My Argentine Nights

Dad sent me a link this morning to the New York Times article on how cool Buenos Aires nightlife is. It was well-timed. Last night I went out clubbing with Daniel, Molly, and Karen, and didn't get back until 6 am. (Actually, I think it was 5 am, because clocks moved back an hour, but even so, it was a lifetime record.) When I don't eat until 11:30 and hit my first bar at 2, it's easy to look at my watch in the middle of dancing and realize that, if I were in San Francisco, I would be waking up pretty soon.

Nightclubs here, called boliches, are inexpensive, lavish and enormous, but somehow less intimidating than the handful I've been to in the United States. Nothing really gets started until after 1 or 2 am, and things reach their peak at 4 or 5 in the morning. Most of them have entrance fees around 30 pesos, or 10 USD, but if you get on the lista (a process that I don't really understand involving submitting your e-mail address via the club's website) then you can get in for free before 2.

The club I went to last night, called Amerika, is either a gay-friendly straight establishment or a straight-friendly gay establishment, depending on who you ask. It cost 40 pesos to get in, but there was a canilla libre, or open bar, with all the cheap, grenadine-spiked champagne you could drink. And, even more exciting, free bottles of water. (Again, Dad, this might not be a Grandma entry.)

Before we went to Amerika, we met one of Daniel's friends at a gay bar, where Molly, Karen, and I probably made up half the women in the crowded room and the ladies' room was deserted. Amerika was a far more diverse crowd — maybe about 50-50 gay-straight. (I could be totally off, since I generally have a terrible gaydar in the US, and it's way worse here.) There was also a solid showing of drag queens in various stages of hormone therapy.

The dance floor is in the center of the ground floor of the club, with a table in the middle and giant screens all around. The screens alternated between flashing the name of the DJ, the words "Desperate Houselovers," and a movie of a bodybuilder flexing. Nicky would have been thoroughly alarmed. I loved it — mostly because I kept imagining his reaction.

To either side of the biggest screen, two minimally-clad dancers wriggled around on little balconies. Women in bikinis on the left, and men in thongs on the right. The club also had a second floor made up of interlocking balconies, with another dance floor, a lounge area with couches, and — my personal favorite — a long, dark passageway where people go to hook up. (Don't worry, Mom and Dad. I walked through that area quickly.)

The cumulative effect was one of an exuberant bacchanalia, but the fun thing about Argentine boliches is that you can control your level of engagement pretty easily. I spent a fair amount of time sitting on a couch on the balcony and people-watching. I danced a little with Molly and Karen, but by the time we left the dance floor was just really getting going.

I woke up this morning far too early with a sore throat from talking over the music and the uncomfortable feeling that I was going deaf in one ear. The club scene is a little too intense for me to partake in all that often. (Although, come to think about it, I was out until 4 on Thursday.) But I think I can say with some authority that (to quote the Times) the "behemoth gay discos" really do keep people up till sunrise.

Kosher McNificas and Water Chicken

I didn't have any classes to fall asleep in yesterday, so I went to the Recoleta Cemetery with Molly, Daniel, and Michael (3/4 of the group I went to Rosario with).

The cemetery is like a mini-city enclosed in a walled-off block in the ritzy neighborhood of Recoleta. It's filled with hundreds of stone and marble masoleums arranged in rows, with passages through them like roads. The main areas are clogged with tourists, but things get deserted pretty quickly. Since the recession a lot of once-wealthy families have lost all their money, and while some of the masoleums are still kept up, others look like they haven't been touched in years. The glass in the windows is broken, layers of spiderwebs cover the locks, and plaster flakes from the ceiling inside. The effect is excellently creepy.

After the cemetery Molly and I went to the Abasto shopping (the Argentine word for mall) to eat at the Kosher McDonald's there. We met Karen there, the other 1/4 of the Rosario group. All three of us are extremely Gentile.

One of no less than seven McDonald's in the mall, the Kosher McDonald's is also the only kosher one outside of Israel. No cheeseburgers, obviously, and presumably the fries aren't fried in weird beef fat like the ones at a regular McDonald's. Other than that, and the profusion of yarmulkes, it seemed pretty standard.

(That's right, Nicky. I ate at a McDonald's. It's okay, though. I felt appropriately guilty.)

Last night I went over to Molly's cousin's house, where I ate some more. Sometimes I think all I do here is eat and sleep. Not that I'm complaining.

Dinner started off with wine and a plate of cheese, olives and sausage. Then it continued with more wine, grilled chorizo, plantains, salad with cheese and avocado, rice, chimichurri, zucchini salsa, and water chicken, a recipe that Molly's cousin proudly told us involves putting a chicken in a dish with water and cooking it until you remember that it's in the oven. It was slightly more complicated than that, since he also cut up an apple and an onion and put them around the chicken, and covered everything with honey and soy sauce. It's something I definitely have to try myself when I get back to a kitchen. Molly and I volunteered to help in the cooking and apparently destroyed the plantains by flattening them before we fried them, but they tasted fine to me. I ate two helpings of everything.

