I woke up on July 9th feeling congested, and didn´t feel like going out to enjoy the nice sunshine, instead staying in and watching Mulan in Spanish (one more Disney film down), but Julieta convinced me to get out, but not before admonishing me to wear my jacket. So I heeded her advice and walked around, looking for any display of patriotism. I saw a few Argentine flags displayed, but not much else. I also bought 100 grams of cinnamon flavored cookies for 2.80. That´s less than a dollar, folks.
I met Brenda in a cafe where we split some Argentine red wine for a total of 18 pesos (9 from each of us) and it was good wine too. Can we get that kind of deal in the States? Well, I can pay a dollar to taste all five of the wines from the Loudoun County vineyard of the week in the Reston Town Center farmer´s market every Thursday. It came with complimentary seltzer, and I ordered herbal tea, which came with complimentary alfajorcitos, and a croissant, and hence we didn´t go crazy with the wine.
The cafes here are fantastic - they´re kind of like Panera, except they serve alcohol, and you´re served, you don´t order up front, and a 10% tip is positively saintly. And they´re not chains. So you could have an afternoon coffee there, or dinner, or after-dinner drinks, they´re just that versatile.
I came home and saw a bit of a Simpsons episode in Spanish, and realized The Simpsons don´t lend themselves to dubbing. Why not subtitle them?
So that was my Independence Day.
I also watched an episode of The Simpsons dubbed in Spanish
Friday, July 11, 2008
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Monday, continued
I went to buy two envelopes for two postcards I wanted to send. I went to the correo (post office) I always go to for its internet (Sunday offers a discount). I asked if they had envelopes for my postcards and the guy told me they don´t, but to try the bookstore just a block down. I went to that place and asked if they had envelopes for my postcards. They said they don´t, but to try the bookstore just a block down. This happened two more times before I finally bought two envelopes for 60 centavos (about 25 cents).
After that goose chase was resolved, I went back to my correo to send them, and the guy said to me in English, ¨OK!¨ I´m famous, I think.
I debated getting cocoa and a snack, and finally decided to go for it at the Cafe Bouquet. I asked for the palmier and pronounced it French so the guy working there thought I was Canadian, and asked for his English speaking coworker. I got complimentary alfajorcitos and a good jug of sparkling water along with my palmier and hot cocoa, and then talked with the English speaker, and it turns out he had spent some time in the US, by GMU, and I told him all about Reston. Yay making more friends.
Today I went back there for lunch with two boys in our group.
Tomorrow is Argentina´s Independence Day. Also, the sun´s out today.
After that goose chase was resolved, I went back to my correo to send them, and the guy said to me in English, ¨OK!¨ I´m famous, I think.
I debated getting cocoa and a snack, and finally decided to go for it at the Cafe Bouquet. I asked for the palmier and pronounced it French so the guy working there thought I was Canadian, and asked for his English speaking coworker. I got complimentary alfajorcitos and a good jug of sparkling water along with my palmier and hot cocoa, and then talked with the English speaker, and it turns out he had spent some time in the US, by GMU, and I told him all about Reston. Yay making more friends.
Today I went back there for lunch with two boys in our group.
Tomorrow is Argentina´s Independence Day. Also, the sun´s out today.
Monday, July 7, 2008
first day of class
I had a poached egg along with my toast for breakfast today, which I greatly appreciated. My parents haven´t a clue how to make poached eggs, and I can´t make them either, so they´re a rare treat for me. Then I headed on to my first day of class, which was fine, until 2 p.m. when we had to listen to a lecture. And it was mildly interesting at first, but the professor was just lecturing, and the things was for two hours, and I felt a bit narcoleptic, and you can see where my pen just veered off. That would be where my eyes glazed over and I hallucinated.
