Buenos Aires, Argentina

Thursday, March 17, 2005:

This is the third of three late general catch-up posts on my six or so weeks in total spent lazing around in Buenos Aires (apart from additional time spent outside the city in other parts of Argentina), studying Spanish, eating steak and hanging around coffee shops and bars with fellow gringos and even a few gregarious porteños. This entry is being posted before Parts I and II for only one good reason: Parts I and II are not yet finished. Yeah, yeah, sorry for the hassle.

Less than 36 hours remain before I leave Buenos Aires for Rio de Janeiro on Saturday morning (March 19). After 6 days there, I will fly to Johannesburg, South Africa (March 25) and immediately try to connect on a flight to Capetown, though I have absolutely nothing booked or planned at the moment. Because that would take effort and I am opposed to the expenditure of effort at the moment. The following descriptions are some last random bits of and pieces of my time here, which I would really rather not see come to end, though its finally time to leave South America after six months and Argentina after more than two of those months.

Third Grade Revisited

Before returning to Buenos Aires from my week way down south in El Calafate and Ushuaia, I confirmed with the IIEE that I would have one last week of Spanish class, this time for only 1 1/2 hours each day, but with private one-on-one lessons rather than group classes. The benefits of one-on-one classes cannot be stressed enough and include (1) the fact that you can progress at your own pace with personalized lessons that cater to your level of ability and (2) the corollary, the fact that you do not have to suffer one insufferably inept student in your class dragging the rest of the class back with him (specific examples to come in Part I, when posted). However, the drawback is rather severe: you must actually pay attention for the full duration of the lesson.

In general, I would say that the quality of the lessons I had at the IIEE ranged from good to excellent. I had a different teacher each week --- which helps you learn to understand different accents and styles of speech --- and they were all more than competent. During this, my final week, I have classes with Noelia, who has an impressive knack for honing in on exactly the subjects I am least competent in and painstakingly forcing me to improve in them. Damn it.

As I finish classes and prepare to leave Spanish-speaking South America, I can say that I am at the point where I am beginning to obtain a very basic level of conversational fluency. This means I can actually talk back and forth with rapidly-speaking Argentinians and speak about more than my name, the weather or where I come from and whether I like Buenos Aires or not. That said, I have a long way to go.

The assignments Noelia gives me resemble assignments given to a third or fourth-grader. As an overly-lengthy but telling example, I was made to read a two-page short story which resembled an Aesop`s Fable of sorts. It was about a Russian Tzar, a tailor and the Tzar`s bear. The gist of the story was that the wicked and cruel Tzar discovers that a button has fallen off of his favorite jacket. He has the poor but clever tailor incarcerated in the palace prison with orders to execute him the following day. But the tailor tricks the guard into telling him what the Tzar`s favorite possession in the world is --- a bear. The tailor tells the guard its too bad he will die because now he won`t be able to teach the Tzar´s bear to talk. The guard, eager to impress the Tzar, relates this to his master, who summons the tailor and commands him to teach the bear to speak. The tailor convinces the Tzar that it will take at least two years and that he will need money because he will not be able to support his family while he teaches the bear. The Tzar gives the tailor a two-year reprieve and sends him home with a cart of riches. When his wife tells him he is crazy for saying he could teach the bear, the tailor tells her that it might be so, but at least he has two more years to live, in which many things could happen (such as the death or overthrow of the Tzar).

To my horror, Noelia made me write a sequel to the story as a homework assignment. I felt like I was about nine years old again (for instance, I wanted to eat a lot of candy). The next day I presented her with a sequel in which the tailor and his family become spoiled rotton on their wealth and in which the tailor takes of smoking cuban cigars and drinking expensive cognac to compensate for his depression in not being able to teach the bear to speak (despite coaching and daily lessons on history and the works of Doestoyevski). After two years the jig is up and the Tzar summons a desperate tailor to his throne with the imperial executioner and the bear beside him. The tailor begs the bear to speak. The bear opens its mouth and bellows "Raaaaa!" The executioner calmly lops the tailor´s head off at the direction of the Tzar. The bear responds with "Thank God! No more Doestoyevski." The moral of the story? Never try to teach a bear to talk. Noelia said the story was very good, but I think she began to get nervous about teaching me.

Anyway, I relate all of this only because I found the ability to be a jack-ass in a foreign language a truly rewarding experience and compensation for the pains of learning. I`m planning to send a copy of the story to my parents so that they can pin it to the refrigerator with a few gold stars on it.

