Peru

This is going to be my final post. I've been back in the US for four days now, and I think it's time to wean myself off oversharing now that my life in boring again.

(Sample post: Today I went to the famer's market and bought tamales. Then I backed up my hard drive, ate a mango, and painted my toenails. True story, just not an interesting one.)

But Grandma requested a final update on my post-Argentina trip to Peru, so here it is.

Hiking the Inca Trail was more amazing and challenging than I can possibly put into words. In the course of the four-day trek, I was every kind of tired imaginable (and I learned that there are a lot): up at 4 am tired; 8th mile of a 9-mile hike tired; can't breathe from altitude tired; uphill tired; downhill tired; muscles aching from yesterday tired.

We covered 26 miles, through mountains that looked like the backdrop of Lord of the Rings and jungles that begged for Indiana Jones jokes. (I made them. Lots of them. They mostly involved the words "booty" and "plunder.") The hardest day by far was the second, when we climbed up interminable stairs to the well-named "Dead Woman's Pass," at about 14,000 feet. The air that high up is so thin that walking even a few yards is enough to make you pant. We walked a lot more than that.

But of course, getting to the top made the climb worth it. From where we had come, we could see a snow-capped peak and three or four other, smaller mountains with various combinations of scrub and rocks. Where were were going, there were more mountains, these covered in lusher vegetation. Mostly, though, we were concentrating more on breathing than on the view.

The third day of the trek was my favorite, although it started with a rather harrowing situation that involved me, yet another mountain, and a breakfast that was threatening to, uh, escape my stomach before its time. The less said about that, the better. In any case, I was distracted by watching the barren landscape of the higher elevations turn into a jungle as we descended from the Dead Woman's Pass.

We stopped a little before lunch in a beautiful Inca ruin that overlooked a valley that our guide referred to as the "ceja de la selva" — the eyebrow of the rainforest. The rest of the day took us above and around it on a narrow path with 30 foot-deep moss on one side and a sheer drop on the other. We saw orchids and ladyslippers and begonias, an abandoned staircase overgrown with moss that seemed to lead to nowhere, and a natural cave big enough for me to walk through with my backpack without bending over.

The last day we woke up at 4 am to make the sunrise at Inti Punku, a site overlooking Machu Picchu that played some part in Inca sun worship. We got there in time, but it was so misty we could barely see the path some 20 yards in front of us. Machu Picchu itself is overwhelming and stunning, but at that point I was pretty sick. (Stomach again.) I took a bus to the town of Aguas Calientes at the base of the site and spent the rest of the day in our hotel reading Angels and Demons in a real bed.

I know the trip was almost two weeks, and I've only talked about four days of it. But the trek was so phenomenal that the rest of the time — the part with beds, and hot water, and sufficient oxygen — seems kind of mundane in comparison. It wasn't, of course: Peru is a fascinating country with tons of indigenous, colonial and post-colonial history that mixes in really interesting ways. And the food was good.

I'm not going to get all nostalgic, because I did that in my last post. (And more recently, got it all out of my system with a crying fit in the security line at the Miami airport.) So I'm going to leave it at that.

Re-Triste

My plane leaves for Lima at 8.15 tomorrow. I'm still not fully processing that the semester is over.

I don't feel ready to leave Argentina. Give me a few more months and I would be, I think — this country is kind of exhausting. Eating dinner at 11, staying out until 6, trying to get to class on time when the only thing you can count on is if you plan for the bus to be late, it's guaranteed to leave early. And there's a constant uncertainty about the future that's disconcerting. Frankly, the government is on shaky ground right now in the conflict with the campo and inflation somewhere around 25% a year. This in a country where the longest it's gone since 1900 without an involuntary change of power is 18 years.

My initial infatuation with Argentina wore off after the first month or two. But it's since settled into a patient, profound love. Living in a foreign country is a constant challenge, I think, until it becomes familiar enough to not feel foreign anymore. I'm nowhere near that point. Still, I've made myself a life here, a routine that's exciting because it's almost mundane.

I have my gym filled with people that don't sweat, my fruitería where the apples are always crisp, my favorite helado place, and my lavandería with a Chinese owner who knows me by name, even if she can't pronounce it. I don't think twice about lighting a gas oven, I know which bus will get me to San Telmo (29) and which one will get me to my tutor's house (39), and I no longer blink when people shout "I luff yoo" when I walk down the street. I know I'll have fun if I go out to Liquid and how not to get run over: cars will stop for me at the "chicken" intersections that don't have stop signs, but never if the light is green.

I honestly don't know exactly what has been so perfect about this semester. Nothing by itself, and everything together. My friends deserve most of the credit, even though they're anything but what I expected. (I naively came here expecting to make a cadre of Argentine friends.) Most things were fun with them, whether it was smuggling a kilo of helado into Indiana Jones, being stuck on a broken-down bus for three hours on the side of a highway, or watching an acrobatic interactive performance experience at Konex.

Over-analyzing it isn't going to get me anywhere, although it does give me street cred in a country where Woody Allen is idolized alongside with Maradona and the Pope. But thank you to everyone and everything that has made this semester so amazing.

Things I Will Miss: Food Edition

In the last week or so, I have been on a mission to eat so much of all the foods I like here that I won't miss them. Unfortunately, it hasn't been working, as I keep craving them and the button on my pants won't fasten. But I have eaten tons of gelato, so I'm going to call it a win. This entry needs to have pictures even though they won't convey the deliciousness of the foods I will miss.

• Argentine helado: Simply the best food ever. Creamier than American ice cream, eggier than Italian gelato, it pretty much has the best of all possible worlds. There are stores everywhere, like the Starbucks of Buenos Aires except that there are four main chains instead of one: Freddo, Persicco, Volta, and my personal favorite, Munchi's. I need to eat lots of their chocolate amargo and dulce de leche flavors before I leave.

• Empanadas: Empanadas are the Argentine pizza, although they have that, too. But they're way better. If you're too lazy to make dinner, you order empanadas. If you're walking down the street and you get hungry, you grab an empanada. If you're having a party and need appetizers, empanadas. It's harder to get the ratios of crust to filling wrong in an empanada than in a pizza. And they're so perfectly wrapped to go!

• Quilmes Stout: The best beer ever. Dark, sweet, and a dollar a liter. Pretty much the trifecta. The national beer (only in the way Budweiser is our national beer — I don't think it's official) is Quilmes Cristal, which tastes remarkably like Natty Light, although it has the benefit of never having seen the inside of a fraternity keg.
  

• Apples: South America = pineapples and mango, right? Except not at all. Argentines are solidly apples and oranges people, which makes sense if you think about it since Argentina is so far south it's basically north again, climate-wise. And the apples here are consistently really good — firm, crisp, sweet. Sometimes I eat three a day.

• Yogurt-in-a-bag: It's yogurt! It comes in a bag! Enough said. (Although it's maybe even weirder that milk does too. You buy a special bag-holder contraption, put the bag in there, snip off a corner and pour.)

• Frutigran: The word in Spanish for both cookies and crackers is galletas. People here don't distinguish between them the same way we do in the United States. A bakery chocolate-chip cookie is a cookie, but an Oreo and a Wheat Thin are both galletas. Frutigran falls into the galleta grey zone — just sweet enough to be what I would call a cookie, but not so sweet that I can't convince myself I'm eating health food.

Of course, there's food in the U.S. that I can't get here that I miss too. I just can't think of it right now. And Daniel just sent me an e-mail saying that he found his personal Argentine food crack, Club Social baked chips, being sold in the States under the Ritz brand name. So maybe if I just wait long enough globalization will take care of my craving for some dulce de leche gelato.

I Can Tell I'm Getting Homesick...

When I get Starbucks and then see Wall-E in English. Which, I'm slightly embarrassed to say, I did today. But Wall-E was great, and so was my caramel macchiato.

I've been studiously avoiding the Starbucks here (which opened to much fanfare in May), but when Karen suggested we go, I pretty much jumped at the opportunity. We met her Ecuadorean friend there, so I felt a little more legitimate. Going to the first Starbucks in Argentina with a non-American is kind of an EC in itself.

And despite my decidedly norteamericana night, I'm not exactly excited to leave. I can't isolate exactly what makes me so happy here, but these are some of the things I'm going to miss:

• Ferias: Sure, they all have the same cheap crap, and maybe it's being sold for four times more than it's worth (five times if it's Recoleta). But I love ferias. Even when I don't buy anything, I like just walking around and being a tourist. I like the smell of sugared peanuts, the hippies in their striped cotton pants and dreadlocks, the stalls with hundreds of mate gourds in red and green and purple.
  

• Boliches: It's taken me almost five months, but I've finally realized why I like clubs in Argentina better than clubs in the United States. And no, it's not because they aren't Toad's. (Although that probably also has something to do with it.) People dance differently here. In the United States, if you're not grinding with someone, you're dancing awkwardly in the group while you look for someone to grind with. And I don't like grinding. I think that makes me a prude, but I'm okay with that.

