located on a street called José Ortega y Gasset, a Spanish philosopher from the early 20th century that lived in exile in Buenos Aires during the Spanish Civil War. Part of the school of liberalism and a strong humanist, he was influenced by such big names as Husserl and Hegel. His philosophy is neatly summed up by, “Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia" (I am myself and my circumstance).

He also believed that we have the choice to be free inside our own fate and within our fate we choose our destiny. Can’t think of a better reason to hit the telo.

I'm Toxico

2009-10-23T15:52:00.000-03:00

As I am getting settled back again in Buenos Aires, I am faced with the grim reminder of how business is done here. Or rather not done here. I have decided that there’s no word in porteño (the Spanish dialect that is spoken here in BsAs) for customer service.

Here it goes… My beautiful, gorgeous Nokia has been declared “toxico” by the cell phone company because I had used a chip a friend had given me when I lived here earlier in the year. The account is in arrears because my friend has been trying to close the account for four months, but there is no one at the company who will help her. Nice, right?

I tried to resolve it the nice way, but ultimately end up screaming like a banshee at an unhelpful and rude drone who works for this horrible company, Claro. The guards circle me, maybe afraid I am going to do something crazy beyond yelling? No, he tells me, this is not our problem. Your phone is the problem, the other cell phone companies are the problem, but we, we are not your problem.

I stormed out in a whirlwind of rage with a littering of expletives echoing behind me. But I realized that I just wanted to prove this asshole wrong. So like an American invasion into an Afghan village, I storm back in with guns ablazing. I get a number and I sit. After a couple of minutes, they announce that the computer system is down and the masses spill from the sliding glass doors into the street. But not me. I’m not going anywhere.

I make small talk with a young woman, Sabrina, who is clad in purple ankle boots and slightly overmade for a daytime appointment. She tells me that Claro sold her a bad phone and she has been unable to use her phone for 6 months. Is that insanity? Yes.

They come ‘round again, telling us it will be at least another hour or longer. But the insane part is that there are people covertly droning on, printing out documents, quietly talking to customers. I notice the asshole manager looking my way now and again. I’m not one to be filled with too much ego, but could this work stoppage be because they don’t want to deal with me? Yes, Sabrina tells me, probably.

Finally, a woman Moria tries to help. We’re halfway there, but my phone remains “toxico” to companies that are not the horrid Claro. Supposedly, it will take a few days to clear this nasty list. Still waitin’.
As much as I hate to blog about my own trials and tribulations in this mundane sort of way, there's a point here. The system in Argentina is pretty broken, the people are pretty broken by it and violating people’s rights is not a big deal to these greedy companies and people just expect it in their everyday lives. The government steals, why shouldn’t the big boys steal when they can? That’s life in a kleptocracy, I guess.
Note: Photo from http://www.que.es

Feriados

2009-10-13T09:53:00.001-03:00

I have had more than my fair share of extra holidays or feriados as I have been wandering. When I was in Colombia, I got Colombian Independence Day (which is also my birthday), the Battle of Boyacá and the Assumption of Mary (yes, I am a Jew but I'll take the freebie). In Argentina, I got some extra Catholic holidays too and one or two nice remembrances of Argentine victories and defeats. The gift of an extra lazy day even if I had to do some work, since my stuff is all based in the states.

Yesterday, both in the US and Argentina (and in Colombia too), it was Columbus Day. In Latin America, it is called “Race Day” because the natives hate Columbus for taking them out, which I totally get. At least here in Latin America, the native people weren’t decimated like they were in the US.

While some people in the states were working yesterday, people here take the term “holiday” much more seriously than those in the US. There’s no run on the malls, there is no going into the office. Instead of throngs of shoppers hitting the mall, there are throngs of families strolling the streets. Gone is the constant roar of the buses zooming by, dog walkers are sans their normal herds. It’s a day of freedom and relaxation as the parks are stuffed with people -- sunbathers in itsy bitsy bikins (yes, I did see one today and it’s only 65 degrees), mothers and daughters clustered together on benches facing the afternoon sun, a couple drinking a lazy coffee at a café, sisters arm in arm sharing ice cream.

I walked in the afternoon sun to run a quick errand, but even I couldn’t move too quickly. Instead, I meandered the streets and for just a few minutes, I joined a city of nearly 16 million people taking the day off. Too bad I wasn’t one of them.

She's Baacck!

2009-10-08T18:29:00.000-03:00

Happily back in the good airs and starting to get settled in. One of the biggest challenges in my respites from Latin America has been keeping up my blog. Honestly, inspiration has been hard to come by as I wandered in the first world. And technically, I wasn’t even really wandering so much. Occasional respites to NYC hardly qualify. So, let me apologize to you my dear readers.

In your own culture, it’s easy to have some blinders. One of the great/difficult/sometimes horrible things about being outside the US is that everything is unfamiliar. This gives me not only insights into my own culture and the one I am living in, but also some interesting experiences to share with you.

When you are a foreigner, lots of people want to show you things and are constantly asking for your impressions about their own culture. I often write about the people I meet as I wander, since they often give me a perspective different than the first world white girl’s.

So today when I went to deal with the cell phone company over a bad SIM card, they told me that to fix it I would have to go way down to the Microcentro. I tried to talk them into helping me in my lame ass Spanish, but they couldn’t help. At first I thought it was because of my Spanish and then I just became frustrated and a string of several expletives fell out of my mouth to describe my frustration.

“Entiendo,” the guy said, “Fuck is fuck in any language.”

Influenced

2009-09-21T10:12:00.000-03:00

I am back in the US for work, mostly hanging in DC and enjoying watching the days slowly shorten as fall begins to fall upon us. While this was my home for many years, the past year of wandering has definitely changed my view of what I need to have a home. Nonetheless, I am enjoying seeing the wonderful people that are my friends who call this home.

One thing I am missing is speaking Spanish. My Spanish has been progressing nicely over the last year and during my time in Colombia it reached another level. Progress capped off with my trip to the coast, which included traveling with a couple of Rolos (people from Bogota) and speaking Spanish day and night. By the second morning of rolling over and having to sputter to life in Spanish before brushing my teeth or drinking coffee, I knew I had gotten there.

Since arriving in the Beltway Bubble, the Spanish has been mostly in fits and starts. The highlight was helping a pruned Salvadorian woman navigate the confusing cereal sale in the Safeway in my neighborhood. After setting her straight that all Raisin Bran looking boxes were not equal (the Safeway brand was not on sale), she commented that my Spanish was good… for a gringa.

All this led me to try an intercambio, something I had done in BA and just loved. You meet someone, chat for an hour in Spanish and an hour in English. I naturally went to craigslist, the modern version of the corner store, to search for a partner. I ended up with a Chilean dude with an accent thicker than tar who wanted to talk politics.

Fortunately I am up on my Latin American politics, including Chile, since I was just there in the last year. We talked about Michele Bachlet and he remarked how she wasn’t really a socialist, since she had been influenced by the whole Chicago/Milton Friedman/free market crowd. What’s so fascinating about this is that she lived in the former East Germany, yet she still preaches and surrounds herself with über capitalists. She also lived in the US as a child, her father serving at the embassy here in DC.

She ain’t alone. Many of the leaders in LatAm these days either lived for a spell in the US or surround themselves with people who were educated here. Uribe, the president of Colombia, did a stint at Harvard. Correa, the president of Ecuador, went to the University of Illinois.

This isn’t always an indicator of policies towards the US, however. Correa kicked the US out of Ecuador. And while Fidel spent some time in the US and almost studied at Colombia, he ended up going back to Cuba and well… you know the rest.

Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing, Really?

2009-08-31T06:25:00.001-03:00

My last week in Colombia included a trip to the glorious coast. La costa is another side of Colombia, filled with the tantric rhythms of cumbia music, the musty smells of seafood and the Atlantic, and the sticky, dewy glaze of 90 percent humidity like icing on your skin. The piece of me that lived in Florida relished the Caribbean-Latin concoction.

I traveled by myself for a while, sitting on buses and planes taking in the landscapes and reading. But inevitably, friendly (there really are no other kind) Colombians (usually of the male variety) would chat me up, my obvious gringa-ness driving them to show

me something fabulous about their town. I took it all in stride, and enjoyed learning every nook and cranny factoid of every pueblito I passed.

Inevitably, the question came. What question? The “are you married” question. At first, I answered honestly, which means no. This invited a series of questions, lectures, sermons, you name it, all in the name of my being a single gal.

William, who I met on a beach crowded with fisherman selling off their daily haul, told me I didn’t want to be married. He waxed on and on, as he waited for the best fish of the day, telling me there was nothing physically wrong with me but that my time was running out. This continued until a boat coasted onto the beach by only the moonlight, with fish as long as my forearm. Finally, William could go home with what he came for. Phew.

No man in North America would ask me this question after knowing me for 20 minutes on some beach while waiting for the fisherman to come in. In fact, I don't even think an Argentine would ask (not as friendly as the Colombians, for starters). I think it has to do with the currents of traditionalism that have a strong hold in Colombia. Women get married, women are married. And if not, there has to be a reason why not. In North America, maybe people are too polite but if you were even asked the question, I can't imagine the discussion going down the road of mine with William.

After that, I decided to create an imaginary boyfriend. Somedays, he would be a dashing Argentine, others just an ordinary North American. Lawyer, doctor, or mechanic. Either way, he was lovely and fabulous and better than any real boyfriend a girl could have. In fact, it might have been better than having a real boyfriend. At least some days.

photo from: http://www.hmseurope.com/nouvel2.jpg

Securely Insecure

2009-08-17T09:50:00.005-03:00

As in all of the Latin America that I know, Bogotá joins the ranks of security obsessed. In front of every shopping mall, there are always a gaggle of security dudes sewn into pseudo-Army styled uniforms, with dogs ready to turn a snarl on a moment’s notice. It’s not just window dressing either, they don’t mess around here - every car that goes into a public parking garage is searched and sniffed, presumably for explosives.

Now granted, here in Colombia (unlike some other places that are security obsessed) stability and a non-violent existence are relatively recent developments. A friend here in Bogotá shared numerous stories with me as we walked through downtown a week or two ago, pointing out buildings that have been rebuilt after being torn to bits by explosives, even a tale about a classmate from school that was left maimed by a paramilitary’s mistaken bomb. Just tragic, especially considering that this all happened less than 15 years ago.

