Aerosol Urbano

WHAAAT is this, a class for spray-painting? Are you for real?? Porteños (the Argentine people) are so crazy. It was everything i thought it would be--three hours on Saturdays to paint murals on the side of a huge expanse of warehouses set by the train tracks. The teacher is the quintessential Art Man. His speckled overalls and bald head and loud voice and handlebar mustache just make you want to...PAINT SOMETHING. Over the week, our calling is to find an object, a drawing, a photo...something inspired by the poverty of the area to guide our art. We each paint one thing (30 people in the class) over 8 weeks and weave the stories together into one huge mural. Today we primed the warehouses--over dirt, doors, spider webs (and their spiders), flower pots, the flowers in the pots, stairs, junk leaning against the warehouse...everything got a coat of red, yellow, or blue paint. It was a bit like slave labor, haha, but it had to be done. Little toddlers came out to watch us while playing in the garbage, a troop of drummers trickled out of nowhere to play a sweet drum circle--it was one big party. I got paint all over my entire body and favorite shoes and now they are just full of character and look even better than before. People kept peeking out the big sliding metal doors while we were at it, and i thought they were just working in there. But then i saw inside one warehouse that had laundry hanging and a stroller and a bed...i think these are people's homes we are painting. Or random warehouses that people happen to be living in. One way or the other, the energy it brought was welcomed by everyone. It is a great call to brighten this place with few resources and a lot of creativity. Plus it is insane fun.

sola seguidora

Maddy, i love that you are the only follower on my blog and you are living everyday here with me. Now that's friendship haha

Piazzolla

Top ten best nights of my life this weekend--our luck lasted all night long!

So the Tango Festival is in Buenos Aires right now. Prime time to be in BA and see the best tango performances and music the world has to offer. We decided to randomly see one show at 8pm Saturday at El Teatro 25 de Mayo. Tickets were free so when we got there and it was sold out, i wasn't really surprised. We stuck around, however, hoping they might have mercy on us if there was room after the show started. The manager came up to us to see what we had been doing hanging by the door for 30 minutes, and then told us to hop in line. They were letting waves of people in little by little, and we happened to be some of the last to get in. A dramatic tango lament accompanied us up the stairs as we entered the auditorium to see THE BEST live performance i've ever been to in my life. The band was a guitar, a piano, a contra bass, a violin, and a sick accordion--five guys with crazy hair and suits with black V-necks underneath. They played Piazzolla-inspired music (really exciting jazzed-up classical tango. If you haven't checked his stuff out pleeeease do.) Accordion solos and piano solos and rhythmic chats on the side of the guitar were flying all over the place. The music was so complex but SO clear, it was like a perfect painting. Or a really really well organized, gorgeous building that kept you guessing but made you feel like you were part of the making. I was SO HAPPY to be there in that tiny beautiful theater in Buenos Aires with some new friends on a lucky night.

We hadn't noticed we were starving, so the Subte ride to San Telmo seemed eeeterrrnal. "Connecting" subs seems easy but actually just makes you walk the blocks and blocks underground. We wandered for a while under a vague destination, i stepped in one of the bajillion piles of dog crap lining the sidewalks, got really angry for a few minutes, then found a perfectly chill dinner place in the side of a wall. Complete with live music that, again, was sensational. We sat right next to the dish-washers and the waitress had to slip by me every single time she wanted to get to the other half of the restaurant. Ha, the priorities were right: sucky seating, terrible bathrooms, notoriously lackadaisical service, great food, stellar cheap wine, dulce de leche ice cream, and rocking live music. We had a three hour dinner that lasted til 1:00am. I didn't even notice nor care about the time i was so content. Hope you had as great a time on your birthday as i did, Katy!

Was that the end of the night? I can never remember which days are which, they all bleed into each other when the normal going-home time = 6:00am. Or 7. Or 8. Hahaha. I mean we must have gone dancing afterward if it was The Lucky Night.

Uraday

Turns out Uruguay is right across the rio! A three hour cruise on the Buquebus dropped us off in Colonia, the tiniest port town on the Uruguay coast. The hostel was a dream--people from New Zealand, Palonia, Argentina, Holland, England, and Chile were staying there. We made friends with two of the workers right away and they showed us the single three main attractions of Colonial night-life. This included, of course, a karaoke bar where Anneke and i yelled through so many Spanish songs we could hardly speak the next day. We stayed with a girl from London who was traveling the entire world in six months--she was on the last leg of her trip in South America, and we got to hear firsthand the coolest stuff about worldwide train-travel, Tokyo, London schooling, where the best food in the world actually is.... Getting to know friends who work at a hostel is literally one of the best ways to make friends with the world really really fast. We randomly ran into them in Buenos Aires again this next weekend and our little network grew to include friends here, too. ¡Que suerte!

Classes started for real last week, and oh my gosh. The University of Buenos Aires is the most intense hub of political campaigning and craziness. The professors barely get paid a thing, but they teach because they're passionate. The buildings are falling apart and there's hundred-year-old peeling paint on the walls (which doesn't matter because every square inch is covered with political posters), everyone is smoking (even the profs go through a pack in class), toilet paper rolls don't even exist in the bathrooms, and it's pretty common to wait up to an hour for class to start. They are on such a different clock here, i love it. People in the States would be so frustrated with this seemly chaotic system. In Argentina it works, though, because everyone's on the same page about it. And bottom line: the classes are wonderful and extremely hard and walking in there has begun one of the best experiences of my life.

I told Luisa i had Tiramasu ice cream--which by the way is the heavens in a cup--and she asked Did i know what Tiramisu really meant? "Tirar" can mean "to throw," so when reflected onto oneself, Tiramisu means "it throws me upward--" in elation, i guess!