• Lunfardo: What am I going to do with all the porteño vocabulary I've learned? It's taken me a while to get used to it, but I'm starting to be able to use slang in my everyday speech. Bondi means bus, quiqui means anxiety, qué se yo means whatever and re- before an adjective adds emphasis. Also, the voseo is going to make me unintelligible to anyone who isn't from Argentina. Argentines use the word vos instead of tú, and conjugate all verbs in the second person differently that any other Spanish speakers. Guess I'll have to move here. (Am I joking? You decide.)

• Telos: Telo-spotting has become one of my favorite hobbies. A lot of Argentines live with their parents until they get married, which makes having sex awkward and complicated. At telos, you can rent rooms by the hour, without any of the stigma motels have in the US. They're everywhere, but almost invisible in a Leaky Cauldron way. Unless you know what to look for you can walk by one three times a week and never notice it's there. I consider it a sign that I've arrived that I can tell when "Playa Privada" means parking garage and when it means secret sex hotel. (For some reason, the phrase that identifies both garage and telo translates to "Private beach" in English. Also, for the record, I've never been to one. I just think they're funny.)

• The exchange rate: For dinner tonight, I had half a pizza and a beer. It cost me nine pesos, or three dollars, total. I could have gone to one of the best steakhouses in the city and gotten a grass-fed tenderloin steak for 18 U$D. I am not going to feel good about going back home and paying ten dollars for a sandwich at Cosi.

• My friends: I don't know if they qualify as something I'll miss about Argentina, exactly, since none of them are Argentine. But my friends are what I'm going to miss the most. (Except for Melinda and Daniel, who I'm already missing!)
  

Stay tuned for what I'll miss Part II — the food edition!

Final (Paper) Thoughts on UBA

When I first started classes at UBA, I loved it. I loved the students' crazy haircuts and the way they all readied their cigarettes at the end of lecture so they could light them the second they stepped out of the classroom. I loved the arguments about whether to legalize abortion written on the doors of the bathroom stalls and the way everyone knew the difference between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic axes. I even thought it was kind of charming that half the desks in any given classroom were broken.

By the time my classes ended last week, I couldn't even sit through an entire lecture. For one thing, my Filo y Letras teoricos were four hours long. It kind of makes sense to do it that way, since students live up to two hours away from the university and have to make the commute for every class. But seriously. Four. Hours. Also, the lectures were recorded and the transcripts were sold for 3.75 pesos, so the only thing that got me to class in the first place was an abstract sense of duty.

And then there was the fact that nothing ever happened on time — or even consistently late, which at least would have meant I had some time frame to shoot for. No, some days class started 10 minutes late, sometimes 45. Sometimes it was canceled because of a massive protest downtown, sometimes because the students had staged a revolt, taken over the building, and shut off the power. I'm not kidding, it happened once.

Last Friday, I went to go sign up for my exam at the Filo y Letras building. I went to the window on the first floor that FLACSO had told us to look for, carrying the materials FLACSO had told us to bring. When I got to the front of the line, the man told me I was missing a piece of paper and needed to go to the third floor. I went to the third floor, where a secretary harangued me for not knowing who had initially enrolled me in my class and then sent me to the second floor. The people at the second floor sent me back to the first floor, where the man I had first talked to told me to go to the next window over. I waited in line and asked the people there what the fuck was going on. They told me to tell the man at the first window I was an exchange student. I went back to the first window, said I was an exchange student, and finally got piece of paper I had come for. By the time I left I would have been happy if the Filo building, which looks like it's going to fall apart, made good on its threat and imploded.

I wouldn't change anything about this semester, and that includes the two classes I took at UBA. But I can't wait to get back to Yale, and the slightly ridiculous way everything I could possibly want appears before I know I want it. You mean I don't have to go buy my midterm? The readings for class are in the packet I bought at the beginning of the semester? There's toilet paper in the bathrooms? Free Thai food during exams?

Only about 20 percent of students who start at UBA end up graduating, and I can now say I know why. Going to class takes superhuman patience and effort. I'm not sure I would be able to keep it up for the 5+ years it takes to graduate. UBA students have my utmost respect. But I'm glad that, as of a week from next Tuesday, I'll no longer be one of them.

Ramblings Produced by Three Glasses of Quilmes Stout

Today I handed in my final paper for my FLASCO class. It was 12 pages, in Spanish, and it took me something like 12 hours to write — easily 8 of which were spent reading celebrity gossip on the Internet. (Madonna and Guy Ritchie? What's up with that?) That begins to explain how incredibly bad it was. Then again, it was better than the story I wrote earlier in the semester about a man who walked through a mirror and into a room where Hitler and Videla were plotting to take over the world.

So anyway, now all I have left is UBA assignments. For Genocidas, a paper that Cassie and I are writing on the ramifications of colonialism in Algeria and Rwanda, and for Literatura Latinoamericana II an oral final, which I've chosen to do on Horacio Quiroga. (Never mind that I skipped the lecture on him and have yet to read a single one of his stories. There's apparently one about a bug that lives in pillows and kills people. He sounds awesome.)

So far today, to procrastinate, I have watched "The Simpsons" online, eaten ice cream, and talked with my host mom for an hour about what she should do when she visits New York in few weeks. I also went out to dinner for Daniel's going-away celebration, but I am in denial about that and will pretend it didn't happen. Although the beans were delicious.

This entry had no point except to not be doing real work.

Argentines — They're Just Like US!

Okay, I'll admit it. Sometimes I spend days thinking about the titles before my posts before I write them, and this was one of those times. Unfortunately, chances are that no one who reads this blog — hi Daddy and Grandma! — will get the joke, since they are all far too dignified to read US Weekly.

(For the record, US Weekly has a section called Stars — They're Just Like US! that has pictures of movie stars doing things like pumping gas and buying coffee at Starbucks. I know your IQ probably just dropped by like five points. Sorry. Y'all are smart. You can handle it.)

Anyway. On Saturday night, I had my first, and possibly my only, playdate with Real Live Argentines. This was a phenomenal achievement, since I have been here for four months and made exactly zero Real Live Argentine friends. But on Tuesday after my last Genocides class, I was invited along with Cassie (the other exchange student in the class) to a bar by Juli and Ceci, the Argentine girls we've been talking to in our práctico for awhile now. They introduced themselves about a month ago by offering us candy, and we started talking.

We planned to meet at Acabar, a bar in Palermo where patrons play board games while eating dinner and drinking beers, at 8.30 on Saturday. I got there at 8.35 and Cassie got there 5 minutes later. Juli showed with her twin sister a little past 9, and Ceci didn't get there until almost 9.30. I should have known better than to get there on time. In Argentina, half an hour late is early.

We got a table in the corner of the restaurant, ordered dinner, and talked. And talked. We didn't leave until 2.30 in the morning, at which point we had covered subjects ranging from fake IDs to Ceci's upcoming trip to Europe to the (inexhaustible) topic of the differences between American universities and UBA. All in all, the only really notable part was how similar it was to a dinner between friends in the United States.

The Argentines gossiped about UBA students and professors, and advised Ceci to bring rain gear to London. The one really interesting part, especially from my extranjera perspective, was when Ceci and Juli told us about the interviews they conducted, for a seminar they're taking together, of people who live by the Olimpo, which was one of the biggest detention centers in the city during the dictatorship. Juli described one man she interviewed who actually walled off his balcony so he wouldn't be able to hear the screams of the people being tortured across the street.

Then we split a chocolate cake and talked about the best brands of alfajor.

I think it's taken so long to make Argentine friends because I'm only just starting to really be able to not only talk in Spanish, but to communicate. It's taken me this long to feel comfortable enough with grammar and vocabulary that I also have a personality when I speak. Last week for the first time I got a joke from a commercial on TV that was about the words being spoken, not just about physical comedy.

On Saturday night, I was so tired that around 1.30 I momentarily thought I would pass out, but I held my own in the conversation. Too bad I'm about to leave. But I'm glad I made some Real Live Argentine friends before I do.

Nicky's Visit

Nicky left yesterday after a brief but awesome visit. He got to experience the EC joys of a cross-town collectivo ride, a parrillada complete with brains, intestines, and a truly alarming liver patterned with lumpy yellow fat, and a chaotic afternoon at UBA.

And to be fair, there are plenty of unconditional joys about Buenos Aires, too. Ordering two kilos of ice cream for delivery and then eating them straight from the container, watching old women in turtlenecks doing a traditional scarf dance at the Feria de Mataderos, and of course understanding the power of the EC to make the worst (and the poopiest) situation better.

The best part about his visit for me was having him understand what it's like to live abroad. He got to eat spreadable cheese, cereal that looks like gerbil food, and Frutigran (the world's best cookie — kind of like a crunchy digestive biscuit. Which is kind of like a fat, round graham cracker with more whole grains).

He even came out with us twice, including once to Amerika, the giant gay dance club that is a cross between Sodom and Gomorrah and the best place ever. He was amused but not at all fazed by the dozens of drag queens, which makes perfect sense given that we live in San Francisco and have a summer house just outside Provincetown. I think his favorite part, actually, was the guy with a single, rattail-cum-dreadlock running down the length of his back, who was hitting on one of my friends. (He was male, she was female — really it's not so much a gay club as it is omnisexual).