This security obsession doesn’t just extend to public places. Every apartment building has a doorman. Doormen range from scruffy looking guys that spend more time sleeping then guarding to the starched, pressed and proper variety. Regardless of appearance or work habits, they are all stunningly polite (a la Colombians in general). It’s a nice touch overall, except for one thing… you don’t have a key to the front door of the building. Yes, people. You don’t have a key to the place where you live!

It may be a matter of security (making sure there are no duplicates made, allowing the unauthorized to enter) but I find it a little much. This over-secured mentality seems to make me a little more paranoid and a little more edgy, which trust me… I don’t really need.

I also think this affects the psyche of people. While people in Latin America generally lean on the side of the over-security obsessed, I have heard endless cautions from nearly ever person I have met about taxis (always, but not from the street) and walking at night (don’t do it, ever). Now I know Bogotá ain’t Kansas, but c’mon people. The US is plenty sketchy. Ever been to Washington DC? I think it had the highest murder rate before Bogotá snatched the honor away years ago. But no more. These days it’s Caracas, Venezuela that’s taking the honors.

Whatever. Ultimately, it’s just annoying when you have a slacker door guy, it’s super late, you’ve had a few and you need to pee.

photo from: http://nitinwirenetting.tradeget.com/F16054/barbed_wire.html

Third World Women and Bikes

2009-08-11T10:19:00.007-03:00

So… you probably didn’t know this, but Bogotá is a city that rivals any Western European city for bike friendliness. There are tons of bike paths and a weekly event where the bikes take over the vast majority of the city streets. It’s not Amsterdam, but it beats the hell out of my favorite bike lane in Washington, DC (on 9th St NW) where you are supposed to do halvesies with the bus.

Anyway, I have been talking to people about the fab bikeness of Bogotá and something really interesting came up that I have never considered… the gender divide of cycling. Not surprisingly, women of Latin America bike less than their male counterparts. This mostly has to do with the fact that women never even learn to ride a bike because this is seen as something unfeminine. Whhhatt?

Latin America is not the only place where this divide exists. According to research done by the UN, this divide exists in Africa too. In addition to the perception that riding is unfeminine, if a bike is the fastest mode of transportation available, you know who gets it. And it ain’t the chicks, I hate to tell ya.

This divide even exists in the US. Recently blogger Anna Letitia Mumford wrote about the bike divide in US, citing a study in San Francisco showing that women make up 49 percent of San Franciscans, but make up only 23 percent of frequent cyclists (meaning cycling two or more days per week) in the city.

Well, what can we do? First off, teach chicks how to ride bikes. I heard that the weekly cycling event in Quito, Ecuador has a bike riding clinic for women - a good step in the developing world. What else? Hmm… maybe make cuter cycling clothes? Just a thought.

P.S. The photo is the Porsche. Love her!

Girls without Guns

2009-08-01T10:31:00.006-03:00

Last week, I took a few days of R and R and headed to the Zona Cafetera, which is the coffee country for you gringos. My journey included nearly every type of motorized vehicle you could think of - my lovely roommate drove me to the airport at 7 am, a tiny crop duster sized plane carried me over the towering Andes (bumpy all the way), a surly taxi driver got me from the tiny airport in Armenia to the ramshackle bus station in the center of town. And all before 10 am.

For the last leg, I got on a small bus headed towards a colonial town called Salento, where I would have four days of coffee plantations, hiking and some R and R. The ride was a curvey one as we scaled the emerald hills with 60-foot high Wax Palm Trees that stood waifishly against the indigo sky and fincas fertile with bananas, pineapples, coffee, blackberries and bamboo.

The bus weaved through a small town or two, someone even gave the driver a package to deliver to the next pueblo, extracting promises that the package not break during the journey. There are kids with their parents, excitement in their eyes as they embark on visiting a family friend or relative and young men who are fragranced just a tad over the top, every hair in place.

The bus moves along for a while but suddenly, we stop. I look out the window to see what the commotion is, but before I can focus a young man in fatigues gets on the bus. A gun lays along his back, spanning from his narrow shoulders to equally narrow thigh. He barks a greeting in Spanish (the Colombians are the most polite people, always) and then asks the men to exit the bus with their papers. The men? Why only the men? I think.

It’s a government checkpoint and they are searching for rebels on our way into this tiny town of less than 10,000 people. Seriously. Although the military is not an uncommon presence in Colombia (or most of Latin America, really) nor are extremely large machine guns. At first, I was a bit freaked out. I mean, here I am in the middle of nowhere in Colombia and the military has boarded my bus. With big guns. But then, I became kind of incensed – I mean, why only the men? Hadn’t they ever heard of Gioconda Belli, who was a Sandinista? Women can be rebels (like Belli) or drug mules too, ya know.

I guess the most disappointing thing is that this is the depth of Colombia’s sexism I have seen so far. There’s no stares or yells or talking to my legs. Only an assumption that I’m not a lefty rebel. Boo and hoo.

Flavors

2009-07-24T14:59:00.007-03:00

First off, apologies. I had some amalgamation of swine flu and was flat on my ass for days. Hence no writing or meeting fascinating people.

Anyway, am back on the stick. Earlier this week was Colombian Independence Day and I spent the afternoon with my roommate and her cousin. We lounged away the last day of a long weekend in the most delicious way – eating, slurping creamy cappuccinos, and chatting. After we scarfed down a traditional Colombian meal of hearty soup and succulent meat with aji that packed a spicy punch, we headed to a coffee shop and sprawled ourselves out in front of a huge window, snuggled into scrumptious red leather seats and lapped up the afternoon Andean sun that filled up the room.

We of course talked about traveling and the amazing range of cultures that exist in Latin America. In Argentina, where the influence of Italy and the old country reigns supreme to here in Colombia, where the imperialist North Americans have left a King Kong sized footprint in the culture. In the middle, in Bolivia, there is a starker line – in one glance native culture fills your vista with the women dressed in their ballooning polleras and bowl hats, while in the other it's first worldified women in tight jeans and pointy stiletto heels wobbling down ancient city streets. These orientations not only affect how things look, they also effect the social dynamics of each place.

The classism and racism are different when the cultural contrasts are so stark. They even cloud the political landscape, creating divisions of animosity and instability for everyone, regardless of their tailor. In North America, while we have our distinct subcultures (even our own albeit meager sized Native America culture), none of them dominate the landscape with nearly as much force as they do in a place like Bolivia. Constant strife exists between the indigenous people of the Alto Plano and the more European influenced residents of the eastern side of the country.

Why is this? The modern Americas -all of us- are the teenagers of the world (compared to other places), but not all of us seem to have to gone beyond young adulthood. Part of it may be the size of each country- it’s pretty easy to exist as a subculture when there are a myriad of subcultures a la the US or even Argentina or Colombia to a lesser extent. These places all share a relatively large mix of ancestries – from the wide reaches of Eurasia and Asia to almost everywhere in Europe and into Africa. Whereas in Bolivia, there isn’t much of a range of subcultures, there’s just two very dominant ones – indigenous and European.

I guess the more flavors you’ve got, the less extreme the contrasts. Plus, isn’t it more delicious? Sorry, it’s lunch time.

Liberator

2009-07-10T10:51:00.008-03:00

It’s my first days in Bogotá and I am trying to find my way against a maze of zig zag roads that climb through the city like vines and addresses littered with a mouthful of numbers (which are my nemesis in Spanish). Add to that a radical microclimate where it goes from spring to fall in less than 15 minutes and you have my first days here.

Yesterday I did a little site seeing and went to the house of Simón Bolívar. Of course, it was a grand affair- a lush garden brimming with gorgeous plants, rooms where Bolívar entertained the intellectuals of his time, and a proud display of weaponry used by him and his compatriots. I went with a young Austrian woman who had studied Bolivar and his battles, which proved to be useful as we traded my translations services with her vast knowledge of all thing Bolivarian.

When we were chatting, she mentioned to me that Bolívar was not an indigenous South America. While born in Venezuela, he came from an aristocratic Spanish family. Simon was a pretty impressive dude, leading efforts to liberate what was known as Gran Colombia, which included parts of today’s Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guyana, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Venezuela, Peru, and Bolivia. Basically this dude was George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton all rolled into one. Or else he had a better PR person than anyone else.

Anyway, Bolívar was an extremely liberal thinker and wrote about creating government with checks and balances and individual rights a la the US. But it all kinda went south on him, he went the dictator route, which of course got ugly. He was planning his exile to France when he died.

In this tragic story, my favorite irony is that a dude totally worshipped by the likes of Chavez and Morales was thinking along the same lines as their present day nemesis. I get how it’s all been distorted, blah and blah. But still, a paradox, no?

First World Fear

2009-07-02T08:48:00.007-03:00

So this is my last week in the states before I head off for the next great adventure – Colombia! I have been bouncing around yet again and this week I’m house sitting in a lush DC suburb, staying in a quiet rambling house hugged by green trees, early summertime flowers and a Hollywood movie-like vibe of peace and tranquility. For this, it makes me think that some of my friends in Latin America would probably conjure up images of this kind of place when thinking about the states.

The other morning I woke up to a glorious summer morning. I felt for a moment like I was at summer camp, that youthful freedom that comes with being a city kid out in the country. I slurped my coffee slowly on the spacious back porch, looking up to see a cerulean, cloudless sky and heard only the clicky chirps of the birds lounging in the trees. I decided that I needed to fully enjoy this deliciousness and take a morning run. I started off slowly, the mini mansions that tastefully looked modest from the road churned by. I picked up the pace, deeply inhaling the thickening summertime air filled with the smells of the impeccably cared for greenery that lined the roads. Zoned….

After a while, I looked around. It all still looked the same. The tasteful homes, the front yards perfectly manicured by a third world person, the politically correct hybrid car parked in the neatly placed driveway. My heart was struck with fear as I realized that I was lost… totally, utterly lost and there was not a soul around to direct me back home.

In the moment when this hit me, I was terrified of this suburban existence more than I had ever been walking home wasted at 4 am on the streets of Buenos Aires or New York or even sketchy ass Washington DC. It was the lack of people, the lack of noise, the lack of someone to help when you are lost. When I did see people, they were cryogenically sealed into their nice cars likely only interacting with other humans through the cloistered veils of cell phones or emails, Facebook or Twitter.

I eventually found my way back home, but found myself pondering this isolated first world life. You make more money to buy a big house, away from people in the city. You make even more money and you hire a nanny to care for your child, instead of caring for them yourself. Your parents get old and you pay for someone to take care of them. Money puts more distance between you and other people.

