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.