Come to think of it, Nicky probably has a slightly warped view of this city now, since the next day we went to Tierra Santa. Tierra Santa is an amusement-park-style recreation of Jerusalem made entirely out of plaster and styrofoam, where the main attraction is a 36-foot plaster statue of Jesus that rises from a plaster mountain once every hour to the tune of Handel's Messiah, blinks his mechanical eyes a couple of times, and then descends. It is truly one of the strangest, least tasteful places on Earth. I went there twice last week.

But then again, he got to see why I like it so much here — a combination of my friends and a growing (although still embryonic) understanding of a city that is never boring and always surprising.

Why I Will Never Be As Cool as An Argentine

When I'm in places with a lot of tourists, I like to play the game "Argentine or American?" Sometimes, it's easy, like when the Americans are dressed in "University of Kansas" sweatshirts and madras shorts, or when they're talking loudly about whether they have time to visit Puerto Madero before lunch.

But even when I can't hear what people are saying, I'm right most of the time. It's not because Americans are (necessarily) easy to spot — despite the stereotypes of Americans abroad, the United States is a diverse country. Some people blend in better than others. The real giveaway is that the Argentines look so Argentine.

I've been trying to figure out exactly what that means. It's definitely nothing inherent to people's physical appearance. There's almost no racial diversity here, and everyone looks like they came over three months ago from Italy or Spain: dark hair, light skin, brown eyes. Ojos claros and pelo rubio are rare and highly prized. (And, for me, part of the package that makes me feel like I have a blinking "Foreigner" sign on my back, although there are some people of Germanic descent here as well.)

Then there are the obvious things: mullets, skinny jeans, graphic t-shirts with nonsensical phrases in English. (Merry Christmas for you Geisha? WTF?) There might be a rule that Argentines need to buy a pair of Chuck Taylors upon entering high school, and maybe one in every four young people has some kind of facial piercing. The most popular one is the Monroe, a little black stud around the smile parentheses, meant to look like a mole. My personal favorite clothing item are bombachas, which are cotton sweatpants that puff out at the top and are tight around the ankles. Basically, Hammer Pants.

Sometimes I try to dress like an Argentine. My Argentine disguise, as I call it, usually involves leggings and a black skirt or dress with a cardigan and a scarf. I almost always wear my Chucks, to the point that their insteps are shredded and they're almost sandals. Also, the mecha (it's purple now!) helps.

The best way I can describe it is to say the entire 20-something population of Argentina dresses like American hipsters. It's like the 1980s were resurrected with a sense of irony and a slightly muted palette. Of course, for people like Mom who don't know a hipster from a hippie, that isn't very helpful. In any case there's still something missing. My disguise never works.

Culture Shock

Nicky graduated from high school today. Although I was grumpy about coming home, I'm really happy I did. I'm not sure when, exactly, I lost my status as family smart-kid to him, but he totally deserves it, and I'm really proud of him. Also, the family dinner tonight was in itself worth both legs of the 24-hour trip. My mom coined the term "slut-worm," which — if it doesn't become a standard insult — will at least go down in history as making Nicky laugh so hard he cried for the first time in years.

Being back in the United States is strange, if only because everything feels very routine. When I first got off the airplane I was totally overwhelmed by how big and loud everything was — people, colors, food portions. I went to Starbucks during my layover and started laughing out loud at the croissants in the pastry case, easily as big as four medialunas. Of course, that was in Texas, where everything is bigger than in the rest of the US anyway. After the initial shock, I've found it pretty easy to get used to being back.

In the airport, I couldn't get over how dowdy everyone looked in their sweatpants and matching mission t-shirts. But having been here for a couple of days now, I think that was because I was in an airport in Texas, not because Americans as a whole dress badly. The San Francisco hippie-chic rich kids at Nicky's graduation definitely don't — I had major celos of a lot of the dresses on Nicky's classmates. And there are a lot fewer mullets.

The one really weird moment was when Mom and I went to the Mission to get pre-made empanada dough. While we were eating lunch, in a Peruvian-Colombian hole in the wall, a woman holding a case of religious-themed bracelets and rosaries came in and started going from table to table selling them. It was so Argentine, or at least Latin American, and when she spoke to me in English I couldn't figure out what was going on.

Then, after lunch, we went to get the empanada dough at an Italian market called Lucca's. I had found it on the Internet by typing pre-made empanada dough" into Google, and even though the store that came up was clearly Italian, I figured it probably sold empanada ingredients just because it was in the Mission. It wasn't until we got there and discovered the aisle with six different brands of mate and three of dulce de leche that I realized it was actually Italian by way of Argentina. If it's possible to get nostalgic for a place you've only been away from for two days, then the sight of all the varieties of yerba and the alfajores de maicena definitely did it for me.

In any case, I'm glad to be going back to Argentina soon. The one thing I can say for sure is that, culture shock or not, this visit has made me sure I'm not ready for the semester to be over yet.

Freaking Out About Going Home

I'm getting on a plane in less than two days to go to San Francisco for Nicky's graduation, and I am media-having a heart attack about it. Not because I don't want to go home — I'm really happy to be seeing the family. (I miss you guys a lot!) More because a) I like Argentina, and I don't want to leave, and when I get back it will be halfway through June and I'll only have a month left and that makes me sad, and b) there's going to be massive culture shock in both directions.

To make myself feel better, here's a list of things I'm looking forward to when I get home:

1) Breakfast — Argentines generally eat toast or medialunas for breakfast. Only weird health nuts eat things like oatmeal (which I eat every day) or eggs. I can already taste my plain yogurt with granola and Craisins.

2) The crossword — I can read the New York Times online, but the stupid crossword costs $19.99 a month. The newspapers here have word games, but they're kind of like comedy, which is to say I don't get them. (Silly things like that remind me how far I am from being fluent in Spanish.)

3) Sweat — Women here don't sweat. At the gym, most of them barely top 6 km/hr on the treadmill, and running on the street is almost unheard of — although I do it anyway, and get weird looks. The logic, as far as I can tell, is that you exercise to make yourself look better, so it defeats the purpose to look gross while you're doing it. Heathen norteamericana that I am, when I exercise I turn bright red and start looking like I just fell into the nearest fountain. I'm looking forward to blending in with the crowd on this one.

4) Starbucks — I've been appalled to realize how much I like takeout coffee. It's so much more civilized to sit down with a tiny cup of espresso and a little cookie and take your time like people do in Argentina. But I guess I'm a heathen, because I miss drinking my giant 16-ounce paper cup of burnt-tasting drip coffee on a street corner between classes. And while the first Starbucks in Argentina just opened last week, I feel guilty enough going in the U.S.

5) Cheese — Argentines eat a lot of cheese, but most of it is queso cremoso, a soft, bland cheese that's sometimes so runny it's almost spreadable. I've come to like it, but I miss cheese that stinks. I want some good simple Extra Sharp Vermont Cheddar.

And really, I'm happy to be going home, if just to see my family. And to not feel like a moron every time I go to buy a pack of gum because the person who works at the kiosco talks too fast for me to understand.

Second Thoughts on the Third World

Today in the práctico for my Genocides class, we discussed the politics surrounding the conflict between the military dictatorship and guerrilla groups in Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s. I understood about four percent of what was going on, which is way below my usual average of somewhere in the 70% range. Yesterday in my Literatura Latinoamericana II class, the lecturer referred to so many words and people that I didn't recognize that I kept a list at the top of my notes of things to look up later. (Piqueteros, Tercera Internacional, Mayakovsky, Haya de la Torre)

The problem wasn't the language barrier; it was the historical background that I just didn't have. I was as lost as someone with no knowledge of the racial history of the United States would be if she sat in on a discussion of Martin Luther King's assassination. (I use that example because it makes me feel better — Argentines generally just don't understand why race is such a sensitive issue to North Americans.)

After a post-class Wikipedia binge, I'm still confused about what my professors were talking about, but I understand better why I've been so lost.

When I wrote a few days ago about what made Argentina a third-world country, I was talking about economics, but actually "third world" is a political term used during the Cold War to refer to countries that belonged neither to the communist Soviet Bloc nor to the capitalist NATO Bloc. (Wikipedia, by the way, classifies Argentina as an "Upper Middle-Income Country" or a "Secondary Emerging Market.")

Obviously, the Soviet Bloc no longer exists, but as far as the designation of Argentina as neither purely communist nor purely capitalist goes, the concept of a political "third world" is still very apt. Before I got to Argentina, I honestly thought that no one took Marxism seriously anymore. Even the most liberal schools in the United States (like every school I've ever attended) teach Marx as a guy with cute ideas that just didn't work out. In Argentina, though, Marxist theory is the starting point of essentially every political discussion — at least at UBA, which admittedly is a pretty rarefied place.

The Argentine economy itself is solidly capitalist, but the concept of class struggle has as central a place in political theory here as Locke's social contract has in political theory in the United States. A large part of the reason I've been having such a hard time understanding the discussions in class is that they assume not only a grounding in history, which I can learn, but also a Marxist frame of reference, which is harder to pick up. In my Genocides class, we read articles that describe the dictatorship as a reaction of the bourgeoisie against the rising power of the proletariat; in my Literature class we read almost exclusively Marxist authors. The intricacies of the political subtext can be hard to pick up unless you've been reading Das Kapital since you were sixteen — which it feels like most of the students in the class have.