Sunday, 6 July 2008
At UB, Profesora Julia told us to go to the Buenos Aires site to look for activities to do. When I visited the Internet cafe, I went to said site and saw a list of things, including tango. Sore about missing the show last Friday night, I went for the tango tab. A dialog box popped up saying this was an adult site and hence blocked. Now I realize that the tango practically oozes sexuality, but the site was a .gov, ¡por amor de Dios!
I then went looking for a nice cafe to have chocolate con churros. The first time I heard about this treat was Spanish 101. Our professor was of Cuban descent and had a sense of humor that´s weirder than mine. Would that my other professors were like that.
Our first project was to partner up and do a presentation on something dealing with the Spanish-speaking world. I´ve always been irritated by American laws. It wasn´t seven months ago that I could legally order Irish coffee for dessert. And it doesn´t matter how old I get, I´ll never be able to go to Cuba just for the hell of it, not short of renouncing my American citizenship. And don´t anyone dare tell me that if I don´t like it, I don´t have to stay in the United States. Why should I leave my country just because I disagree with its policies? I want to see progress in the United States because I love the United States. Patriotism is not blind acceptance of every policy.
Anyway, as Cuba was forbidden fruit, I got very interested in that country, although after learning about tourism apartheid, maybe not so much anymore. I asked the girl who looked like she´d get along best with me if she was up for doing Cuba, and so we looked for pictures of truly Cuban things to put in our powerpoint. I found a picture of a very Cuban dessert - chocolate con churros. Churros would be like sticks of those things you find in chichi bakeries, I believe they´re called palmiers. You dip those in the hot cocoa, or I did anyway, in the Cafe Virrey. Virrey is Spanish for viceroy, FYI. It was fantastic.
I had a few hours until Julieta came home, so I decided to get a pedicure for 34 pesos, or about 12 USD. I can think of any number of things - getting a tattoo, a full facial waxing, threading even - that are less painful than what I endured then. The lady dug and dug into my cuticles, and my Spanish wasn´t good enough for me to shriek, ¨What in God´s name are you doing to my toenails, woman?!¨ I was doused in sweat until we got to the nail color part (crimson, to hide the blood). I then tipped her 2 pesos. Why am I such a masochist?
I then went looking for a nice cafe to have chocolate con churros. The first time I heard about this treat was Spanish 101. Our professor was of Cuban descent and had a sense of humor that´s weirder than mine. Would that my other professors were like that.
Our first project was to partner up and do a presentation on something dealing with the Spanish-speaking world. I´ve always been irritated by American laws. It wasn´t seven months ago that I could legally order Irish coffee for dessert. And it doesn´t matter how old I get, I´ll never be able to go to Cuba just for the hell of it, not short of renouncing my American citizenship. And don´t anyone dare tell me that if I don´t like it, I don´t have to stay in the United States. Why should I leave my country just because I disagree with its policies? I want to see progress in the United States because I love the United States. Patriotism is not blind acceptance of every policy.
Anyway, as Cuba was forbidden fruit, I got very interested in that country, although after learning about tourism apartheid, maybe not so much anymore. I asked the girl who looked like she´d get along best with me if she was up for doing Cuba, and so we looked for pictures of truly Cuban things to put in our powerpoint. I found a picture of a very Cuban dessert - chocolate con churros. Churros would be like sticks of those things you find in chichi bakeries, I believe they´re called palmiers. You dip those in the hot cocoa, or I did anyway, in the Cafe Virrey. Virrey is Spanish for viceroy, FYI. It was fantastic.
I had a few hours until Julieta came home, so I decided to get a pedicure for 34 pesos, or about 12 USD. I can think of any number of things - getting a tattoo, a full facial waxing, threading even - that are less painful than what I endured then. The lady dug and dug into my cuticles, and my Spanish wasn´t good enough for me to shriek, ¨What in God´s name are you doing to my toenails, woman?!¨ I was doused in sweat until we got to the nail color part (crimson, to hide the blood). I then tipped her 2 pesos. Why am I such a masochist?
Sunday, July 6, 2008
fernet!