I guess it is no different for those third world elites I saw in BA. They have fallen prey to the same Hobson’s choice that the first world has already committed itself to lock, stock and barrel. I know we all think this is progress, but is it?

Nomadic Ways of Being

2009-06-22T16:10:00.002-03:00

I am in DC this week and feeling a little bit nomad-like. My apartment that I own here is rented through the summer and I am relying on the kindness of friends and family along the eastern seaboard for shelter. A friend of mine and I decided that to call myself homeless was too flippant, so now I am using the moniker “domicially challenged” as to not offend the real homeless that wander around without the option of a home.

While meetings, social engagements and baseball have all been eating up my time, I haven’t had a ton of time to unwind. But when I push myself to the brink of exhaustion and need to unplug for a bit, I have been watching the amazing series by Ewan MacGregor called Long Way Round, which chronicles the story of Ewan and his buddy driving 20,000 miles across Europe, Asia and the US on motorcycles. It came out about 3 or 4 years ago and the moto crowd just dug it. I am not a motorcycle person, but can appreciate the idea of traveling exposed to the elements and the people (a la a bicycle) in a way that a car cannot even pretend to give you.

The other night in my mobile living room (aka my computer), Ewan and Charlie were schlepping through Mongolia. And I mean schlepping. Shitty roads no more than a jagged path of boulders with puddles bigger than a circus fat lady, accidents, and other scary stuff filled their days. When they were getting near the end of Mongolia, Ewan commented about how being nomadic was part of the culture in Mongolia and how there was something really nice about that freedom.

As a nomad, I can say it has its ups and downs. I enjoy the simplicity and variety of locations, something that I think Ewan was appreciating too. But sometimes you just wish for your own kitchen, your own routine and your own bed. I think this come from conditioning, however, since in the first world we are not raised to put our clothes and our houses on our back every few weeks to find the next bit of food or avoid a tribal skirmish.

The Mongolians are not alone as nomads. Throughout the third world, in the Middle East and parts of Africa people live in a constant state of movement often for reasons of food or environment. In most first world cultures, a nomadic lifestyle is not embraced or impossible. How could you possibly live as a nomad if you go shop at Macy’s every week? Economist Juliet Schor estimates that in 2004, Americans purchased an average of fifty-seven garments per year. Where are you possibly going to carry all that stuff you keep buying if you needed to pack it up and move on out?

And of course, since I am not buying this stuff, someone is buying my share too. Ouch.

Good Air

2009-06-15T12:12:00.005-03:00

Well, I woke up today missing Buenos Aires just terribly. Missing my friends, missing the onda of the city, missing wading into the chaos of a place that is mine and not mine all in an instant. Funny how a place looks from thousands of miles away...

Buenos Aires

Yellow taxis,
yellow walls,
yellow skin.

Damp crisp winter bites my bones.
Chunky crosswalks of thick white lines line the path home.

The glow of green lights goes up the boulevard as we barrel north.
The clatter on the radio calling cars to Chacarita, Cordoba, Corrientes.

Streets the span of a redwood tree
Cars shooting through the intersection like a rocket into space
Motorcycles flying like a shooting star through the cloudy nighttime sky.

Trees line the avenues,
Silent sentinels in bursts of dusty green and gold.
Collectivos screaming down the street
Every corner is a suicide mission to the other side.
The chaos of the city has its own rhythm and rhyme.
Heavy air tinged with the toxic waste exhaust of the cars
that clunk and fume into my open window.

The roaring of the motorcycles
The barking of the dogs
The crying of the children.

La gente, la gente, la gente there.
Living in the good air.

Back to the Roots

2009-06-10T14:48:00.006-03:00

I am in Florida this week, South Florida to be exact. Part of me feels like I am in Latin America here in Florida, which is sort of nice. There’s tons of Spanish everywhere and not just the service personnel, which is all too common up north.

Yesterday I went to the clubhouse where my mom lives to run on the treadmill. I briefly considered running outside but the hot, sticky air was clinging to me like a size 4 dress – even at 9am. I knew breathing outside and trying to run was going to be virtually impossible so I retreated indoors to the clubhouse of a development reminiscent of Jerry Seinfeld’s fictional Del Boca Vista, replete with old Jewish ladies from whatever northeast city you’d like to name.

They were lovely, these girls with grey hair all pumping iron just as hard as Ar-nald. Delray Beach became Venice Beach right before my eyes. These girls of steel were not alone in their quest for physical perfection – they had a fearless leader, a tiny woman who ruled with an iron fist in a velvet glove, pushing the Jewesses to keep it moving to keep their heart rates up. She was one of those beautiful women who had aged gracefully, retaining the body of her youth in tight spandex with a faced lined with just a few tributaries of her true age.

I chatted with the gals and was quickly invited into the inner circle of exercise culture in Del Boca Vista. They asked about what I was doing and when I told them I was wandering around South America, they looked at me with a bit of shock. One asked, “You did that all by yourself? Is that safe?” I responded, “Yes and yes.”

I continued to talk about how I loved South America, how wonderful the people were and that I had about the same amount of fear wandering around Boca Raton on a dark night as I did wandering around most cities in Latin America. Velvet glove, who it turned out was from Venezuela, grinned at me. As we were walking out, she said to me, “You know, I am 55 years old and I have traveled all around the world, Europe, Asia and the US doing the same kind of thing you are doing.” She also explained how her family had come from everywhere to end up in Venezuela, so she grew up understanding just how big the world was and always wanted to know it all.

Most of our families ended up wherever they are today as immigrants, but before too long we all seem to forget where we came from. In the US, within just a few generations we are assimilated as full-blooded North Americans, leaving our curiosity about where we came from back with our great grandmas. In Latin America, all of my friends knew where their families came from and were still connected to it through culture and custom. Is this because they lack a singular national identity? I don’t think it is that simple, but I just recall how every Argentine I met would tell me about where their families came from while I have some friends here in the US who I have known for years that I have no idea where their families come from. What is it about North American culture that makes us forget our roots?

New York, New York

2009-06-02T09:30:00.007-03:00

The tour of the north continues. This week I am staying in Brooklyn and dodging into the city here and there, but mostly camping out in the borough because it is generally so much more livable. The amazing thing about New York (and something it shares with Buenos Aires) is the range of possibilities that are available in one city.

A friend of a friend has loaned me her bike and I rode all over Brooklyn yesterday. It was an inadvertent adventure that unfolded while going from friend to friend to home last night. I rode through Prospect Park after 9 pm, the chill of spring still clinging to the trees and hovering around the lakes and ponds and assorted bodies of water that dot the park. I took joy in the ride home, downhill to the end, even crying out a “yeaaah” as I flew down the other end of the slope that would spit me towards Coney Island on the other side of the park. Ah, my idea of zen.

I even took a bike tour of Brooklyn on Sunday with some friends. We weaved in a line from the Hasidic Jews of Kensington to the Asian in Sunset Park and through the little ghettos of Latins and African Americans sprinkled throughout Brooklyn. Then we hit Red Hook, a hipster enclave laced with projects to stop for a view of the State of Liberty and a snack. A friend remarked how we had been on a world tour in an hour or two and all without an airplane.

There are other New Yorks too… for example I went out on Friday night and was introduced to some new friends, a couple from Uruguay. I immediately loved their accents (reminded me of Buenos Aires) and their warm, fun and highly social manner. These lovely, colorful butterflies and I flitted all about the Lower East Side until the wee hours of the morning, drinking cocktails, chatting in Spanish, and just reveling in the glow of the NYC nightlife. We snaked our way into bars that were in buildings two layers back from the street, speakeasy style that served drinks in teacups and beers in paper bags. We ran into an Argentine friend of mine on the street outside another, all chatting in Spanish as we made introductions and shared some drinks at the next bar.

It is only the greatest cities in the world that can allow you such extremes- to go from being a hippie girl on her bike, hair fluttering in the breeze as she rolls through the park to glam bar hopping in Spanish. While New York doesn’t make me miss BsAs, it reminds me how much I love the city life pretty much everywhere in the world.

Temporary State of First Worldness

2009-05-22T17:20:00.018-03:00

So, I am in the states for a few weeks for a little business, a little pleasure and a little summertime. After a long ass flight, I am in Washington DC for the week, a place I lived on and off for over a dozen years. First off, in case you were worried, modern Rome is doing just fine. A little more gentrified then six months ago, which means a little more anger in the street, but otherwise all good. The flowers are in bloom, everything is fertile and green, and the sun is getting hotter as summer kicks off this weekend. Lucky me.

DC feels like a old pair of comfortable jeans in one moment and then in another, it feels like shoes that don't quite fit. I am loving the familiarity of the neatly tree lined streets, the stores that I shopped in for a large chunk of my adult life, the sweet smell of summer hitting the city. The girls are wearing their newest sundresses, their shoulders finally fully peaking out after their long hibernation. The boys are in shirtsleeves, their arms just starting the process of the inevitable summertime farmer tans. But after six months in the third world, it is very odd to be where there is so much order, so many straight lines. The rules are much more rigid in the first world, or maybe the compliance levels and expectations are just much higher. I am not sure exactly what it is, but there is a sense of order than just evades the south somehow.

In some way, I feel like a stranger peeping into a life that I only want to dip my toes into as to not be fully enveloped by it. When I was sitting in the back of a taxi yesterday morning, the early summer glow bathing the cars patiently waiting in the enormous traffic jam on the highway (sans crazy horn hocking a la Buenos Aires), all I could think was, “Is this the only way that people can live here? “ Jammed in their cars, following the path that someone before them grooved out for them and was drilled into them as they did the things that their families and society preached to them were the things to do: College, the big city, good job, insurance, security, spouse, car, children, mortgage, dog, college funds, 401ks, retirement, bigger job, bigger office, bigger salary, bigger mortgage, bigger car. Does it have to keep on getting bigger to be considered progress? There was a lot of the same thing in those shiny new Hondas, Toyotas, and Volkswagons.

This isn’t only a first world affliction anymore… the bigger, more syndrome. I saw it creeping into life in Buenos Aires, especially in my first world light neighborhood. For example, blackberries, Iphones – the accoutrement of most people with money and not enough time scrambling for excess– were more and more noticeable in my hood in BA and are ubiquitous here. In fact, I don’t know if I know anyone in DC who doesn’t have a blackberry/Iphone/PDA. Even me.