Honestly, I'm getting frustrated. I really feel like pointing out that the Soviet Union collapsed almost two decades ago, and it collapsed because Marxism isn't a viable political system. It seems pointless to keep holding on to a framework that doesn't hold up and focusing on the literature of a failed movement.

I know that attitude makes me either a bad liberal or a good American, both designations I have mixed feelings about. Anyway, I probably just don't get it. And probably never will.

Pictures

I have about nine million pages of reading to do. It's all in Spanish and about either genocide or avant garde-poetry. Here's a sample of a translation of Trilce, a poem by César Vallejo that we're reading in my Literatura Latinoamericano II class:

Finished the heated afternoon;
your great bay and your clamor; the chat
with your exhausted mother
who offered us a tea full of evening.

Finally finished everything: the vacations,
Your obedience of hearts, your way
of demanding that I not go out.

It goes on like this for 150 pages. I think that explains pretty succinctly why I decided to make a shutterfly account. You can access the pictures here. I'll label more of them after I'm done. Or after I decide that one more page of impenetrable babble about night-flavored tea might turn me off books for life. Whichever comes first.

Why Argentina is a Third World Country

I just got finished with an epic lunch with my host mom, Mónica. We started eating at 2:30 and ended up talking for the next two hours. We discussed American and Argentine politics, mostly. Mónica explained to me why Argentina grows so much soy (answer — it's like the corn of the US; there are lot of subsidies and the economy depends on it even though no one actually eats it or even really uses it for anything). I tried and failed to explain to her why the US impeached Bill Clinton for lying about a blow job but hasn't so much as slapped Bush on the wrist for lying about Iraq.

More than anything specific we talked about, the conversation was fascinating because it helped me understand why Argentina is a third world country, and how that makes it different from the US. It's easy to forget while I'm eating a a veggie tort with squash in a four-bedroom apartment that has wireless internet and three cable TVs that I'm not only not in the US, but that I'm technically not in the developed world. What exactly does developed mean if not home to a comfortable middle class and able to provide its citizens with basic amenities like education and (ahem) health care? Argentina has all that. Of course, it also has people living in abject poverty in shantytowns, but that tends to be pretty insulated from city life.

And yet certain things Mónica says remind me that not everything is as clean and functional as it seems, even in the city of Buenos Aires. As an American, I tend to take things at face value. If airplane is supposed to take off at 3:45, it will take off at 3:45. If the president says the economy is improving, the economy is improving. The money in my bank account will be there until I spend it.

Argentines, on the other hand, approach life with the assumption that the bus will break down, that the government is lying, and that the money they have in the bank could be gone when they wake up tomorrow. This pessimism — or realism, depending on how you look at it — is the real difference between Argentina and the US. Because the fact is that the buses here are old, the government's figures understate inflation by some 20%, and once every ten years or so, there's an economic crisis, a rush on the banks, and the money that had been safe in an account the day before just no longer exists.

Life here has a sense of precariousness that doesn't exist in the US. People expect to be inconvenienced, delayed, lied to and cheated, and it comes out in the details. For example, when I took a bus to Uruguay, it was delayed for three hours. The only reason I knew it was delayed was because it wasn't at the station, and I wasn't even sure of that because the bus company didn't know yet where the bus would stop — only the general area. They also didn't know how delayed the bus was, or when it would come, or whether it would come at all, and were both mystified and annoyed when I went to ask. How should they know?

Somehow, Argentines don't end up bitter from all this uncertainty, just resigned. But it makes me realize (and I know this is totally cliché) how lucky we have it.

A Típico Weekend

I have six hours of class on Monday, seven on Tuesday, and three on Wednesday. That's more than I ever have at Yale, where even with a five-class course load last semester I only was in the classroom for 10 hours a week. But I still feel like I have way more free time here, which is partly because my weekend starts Wednesday night. (It's also partly because I don't spend five hours a night in the Yale Daily News building.)

Anyway, this last weekend started Wednesday night with "Peluquería Día." After class, I went over to Molly's house, where she, Veronica and I tried ourselves mechas, or highlights, in various shades of red, blue and purple. We bought the wrong kind of dye, but Molly's 24-year old host "mom" — whose rainbow-color highlights change with her mood — came home in the middle of the process and showed us her stash of permanent hair paint. I now have a fuschia skunk stripe on the underside of my ponytail. Some other friends came over towards the end of the process, and we made breakfast for dinner, drank wine, and watched Juno as our hair dried.

Thursday I barely left my house all day, having gotten home late the night before. Around nine I went out to dinner with Melinda and her cousin at a norteño restaurant in Palermo, where I had a delicious cazuela, or beef stew, that probably contained about a third of a cow. I left at eleven to meet some other friends at a bar. We went from the bar to a club a few blocks away from my house, and six hours and two new phone numbers later, I walked back home as the newsstands were putting out the morning paper. (Don't worry, Mom — I was going to go on a date with a guy I met, but it didn't end up working out.)

Friday I woke up at noon, went for a run, made chili for a potluck at my friend Beth's house, and then went back to sleep until five. I got to Beth's around seven and ate a freakishly early dinner. We ordered ice cream for dessert and talked awhile, but most of us were tired from the night before, and Karen, Logan and I left at around ten for the three-odd mile walk back to our houses. We all live just off Santa Fe, one of the biggest streets in Buenos Aires.

Earlier in the week, Karen and Daniel had somehow found out that a foundation called ALAS was sponsoring a huge free concert on Saturday, and stood in line to get tickets. Daniel gave me his extra one, so on Saturday I woke up, went for a run, and then met up with my friends to go — along with an estimated 130,000 other people — to Costanera Sur, a huge field in an ecological reserve by the water where the concert was being held. The concert was supposed to start at 2:30, so we got there on time for an American concert, around three. Except we're in Argentina, so the first act didn't come on until four, and Shakira, the headliner, performed at 9:30.

At one point Molly and I got so antsy and hungry that we left to go find food that wasn't a superpancho (hot dog — essentially all that was available) even though we weren't sure we'd be able to get back in. When we got back and handed the man at the gate our ticket stubs, he just looked at us, laughed, and said, "You're not from around here, are you?" But he let us in anyway. And when we got back, Jorge Drexler was playing, who's my favorite new music I've found here (I'm going to a concert of his next Friday). Paulina Rubio, Alejandro Sanz, and Calle 13, a Puerto Rican reggaeton band, also played, and Shakira did a duet with Mercedes Sosa. I didn't know a lot of the music, which made parts of the eight hours I spent at the concert seem incredibly long, but when Shakira sang "Hips Don't Lie" with a fake Wyclef Jean, I almost died. I had a moment where I got really sad because as long as I live, I'm never going to be her.

Today I had lunch with my host mom and her friend, and we talked for two hours — about Argentina, the United States, boyfriends, smoking laws, you name it. Ever since then I've been successfully not working. Now I'm going to go make myself dinner and continue the pattern.

Random Observations

Jujuy was so different from Buenos Aires that coming back made me feel a little like I was rediscovering Buenos Aires again. I've started taking certain quirks of Argentine culture for granted — and while that means I'm not bewildered and overwhelmed by everything from the city layout to which cheese I want on my sandwich, I also like to take a step back once in a while and observe.

Argentina, or at least Buenos Aires, is similar enough to the United States that the differences really only come out in the details. Here are a few of my favorites:

Kisses — This one's pretty standard in other countries, but I love it. My hands are so sweaty that I always get really uncomfortable about the impression I make on other people when I shake their hands. Then I make a doubly bad impression, because not only are my hands sweaty but I'm acting all awkward about it. A simple air kiss totally solves the problem. And it's funny to see how quickly the American guys on the program have picked the habit up with girls — and how awkward they get when Argentine guys try to do to them.

Mate — It's not uncommon to see people, on the subte or walking down the street, carting big metal thermoses full of hot water around in one hand and hollowed gourds filled with mate leaves in the other. Yerba mate is a tea drunk loose-leaf out of a gourd or wooden cup (also called a mate) with a metal straw called a bombilla, and it's one of the few things in Buenos Aires that I can think of that's totally indigenous in origin. Its consumption in Argentina is a tradition that comes close to a ritual, and I went through three mate gourds before I finally found one that worked for me. The first one molded, the second one cracked, and the one I have now (which cost me four pesos at a grocery store) is perfect.

Delivery — This is really more of a big-city thing than an Argentina thing, but you can get everything delivered to your house here. Groceries, late-night empanadas, doggy toys, even wine and beer. Stores aren't allowed to sell alcohol from the storefront after 11 pm (strangely early in a city where people are just finishing dinner at midnight), but you can call a store and have it delivered to your house free of charge. The best, and most Argentine, thing you can get delivered is gelato. One night my friends and I went looking for ice cream after dinner, but it was 1 am and all the stores were closed. So we went back to Veronica's house, called Persicco — a famous gelatería — and 40 minutes later were finishing off a kilogram of chocolate mousse, dulce de leche and lemon pie ice cream between the five of us.