Now anyone who knows me knows I´m a sucker for anything regional or seasonal, especially flora and fauna, seasonal produce and of course, drinks. I´d already tried the mate, although I can no more claim that than an American who´s only ordered chai lattes from Starbucks can claim he´s tried chai. Besides the yerba mate tea, a very Argentine drink is the Fernet-cola. Fernet is this liquor that´s really bitter. I´ve been antsy for it for a very long time. Well that night at the Van Gogh cafe, I finally ordered it. It came with an endless supply of complimentary peanuts, chips and what looked like farsaan (sp?). Our waitress poured a bit of the liquor in a Collins glass and gave me a longneck of Coca-Cola.
At college frat parties, kids always tilt their glasses to avoid getting too much head in the beer, but I heard that head with truly good beer is a good thing (not a word from you, you know who you are). Well I didn´t bother tilting my glass or pouring slowly. Growing up, the head was my favorite part of coke, and I always like my cup of coke foaming. I believe I threw a temper tantrum because I didn´t get to my cup in time before the fizz was gone. My glass spewed like some sort of cocktail volcano and I desperately tried to clean up the mess with the little napkins on the table. I call them napkins, but I ought to call them oil-absorbing sheets. Rather than paying a pretty penny for fancy oil-absorbing sheets in The Body Shop or even CVS or Target, I think I´ll just jack a bunch of those napkins and bring them back to America with me. I wanted to use them on my face, but the mattifying oil-free moisturizer I bought here, OMS brand, 20 pesos, was doing too good a job. Anyway, as I drank my Fernet-cola, I realized in a trice why it came with all that food.
I came home to Julieta and Susana watching Erin Brockovich, subtitled, not dubbed. None of the four-letter words Julia Roberts uses got properly translated. It´s a bit like watching a movie on Fox. Then I watched Finding Nemo dubbed in Spanish. There were much fewer commercial breaks. I must say, as far as the Disney channel goes, I like it way better here than in the States, where all you see is Hannah Montana and the Cheetah Girls and teeny bopper and jock go to the beach and sing and dance.
At college frat parties, kids always tilt their glasses to avoid getting too much head in the beer, but I heard that head with truly good beer is a good thing (not a word from you, you know who you are). Well I didn´t bother tilting my glass or pouring slowly. Growing up, the head was my favorite part of coke, and I always like my cup of coke foaming. I believe I threw a temper tantrum because I didn´t get to my cup in time before the fizz was gone. My glass spewed like some sort of cocktail volcano and I desperately tried to clean up the mess with the little napkins on the table. I call them napkins, but I ought to call them oil-absorbing sheets. Rather than paying a pretty penny for fancy oil-absorbing sheets in The Body Shop or even CVS or Target, I think I´ll just jack a bunch of those napkins and bring them back to America with me. I wanted to use them on my face, but the mattifying oil-free moisturizer I bought here, OMS brand, 20 pesos, was doing too good a job. Anyway, as I drank my Fernet-cola, I realized in a trice why it came with all that food.
I came home to Julieta and Susana watching Erin Brockovich, subtitled, not dubbed. None of the four-letter words Julia Roberts uses got properly translated. It´s a bit like watching a movie on Fox. Then I watched Finding Nemo dubbed in Spanish. There were much fewer commercial breaks. I must say, as far as the Disney channel goes, I like it way better here than in the States, where all you see is Hannah Montana and the Cheetah Girls and teeny bopper and jock go to the beach and sing and dance.
on tombs and machismo
One time just for shits and giggles, I checked out the Not for Tourists Guide to DC from the library. It´s part of a series of books that help people that have to spend lots of time in some place. I believe there are editions for Boston, Atlanta, Chicago, New York City, LA, Philly, San Fran and Seattle. NB, Amy: I highly recommend getting the NFT Guide to Seattle. I really wish there were one for international cities, and I wish one of them could be Buenos Aires, and I wish I´d have that one in my hands.
