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.