Too Much Meaty-Cheesy Goodness

Can you ever get sick of eating high-quality steak each day? If you mean "sick" as in "a rotting diseased heart the size of a pulsating bloody-red watermelon" the answer would probably be yes. The average Argentinian eats more than 4 ounces of red meat each day (second in the world only to those frisky carniverous Uruguayans who are also famous for... ummm... nothing) and I am amazed they do not eat more of it, as it seems than 99 percent of the restaurants in Buenos Aires (excluding the ubiquitous McDonalds and Burger Kings) are meat and grill places specializing in steak, ribs, goat, sausage, blood-sausage and various organs including kidney, liver, intestines (tripe) and things that are probably much much worse. Accordingly, I expect that after 70-some days in Argentina my cholesterol is hovering somewhere around six-hundred thousand and twelve, give or take a few points. Another few weeks here and I would not be surprised if I experienced a Kafkaesque metamorphasis overnight, not into a cockroach but into the late Chris Farley`s Chicago Bears "Super Fan" from Saturday Night Live. Should this happen, I would have to update the blog to carry another category entitled "I´m Having Another Heart Attack." (I would also change the name of the blog itself to "The Bears.")

For the sake of introducing variety to my healthy diet of meat, meat and meat (and beer!), I would occassional order some of my meat with some form of "sauce" on it. Rocquefort cheese sauce, recommended by doctors everywhere, seems especially popular here. I will clue readers in on this little nugget of recently acquired wisdom: Steak with rocquefort cheese sauce tastes a lot like rocquefort cheese sauce. Also, chicken with rocquefort cheese sauce tastes a lot like rocquefort cheese sauce. I was able to try salmon with rocquefort cheese sauce but this actually tasted like rocquefort cheese sauce with rocquefort cheese sauce. I was forced to drink plenty of beer just to get the stuff unglued from the sides of my esophagus.

Down to my last four days in the city, I finally discovered what I had most been missing: a decent Chinese restaurant that actually serves real Chinese food, as opposed to the bland Argentized imposters for Chinese food that are served at several places claiming to offer Chinese buffets (but which actually consist mainly of meat empañadas, prosciutto, steak and sausage). The spicy dishes were actually spicy, which is miraculous because I have yet to visit a country so adverse to peppers and hot sauce. I was even able to eat vegetables, things I am rarely known to actively seek out, but which I have been driven to consume more of in an effort to keep my arteries from sealing shut. I have tried to find a restaurant like this one ever since arriving in Buenos Aires. As it turns out, it was a block away from my hotel all along.

Visa-Application Fever

I went to the Brazilian Consulate to obtain my visa to enter the country. U.S. citizens now need one and have to pay more than $100 to obtain one because the Bush administration has imposed similar requirements on Brazilian citizens. And they`re pissed. Needless to say, having been in Buenos Aires for ages, I should have taken care of this errand a long long time ago but because I had read that they only need 24 hours to approve and issue your visa --- assuming you aren`t wanted on any criminal charges and don`t seem too shady --- I decided not to hurry (and in fact, because I recently changed my plane tickets I probably saved myself a return trip to the consulate anyway --- another example of laziness working out well for me). In any event, due to my delaying the chore, I was left in the position of absolutely having to sort things out on Wednesday or Thursday and so I struggled to rise early Wednesday morning to be at the offices of the embassy at 10:00 AM because they close to non-Brazilian citizens at the early hour of 1:00 PM (I failed in my struggle, waking up at 10:30 and arriving at 11:30).

After passing some very stern looking men in uniform manning the metal detector, I rode the elevator up to the consulate`s offices on the fifth floor of one of the massive buildings that line Avenida Pellegrini, which is part of the 16-lane monster road that constitues Buenos Aires´ equivalent of the Champs d´Elysees (there are some real differences here in comparison to Paris, however, e.g. more steak joints and fewer Arc d`Triumphs). I stepped out into a busy room filled with more very serious guards, another metal detector and a series of counters behind which various clerks and officials were going about their business. A series of emblems and the flag of Brazil were centered prominently overhead. Overall, the place filled me with that sense of awe and wonder I have more commonly experienced in such places as the Jersey City Department of Motor Vehicles and the Binghamton, New York outlet of Walmart on double-coupon day.

A guard told me that to get a visa I would have to head to one of several computers that were lined up along the wall and fill in the necessary application information. After that, I would have to head to the line for non-Brazilians, which was thankfully not looking too busy at the moment, with only several people waiting there. Some of them appeared to be Australian, judging from the Australian flag t-shirts they had on. In any event, the computerized form was relatively straight forward (name, address, country of citizenship, purpose of visit, passport number, ever kill anybody? planning to start in Brazil? stupid enough to write that here?). I hit the "submit" button and went to the back of the gringo line.