Dietéticas — Coming from California to a foreign country can be hard. Apparently flaxseed, wheat germ and anything containing Omega-3 fatty acids aren't considered staples here like they are in San Francisco. Who knew? Most Argentines live off a diet of medialunas (mini-croissants) for breakfast, empanadas for lunch, white toast for a snack, and pasta for dinner — enough white carbs to feed the Pillsbury Doughboy for months. But fortunately, there are health food stores, called dietéticas, on pretty much every corner. (I haven't figured out how they're so ubiquitous, since the average Argentine wouldn't let a sprouted grain within a mile of his buttery medialuna.) They mostly sell dried fruit, nuts and whole grains, alongside herbal tea and cookies made with fake sugar. I'm not entirely sure what the unifying principle is behind their stock, since the aspartame in the fake-sugar cookies defeats the purpose of "natural" foods and the calories in the nuts defeat the purpose of "diet" foods, but they're good for making me laugh while I buy sunflower seeds and quinoa.

Wine — When I splurge on wine, I pay nine pesos, or three US dollars. Enough said.

Llama-spotting

This weekend I went with the FLACSO program to Jujuy, a province in the north of Argentina. Jujuy is much poorer than the area around Buenos Aires, and has a much larger indigenous population. I probably wouldn´t have visited it on my own -- it´s a 20 hour bus ride, but we took a plane -- so I´m glad FLACSO took us there.

The landscape looks something like the American Southwest, with dry riverbeds, brushy fields, and red clay cliffs like drip-castles; the towns look much more like the stereotypical image of South America than the other places in Argentina I´ve been. All of the houses, one-story clay with flat rooves, stretch down the street in continuous, split-level rows.Since it´s the desert, everything is dry and dusty, and it drops about 30 degrees when the sun starts to go down.

FLACSO trips are great since everything is organized for us and we stay in fairly nice housing, although sometimes I feel like I´m on a school trip in second grade, complete with head counts and snacktime. (Not that I´m complaining about the snacks.)

Both of the FLACSO trips I´ve been on have involved disgusing amounts of food, which in the north means things people typically associate with South America -- tamales, empanadas, quinoa. In addition to lots of beef, since we are still in Argentina, I had a delicious pastel de quinoa with llama meat. Llama essentially tastes like cheap steak, but now I can add it to the list of "Things I have eaten in Argentina that are fundamentally gross." (The list also includes cow brain, kidneys, blood sausage and kosher cow intestines.)

The weekend also involved a few walk-y "hikes," a tour of a re-creation of some indigenous ruins, and an absurd amount of shopping. Jujuy is famous for its wool products, and I came away with two sweaters, two pairs of gloves and a pair of socks. All of them have llamas on them. (Not all of them are for me.) I also bought a scarf, a ring, and a wall-hanging. And yet despite the convulsion of acquisitiveness that came over me this weekend, I spent a total of 160 pesos, or 50 dollars.

Pantsless in Palermo

It's late, and I have to wake up early tomorrow if I want to finish my Literatura Latinoamericana midterm before I go to Jujuy on Thursday. But I haven't posted in a while, and why sleep when I can blog?

That question is only halfway facetious. I've been in my new house almost a week now, and one of the many perks of moving is that I now have wireless internet, so I can post from bed. My room is small — bigger than my dorm room, but not by enough to matter — but comfortable. I have two closets, a desk, a bed, a shelf, and a TV I've only turned on once. The decor is pretty much white, but with my stuff all over the shelves (and sometimes the floor) it has a decent personality.

The girl who lived here before me warned me that my host mom, Mónica, sees her job as "strictly a business relationship." That's partly proven to be true: I get breakfast and dinner, but I'm on my own when it comes to lunch and snacks, I wash my own dishes, and I take my laundry downstairs to the laundromat even though Mónica does her own in the washing machine. But she's friendly and corrects me without judgment when I do something wrong (like put the matches for the stove back in the wrong place or eat the dinner she was preparing for lunch). I don't want a mom who's going to obsess about where I am or ask about my feelings. I already have one of those.

The big thing is that there's no such thing as a family dinner here — I think Mónica likes her personal space. Still, she's pretty chatty when I ask her questions about Argentina, and she lets me know when she's going out. She usually eats dinner in her room, and leaves me out a portion to serve myself when I want to. The food is pretty good — she makes a delicious shepherd's pie with olives and Argentine beef — and I like being able to eat what I want when I want it. Today for lunch I made myself a lentil-and-squash stew that turned out surprisingly well.

I also have a brother, Mariano, who never fails to make me laugh, although I'm pretty sure he's not trying to. The key details to know about him are: he's 27, he's in the family business breeding racehorses, he only speaks to me in thickly accented English, and he hates life. He thinks Buenos Aires is too big and ugly and wants to live in the countryside, and whenever he's home he stomps around looking angry at the world and not wearing pants. (In the week I've been here I've only seen him in pants once, and that was right after he came home from work. He even answers the door in boxers when the grocery delivery man comes.)

Apparently there's another son who's in Europe right now, "testing turf" for racehorses and bumming around in Monaco. He's supposedly nicer, but I like Mariano fine. He's not mean, he's just grumpy as hell. I can see why the girl who lived here before me moved out: this family is weird. But so far I like living here a lot. It's weird in a way I can get used to.

A Brief History of Argentina

Today I got a warp-speed lesson in Argentine history in my tutoría for Analysis of the Social Practice of Genocide. It was given by Tomas, my incredibly nerdy-cute tutor, who's also my docente, Spanish for extremely underpaid TA. (Docentes make 350 pesos a month — about $120 — which helps explain why they go on strike so much.)

The Genocide class so far has mostly been general sociology with a focus on the Holocaust, which we're studying as a paradigmatic example of a genocide. Starting next week we'll be relating the Nazis to the government under the dictatorship in Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s. Since all I know about the dictatorship in Argentina is that it existed and that it was, like, bad, I found the tutoría really interesting. I'll give a quick summary of the highlights.

Basically, in the 19th century, Argentina won its independence from Spain and then rebuffed an attack by England to become a moderate power in South America. At some point after that, it joined with Brazil to attack Paraguay, which despite being landlocked was getting uppity. Brazil and Argentina totally destroyed Paraguay, which has been impoverished ever since.

Then Argentina turned its sights on its own indigenous population. The indigenous people of Argentina had never had a very strong presence, since the population was largely made up of nomadic tribes and distant outposts of the Incan Empite. Now they have even less of one, since European descendants took care of them in a massacre charmingly commemorated on the 100 peso bill.

[This is my own interpolation — At one point, there was also a decent population of people of African descent, but in one of the wars I listed above (not sure which one) they were all sent first to the front lines, essentially to get rid of them. It worked. There are now between 3,000 and 5,000 black people in the entire city of Buenos Aires.

Argentines as a whole are extremely proud of their Europeanness, and have a disturbing lack of self-consciousness about the scarcity of people of color of any kind. As a norteamericana raised on a diet of strict political correctness, it's offensive to hear all Asian people called chinos and to hear about how Bolivians are dirty. And yet any Argentine you speak to will swear up and down that Argentina is one of the most open-minded countries there is.]

Anyway, back to Tomas. Around 1900, there was a huge influx of immigrants from Europe who came to hacer la America, not really differentiating between North and South or New York and Buenos Aires. There's still such a large population of recent Spanish and Italian immigrants and expats here that politicians from Europe sometimes campaign in Argentina. Tomas told us a joke that an Argentine is someone who: thinks he speaks Spanish, actually speaks Italian, wants to be English, and thinks he's French.

The wave of immigrants, which started out with poorer Italians and Spaniards and spread to include groups from all over Europe, helped define the incredibly complicated politics of the 20th century. As far as I can tell, it was a constant back-and-forth between left-wing socialists and military dictatorships, with a giant chunk in the middle dominated by Juan, Eva, and Isabelita Perón.

Knowing all of this helps me fill in a lot of holes in my understanding of Argentina. First of all, we are currently in the longest period of democracy in Argentina since the beginning of the 20th century, and we're just now entering the 25th year since the end of the last military dictatorship. Also, the three main political players have been the UCR, which is a socialist party, the Peronists, and the military. That helps explain both why the figure of Perón is still so dominant and polemical and why everyone is so obsessed with Marx and social activism.

I still have a ways to go in my understanding of this country. But this is a start.

The Residencia

I´m moving out of the residencia into a host family. It was a pretty spur-of-the-moment decision, and I made it at the last minute. The last day the program allows people to move is May 1, so that´s when I´m going.

I don´t hate the residencia, but I´m tired of it. It has a lot of silly rules, and sometimes it feels like the people who work there keep adding new ones just to make our lives more difficult. My room is pretty sterile since we´re not allowed to hang things on the walls, and there´s no real place to do work. That´s mostly my fault, since I could work at my desk if it weren´t completely covered in papers and dirty coffee mugs. But it´s also the only place to throw stuff if I don´t feel like putting it in boxes and folders, which I mostly just don´t. We´re not allowed to have guests in our rooms ever and in the building at all after 10:00.

These are all minor annoyances. The real problem is the food, which is a constant struggle. At the beginning of the month, we get 30 meal tickets for breakfast and 30 for lunch or dinner. Breakfast is fine. There are several options, and I usually get cafe cortado, a piece of fruit, and scrambled eggs with a little roll. We used to be able to get dulce de leche or queso untable to spread on the roll, but now it only comes with the toast option. We have to pay extra for it otherwise.