I am missing Buenos Aires this afternoon, mostly the crazy chaos and energy of the city. BA is eternally alive with its heart beating wildly, loudly, and sometimes even erratically each and every day. In Washington, I am trying but just cannot feel the city’s heart. Maybe I have to try a little harder to listen since maybe it's just not as loud as BA. After all, with it's buses and crazy cars and random third world trucks, BA's heart has some serious competition to be heard.

Wash ‘Em If You’ve Got ‘Em

2009-05-13T16:55:00.005-03:00

My life here in Buenos Aires is a little bit in a bubble, I will admit it. I live in a posh neighborhood, as a friend and former BA resident mentioned on Facebook to me in regards to my last post. Living here was a deliberate move. Before this, I lived in San Telmo – the gritty, über urban enclave of hipsters ensconced in stunning, old buildings that once housed the working class settlers of Buenos Aires.

Anyway, a Paco problem (kind of like crystal meth) drove me north to my tree-filled, breeder-ish hood of first world light. This neighborhood, with its' lovely little specialty shops for cheese, wine, underwear, and delicious imported treats tucked in the corners. No paco. Non-native English is occasionally heard on the streets with the thick Argentine accent that can’t quite grab the right vowel.

Many of these people who don’t care how much anything costs- they have the housekeeper, the trainer, the cook, the nanny- you name it, Third world elites. They don’t just exist here in BA, they exist all over the third world. Want someone to wait in the maddeningly long lines everywhere for everything? Hire a personal assistant. Why do anything yourself when you can afford for someone else to do it?

I chatted with a South American friend about it. What is the reason for this? He thought maybe it had something to do with power – money equals power and if you have it, you can hire people and tell them what to do. He also thought it was also part of the traditional classist and racial hierarchy in Latin America, which is strong here in Buenos Aires.

I also thought it was about the system. For example, I once read a story in the New Yorker about the way of life in Lagos, Nigeria – a giant third world city where people will do anything for money - even wash your feet! In a place where there are not a lot of jobs, people make their own jobs and force you to pay. This is one of those places.

For example if you want to park on the street, often there is a guy helping to navigate the traffic for you. He doesn’t ask, he just does it. As I walk down the street to the gym, I often see the same group of guys outside a hulking church and sprawling private Catholic school complex. There are three or four of them who sit on plastic containers turned upside down, chain smoking and talking amongst them selves and waiting. Waiting. Waiting is the classic posture of the service class.

When a car comes creeping slowly off the hyper-trafficked Luis Maria Campos onto the calmer Maure, they often spring into action. They furiously wave their yellow rags to direct the drivers, standing in the street with an air of authority more like a crossing guard than a cop. Sometimes they wash the cars too, earning a few extra bucks.

Work is work, I suppose. Especially in this economy, right? Guess washing cars in Buenos Aires is better than washing feet in Lagos.

Wandering the World

2009-05-08T09:33:00.010-03:00

I have a standing date most Wednesdays with a friend to have an intercambio, which is when you meet up and spend half the time speaking English and the other half speaking Spanish. It has been a huge help for me as I am working on my Spanish and has given me the chance to learn a bit more about Buenos Aires through the best source of information – the locals.

The other night I was waiting for my friend in Palermo, outside of the University of Buenos Aires. It was a mild fall night, the shadows of the bare trees reflecting onto the sidewalks and into the windows of the chic boutiques that line the cobblestone streets. As I waited for her to come out of her English class, I struck up a conversation with a woman who worked on the campus as a security guard type. Short, stocky, with a pockmarked face and ill-fitting clothes, we chatted about the erratic onset of the fall. She asked my about my bike, which I had leaning up against the light post a couple of feet away. Did I want to put it inside? “No,” I said, “I’m just waiting for a friend who should be out shortly.” We chatted a bit more and then she asked me if I rode very far. No, I responded, just from Las Cañitas. “Las Cañitas?” she asked, “Where is that exactly? I have heard people talk about it, but I don’t know it.”

Las Cañitas is maybe 20 blocks away, but to this woman, it could have been Mars. Another world.

I will give you that Buenos Aires is a huge, sprawling city, with a metro area as big as Yellowstone National Park. And this is not a phenomenon unique to BA. There are other people like this woman I have encountered in New York, Berlin, and Washington, DC. It’s more about curiosity about the world and this woman (and those who don’t leave their little universes everywhere in the world) just did not have it.

In my travels I have also met the other extreme, people who want to travel and cannot because of their government or their own situation with money or family. These are the people I love to chat with and will usually find me across a crowded room at a party. I am inspired by their love of adventure, especially when I grow weary of my own. They remind me why I go out into the world and how amazing it is to discover all that the world has to offer.

As for the non-nomadic woman, she reminds me about how wonderful it is sometimes to just be home.

Los Chicos de Mi Barrio

2009-04-29T10:09:00.000-03:00

I haven’t talked too much about my neighborhood, but I am in love with where I live. Aside from having a cool apartment owned by an amazing artist, I live in a neighborhood mixed with posh apartments, young families, singles, you name it. I love the diversity when I walk down the street… there are teenagers in their rumpled school uniforms shouting at the end of a busy day, backpack lazily slug over one shoulder. The tiny girls with their hair cascading down their backs, giggling groups of gawky, long-limbed budding teenagers, rambunctious boys yelling as they run down the broken sidewalks on a fall afternoon. Old ladies with canes, hunched over their packages and moving glacially across the street as the impatient cars wait for the light to change. Young mommies pushing strollers while lugging their groceries and talking on the phone in rapid fire Spanish, probably to their housekeepers And hunky boys in gym shorts flashing their over-muscled soccer legs, my favorite.

Another part of my neighborhood is the little shops that just become part of your life when you live somewhere. There’s a lovely verduria on the next block that I frequent. When you walk in most afternoons, beautiful melodies reminiscent of Frank Sinatra but in Italian or Spanish greet you. The owner, a shriveled and charming man with sparkling blue eyes is always there, handing out compliments as fresh as his beautiful spinach. Last week he told he how much he loved my accent in Spanish, this week he complimented my hat.

There’s also Raul, who greets everyone by name as he sells them sodas and cigarettes at the corner shop. He must work 17-hour days, but he always has a smile and a greeting for you. Last night, when I went to pay, I offered him monedas and said, when I have them, I give them. He smiled and when he gave me my change, he included a little chocolate treat with his customary smile.

It's just a reminder how attitudes about work here are different. In a country where unemployment has climbed over 20 percent, people are often grateful for work regardless of what the work actually is. While things are changing in the US because of the ever shrinking economy, when's the last time the guy at 7-11 smiled at you?

Meaty Culture

2009-04-24T16:00:00.000-03:00

I was a vegetarian many moons ago, sometime in college when it was de riguer to do it. I eventually returned to my carnivorous ways, as my body never loved this state of being, always feeling deprived of something.

Thankfully I got over this before I came to Argentina. This is a place of meat, meat, and more meat. Ummm… Delicious meat. I have met some Argentine “vegetarians” who eat every type of flesh but actual red meat – this includes ham and chicken.

When you go to the carniceria (butcher), there must be more than two dozen cuts of beef to choose from, each with their own very Argentine names. Or when you go to a parilla for a diner with friends, there’s no less than 10 different types of meat to gobble down with your Malbec. I still don’t know what some of them are and I suspect if I knew, I still probably wouldn’t eat them.

For example, the other night I was at a small dinner party where the chef was a vegetarian and she cooked us a delicious Middle Eastern inspired dinner, with homemade hummus and falafel. While eating, we got into a discussion about meat and one of the guests (a dear friend), asked me about what cuts of meat I liked. Before too long, we had to pull out the Spanish-English dictionary to look up what we were talking about. Brains, livers, ever organ you could imagine was mentioned.

Nonetheless, the stuff I do eat is scrumptious! Some say it’s the grass feeding, others say it is the lack of hormones and medicines the cows are given here in Argentina. But it’s not important. It’s damn good, with a nice texture and gentler flavor than North American meat. But what do I know about meat anyway? I had seitan for lunch.

A Funny From My Day

2009-04-16T11:35:00.000-03:00

Yesterday I had a crazy day, running from place to place… up early, to the gym, a little work, and then had to run off to a long meaty and winey goodbye lunch for a friend. I was running a little behind, so I hopped onto my bike to ride down to the restaurant. You may recall that my bike is kind of crappy and is now steadily declining into unsafe territory. The seat now is half broken, so when I ride it I have to focus on putting most of the weight on the right side so the whole thing does not snap off the stem. Arrgh! Not as much fun to ride, but still does the job.

Anyway, it was a beautiful fall day. A bit nippy as the sun cascaded through the trees as I plodded through Palermo for a bife with the gals. My scarf was fluttering in the wind and I had Yo La Tango on my Ipod as I felt the sun warm the top of my head. I turned onto José Cabrera and rode by a group of guys in pressed khakis on their way to lunch. One stuck out his thumb, grinning at me as he begged for a ride. I looked him right in the eye and said, “ I could, ya know” and kept pedaling, cackling all the way.

South American Seder

2009-04-12T11:29:00.000-03:00

I have had a friend in town, thus playing tour guide and venturing around my adopted country has taken priority for the last two weeks. I inadvertently ended up missing the first days of Passover and over the last couple of days have been thinking non-stop about my mother’s rock hard matzo balls (which we loving refer to as hockey pucks), my grandmother’s salty chicken soup, and the tender pot roast of Aprils past. Not that I am such a devout Jew, but who doesn’t love cultural Judaism?

Last night I decided to bring a dash of it to friends from Honduras by preparing matzo brei. I bought matzo (over 10 bucks for a kilo, ouch!) and headed to my South American style pseudo-seder.

After announcing that Elijah was at the door when I arrived (which no one but me understood), I told the goyim the story of Passover as I scrambled the eggs and soaked the matzo. I am a pancake style matzo brei girl, served with a little sugar. I explained to them the variety of ways to prepare and serve matzo brei (scrambled, with lox, with onions, with salt, with jam) and successfully flipped the giant matzo pancake without disaster. Phew.

They loved my concoction. When sampling the final product, they decided that we must have chicken with it. Chicken? For a moment, I was incredulous, thinking how in the world could I have chicken with matzo brei? They went even further, talking about bacon and pork rinds. Treyf! Treyf in matzo brei? It’s not chametz, but equally sacrilegious.

