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.