Our GMU group took the subte to the Recoleta artisans´fair. I had left with 76 pesos, and after buying a purse, a coin purse, earrings and a necklace, I was left with 23. Then I went to the front of the cemetery, where we were meeting at a certain time. I looked around, took a few photographs, and realized all we needed was a man pushing a cart screaming, ¨Kulfeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeyeh!¨ and we´d recreate Thana. It´s just got to be Buenos Aires´sister city.
As this excursion was a GMU event, lunch was covered, so I naturally went for the most expensive items on the menu. We met Alejandro´s fiancee, Natalia, and we got to taling about flirting and boys and stuff, and I told them about my argentino friend who hit on me at my least attractive. I said, ¨I learned that the less you obsess about being found sexy, the sexier you´ll be found,¨in English, because I can´t say that in Spanish. Well, Natalia probably couldn´t translate that thought in Spanish into English, so Alejandro translated, and Natalia replied, ¨¡Claro!¨ (¨Obviously!¨)
We found Evita´s tomb, surrounded by tourists, of course. One boy in our group remarked that it´s a bit like the Arlington cemetery. The desecration via tourism is the same, at any rate. Arlington is nowhere near as grand as Recoleta though. Evita is buried with the rest of the Duarte family. Actually, Evita had a hard time getting the last name Duarte. Her mom´s name was Ibarguren, her dad´s name was Duarte, and Evita was an illegitimate child.
Evita´s destractors say she didn´t so much help the poor as hate the rich. I´m reminded of a South Park episode showing Bono walking through a village in Africa, gladhanding and going, ¨Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!¨I have that same impression of Angelina Jolie, actually. But as far as hating the rich goes, I kind of don´t blame Evita for that. She had the hardest time growing up just because she had the misfortune to be sired by a stupid manwhore. Stories like this give me a rush of affection for my own father and of gratitude for the relative lack of machismo in our household.
Oh, and I met a Brazilian woman and got to use some Portuguese I learned this past semester.
But getting back to machismo:
Machismo is when the sex shop doesn´t stock the I Rub My Duckie vibrator (looks like a rubber duckie and can function as one too), nor does it stock the Screaming Octopus (a little bullet sheathed in a silicone covering shaped like a mauve octopus) nor anything else that´s actually designed for women´s pleasure (You mean such a thing exists?!), but instead favoring handcuffs and videos with names like ¨Anal Violation Part Sixty-Nine¨ and other items that make me cross my legs and the knees and ankles. It really upsets me that so many men exist in this world that are turned on by this shit that it actually sells. And instead of a sweet, non-threatening lady running the shop, it was a lecherous-looking man. Brenda and I got the hell out of there. We were on a quest for the bank anyway. She was, at any rate.
We got directions from a man who asked if either of us spoke French (perhaps we gave ourselves away as non Hispanic), and I piped up, ¨Moi, je parle français!¨ He wasn´t a native speaker, he was Argentine but had studied in Paris in his youth, and he butchered French Argentine-style. Thing is, even when Argentine´s are butchering cultures, they sound classy. I daresay I had an easier time understanding him than I ever did trying to catch what was said in Le journal. And their most ridiculous of dances, like these few songs they played at the dance hall, even those, looked better than our own electric slide, macarena, what have you. The francophone Argentine man led us to the bank and it worked out just fine.
Our GMU group took the subte to the Recoleta artisans´fair. I had left with 76 pesos, and after buying a purse, a coin purse, earrings and a necklace, I was left with 23. Then I went to the front of the cemetery, where we were meeting at a certain time. I looked around, took a few photographs, and realized all we needed was a man pushing a cart screaming, ¨Kulfeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeyeh!¨ and we´d recreate Thana. It´s just got to be Buenos Aires´sister city.