Thankfully there were no pork products in the house so I was spared such extreme levels of lawbreaking. But I did end up enjoying my first ever matzo brei with a side of tangy Central American chicken. Zissen Pesach!

Mis Piernas

2009-03-24T09:54:00.000-03:00

I know you’ve had a lot of my men stories here in BA, but I had such an odd male encounter the other day that I just have to share it with you.

This past weekend, I ended up having a fun filled night with a new friend who was a hoot. So much of a hoot that the next day when I was going to meet her for a late lunch, I was a certified disaster. My muscles ached from laughing, my throat was sore from yelling and my head still throbbed from the wine, beer and lord knows what other concoctions I had ingested well into the morning.

A mess.

And of course, a kind of late to meet her mess. And of course not knowing where the hell I was going and of course not able to find two brain cells to rub together to actually look at a map kind of mess. So I grabbed a taxi and told the driver my destination in Spanish. He soon asked me where I am from, the usual banter I am forced to engage in with the taxistas of Buenos Aires.

But this one is different.

He starts pouring on the flirt with a heavy hand. I have been living here long enough that I am used to a charming Argentine man who hands out compliments like a man handing out dollar bills in Vegas. So I just play along as best I can, operating on whatever intellectual fumes I have left from the night before. It wasn’t easy, my Spanish sputtering like the Ladas I had seen in Cuba the week before.

He loved it.

Then he started talking to me about my legs. "Tus piernas!" he exclaimed. At every stoplight, he turned around and directed his comments about my body, my face, my everything to my legs. Now don’t get me wrong, I run, I bike and all that crap. I have nice legs. But talking to my legs? Over the top.

We arrive at my destination and as I am rummaging through my bag looking for my 20-peso note, he turns and asks me if I would have coffee with him. There is a pleading in his eyes that I am not sure I have ever seen in a man before.

Do you just shoot a wounded man or leave him dying?

If you’re Jill, you just let him die a slow death. I took his number.

Primer Mundo Blanca Chica

2009-03-20T13:06:00.001-03:00

At the core of being a first world white girl is having freedom. The life I am living right now is the embodiment of this idea. I am free to live in another country, go wherever I want, talk to whoever I want, and say just about anything I want. I have all of these liberties because of where I was born as well as some other socio-economic things that stem from where I come from. I am not the only one lucky enough to have this… chances are if you are reading this you probably are too.

Part of my adventures has been traveling in Latin America, so I recently went on a trip to one of the only places in the world the US government forbids me to go (well not directly, but they cut off my ability to legally spend money there so that basically makes it very difficult), Cuba.

First off, Cuba is beautiful. The weather is fantastic, the beaches are stunning and the people are incredibly friendly. I met tons of Cubans who opened their hearts and homes to me, fed me and plied me with beer while they told me about their lives and their dreams. For many of them, they feel trapped. Trapped on a beautiful island in the middle of the sea, left to only dream about the places they see in movies.

Juan, a taxi driver I met, asked me, “Is New York City like the movies or better?” “Oh Juan,” I responded, “Even better.” I explained to him about the rhythm of the people, the giant buildings everywhere, the smells of the food in the streets, the sounds of the cars and the voices and the never-ending streets of stores with anything and everything you could dream of. It made me miss New York, to miss America, and to feel bad that this 35 year-old man did not have the choice to go and see with his own eyes the myths and realities of a piece of my home.

Juan wasn’t the only one. I met a group of Cuban guys who wanted to take me out to lunch and when we tried, we were turned away at a restaurant in La Habana Vieja. The owner of the place yelled at my newfound friend, “No, I won’t have a foreigner in here… I don’t want trouble from the police.”

So we ended up in the countryside, taking an old dusty enclosed pickup truck with the rest of the locals to a relaxed place away from the prying eyes of the police. Giovanni, Jose and Yohan all told me about their lives, about how they dreamed and hoped for a better life. I tried to explain to them, just as I had tried to explain to Victoria in Peru about the price you pay for the other life. “Yes,” Giovanni responded, “But at least you have the choice.”

He was right on that one.

As sad as I am about their lack of freedom, there is something to appreciate about their lives. The people stop and chat, they have the time to hear your story, to ask questions about where you have been, to stop and talk to a neighbor. Life is about the most basic of elements, since there is not really anything else. I can’t really make a judgment though, since I am free to choose my life and most Cubans are not.

Not everyone in Cuba was critical of life under the regime. Many supported the Revolution and the Castros. I spent one afternoon talking to a beautifully talented musician, Julian, who say it best, “En tu mente eres libre” … in your mind you are free.

Being A Foreigner

2009-03-07T10:45:00.000-02:00

The other day I went to look at an apartment (my roommate is moving South, which sadly means that I have to move too). Before I went to look, I emailed and spoke with a guy about the place. All of our interactions were in Spanish and when we met, he asked, "Where are you from? I can tell you are a foreigner because of your accent."

That comment about my damn accent (which I am told is cute, although I don’t believe it all) reminded me how obvious it is to others that I am a foreigner.

I know it. Looking at that apartment, there was just something I could not fully understand about the situation, the place, the people. Conversation would not bring me answers. I decided I couldn’t take the place because I couldn’t get the situation or the people… it was like trying to read a book in Russian to me.

This happens when you are a foreigner. Things and cues that may be obvious in your home country are just not available to you when you are in the middle of something. Sometimes its the language sometimes its the onda. Look, there is an entire tense in Spanish to talk about things you want but may never get and this impacts how people interrelate.

At the end of the day, soy una extranjera.

With this label comes the ignorance of not always realizing how deaf, dumb and blind I am to local customs and sometimes utterly failing to know when I have contorted them to their outermost limits and offended someone. If you know me and know even a morsel about Latin America, you know I have done this.

For example, there is my brazen indifference to my femaleness that is a regular feature of my blog and my life in Latin America. Here’s another example of it: I have a friend, a Brazilian woman. She is in her late 20’s and still lives with her parents and she is deathly terrified of walking to and from the gym at night alone in her neighborhood. Mind you, she is not living in the Buenos Aires equivalent of the Bronx, it’s probably closer to Long Island City.

I, of course, find this completely nuts. Is this because I have no idea really how safe or unsafe it is? Or is this because my definition of sketchy is worlds apart from a Brazilian one? Or maybe it is because I wouldn’t even know Latin American sketchy til’ it stabbed my gringa ass?

I’ll take option number three.

The good thing about being a foreigner is that people will just forgive and forget most of your transgressions. Aside from my femaleness, my other issues seem to be my punctuality (although I am learning how to be a half hour late to EVERYTHING, it’s great), my inability to stay up until 5 am and live on four hours of sleep and my severe resistance to underwear that is the size of an eye patch.

At least I have that accent to charm them, right?

More Women Talk

2009-02-26T08:28:00.000-02:00

Sorry for the slack in writing, I have been swamped with work and haven’t had the time to give my blogging and thoughts about my first world white girl life much attention.

But I’m back and thinking about so many of the women I have met here in Latin America. I’ve met women who are smart, strong, successful and confident. Some are also scared, afraid, and unsure about their role in society because they are women. This is not a condition exclusive to Latin America, but definitely this is definitely a place with masses of mujeres that are afflicted.

When I travelled through Latin America in the winter, I met this one chica in Bolivia that still blows my mind. She had gone to college, she spoke at least three languages and when I told her about my trip wandering around South America, she told me she could never do anything like this. Her reason? Because her dad told her that she could not do anything alone because she is female. And since she had heard it from the time she was little, she believed it.

WTF?

Another dear friend lives here in Buenos Aires because in her home country in Central America, it would not be acceptable for a woman in her 30’s to live alone, to be unmarried, to have a life that does not include a husband and/or children.

Even here in Buenos Aires, some women move from their parents’ house to their husband’s house without ever having a chance to be on their own. We spoke about it in my Spanish class the other day. Sometimes it is economic, but it is equally cultural, with many parents not understanding why a woman would need to live on her own.

Hell, it existed in North America not too long ago. I recall several years ago having a conversation with my mother, grandmother and a close family friend. They all remarked how they had never lived on their own, going from the house of their parents to the house of their husbands. Even after getting divorced, they had children camped out at home. In fact the only people around the table who had lived alone were my grandmother and I.

She had been recently widowed and I asked her about living alone. She looked at me with the raw grief, sadness and anger that could only come from the loss of the biggest piece of your life that can never be replaced and said to me, “I hate it.”

A few months later, she mentioned our conversation from that day and told me she had changed her mind, “It’s amazing to be able to do whatever you want.”

I’ll leave it at that.

Caca!

2009-02-12T15:44:00.000-02:00

Dogs. I love them. Many of you have heard me wax poetic over the years about my darling Maxwell, a lovely dachshund whose ashes are now in a box in Delray Beach after 18 years of being waited on paw and tail.

I’m not alone. People in Latin America love their dogs too. Tons of small dogs – Yorkies, Doxies, Toy Poodles -- all nipping at your heels as you walk down the street. While the perritos are no bother to me, I have started to develop a fear of bigger dogs.

I think part of it comes from the fact that most people don’t keep their dogs on a leash. Another contributing factor is the large number of strays around town. It is actually quite horrible, as I often see dogs that are battered, bloodied and scabbed. Sometimes they lay listlessly on the sidewalk and I can’t figure out if they are dead or alive. Other times I watch in amazement as these “slumdogs” exercise the caution of a crossing guard to make it to the other side of a busy avenue.

In the tranquil neighborhood I live in now, there are not a huge number of strays and the pups are well behaved (like the people, generally). But I think my newly found fear can be traced back to a few months ago when I was literally chased by a pack of wild dogs while riding my bicycle. It was terrifying to say the least, the adrenaline coursing through my body as I pumped the pedals for dear life. As I streaked through the streets like Mario Andretti on a bicycle, the six-pack of wild dogs were howling and baring their teeth at me. I could feel the breath and saliva of a bastard German Shepherd on my heels as I put every last bit of oxygen I could find into getting away without getting rabies. Happy to report I escaped.

Stray dogs are not the only things in the street, though. There’s dog shit and lots and lots of it. Everywhere... in the nicest neighborhoods and the mas sketchito ones too. Piles of caca, little landmines everywhere just waiting for you in your new Havaianas.

Shit!