No, Konex isn´t a Tampon Brand

Woke up way too early today for my first class (Argentine Literature) at la UCA, the private Catholic University in Buenos Aires. When my alarm went off at 6.30 it was still pitch-black outside, thanks to the accidental daylight-savings time being observed in Argentina this year. (I totally don´t understand that. How can an entire country accidentally decide to set its clocks forward an hour? I think I´m probably missing something.)

Anyway, I´m not going to be taking the class. I wanted to study Argentine literature while I was in Argentina, but I started falling asleep after fifteen minutes. The next hour and a quarter was pretty much torture. I´m not usually a sleeper, especially on the first day of class, but I definitely woke myself up more than once when my head jerked down.

The boringness is actually kind of a good thing. I really didn´t want an early class on Tuesday mornings after last night. I went to a drum concert at Konex, a cultural center in the Almagro neighborhood, which happens every Monday night. I plan to become a regular.

Melissa, a girl at the residencia, needed someone to go with her to the concert. She was meeting a guy whose number she had gotten at a club over the weekend, along with a few kids from FLACSO. I agreed to go with her for lack of anything better to do. It was a good decision. We got there at around 7.30 last night to find hundreds of Argentine twenty-somethings in skinny jeans an mullets hanging out in the street outside. No one seemed like they were in any rush to go in. Michelle and I bought a liter of Quilmes for a dollar and drank it on the street while we waited for the FLACSO people and watched the crowd. Most people were sitting on the sidewalk, talking and smoking cigarettes. The women were all impossibly thin, with sideswept bangs and torn leather sandals. The men had long hair and day-old beards, and looked like they probably kept a copy of Marx on them at all times.

Eventually, we went inside. The cultural center is in a converted factory. For the concert, everyone stood in packed courtyard surrounded by old industrial warehouses, listening to about 10 drummers on an elevated stage in the center. The atmosphere was relaxed and mellow, and it reeked of pot. After about an hour, a trumpet joined in the music, but mostly it was just the drums.

The concert cheered me up about Buenos Aires in general, which I needed. I found out yesterday morning that I can´t go to Patagonia if I want to take Filosofia y Letras classes at la UBA. BUt things look better this morning. I just hope my second class of the day, Contemporary Spanish Literature, is more interesting than the first.

The Second Stage

When we first got here, the program coordinators told us that, like grief, study abroad has several stages. In the first ¨Luna de Miel¨stage everything is new and exciting and perfect. In the second stage everything is impossibly foreign and you start to hate the world.

I think I might be entering the second stage. This weekend had its highlights, but overall it was frustrating and strangly exhausting. Friday I went to a Chabad dinner with some girls from the residencia. The rabbi who spoke was from New York, and even though he was speaking Spanish and had a beard down almost to his belly button, it was easy to picture him walking down the streets of Manhattan. Prayers took two hours, and then dinner took two more.

It was my first Chabad, and I liked it, but my migraine came back partway through (I think because there was nothing to drink with dinner) and by the time it was over I just wanted to sleep.

Saturday during the day I went to a park with the same group of people. We drank wine and ate cheese on the grass until it started raining. Then we sat in a tree to escape the rain and talked. It was definitely the best part of the weekend. That night, though, a big group from the residencia tried to go out to a boliche to go dancing, and all 40 of us got turned away at the door. I went with a few girls to get gelato in an effort to rescue the night, but I got a gross flavor and still ended up grumpy.

And the little frustrations keep building up. I don´t start classes until tomorrow, so when I woke up this morning, I was planning to go to the suburb of Tigre for a day trip. Then I looked once more at my class schedule and realized that I´m taking two classes on opposite sides of the city at exactly the same time. Right now I´m at FLACSO trying to change that. But no one gets to work until 11, apparently -- except for the program director´s assistant, who just told me there´s probably nothing I can do.

Here´s hoping the second stage passes and I can move onto the third: the humor stage.

The Wisdom of the Argentine Youth

Orientation is finally over. Parts of it were helpful, but overall it was a phenomenal waste of time. Yesterday's "Workshop on the Youth of Argentina" was especially useless, although it did have some redeeming comic value. Some of the gems imparted to us clueless Americans are:

1) Don't be afraid of dancing with an Argentine boy in a club. It does not necessarily mean you're expected to have sex with him, marry him, and have his babies.
2) Don't be afraid of catcalls. They aren't always a prelude to a physical attack.
3) Don't be afraid of making friends with boys. Boys and girls can be friends! Even in Argentina!
4) Argentine women are just as independent as Argentine men. Some of them even have jobs and boyfriends at the same time!
5) Don't be afraid to say no to sex.

