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.