Sexism Produced (and Washed Too)

2009-02-03T13:32:00.000-02:00

I am a fruit and veggie addict. When I worked in an office, I was known to bring a veggie bag to work everyday as a snack. Since arriving in BA, I have had some dreams about Whole Foods. I either dream about the one on P Street in DC or the one in Columbus Circle. All of these dreams usually involve the produce section where I can see for miles and miles and miles the endless rows and piles of crunchy fresh overpriced goodness. In my delicious dreams, I see 55 types of apples, every newly plucked spice known to man and piles and piles and piles of exotic organic greens harvested by some third world child.

Oh how I miss it.

Here the produce is pretty good. You can buy it in the grocery store (which I do on occasion) or you can but it at the verduría (vegetable stand). I prefer the verduría, if only because they usually have more variety and the stuff seems fresher. Plus, I like to help the small guy and it appears that many verdurías are owned by Bolivians or Peruvians. Sometimes you can hear them speaking quietly in Quecha or, even better for me, in the gently accented Spanish of the northern half of the continent which I find much easier to understand.

There are two joints by my house that I frequent and I’d say the quality is about the same. It ain’t Whole Foods but it ain’t the Soviet Safeway, know what I’m sayin’? One is located on the main drag near my house, the purveyors a group of young men who barely understand my slowly evolving Spanish. I typically ride up on my bike after the gym and don’t even lift my big tush off the seat while the boys scramble around fetching my spinach, tomatoes, apples and peaches. It’s like a drive thru veggie joint, Jill-style.

The other place is about a block or two away and is a little darker and danker than the drive-thru. It is filled with a couple of women who come up to my armpits and flurry about in long skirts with their midnight hued hair pulled back into messy buns. The weird thing about them is that after they gather my broccoli and red peppers, they won’t take my money. They direct me towards a man with pockmarked skin and a little belly who manages the funds. The women are not allowed to touch the plata.

This is also something I noticed at the lavadero where I get my laundry done. The chicks do the work, the men take the dough. Why?

When I see those nice woman all look at me meekly from behind their inky bangs, I get pissed. These chicks birth the kids, clean the houses, do the labor. Is it about trust? Is is about sexism? Is is about women being bad at math? Who knows. Maybe the women of Latin America need a hand from Barack to get a little more equality.

Update 6:27 pm: Just picked up some laundry and guess who took my 20 pesos? A chick!

Subte Stuff

2009-01-28T22:23:00.000-02:00

So I am deep into my Spanish classes at the University of Buenos Aires. UBA is supposed to be the best place for Spanish, although I have my doubts. I try not to let the fact that the buildings look like the have been standing since pre-Weimar Germany (and survived that whole war thing) bother me too much, but when you have to practically go outside to go to the bathroom you kinda go hmmm.

Everyday I take the subway, called the Subte, to the microcentro. The Subte is more DC than New York with lousy hours and only a couple of lines. The upside is that when they are out of change they let you ride for free. Another fabulous thing is that they have Wi-Fi, although I can’t imagine most of the people who are riding the Subte are the kind with Wi-Fi enabled devices (although I do have one and I ride the Subte). And last but not least, I’m not sure that pulling your wireless device out on the Subte is always the best decision, as I once saw a snatching.

A friend told me the other day that Buenos Aires was the first city in South America to have a subway. Turns out it is not only the first in South America, but the first in the southern hemisphere and in the Spanish speaking world as it was built in 1913. Impressive.

I love my Subte ride to catch a glimpse of people living their lives in the city. There are stunning men in crisp shirts, looking preppy and pressed. There are beautiful women who are impossibly thin, fully made up or making themselves up as we barrel underneath Avenida Santa Fe towards downtown.

The mornings are usually cramped and hot; halfway through my ride there is usually sweat dripping from me and/or my fellow passengers. I prefer the afternoon, when the commuters are ensconced in their downtown offices and the common people are out on the prowl. The usual suspects include a blind man who regularly begs on the Green Line, his grizzled face and voice to match calling out, “Por favor, ayudarme, cinco centavos, por favor,” the tap-tap of his cane serving as the beat for his melancholy song.

Another feature of the Subte are the people hocking their wares. In South America vendors are generally more aggressive than in the North, the ones on the Subte place their selection of Guias (city guides, like London A to Z) or hairbands right on your lap to entice you.

There’s entertainment of a more traditional sense too -jugglers, actors, musicians, and singers. I was serenaded for part of my ride home the other day by a wistful tango, played on an accordion by a white haired man. Beautiful.

Sometimes what you see isn’t beautiful. Many of the people standing up and asking for some change on the Subte are children or poor men and women dragging their children from car to car, hoping for the kindness of strangers. It’s not a common sight in North America and when I first saw it, I couldn’t decide what bothered me more- the children being schlepping around alol day or that their parents are doing it in front of them. I guess if you have to survive, you do what you have to do.

Monetary Policy in Buenos Aires

2009-01-24T11:59:00.000-02:00

In Argentina, a coin is called a moneda. And they are critically important for the everyday commerce of normal people like you and me. Especially if you want to take the bus, since they are the only form of payment accepted. Since the subte closes at 10:30pm (which would be the equivalent of the subway closing at 8 pm in the states) the bus is often a requirement for getting home from dinner sometime after midnight.

But there is a moneda shortage… everywhere there are signs reminding you there are no monedas, that you should share monedas and that if you don’t have them you may not be able to buy things. I have my own moneda policy; if asked, I will give them up unless I know I need them.

It’s not even just monedas, frankly. The money thing here generally is filled with suspicion (as it is in Bolivia and Peru as well), most smaller shops refusing to change a 100 pesos note (about $28). If you are lucky to find someone to break your cien nota, they will scrutinize that thing more than the first boy their daughter brings home. That’s if they even have change at all. And I am not going to even get into the counterfeiting thing….

But yesterday, I saw the true insanity of the monetary policy of Buenos Aires.

After my Spanish class, I had about an hour until I was supposed to meet a friend for lunch and pool time. It was another sweltering day, nearly 90 by noon and I was down in the microcentro, meaning the temperature was probably closer to 100. I decided to relieve myself of the stickiness and ducked into a chainlike coffee shop to enjoy some AC, grab a cup of coffee and do my Spanish homework. I ordered a short macchiato at 5.25 pesos and pull a 100 pesos note out of my wallet. The woman behind the counter is already shaking her head. No, I cannot buy my coffee with a hundred. But I only have a hundred, I respond. She proceeds to ask her colleagues at the three other cash registers if they have any change.

You can guess the response – simultaneous head shaking, horizontally.

No. Ugh.

The insanity is that I saw the woman right in front of me pay with a 50-peso note and the counter was mobbed with at least a dozen people all clamoring to pay for their lunches. This is what I can never understand.

Then, she asks the manager. The manager looks me up and down and asks do you have 25 cents. Ah yes, monedas. With monedas you can get anything you want.

And with 25 centavos, I was able to get my 95 pesos and my coffee.

What’s Inauguration Day Like Everywhere Else in the World?

2009-01-21T08:17:00.000-02:00

Just a quick one on this… yesterday was the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States, a very historic occasion due to a wide variety of circumstances. I watched on CNN en Español and even heard about one or two gathering where ex-pats could watch with their own. I decided not to go, fighting a cold brought to me from the states by a friend.

It was just another day here; I went to my Spanish class where those who weren’t American didn’t even realize what was happening. Even an American in my class was like, “I’m going to the gym” when I asked him if he would be enjoying the festivities. On the other hand, I learned from Facebook that my American friends everywhere (including overseas) were all watching and telling us about it. This of course, could be because so may of my friends on FB are people I met through working in Washington.

Their sentiments were pretty similar. Everyone had chills, everyone was thrilled, everyone was beyond words, crying, etc. Me, I was amazed to see America from the outside, to see how much we needed yesterday. That’s when I realized that yesterday was for us, the pomp and circumstance, the patriotism and nationalism in our language and custom. It was a moment where we could almost believe that our hope was more than just an illusion. Our hope was alive and real on a 20 something degree day in modern Rome, the sun coming out just moments before President Obama took his oath, warming us all for a moment, even those of us sitting 5000 miles away on a 80 degree day.

As happy as I was to see yesterday, I remain cautiously skeptical about the time ahead for America. Things will be tough, probably tougher than many of us have ever known. I know we are strong, but I only hope we have the patience and wisdom as a nation to understand that getting out of this won’t be easy. Or that the man we elected is as mortal as you and me and will get up every day and do all he can do as a mortal– try.

Agressive Man Update

2009-01-15T17:20:00.000-02:00

I wrote briefly about my experience as a woman here in BA, mostly laughing and a little shocked at the behavior of the men in the club a couple of weeks ago. Well, I have an aggressive man update…

I go to the gym most days near my house. It’s a nice enough place and after a month of going there, I feel pretty comfortable in my surroundings and doing my thing. My thing often is a little different than the thing of others. I am pretty into the gym and my gym in DC was a reflection of that. As my DC readers know, Results the Gym in Dupont Circle is for two things – getting laid (if you are gay) and hardcore workouts. So for me, I’ll take option two.

Anyway my gym here is decidedly more straight, more age diverse, etc. I welcome this mix overall; it is one of the things I enjoy most about leaving the gay ghetto I loved so much.

The one thing that seems to be the same is the social component. At Results they are looking for a date, here maybe they are just looking to avoid exercising – they don’t seem to be working out so hard. Many of the women are caked in full makeup, sometimes even dripping in jewelry while I am dripping in sweat.

It doesn’t matter. I do my own thing; listening to my Ipod, wearing my crappy Adidas shorts, enjoying my little world sans my precious baubles. Occasionally I get stares, but I have learned to ignore them.

The other day, however, things got a bit more aggressive. I went to do some lunges, taking the 6 kg (about 12 lbs) weights from the weight rack. As I am looking in the mirror and doing my lunges, I become aware of a pair of eyes on me. The eyes are attached to a 40ish guy with a slight paunch, who has turned to watch me do my lunges with a lusty look in his eye. I am a little embarrassed (remember my long history with the gay gym), but finish my set. He then comes up to me and asks to borrow my weights and tries to engage me in a conversation. Not a problem, I respond, giving him the weights and going back into Madonna-land on my Ipod. He then proceeds to do curls right in front of me, like a peacock showing me his feathers.

I was not impressed with the colors, I was creeped out.

I took the weights back, finished my lunges, and went to the other part of the gym to stretch. My advice on aggressive pickups in the gym: always wear an Ipod. That's of course, if you are lucky enough to have one.