The other meal changes every day. On days that it´s good (salad with tuna fish, beef stew, potato-and-egg torta) there´s no problem. On days that it´s gross (hot dogs with fried eggs, fried beef with french fries) we can choose from three other options: chicken with salad, beef with salad, or pasta. I get the chicken, since I don´t like white pasta and the beef is almost inedible. But sometimes that means I have chicken for lunch and dinner two days in a row.

I tried talking to the owner of the residencia to get salad with tuna fish added to the daily options, and he told me it was too expensive. I pointed out that switching canned tuna for chicken couldn´t possibly cost that much, and he told me I didn´t understand inflation. Now he hates me, which is fine, because I don´t like him very much either. We can no longer get butter for the rolls that come with dinner without paying extra for it.

We´re also not allowed to keep any food in our rooms (although I do anyway) and the wireless internet that broke after the first week still hasn´t been fixed. I have to go downstairs to the computer room whenever I want to go online.

Reading over what I´ve written, it sounds whiny, and in all honesty it´s not that bad. The residencia was perfect for the first month. I was lonely and overwhelmed and I could walk outside and find someone else lonely and overwhelmed to talk to. But I miss my privacy, and I´m excited to have a kitchen. I don´t know what the family is going to be like, but I´ll find out soon enough.

The Humo

A few days ago, I woke up in the middle of the night with a dry, painful throat, a throbbing head and a queasy stomach. I was still half asleep, and I started to panic. At three in the morning, it seemed like a reasonable question: Has an entire city just died of smoke inhalation before?

The next morning I realized I was probably overreacting, but only by a little bit. The view out the window of the residencia dining hall right now looks a little bit like the view outside the window of our house in San Francisco in August. The apartment across the street looks washed out and almost blurry, like I'm looking at it through a cloud.

Which I am, basically. For the past four days, Buenos Aires has been covered in a massive, suffocating cloud of smoke so thick it's been causing accidents on the highways. The smoke comes from the countryside, where every year, farmers start fires to clear their fields. This year they got out of control.

I've heard several different reasons for why the smoke is so bad this year. The government is blaming the campo (translated as countryside, but used to mean farmers), saying that the fires are a form of protest since the paro didn't work. The campo, in turn, is blaming the government. They say the government started the fires to blame them on the farmers to make porteños less sympathetic to their cause. And then there are the natural explanations, which are probably at least partially true — the winds this year blew the smoke into the city with particular force and effectiveness, and there's no rain to wash it away.

I asked my tutor yesterday if the humo was normal. She said not really, but that strange things happen so often in Argentina that normal doesn't really mean anything at this point. Last week the whole city smelled like burnt garbage, because someone at the municipal dump decided it would be a good idea to try incinerating trash instead of burying it. The week before that (and the week before that) there was no meat, anywhere.

I just pretty much accept everything as an EC, but when I step back and think about it, it's just bizarre. It doesn't help that the smoke makes me think slower. Sometimes I feel like I'm dreaming.

I'm going out of town on Thursday, so I just have to make it until then without dropping dead of spontaneous lung cancer. Meanwhile, the government will blame the campo, the campo will blame the government, and we'll wait for the wind to change.

UBA and activism

On Tuesday the lecturer in my Genocides teórico ended class 45 minutes early. He gave students two options: leave, or stay and debate the role students and professors at UBA should play in national politics.

I expected everyone to leave, except for maybe a few weirdoes who wanted to hear themselves talk. It was 9 o’clock at night, and in Argentina students don’t even go to university full-time. Why should they waste their time in class when they could be on their way home to their families, or out to dinner with friends, or clocking a few extra hours at work?

But everyone stayed. For the next hour the 70 or so students in the class discussed everything from whether UBA should help the Argentine government monitor newspapers during times of crisis to how to persuade the University to fix the elevators in the Social Sciences building. The professor looked on from the back of the classroom as people took turns making arguments and responding to each other’s points.

Meanwhile, I sat with another exchange student and tried to get over my amazement for long enough to actually listen. Not everyone was speaking, but even those who didn’t say anything were engaged and paying attention.

In my month so far taking classes at UBA, I’ve learned as much about political and social activism as I have about anything I’ve actually studied in my courses. This is partly because I’ve missed almost as many classes as I’ve had. (My professor was sick or traveling; it was a national holiday; the lecturer’s microphone was broken…)

But a bigger part of it is that activism and protest are central to the culture here. The paro de campo that just ended, for example, had the Americans I know here mystified — how can an entire country just stop producing food? And yet Argentina essentially responded with a collective “Oh, damn. Not this again.” Today my professor was a half an hour late to my FLACSO class because of traffic jams tied to a strike by bus drivers.

The activism is even more pronounced at UBA. I never have a class that isn’t interrupted by a student group making an announcement for a march, a debate or an impending strike. The walls of the buildings are covered with posters that range from fliers advertising a discussion about Argentina’s role in the world economy to hand-painted signs calling for a revolution of the proletariat.

But one of the things my class on Tuesday discussed is whether or not the activism is effective. Students, professors, or teaching assistants at UBA strike at least once a week in one department or another, to the point that a lot of people just roll their eyes and ignore them. Even the paro de campo, while it was impossible to ignore, wasn’t actually successful. Cristina Kirchner, the president, refused to negotiate until the farmers agreed to allow the distribution of food.

I don’t honestly know what I think. I love the activism here, and the political involvement, and just that if there’s something people are unhappy about, they’ll do something to try to change it. But striking is so commonplace that it’s viewed as an annoyance rather than a strong statement.

We didn’t reach any conclusions in my class, either, even though it ran fifteen minutes past the time it was supposed to end. We’re continuing next week, so I'll see what people say then.

The Experiencia Cultural

Now that I'm in classes, I'm starting to develop a routine, and I feel comfortable in my neighborhood and around school. I know where to go to get hair elastics and that kioscos stop selling wine and beer at 11:00 at night. (And really, what else do you need to know?) I carry toilet paper and hand sanitizer with me everywhere, because I know better than to expect actual hygienic products in public bathrooms. And I know how to prepare a drinkable mate, a phenomenally complicated process for a different post.

But living in a foreign country involves accepting the unexpected. Things that seem like they should be simple are often overwhelmingly complicated, and things that should be mundane turn out to be transcendent. My friends and I have coined the catch-all word EC (short for experiencia cultural) for whenever something turns out surprisingly — either badly or well.

A good example of an EC is when my friends and I decided to make chocolate chip cookies at our friend Veronica's house. In the United States, it's pretty much as simple as buying a bag of Tollhouse chocolate chips and following the recipe on the back of the bag. Not so much here.

For starters, there's no such thing as chocolate chips in Argentina. Or brown sugar. We spent about an hour in the grocery store finding ingredients before we could start baking. (Bicarbonato de sodio = baking soda. Makes sense, but only after you know it.) There were no chocolate chips, so we just hammered a couple of chocolate bars into pieces, and we substituted some weird thick honey for the molasses that the recipe we were using had substituted for brown sugar.

Then, when we went to bake the batter, we realized that — like everyone here — Veronica's family has a gas oven. None of us knew how to light it, so we ended up baking half the cookies in a brownie pan in the toaster oven and cooking the other half on a griddle like pancakes. (Molly's idea, which I made fun of, but they were actually delicious.)

I ate so many cookies that night I didn't have room for actual dinner, and it was fun, but it was definitely an EC. The EC is a key concept for living abroad, because it makes everything better. The glare I got from a shopkeeper this morning for having the gall not to have exact change — an EC. Sitting on a street corner at 4.45 and waiting for the subte to open at 5 after a night of clubbing — an EC. Drinking a 95-cent bottle of wine on the curb in front of a ferreteria as a police car cruises by — an EC. (A ferreteria, incidentally, sells electronics, not ferrets.) Essentially everything about UBA — an EC.

I felt like I had to blog about the EC because it's going to come up again. That's one of the few things I can be sure of.

Fútbol

For the last three Thursday nights, I've been playing soccer with a group of American and Argentine students in a game organized by FLACSO. I'm terrible, and possibly getting worse, but it's fun. No one really seems to care that I don't know what I'm doing.

The games are organized and paid for through FLACSO, but the group is usually about half Americans and half porteños. It's led by Martin, a tiny Argentine man (probably about 5'5'', maybe 140 pounds) with a hoop in one ear and a big black beard. He looks a little like a miniature pirate, but with incredible soccer skills. I think most of the Argentines who come play are his friends, but I'm not really sure. They just kind of show up.

We play in a huge indoor soccer complex called Open Gallo that takes up an entire city block. It has about 10 mini-fields, which are filled until at least midnight with dozens of Argentine men, and not a single woman. Fútbol is by far the most popular sport in Argentina, but like American football in the U.S., it's a guys' sport. Argentine girls just don't play. My roommate thinks I'm hilarious, and most men are just alarmed at the idea of a girl with a soccer ball.

For the most part, though, the Argentines we play with (all guys) are pretty unconcerned by the presence of girls. I think they just chalk it up to our American weirdness. The girls who are good get the ball passed to them a lot — more than the guys, sometimes. Even the terrible ones, like me, aren't totally ignored.