People on the Subte looooove to stare...Not just at me or anything, but at everyone. i felt super uncomfortable until our amazing head coordinator, Carolina, told us there isn't even a word in Castellano "to stare." There's only "looking." This is such a looking culture--that's how the people size each other up on first-impression. 10-second eye contact would be really creeperish in the States. But it's custom here. So, i happily have joined in the "staring" and it's not weird at all. It's a relief to be allowed to have a hay-day on the Sub just staring around, cause i can't take my eyes off these beautiful people anyway. There's also not a word for "snobby" in Castellano. I explained it to my family in many different ways: a "prideful" person, a person who flaunted their money, etc...and they didn't seem to understand it as a set concept either.

I'm sitting here in the kitchen on Saturday afternoon listening to a really badly-dubbed-over movie in Castellano. We stayed out exploring the town (and mostly dancing) last night until 5:00am--late enough so we could ride the subway home as it opened for the early-birds. And we were the ones who went home early!

Everyone here seems to be speaking slower this week...i think that's a good sign. My head's picking up these strange noises a little more easily everyday. Haha it was a mean trick when i arrived a month ago--it was like a different language than i'd learned in all those years of class. The dialect and verb forms between school Spanish and Buenos Aires could be compared to the difference between Ebonics and British English. Thankfully, 4 weeks of inundation has about equaled all that Spanish-schooling and i can understand most all of a lecture at UBA. And at the dinner table, it's already been a big change from when i felt like the deaf Great-Grandma to whom the family threw out a very simple question everyone once in a while before going back to happy chatter amongst themselves. My brain muscles are really sore but i am LOVING every hurdle in learning a new language.

Sexy Girl

I'm currently sitting next to my host Ma, drinking Mate, who has on a bright green shirt with English writing. I asked her if she knew what it meant and she laughed and said no, but did i know? Haahaha it says "I'm sick of searching for a sexy girl" and has a beach babe lounging across the front. I think she loves it even more now. I told her it makes sense because she's that sexy girl. It used to be her husbands but i think this makes much more sense.

Having trouble uploading photos, but i'm going to get on that train and update you on the last week of insanity!! Gauchos in the campo, Uruday, first week of classes... ¡Ay ay ay Dios mio!

Twist & Shout!

This gym by my apartment....is like a hampster cage. They close the front with a garage door at night (like most every business here) and have crammed 100 machines in a plot as wide as my finger. But it's enough for me--fancy dancy gyming is a scam anyway! Give me a mat and i'll be okay. What i really joined for is the cycling class you get for 10 pesos extra a month (that's less than $3). And it has already been worth it. The instructor hopped on his bike at the back of the room about 10mins late (classic Argentine timing), flipped off the lights, and flipped on the tecno version of "Twist and Shout" complete with siren sounds. He kicked our asses for an entire hour without one break. This guy was actually insane. When i didn't have sweat dripping--no, flowing--into my eyes, i had to blink anyway because the 2 spinning disco balls blinded me anyway. When we slowed down he held up a paper sign taped on the end of a yard stick that yelled "VAMOS!!!" at us (that means Let's get goin!!!) Or he turned off the song musical-chairs style and made us sing the chorus. The class rocked. It was the weirdest, most invigorating, wettest exercise i've had in a long freakin time.

I came back to shower right when Luisa (host mommy) was walking in. (She was probably relieved to see i was ready to shower, she has been asking if i want one all week.) We had a sweet conversation and i got to see her very equal-power perspective of the world. She told me the thing she tells all her "alumnos," (friends): "La independencia economía es igual a la soberanía política."

Some brilliant friends of ours were eating pizza in a parlor and saw that the back wall of the building was missing. The discovery: the entrance to a huge indoor soccer complex plopped in the middle of the block. It's 100 pesos to rent out a field for an hour (the equivalent of about 30 bucks), and with 20 friends playing that's basically nothing. We played for 2 hours today on the ghetto, sandy field and it was one of the best times here yet.

Walking out of the parlor we saw a group of people gathering in the middle of the street. A man in a gray and pink sweat-suit was lying deathly motionless. We waited around a few minutes, assuming the attentive people had done all they could to help, (only later realizing that was probably a bad assumption). A woman poked the guy in the belly. Nothing. Ten minutes later the police showed up, bending over him and shuffling around in his jacket for ID. They looked pretty clueless. 2 ambulances and 20 minutes passed before we decided to leave and saw a third coming up the street. Hope that was the one, even though there was no hope for him. Cars and taxis and people scuttled by going on with their business for the night. I don't know how long he stayed there, a spectacle of the fragility of life. His fingers were still holding a lit cigarette.

I told my host mom about it at dinner. She said "Oh," and kept watching TV. I asked if death in the street was common, and she said "Oh yes." That was the end of that. I am still a little hurt and mad by her flippancy, but I get the feeling more and more that you need to have "piel muy dura" to live here. Thick skin. Whatever, I don't think i could ever adopt Argentine-unaffectedness at the sight of a lifeless body in the middle of the street i'm about to across.

We had Polenta with dinner again tonight--oh my gosh i have found a new love. Luisa just asked me if i want to shower cause "i was running around for 2 hours." No Luisa. No no, i don't do that sort of thing. Are you kidding? I just showered this afternoon. Give it at least a few more days.

Taxi?

SO...apparently there are 2 ways to ask a taxi to "pick you up." One elicits a ride home. And the other, I have just now been informed, asks to please pick me up for the night. It's probably good Felipe explained this crucial difference in the first week...