Move Over Starbucks

2009-01-10T12:13:00.000-02:00

On every damn corner in the urban northeastern US there is Starbucks. We can’t live without Starbucks in North America. Here in BA there are two Starbucks that I know of (although I just saw one that looked like it might open soon on Corrientes the other day), but I have yet to actually go into one and buy anything.

Instead the Argentines and now me are obsessed with helado or ice cream. On every corner there is heladeria, ranging from grungy places where a pockmarked teenager is stuffing your dulce de leche ice cream into a tiny cone to places where a grown man in a neatly pressed uniform is handing you a cuarto (quarter kilo, about a pint) in packaging that was designed by Dior.

Seriously. Welcome to a taste of third world luxury a la ice cream. What my glam heladeria and Starbucks share is a touch of lux - for all. Call it democratic in the crudest sense of the word. Nearly everyone can afford ice cream – even if you just buy it once a month- and nearly everyone can afford Starbucks with the same conditions. For some, it can be a daily or thrice weekly occurrence, for others it can be a splurge after a job well done or a report card of good grades.

Now I realize that 15 pesos /5 bucks is a lot of money for some people, am not going to discount that reality. But my point is that for that kind of money, you are able to buy an experience whether it's hipster coffee or glamorous ice cream. Even if you have the tiniest bit of disposable income you have to treat yourself, right?

Fortunately for the Argentines they seem to have a better metabolism than me, so they can treat themselves a little more often.

Choices – Part One, Time vs. Money

2009-01-07T16:07:00.000-02:00

A long time ago, I went to dinner with an Austrian friend. When the waiter came by our table, my friend ordered an entrée that came with a salad. “What type of dressing do you want with that?” he asked her. “I have a choice?” she responded. “Yes,” he said and proceeded to rattle off a litany of options longer than David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. She was overwhelmed. She quickly chose a vinaigrette, shooed the waiter away, and said to me, “All of these choices, it’s too much!”

It was just salad dressing, but it was a telling comment. Even a fellow first worlder was overwhelmed by the number of choices we have in North America. Today, these unlimited options are starting to spread around the world when it comes things, but not necessarily when it comes to how we live.

In contrast, when traveling through LatAm in the winter I met a woman in Peru named Victoria. Victoria was educated; she was a teacher in a small village and we met on a collectivo (bus). She was a small woman, with graying hair pulled back into a bun, her real age a mystery as she heavily wore her years. When I told her I was traveling around and learning Spanish, she marveled at the luxury of being able to do something like that and how much it must cost. “Well, my life had gotten too hectic, ” I told her, “I had no time and needed a break.” She replied, “We have plenty of time, just no money.”

The choice between time and money - welcome to my old life. Choice is at the heart of being a first world white girl and everyday I am reminded about how many I have and that I live my life so differently because of them. And in case I ever forget, I just remember Victoria.

Another View of the Third World

2009-01-05T14:17:00.000-02:00

First off, let me apologize for the slack. Holiday time, whether with snow or the beach is celebrated all over the globe and I took my appropriate liberties. But I headed to an even more third world lite locale – Cape Town, South Africa.

Maybe it’s all that Anglo – English speaking, right hand driving (which I managed to do) that makes it less third world than Buenos Aires. No matter. I enjoyed 10 days in one of the most beautiful cities on earth, replete with mountains and sea and of course, amazing people.

My friend who lives in Cape Town (when he is not out traipsing round the world) introduced me to two of his dearest friends who opened up their incredible home to us during my stay. One half of the duo is an art dealer and we checked out his gallery down on the waterfront. When we walked into the relaxed, informal space I was immediately drawn to a large painting called Where Will the Wind Blow This Time by Ricky Dyaloyi, a young South African painter. The canvas, wider than my own wingspan, was of a large crowd ready to listen while the stage stood empty except for a microphone and a loudspeaker. A blue sky, with puffs of clouds crowded about half the space of the painting, leaving you to wonder exactly what it was that all these people were crowded around to hear.

Because of my history, I immediately viewed it as a political piece, a crowd waiting to hear from a political figure. But maybe those people were already listening… there’s another element that I had not considered which my host spoke of, spirituality.

The concept of spirituality is very different in the third world that in the first. For the most part, first worlders will go to their houses of worship on the weekends (Friday, Saturday or Sunday, depending on your persuasion), pray to your deity as you see fit and eat brunch. There are occasional dips into the alternative pool – maybe a wiccan has come your way or a little Native American while enjoying a weekend out west.

But in the third world, it’s a bit different. Sure, there’s church and structure and lunch for many. But there is also religion based on spirits, on heritage, on history, on things that may not add up neatly when you think about it rationally. And they are powerful, maybe more powerful precisely because you cannot explain them.

Badass Biker Girl

2008-12-23T09:38:00.000-02:00

Some of you know about me and biking… and some of you don’t. I am a crazy biker, highly committed to the bike as a mode of transportation. I love my bike.

I am crazy about the rhythm you move on a bike, somewhere between walking and running. You can gaze, enjoy, see and wonder but a little but faster and a touch away from the crowd. Pic to the side from a recent day on my bike, a beautiful mural.

I love my bike.

In America, I have the most amazing, ridiculously beautiful bike. Prettier and skinnier than Kate Moss. It weighs 17 lbs and glistens with the most handsome royal blue and beautiful details of tiny scalloped flowers.

I really love that bike.

I debated briefly about bringing it here to Buenos Aires, but this is a tough town for everything (including biking) and I can’t imagine my slim racing tires would last long in a town with potholes wider than my behind. But through some good fortune, I managed to pick up a bike for less than $100 from the friend of my old roommate. Score.

It’s kind of a junky beach cruiser and if you look at my profile pic, you can see it in the background. The handlebars broke within two days, which I thought was a sign of my vast strength. No, the dude in the bike store told me, they’re just old. Just like the rest of the clunker, I thought. Nonetheless, it gets me around. The old bag - gearless, with foot brakes – gets me to and from the gym every day, to matés in the park, to friends’ houses. And more importantly, the ability to just explore the city at a pace I love.

My favorite part has been learning how to ride in the city. Riding a bike in a city requires understanding another language – the language of driving. The crazy thing is there is no professor, it is only about understanding how people move, think, act and react.

What's even more interesting is the language of driving in the US and here are probably more similar than the spoken language. Both have extremely aggressive drivers who believe they own the road and see little reason to stop, give an inch to or not permanently maim those who share the road with them. Good times on a bike.

The difference here is that I am mostly ignored on my bike. In DC, assholes love to honk at you on the road as they drive up your ass. Here they just zoom around you, indifferent to your existence. The only time I am acknowledged is when I ride on the sidewalk and occasionally feel the disapproving glare of an old woman, which may be for riding on the sidewalk or may be for being sweaty and dirty in my gym clothes in public. Who knows? Chances are if she yelled at me, it would be in crazy lunfardo and I wouldn’t understand her thick porteña accent.

Anyway, don’t worry about me on my bike. I take it easy, not afraid to stop if the rhythm seems off or if I don’t understand what's going on. Besides, how fast do you think a bike with no gears can go? It’s safer this way, trust me.

Whatever World Do We Live In

2008-12-18T10:41:00.000-02:00

I have privately gotten some comments about my use of the terms third world and first world. Seems they are old school, a total throwback to the Cold War.

Today, I am told that the correct term is Global South. But I’m not sure it makes a difference if I am politically correct here; my lack of political correctness has gotten me in trouble tons of times.

To me, this debate seems like a bunch of academic masturbation. I get that the original idea was that the first world was America, Europe and Oz; the second was the Soviet empire; and the third was pretty much the rest. And no matter what happened in that whole Cold War thing, those divides still exist. The things that divided life in the US, Europe and Oz and everywhere else are still alive and well. The only difference is that the first and second worlds have stopped directly manipulating them – now it’s just through foreign aid and trade agreements.

Besides, the URL for non-global south girl in the global south was already taken.

Welcome to Unstable

2008-12-17T15:26:00.000-02:00

Last week before I went to a dinner party, I got a note from the host…

“Be forewarned there like to be a transit strike tomorrow. No subway, gas stations likely to be closed, so limited taxis. Plan accordingly.”

So life in the third world can sometimes be a little unstable. Take your pick, depending on your locale: dictators, money that loses it’s value from one day to the next, riots, protests, coups, wars. In addition to the Subte last week, there is also a crazy government that is cooking the books and just took everyone’s Social Security. People here are used to it, especially after the whole economy collapsed in 2001.

It depends on where in the third world you live as to the extent of it, but part of life is accepting that tomorrow things may not be the way they were when you went to bed yesterday.

Sometimes shit doesn’t work that was working just fine yesterday. The price of something can climb for no reason. Every bus charges a different price, even for the same route. Three places on the same block can charge three different prices for the same thing. Sometimes there is no logic to what is happening around you.

This is such a huge contrast to life in the US, where it mostly is how it is stated. For so long, life was stable. Or we thought it was stable. We didn’t have to worry about the wars somewhere else or the unstable of economies of wherever. These things were not important, they had no impact on our lives as we continued to live high on the hog.

But now it’s all coming to roost.

Life in the US right now is anything but stable. Everyday you read about people losing their jobs, their homes – the things that make up life in capitalist driven societies. But maybe it’s time to look past those things and recall what remains when you can no longer depend on those other things – people, experiences, the journey and not just the destination. When you can’t rely on the tangible things like money and work, you start to realize that maybe they were never that stable anyway. You just convinced yourself that they were.

In the third world, many people have seen how unstable things can be. Enough to know that to wake up in the morning and not have people in the streets is stability.

I realize this may not make my friends up north feel any better, but just giving you some perspective. Most of the world lives with instability, so welcome.

Digitally Divided

2008-12-16T09:58:00.000-02:00

Right now my home is 5000 miles from where it has been for the last dozen years, but technology keeps me up with everyone and everything. I have a Skype number that has a 202 prefix and rings on my computer wherever in the world I decide to go. I even do a little freelance work here from Buenos Aires for folks in DC. It’s kind of like shipping jobs off to India – my hourly rates are a little lower and I am a highly skilled worker who speaks English.

Wandering here, but the point is that technology allows us to be connected like never before – the world has become a small place.

I had a crazy incident last week that reminded me just how small the world actually is. On Facebook, a friend in DC (who is Argentine, but I met him in DC) tagged me in a photo. That’s odd, I thought, I have been living here and have not seen him in ages. When I clicked through to the photo, yep, there I am hanging on the edge of a photo of a group in line to see Madonna.