Last week, though, I volunteered to play goalie, and without realizing it committed a horrible faux pas. The guys on my team had been rotating in and out of the goal for the entire game, and I decided I wanted to try, since essentially the only thing I can do anyway is hurl myself in front of the ball and tackle people anyway (thanks to rugby). But when I went to stand in the goal, the Argentine guys freaked out, saying they couldn't possibly shoot on me.

Martin waved them away, and I ended up being a decent goalie — not because I actually stopped anything, but because no one wanted to kick the ball too hard at me. I haven't volunteered again. I appreciate the fact that the guys are open to girls playing at all, and I don't want to traumatize them too badly.

I'm pretty sure I'm not the first person to have come to this conclusion, but fútbol is a good way to hang out with people you don't know very well without any awkwardness. I haven't actually really talked to any of the Argentines outside calling for the ball, but that's the next step.

The Subte

I have a theory that subways can tell you a lot about the city they belong to. (Actually, this may be less of a theory than a truism. Anyway.) New York: dirty and crowded, but it gets the job done. London: Spotless to the point of being antiseptic, ruthlessly efficient, and yet somehow charming and almost quaint — all neatly encompassed in the phrase “Mind the gap.” Washington, D.C.: Poorly run and disturbingly segregated, but still my favorite. San Francisco: Just weird. It’s a subway and a tram at the same time. And there are no maps. If you have to ask, you don’t get it, are probably an Easterner, and might even vote Republican.

The Buenos Aires subway, like the city itself, artfully treads the line between the first and third worlds. Of course, even having a subway system is a sign of affluence. But the subway system (or subte) is incredibly badly designed — all the lines are essentially parallel to each other, and meet only at the Plaza de Mayo at the far east side of the city. You can easily spend an hour on the train to get ten blocks north or south.

The part that was the strangest for me at first is the peddlers that walk from car to car handing out little knickknacks — cheap pens, or coloring books, or lighters — to everyone who will take them, and sometimes even to the people who wave them away. The first time someone gave me a cell phone card I thought it was a present. But then the peddlers return and take back whatever they handed out, unless you pay them, which as far as I can tell no one ever does. I barely notice anymore when someone places a highlighter on my lap and then takes it away a few minutes later.

Subte cars get elbow-in-the-face crowded and swelteringly hot during rush hour, which seems to last somewhere between 8:00 am and 1:00 pm for the morning and 3:00 pm and 9:00 pm for the evening. The last train runs somewhere between 10:30 and 11:00 at night, stranding anyone eating dinner out. Sometimes when it rains the trains get flooded and certain stations have to close.

But I use it to get almost everywhere I go. The subte runs regularly every five minutes or so all day, and rarely breaks down. Despite the awkward layout of the lines, trains go incredibly quickly, and as long as don’t have to switch to a different line I can get from one side of the city to another in half an hour flat. Every station is equipped with television screens that show SubTV, a channel that shows the frequency of trains on each line in a ticker tape across the bottom, and alert you to any delays or breakdowns. (The top part of the screen shows random clips about tango or girls running around in bikinis, along with about five commercials that play repeatedly — all of which I have memorized.) Unlike the buses, you pay for the subte with magnetic cards, not coins, so the moneda shortage isn’t an issue. It only costs 30 cents — 90 centavos — no matter where you’re going.

The extensive bus system is an alternative form of public transportation, but it confuses me so much that I try to avoid it at all costs. Figuring out which bus (or colectivo, or bondi) to take is a multi-step process that even native porteños don’t really have down.

(A simplified explanation: Everyone in the city has a Guia T, a novella-sized booklet sold in kioscos that contains the routes of the several hundred bus lines that crisscross the city. You have to use the Guia T to look up the address of where you are, which points you to a page with a map on it, which is divided into little squares that contain numbers of the all buses that pass through your particular square. Then you look up the address of where you want to go and try to find a number bus that passes through both of the little squares. Once you’ve done that, you have to figure out in which direction you want to take the bus by reading all the stops in the back of the book, which if you’re lucky also tells you on which street the bus will stop. Basically, I don’t get it.)

Being able to navigate public transportation is one of the few concrete things that always makes me feel comfortable in a new city. I’m only halfway there here, but it’s fun figuring things out.

Procrastination

I’m starting to feel like I’m actually in school, even though I haven’t touched a book since Wednesday morning. The beginning of my week is front-loaded with 13 hours of class on Monday and Tuesday — including both of my UBA classes — and by the time I get out of Genocidas (Tuesday nights at 11) I can barely walk in a straight line.

I had a minor crisis Friday when I thought I was going to have to drop one class and start taking another one three weeks late, but it ended up working out. My course schedule is signed and submitted, so shopping period is over.

That said, I’ve only been to one of my Literatura Latinoamericana II lectures, and there isn’t one this Monday either because the professor has a talk to give somewhere else. The first week the microphone was broken, and the second week was a national holiday to commemorate the anniversary of the military coup. Last week there was a paro, or strike, of UBA professors, so I didn’t know until class actually started whether or not it was going to happen — and neither did anyone else.

Apparently this is relatively common. The organization of UBA professors goes on strike frequently, and it’s up to each individual teacher if and when they join. Our professor explained last Monday that she supported the goals of the strike, but that we did need to have class at some point.

The class was, above all else, long. Because there’s no campus system here, and most of the students work in addition to attending university, classes tend to be late at night and all at once to minimize time spent traveling. On Monday I go to the Filo y Letras building, an hour subte ride from the residencia, for my Literatura Latinoamericana II class. At one I have a practico, which is the equivalent of a section — about 10 students and an assistant professor, with an emphasis on class discussion. After the practico, I have a two-hour break before the teorico starts at five. Tuesdays I have my Genocidas teorico from seven nine at night, and the practico from nine to 11.

The teoricos are pretty much like a Yale lecture, although the professors editorialize more. They take the liberal part of the liberal arts education seriously. The practicos are basically sections, where we split off into smaller groups led by assistant professors — what we would call TAs.

I would write more, but I’ve successfully procrastinated since I woke up this morning, and this was supposed to be my “get shit done” day. (Granted, waking up at three pm was probably not the smartest way to get started.) But now I really do have to work.

Meatless in the Land of Steak

I've developed the habit of walking around in grocery stores when I'm stressed. I don't necessarily even buy anything — usually just an apple and a Diet Coke, or a container of queso cremoso (a delicious processed spread that tastes like a cross between runny cream cheese and Laughing Cow cheese wedges). But it's just enough like home that it generally calms me down.

The bigger stores are set up like any grocery store in the United States, with produce, meat and dairy around the edges and processed food in aisles in the center. The food itself is different in tiny, telling ways that never cease to fascinate me. Fruit and vegetables tend to all be grown in Argentina, so there are a lot of apples and almost no berries. (It's the beginning of fall here.) It makes me realize how much I'm used to being able to get imported fruit in any season from anywhere. Also, even the tiniest stores almost always have an entire aisle devoted to yerba mate tea leaves in dozens of varieties and flavors, and at least 10 different brands of dulce de leche. Raisins are sold with the seeds still in them, and milk is sold unrefrigerated in boxes and bags. Also, no one refrigerates eggs.

And, right now, the meat aisles in every grocery store I've been to in the last week — somewhere around five — are completely out of meat. The refrigerated meat cases are all empty, usually with white sheets over them, like furniture in an abandoned house. Sometimes there's a package or two of week-old chicken or some sausages, but most often there's just nothing.

The reason for the lack of meat is that today is the 19th day of the paro del campo, which translates literally to "strike of the countryside." For the last two and a half weeks, Argentine farmers have stopped selling food to protest an increase in export taxes. (There is no real conceptual translation into English, because the idea that every farmer in the entire country would just stop producing food is pretty inconceivable in the United States.)

To be completely honest, I don't exactly understand what's going on. But the highways all over Argentina are blocked to keep any strike-breakers from transporting food secretly, and there are daily marches throughout the country — including on the street outside the residencia — complete with banners and people banging plastic drums. I think most producers of agricultural products are participating in the strike, and the meat is just the first to run out because it has such a short shelf life. I went to find milk yesterday and I couldn't, so that might be the next to go. The newspapers are filled with pictures of rotting piles of fruit and vegetables, and I've heard that flour and soy are also being blocked.

No one seems to know how long the strike is going to last. The president, Cristina, has made several public speeches announcing her refusal to negotiate with the striking farmers, which of course made them reiterate their determination to hold out for as long as it takes. In theory, I'm in support of the right to strike, but I hope this is over soon. For one thing, sources of protein are rapidly drying up. (Nicky, when you stop hating me, you can appreciate the severity of the impending crisis!) And more importantly, grocery stores are my therapy right now.

UBA: The Beginning

Yesterday I got official approval for my course schedule from the Yale study abroad office. (Once again, fantastically unhelpful — the e-mail from my study abroad advisor said something like, “Yeah, I guess those classes look fine, or whatever.” I really hope the credits actually transfer.) Anyway, that means my classes are essentially set.

My schedule is split down the middle, with two easy and boring classes and two that are hard and interesting. The easy-boring ones are a Spanish-language speaking workshop and an Argentine literature course at FLACSO. (The literature class itself is actually pretty good, but it’s all CIEE kids. I’m not all that excited about going all the way to Argentina to take a class with Americans).