As this excursion was a GMU event, lunch was covered, so I naturally went for the most expensive items on the menu. We met Alejandro´s fiancee, Natalia, and we got to taling about flirting and boys and stuff, and I told them about my argentino friend who hit on me at my least attractive. I said, ¨I learned that the less you obsess about being found sexy, the sexier you´ll be found,¨in English, because I can´t say that in Spanish. Well, Natalia probably couldn´t translate that thought in Spanish into English, so Alejandro translated, and Natalia replied, ¨¡Claro!¨ (¨Obviously!¨)
We found Evita´s tomb, surrounded by tourists, of course. One boy in our group remarked that it´s a bit like the Arlington cemetery. The desecration via tourism is the same, at any rate. Arlington is nowhere near as grand as Recoleta though. Evita is buried with the rest of the Duarte family. Actually, Evita had a hard time getting the last name Duarte. Her mom´s name was Ibarguren, her dad´s name was Duarte, and Evita was an illegitimate child.
Evita´s destractors say she didn´t so much help the poor as hate the rich. I´m reminded of a South Park episode showing Bono walking through a village in Africa, gladhanding and going, ¨Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!¨I have that same impression of Angelina Jolie, actually. But as far as hating the rich goes, I kind of don´t blame Evita for that. She had the hardest time growing up just because she had the misfortune to be sired by a stupid manwhore. Stories like this give me a rush of affection for my own father and of gratitude for the relative lack of machismo in our household.
Oh, and I met a Brazilian woman and got to use some Portuguese I learned this past semester.
But getting back to machismo:
Machismo is when the sex shop doesn´t stock the I Rub My Duckie vibrator (looks like a rubber duckie and can function as one too), nor does it stock the Screaming Octopus (a little bullet sheathed in a silicone covering shaped like a mauve octopus) nor anything else that´s actually designed for women´s pleasure (You mean such a thing exists?!), but instead favoring handcuffs and videos with names like ¨Anal Violation Part Sixty-Nine¨ and other items that make me cross my legs and the knees and ankles. It really upsets me that so many men exist in this world that are turned on by this shit that it actually sells. And instead of a sweet, non-threatening lady running the shop, it was a lecherous-looking man. Brenda and I got the hell out of there. We were on a quest for the bank anyway. She was, at any rate.
We got directions from a man who asked if either of us spoke French (perhaps we gave ourselves away as non Hispanic), and I piped up, ¨Moi, je parle français!¨ He wasn´t a native speaker, he was Argentine but had studied in Paris in his youth, and he butchered French Argentine-style. Thing is, even when Argentine´s are butchering cultures, they sound classy. I daresay I had an easier time understanding him than I ever did trying to catch what was said in Le journal. And their most ridiculous of dances, like these few songs they played at the dance hall, even those, looked better than our own electric slide, macarena, what have you. The francophone Argentine man led us to the bank and it worked out just fine.
Friday, 4 July part 3
The plan was a salsa lesson followed by a tango lesson, followed by an 11:30 show. Turns out the show was at 1 a.m., Latin American time. Tango is exciting to learn, but it was the show I was most looking forward to. Were the 13 pesos I spent that didn´t end up in a tango show worth it? Well, during the tango lessons, I managed to partner with a German boy who looked like he belonged on the cover of one of those teeny bopper magazines that girls secretly masturbate to. He worked for the Chamber of Commerce, so he may well have been rich as one of those guys too. I could kick myself for not moving aside to one of the tables to talk some more with him. I´d have an excuse too, because for the life of me, I cannot talk and dance complicated dances like tango and salsa, much less in foreign tongues. So I suppose the 13 pesos were worth it.
The 7 I spent on a pot of what was ostensibly red tea, i.e., rooibos, but actually just plain old black tea, was not. Beware of false advertising, folks. And note to self: if it doesn´t say rooibos, assume it´s not.
The 7 I spent on a pot of what was ostensibly red tea, i.e., rooibos, but actually just plain old black tea, was not. Beware of false advertising, folks. And note to self: if it doesn´t say rooibos, assume it´s not.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