I was in line next to his Argentine friends at the Madonna show!

Now that’s globalization, baby.

Cool, yes. But I, along with my friend and his friend are the lucky ones. We have access to technology, we can afford computers and are on a different side of the digital divide. In Latin America, just a quarter of the population is online. In North America? Nearly 75 percent. In Africa, just 5 percent. Whoa, yo. (Note: This is from 2000, but I expect the divide is still pretty huge.)

Just imagine a life without that little box in front of you, that’s reality for most people. I know I’d miss ya.

Taxistas

2008-12-15T16:18:00.000-02:00

Buenos Aires is a huge city and getting around sometimes can be a bigger pain in the ass than getting from Brooklyn to Manhattan. There are tons of buses (collectivos) for the lazy, often delivering you within meters of where you want to be. There’s a price for the convenience – often you will sit forever (if you are lucky enough to get a seat!) in sweltering temperatures while your bus crawls along like an 8 month old.

For the less patient, there are taxis. Tons of them. Also NY style – yellow and black, zipping through town, commandeered by aging Argentine men who vary from straight out of central casting with fedoras and tango music blasting to those who look they missed their calling in the next carnation of Guns n Roses (Ed note: there is a LOT of this look in Argentina generally).

A taxi is pretty cheap if you think in dollars and if you are really late (not just Argentine late), it is simply the only way from A to B. I also use the taxi ride as an opportunity to work on my fledgling Spanish. Inevitably because of my lovely gringa accent, the taxista and I will get into some type of conversation, usually focused on Barack Obama or my lack of a husband.

Late last week, I was in a taxi and the taxista decided to talk to me about #2, my lack of a husband. The dialogue went like this (translated into English):

T: “So, you are not married?”
J: “No.”
T: “Well why not? How old are you?”

I told him my age.

T: “And no husband?”
J; “No.”
T: "But you must have a boyfriend, no?”

I decide to play with him a little.

J: “Yes, a few.”
T: “Seriously?”
J: “Yes.”
T: “How do you do that?”
J: “Well, there are 7 nights in a week.”
T: “So these men, how soon do you go to bed with them?"

Whhhatt? I paused. Surely I am misunderstanding him? I say excuse me. He repeats the question and it is exactly as I heard it.

I am pissed. Who asks that kind of question? But then again, recalled the whole women in Latin America thing, the sexism. Also, there are many who think American woman are easy.

He has already made up his mind about this, so I respond, ”Depends on how I feel.”

My next taxi ride, when I am asked if I am married, I respond yes and talk about Barack Obama.

Money, Money, Money

2008-12-12T12:56:00.000-02:00

So I, along with my friends who live here often have visitors. When we do, we will inevitably bitch that we are poor. Of course, I realize that poverty is a relative term, being a first world white girl in the third world. Some of the people I know here work for pesos while others are living off savings in dollars. Either way, the thing that many of us share with our Argentine friends and neighbors is that this country is expensive relative to what people earn.

Want to buy a computer in Argentina? Expect to pay over $1000USD for the equivalent of roller blades for the information superhighway. How about a bottle of fancy perfume? Tack on a 20 percent tax if it ain’t made here or in a MERCOSUR. Stinky.

This discussion always comes up with the visitors because they marvel at how affordable things are. Last night, we went out for a super luxe dinner, which came out to roughly $25 a person. Not too much if you are earning the average American $40,000+ a year, which is way less than the average NY, LA, DC person.

But here, the landscape is vastly different. I tried to find what the average wage in Buenos Aires is, but the problem is that you can’t trust any of the old numbers (due to the instability of the economy), there is such a massive range between skilled and unskilled workers and there is a big underground economy. I found this, which estimates the median to be $22,000 a year. That’s half of what people in America are earning, more or less. So for an Argentine, that was a $50 dinner.

If you are paying twice the price for stuff that we consider essentials in America and earning half as much, I suspect the steaks we wolfed down last night looked a little excessive.

Oh well. It makes you realize that it’s less about the steak and more about the company. Which was lovely, of course.

Being A Woman in Latin America

2008-12-11T12:02:00.000-02:00

I always get questions from people about being a woman in Latin America. They usually ask me if it’s safe, which is pretty silly. Of course it's safe. It’s as safe as being a woman in NYC or LA or whatever large city in the world you may find yourself in. I mean, don’t be a dumbass… watch yourself and your purse and your drink. Don’t be the fool you typically become after three vodka and Red Bulls, know what I’m sayin’? And if you do, make sure you’ve got your girls with you to get you into the radio taxi and get your sorry drunk ass home. Alone.

The treatment of women here, however, can sometimes leave you asking WTF. Sure, there’s cat calling down the street and yes, there is most definitely staring. In Chile, they will sometimes get right in your face and mutter dirty things under the breaths. But there is also carrying your bags, holding doors, and lovely graciousness. Nice. Hermosa.

Then you’ve got the dance floor. When you go out dancing (in Buenos Aires at least, this did not happen to me in other places) the men become more like vampires out for your blood. Dancing in a club on a Wednesday night in Buenos Aires can feel more like duking it out with Dracula than letting loose for a night of fun.

Last night we were grabbed, kissed, cuddled, felt up, made to feel ourselves up, and just generally harassed as we boogied down for a couple of hours. At first, it was really funny… I laughed along with everyone else, bopping my head and wiggling my hips while half the bar ogled us. But eventually it just got annoying.

I looked around at one point, trying to see if other groups of women found themselves defending their blood from the circling bats. It didn’t seem like it. Was there a reason we were the prey of the night? I’m not sure.

Being a woman in Latin America is no easier than being a woman in any other place in the world. Harassment comes in all forms here it just requires biceps.

In the end, we danced our asses off and had a grand time. And the cab ride home with a group of drunk giggly girls recounting the insanity made for a good time.

The Immaculate Conception Weekend

2008-12-08T15:55:00.001-02:00

I saw Madonna last night in a massive soccer stadium on the edge of Buenos Aires. First of all, let me say that the Argentine energy was infectious. I love Madonna, but last night I was IN LOVE with Madonna. I danced, I sang, I worshiped at her alter for two hours along with 70,000 other people. Yes, 70,000 people!

When we were meeting up and heading into the show, we had to get in a line that stretched across 10 city blocks, maybe 20. We walked and walked and walked and I examined the people in line. Young, old, gay, straight, male, female, tragically fashionable, scruffy and dirty. You name it – these people had all paid good money to see the icon that is Madonna. And they gave up half their Sunday to wait in line and get a good spot inside the hulking stadium.

The show was absolutely amazing – incredible dancers, brilliant choreography, vivid costumes, and even good songs (especially the oldies). But the crowd was something magical, the spirit infectious. A wave began before the show even started and we in the mosh pit were applauding their spirit. It was a sticky afternoon (the sun goes down after 9 pm here), but we all stuck together, dancing while Paul Oakenfold serenaded us with dance tunes.

The moment the lights came down, the energy went into turbocharge. Screaming. Yelling. Chanting. I could feel the young girls behind me grabbing onto me, hoping to get a real live glimpse of her. They were clawing at me – girls of no more than 12 or 13. I felt their emotions, their need to witness and be a part of this history unfolding in front of us.

For me it was not even so much about Madonna. It was about the image of Madonna, the product she has so carefully cultivated after nearly 30 years. The dancers wore perfect costumes, their moves creative and expressive. Even the old songs were reinterpreted, just as Madonna has done her entire life. Madonna is constantly reinventing herself and her new invention was on full display for us.

The one ever-present theme of Madonna is sex. Lots of bumping and grinding with guitars, with dancers, with herself. But even though the days of Like A Virgin are long behind all of us (are they ever…), Madonna still wants us to think of sex when we think of her. All that reinvention made me forget about the sex part from like 20 years ago. That and no matter what she does or how many botox injections she gets, or how many lotions and potions she smears herself with, she is still 50 and she can’t turn back the clock. None of us can.

Another part of the show that that stuck with me is when she sang “She’s Not Me”. Madonna eerily pranced around the stage singing to women all dressed up as her with words about someone else. This came shortly before she asked the crowd to keep chanting her name. It was the epitome of what Madonna and everyone is about at the end of the day– ourselves.

Feel the Ritmo

2008-12-06T10:44:00.000-02:00

Cities have rhythms. I have lived in cities for a large chuck of my life and after a time, you begin to understand how they move, what makes them wiggle and jiggle.

It’s a whole different experience when you are living in a foreign city. There are noises that are new, there are things that will make you stare. This gives you a different rhythm. Even the language has a different tune and you speaking with people or listening to people talking is part of what creates the groove.

Sound is the background for rhythm, but there’s also mood that fills in corners of a vibe. Here one of the factors is time. It is 10:30am and the sun is out, but it has the feeling of the middle of the night. The streets are empty. The noisy cars that normally zoom by my window are intermittent. The noisiest city in the world is quiet. Buenos Aires is truly a nocturnal city, more alive at midnight than at noon.

All of this is a far cry from DC, where I have friends who go to the gym at 4 am. Here that’s about the time when the disco is really fun.

Thanksgiving

2008-12-04T19:12:00.001-02:00

I am with you
we are in a clear
milky white winter day.

We walk along the reservoir
Our minds numbed from the smoke of the morning.
Nothing more than the silence of the cold.

My fingertips
bitten by the air.
My eyes
soothed by tears from the assault of the wind.
I close them.

The horns are blaring
As the noise drips from my temples
Into my ears.

I feel the sweat pouring
down my legs, my back
leaving my pores, coating my skin.

I inhale the thickness of the day.
I exhale the cold of winter
And I am no longer alone.

You sit next to me,
I can smell the summer
on your skin.
As I have a thousands summers before.

It’s our Thanksgiving, together.

Welcome!

2008-12-02T15:29:00.000-02:00

Welcome to First World White Girl, my blog about my adventures living outside of the first world. Right now I am in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which is definitely third world lite but a nice balance.

I traveled through South America all winter (summer for you northern world folk), exploring Peru, Chile, Argentina and Bolivia. Now, am back in BA to work on my spanish and the rest of my life. For the last dozen years, I worked in Washington DC in the political arena. An incredible experience that allowed me to meet amazing people, see cool things, learn about interesting stuff and opened me up to possibilities that exist in the world.

This blog will be a place for my writing and any other stuff that tickles my fancy as I explore this wonderful city and all it has to offer.