The hard-interesting ones are both at UBA, a massive jumble of a university that I am completely, stupidly in love with. One of the classes, Analisis de las practicas sociales genocidas, is in the social sciences school, and the other, Literatura Latinoamericana II, is at Filosofia y Letras (affectionately known as Filo y Letras), the school of humanities.

My UBA classes are in two different buildings with distinct personalities but a shared atmosphere of bohemian intellectualism. (UBA is scattered in different buildings all around the city — the social sciences school alone has four different facilities). The social sciences school, which is close to the residencia, is in a hot, crowded four-story building. Getting to class involves pushing through the students gathered around the front door smoking cigarettes, waving away the handfuls of fliers announcing protests for everything imaginable that get thrust at me when you walk into the entrance hall, and walking three stories up a staircase papered with handmade posters announcing more protests. The staircase gets so crowded with other students that the traffic sometimes stops dead.

Most of the desks in my Genocidas classroom are broken, and the professor is fifteen minutes late without exception. The walls are covered in graffiti dominated by anarchy symbols, liberal political slogans, and stenciled rats whose significance I still haven’t figured out. There's a bathroom right outside, but there’s never any toilet paper, and three out of five of the stalls don’t have doors. Of the two that do, one of them doesn’t stay shut, so you have to get someone waiting in line to hold it for you.

The Filo y Letras building is similar, but bigger. It’s on the outskirts of the city, an hour-long subte ride from where I live. The walls have slightly less graffiti than at the social sciences building, but just as many posters and fliers. On the first floor a makeshift marketplace, where people sell cookies, coffee poured from thermoses, and books, lines the hallway outside the classrooms. I can’t tell if the vendors are regulated by the school or if they just show up and claim a spot. I’ve already learned to wear as few clothes as possible to class, since the combination of massive crowds and no air conditioning makes the classrooms feel like D.C. in August.

It sounds kind of awful. But somehow, even though it's totally overwhelming, I always leave UBA feeling excited and energized. The students are all really political and overtly intellectual. The dirty bathrooms and flaking plaster on the walls don’t feel gross — it’s just that no one has time to worry about mundane concerns like toilets and paint when they’re debating the possibility of representation through literature.

I haven’t even talked about the classes yet, partly because I haven’t been to enough to really get a handle on what they’re like. To be continued once I stop gaping at everything going on around me for long enough to actually pay attention.

Eating and Sleeping in Uruguay

Got back at around 8:30 this morning from a spring break trip to Uruguay. (Never mind that I’ve only been in school for two days.)

On Wednesday night, Reva, Rona, Melinda, Daniel, Ashley and I got to the bus station at 10:30 for an 11:30 bus. It was chaos — hot, confusing, and so crowded it was hard to walk from one end of the terminal to the other. Since yesterday was Easter, most Argentines get Thursday, Friday and today off work, and everyone travels.

But by about 12:30, it became clear that part of the reason for the chaos was that all the buses were late. Not only was there no sign of our bus, there was also no indication of when it would get there. The woman at the ticket counter couldn’t tell us which gate the bus would leave from or guess whether it would arrive at the station in half an hour or two hours.

When the bus finally came at around 2:30, I had half-convinced myself we would play cards on the floor of the bus station until the morning and then go home. The ride itself was uneventful, and I slept the whole way.

Thursday five of us stayed in Montevideo, while Ashley went to her father’s summer house in the town of Jauriguiberry. Ashley’s family is Uruguyan, and while she lives in Connecticut with her mom, her dad lives in Uruguay. On Friday we joined her.

Jauriguiberry is a tiny town on the Uruguayan coast with a beautiful white-sand beach, two almacenes, the “Yacht Club” (a dive-y bar with two pool tables and lots of whiskey), and not much else. Ashley’s father, his girlfriend and her daughter live in a one-story, six-bedroom house two minutes off the main road (dirt, like all of the roads there). Next to the house is an open-air kitchen and dining area.

Including us, there were 16 people — and three dogs — at lunch on the day we got there. Some of Ashley’s aunts and uncles had stopped by to visit, and her family also had guests spending the weekend. Ashley’s dad’s girlfriend cooked canelones, a traditional dish in Uruguay and Argentina made of some sort of stuffing (in this case, choclo and ham in a white sauce) rolled in a flour-and-egg wrapper. They’re something like a cross between Italian cannelloni and enchiladas. They were delicious.

Saturday we left Jauriguiberry and went to Punta del Este, where Ashley’s mom has a beach house. The city of Punta is the Uruguayan equivalent of a Florida resort town, with dozens of high-rises lining the beach and a main street crammed with casinos and shops selling bathing suits that cost more than our entire trip. Ashley’s house is about 20 minutes outside of the center of town, on a quiet street off the main highway.

That night we had an asado, or barbecue, with ribs, steak, chorizo, eggplant, onions, zucchini and red peppers stuffed with eggs, all grilled slowly over the coals of an outside asado. Ashley manned the grill for two solid hours. She might have looked funny (she’s a five-foot, hundred-pound girl with three tattoos, a nose ring and a brand-new lip piercing), but she did an amazing job.

All six of us ate, as Ashley said, until we felt sick, and then we ate some more. It was easily one of the best meals I’ve ever had. Partway through dinner, Ashley’s cousin came over with some of her friends. Even though we were so busy stuffing our faces we completely ignored all the guests, more people came, until there were probably about 20 or 30 people. The plan was to have drinks at Ashley’s house and then go out dancing, but somehow we never moved past the having drinks part. Other than one guy who tried to start a rigged game of strip poker and then gave up and stuck a banana down his pants (which someone subsequently ate for breakfast), everyone was really friendly, interesting and easy to talk to.

I went to bed at 6 and slept until noon. Yesterday, I ate ice cream for breakfast, went to the beach and fell asleep again on the sand. It was basically the perfect weekend.

Shock Cultural

Before I came to Argentina, I got advice on what to expect from a million sources, and most of it was the same. From the guidebooks: Be prepared to eat lots of red meat. Expect piropos. Dinner doesn't start until 9 pm at the earliest. From former study-abroad students: UBA is a glorious, disorganized mess. Everyone has a mullet. Argentine women are skinny as hell.

All of these things have proven to be true. But in addition, I've run into other things that no one mentioned, little quirks of Argentine culture that people take for granted here. Here they are, before I forget that they're not what I think of as normal.

Coins — A national change shortage has led everyone to hoard coins. The bondis, or buses, only accept coins, so people need them to get around, but there just aren't enough. (Daniel said he read in the Economist that the bus company is actually manufacturing the shortage so they can resell coins to shop owners at a markup.) At stores, cashiers will ask you for exact change, and when you don't have it they give you a dirty look before handing over the 50 precious centavos they owe you from your 2 peso note.

Air Conditioners — Most people have external air conditioning units on the fronts of their apartments. They drip onto the sidewalk, so for the first week or so I was here I thought it was constantly raining. Then Molly told me that the dogs in her host family pee off the balcony. Now I'm never sure if it's condensation from the air conditioning or dog urine dripping constantly in my hair.

Beer — Beer is served almost exclusively in one-liter bottles. It's possible to get it in a 330 ccl-size, but when you order it, the waiter always looks at you like you're a hopeless lightweight.

Coffee — There's no such thing as coffee on the run here. Everyone drinks it, all the time, but it's treated as a sit-down mini-meal, usually in the late afternoon, to tide you over to dinner at 9. Cafe, the standard drink, is actually what we think of as espresso. It comes in a doll-sized cup, always with a shot glass of seltzer water and some tiny cookies or a piece of a pastry. The few occasions I've managed to find that sell coffee in paper cups to go (at McDonald's and a few other chains), it's served on a tray, and you're clearly expected to drink it at the restaurant anyway.

Cell Phones — While it's possible here to get monthly or yearly plans like people have in the United States, another popular option is to just buy a cell phone and pay for minutes with prepaid phone cards in units of 10, 15, and 20 pesos. Since you can't get a monthly contract that lasts less than a year, I'm using the prepaid option. Phone calls are incredibly expensive — I don't know how expensive, exactly, but it's easy to run through a 20 peso card in three or four conversations — so everyone communicates by text messages. I sometimes send and recieve 20 or more text messages in a day. I have to really like someone (or really need to talk to them) before I actually call.

Kioscos — A kiosco is kind of like a cross between a 7-11, a CVS, and that car in the second Harry Potter book that's enchanted so that it can comfortably fit about 20 people and all their luggage. From the outside, they look like glorified vending machines, with a window facing the street where you can order a soda or buy a candy bar from the ones on display. (Some of the bigger ones also have a section inside with computers connected to the internet or a place to make photocopies.) But the person in the window has a magical ability to produce almost anything you ask for, from a $2 bottle of wine to toilet paper to prepaid cell phone cards to coffee. A friend told me about how she asked a man at a kiosco where she should go to buy blank CDs, only to have him pull one out from behind the counter.

There are a million other strange little things that I'm just beginning to accept as mundane, but these are the ones that came to mind. In a few hours, I'm getting on the bus to Uruguay, which doubtless will have even more unexpected customs to confound me.