Spicy Accent? NOT!

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.

She's Baacck!

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

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.

New York, New York

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.

Being A Foreigner

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?