Bones, Birds and Pots

I have become the good fairy of Argentine shopkeepers. Since arriving in Argentina, I'd picked back up the habit of hoarding monedas (coins), jealously refusing to part with them while shopping, lying when shopkeepers asked me, dutifully but without hope, if I had change. Pretty much all Argentines do this, because you need coins to ride the bus - the machines don't accept bills - and as a result, there's a pretty-much-permanent change shortage, which is partly organic and partly manufactured by the official bus company so they can sell change back to people on the black market at a markup. (Sounds like something out of a DFW-esque dystopia-parody, but that's the Argentina I know and love).

There's a genuine skill to collecting change, a quick calculation with every purchase of exactly what combination of bills and coins will net the desired peso in return. But I've been so effective at change-hoarding that I now have some 20 pesos in coins to get rid of by the time I leave tomorrow afternoon. All day, I've been paying for things in exact change, or sometimes volunteering the extra 50 centavos that will allow a shopkeeper to give me a two-peso bill instead of a handful of change. About half of them get this gleeful-furtive look on their face, not entirely unlike the one vendors wear when they quote a tourist a ridiculous price and the tourist agrees to pay. The other half thank me with a sincerity that's just a little bit more amusing than it is embarrassing. It's pretty much the easiest good deed I've ever done.
 

Recoleta: like this, but creepier.

In addition to my busy schedule distributing coins throughout the city, Nostalgia Tour 2011 continues. Yesterday I met up with some friends I met in Mendoza at the Recoleta cemetery, home to the remains of Eva Peron and various other members of the Argentine elite. The thing about Recoleta is that it's pretty obviously beautiful from pictures. Row after row of masoleums in black and white marble, doors and windows woven with elaborate cast iron bars, ancient locks netted with cobwebs, and sort of terrifyingly unfriendly but well-kempt cats. What I've never gotten a picture to convey is that it's also an incredibly eerie and romantic place, like an Edward Gorey drawing come to life. Some of the masoleums, left to fall into disrepair after the family to whom they belonged died out or ran out of money, are filled with broken glass and crumbling plaster and, occasionally, rotting coffins and hollow bones. Others are immaculate, with photographs and flowers carefully arranged on an embroidered white cloth and sealed behind a window that mirrors the face of anyone trying to peer into the grave.



My pot (corn, squash, cheese) at Pots. You can also see a little of my art.

After Recoleta, I managed to convince everyone to go to Pots, a restaurant a couple of blocks away that we used to frequent while I was studying abroad. (Most people, including the owners and management, call it Cumana. I had to send out an emergency e-mail to my study abroad friends to find out its real name before I could find it again.) It serves mostly cazuelas - little casseroles of meat and squash and corn and potatoes and cheese in various combinations - and every table has a little basket of crayons that you can use to draw on the paper tablemats.

 

What passes for a lobby at Konex.  When I was studying in BsAs, I also saw Rent in Spanish here, and a play for blind people that took place entirely in the dark.


That night, we went to a concert of the precussion group La Bomba del Tiempo. I used to go to their weekly Monday night show back when I was studying in BsAs. There were more foreigners there than I remembered last time - the scene appears to have shifted from mostly Argentines to mostly tourists, as cool things do when they're past their prime. (Cause and effect being, of course, a bit blurred.) But it was still fun.

El Caminito in La Boca.  For reasons I can´t explain, the whole neighborhood is filled with statues that look like the woman in the pink dress and the guy leaning out of the window.  They´re grotesque, and not in a particularly good way.  Other than them, though, it´s pretty sweet.

And today, I actually went to a place I'd never been before, El Caminito in the working-class neighborhood of La Boca. (I wasn't particularly encouraged by Molly, who did go and whose report basically consisted of, "A bird shat on my head and an old man asked me for a lottery number.") La Boca is a neighborhood guidebooks often call colorful, which is usually a euphemism for either artsy or filled with crazy people. In this case, though, it's quite literal; the houses lining El Caminito are painted in blocks of primary colors, so that the whole street looks a little like it was made out of Legos. We wandered from shop to shop and ate lunch - a parrillada complete with all the gross stuff, blood sausage and liver and horrible mealy-chewy intestines - in a sunny courtyard where an old man sang tango music and a bird shat on a friend's head.