Apparently, Argentines think Americans are afraid of anything related to sex. Not that that assumption is entirely unfounded. But really. It was like a dumbed-down version of seventh-grade sex education with Ms. Knapp.

(By the way, Dad, this might not be an entry that you want to send to Grandma.)

Last night after the workshop FLACSO funded a "cultural outing" to a bar near the residencia for hands-on application of the lessons learned. I'm still not clear on the cultural aspects of lots of free beer, gross pizza and conversations in English with other Americans. But it was fun. And thanks to the workshop, I wasn't afraid to dance with Argentine boys.

I didn't dance with Argentine boys, but it was because I was playing flip cup with Americans, not because I was afraid.

Classes (Yuck)

I´m trying to decide what classes to take. The classes at UBA, the big public university, are supposed to be insanely hard (tons of reading, grades that change depending on the professor´s mood), but they look the most interesting.

So should I take Twentieth Century Literature or Latin American Literature II? Or go really crazy and take Folklore? Will I get into my class on genocide? (And why is it that even here the poli sci classes are completely oversubscribed and impossible to take if you´re not in the major?) These are the questions that have been keeping me up at night. No, really.

I´m also taking a class on Argentine Literature at the Catholic school, which is not as good as UBA but much easier. I don´t actually want to kill myself with work.

"Hitler Died in Argentina"

Saturday we spent wandering around Rosario. It’s somewhere between a small city and a large town, but it felt tiny after Buenos Aires. It was disarming to be able to walk literally everywhere in under an hour. (In BsAs an hour will maybe get you to the next neighborhood.)

It rained on and off all day, but we still probably walked about three or four miles. We went to a museum that smelled like mothballs and old furniture that was set up like a 19th-century mansion, and to the apartment building where Che Guevara was born. Refreshingly, there wasn’t even so much as a plaque to identify it.

The highlight of the day was probably the planetarium, where we saw two consecutive shows. The first was called “Las Diferentes Caras de la Luna,” and described how the moon and the sun were forced to end their romance when God placed them on opposite sides of the earth, sending the moon into a depression from which she has never recovered. The second one, about how black holes are formed, was considerably less terrible. I fell asleep in both.

That evening, we went to make reservations at a restaurant we had tried to eat the night before. The five of us walked into the main dining room to ask about dinner. After taking down our names, the owner asked us if we had ever “seen the place.” None of us knew what he meant, but when we said no he offered to give us a tour.

It turns out that the restaurant was in the “Instituto Martin Fierro,” a historical society and museum about the history of Rosario. The owner took us into a back room, where he gave us wine to try and showed us an armadillo skin mounted on the wall, along with gaucho boots made from horse leather that were so old they has started shredding. In the next room he showed us a helmet from the early 1800s, his brother’s helmet from the war over the Falkland Islands, and what he said was General Rosa’s mate cup.

Just when we were recovering from the surprise of going to a restaurant and ending up in a guided tour of a museum, the owner said, “Have any of you ever seen a crocodile?” When we said no, he called two boys from the back of the building. A few minutes later they entered carting a massive dried crocodile skin on their shoulders. Then the owner brought out some “salsa criolla” (a salsa with garlic, olive oil, tomatoes, onions and herbs) for us to eat while we pet the skin.

When we came back a couple of hours later for dinner, the dining room was starting to fill up with people. The owner greeted us like we were his favorite people in the world and snatched away the menu the waitress has placed on our tables. He explained to her that he had us taken care of.

He wasn’t kidding. The meal started with a platter of three different kinds of sausage (including black, squishy blood sausage, which didn’t taste nearly as grotesque as it looked), olives, French fries, cheese and empanadas, served with a Malbec wine that the owner chose himself. It was followed by a green salad and two giant slabs of grilled pork covered in a thin, crispy layer of fat and some salsa criolla.

As we were eating dessert, the music started. The first man who came on sang and played folk songs on his guitar. He was followed by a duo of an older man and a younger boy —I think they were father and son. The boy, whose guitar was covered in Che cutouts, was incredibly good and made me miss Nicky. After their set, someone from the restaurant came onstage and introduced us as the guests of honor, making us go around the table and say where we were all from. Then first man came back and played Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight” in Spanish (“Maravillosa Hoy”) after dedicating it to us.

We finally left after 2 am, having paid $20 each, including tip, for the meal and the concert combined. When we got back to the hotel, the guy behind the desk was waiting to inform us that Hitler died of old age in Argentina in the 1980s.

I didn’t think it was possible, but Rosario makes Buenos Aires feel normal. I might not even know how to order a cup of coffee in this city, but at least here restaurants are restaurants and the people at the front desk of the residencia limit the educational instruction to helping me use the phone.