In general, Argentinians don´t like the concept of "waiting in line," apparently finding that it cramps their style. Accordingly, I was not surprised when an Argentinian woman and her boyfriend walked directly in front of me as I stood at the point where the single main line splits off to three separate service counters. This is the sort of set-up you see in most banks, for example, but you generally don´t find people bypassing everybody in the single file and standing directly behind one of the guys who is transacting business with the teller. But this was exactly what they did, calmly and shamelessly. "Excuse me I said, I am next." The woman faked innocent surprise and said, "Oh, but I asked at the other counter and they said I should wait here." "In this line," I said. "Yes," she agreed, meaning where she standing and deliberately missing the point. But just at this moment another counter opened up and I practically dove for it to get there before the woman decided that that was the line she was told she had to wait in.

The woman on the other side of the counter was in her early 30s, sharply dressed and fairly (but not, as it turns out completely) fluent in English as she immediately addressed me with a "Hello, can I help you?" I took that as an invitation to give her the whole "I wanna visa" shpiel in English and handed over my passport, plane ticket and one of the (strikingly handsome) photos of myself that I have been hauling around with me for months on end for just this purpose (also to give autographed copies). She looked everything over, flipping one by one through the pages of my passport. Then she paused suddenly and glanced up at me:

"You were in Ecuador for the last three months?"

"No," I said, wondering where she got that idea from, "I have been in Argentina for the last two months."

"But you were in Ecuador in the last three months?" Ah hah, I thought, that`s what she had meant to ask the first time.

"No... I think its been at least four months since I was in Ecuador."

She nods and flips to the next page. Then she looks up again. "But, you have been to Bolivia in the last three months, yes?"

"Yes," I say.

"Then to enter Brazil you will need to have your yellow form from Bolivia."

Say whuh?

"Whuh?" I said. "What yellow form from Bolivia? I don`t have a yellow form from Bolivia." I was baffled by this, wondering what the hell she was talking about. It then occurred to me that while I was in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, I was given small yellow immigration cards at each border crossing which I was supposed to carry along with my passport at all times. But I didn`t have these anymore and had no idea whatsoever that I would need them to get into Brazil. I mean, how much sense does that make?

"But you must have a yellow form for Bolivia," she said. "You cannot go to Bolivia without getting one. "

"Well," I said, "I had the form when I entered Bolivia but I didn`t keep it when I left because I had no idea that I would need it to get into Brazil." We weren`t arguing exactly but I probably sounded a little agitated and she seemed incredulous, shrugging her shoulders and shaking her head as she spoke.

"What you can do," she told me, "is go to the Bolivian embassy to get another yellow form --- but after you do this you will then have to wait ten days before entering Brazil."

"I`m supposed to fly to Brazil in three days," I said, "and I am supposed to fly to South Africa in nine."

"But you cannot," she said, her Portugese accent growing thicker as she grew more incredulous that I did not have this ridiculous Bolivian immigration card. I was incredulous myself for several reasons including (1) the beaurocracy involved in obtaining a tourist visa, (2) the realization that I had screwed myself over by delaying to visit the embassy and (3) the impact this was going to have on my plans to head to Africa, much less Brazil. Maybe this was a sign I was supposed to stay in Argentina (and change the name of the blog to "The Bears").

"Ok," I said, "What if I want to fly to Brazil and connect immediately to get my flight to Africa? If I change my ticket so that it takes me to Rio and then I connect in the airport for Sao Paulo and Johannesburg all in the same day without leaving the airport?" (And without passing through customs, by clear implication.)

She shrugged. It was the I have no idea shrug. I couldn`t believe she had no idea. If the Brazilian Embassy doesn`t know the answer to this, who the hell does?

"I cannot say," she told me. "You would still be in a waiting area."

"Well this is just awful," I told her, "I cannot believe its this difficult to visit Brazil."

"You didn`t check the requirements," she chided me, "you need the yellow form for Bolivia and to get into Brazil and you would also need it for Africa."

HUH? Sudden enlightenment smacked me in the head.

"Wait! Are you talking about the yellow fever vaccination card?!!"

"Yes."

"I have that!" I said, shaking my head, relieved and amazed at the level of misunderstanding caused by her talk of a yellow form from Bolivia and how close I came to leaving in a hopeless state and heading off to try to change my tickets again and visit the Bolivian embassy. "Its not here, but I can go get it."

"No, you just need to show it at customs," she said. I gave her a laughing semi-apology over the situation, not because I actually considered the misunderstanding to be my fault but because I didn`t want her to be upset and hold up my application for anything else. After this she spent another 45 seconds reviewing everything, then took my passport and picture and handed me a slip of paper. "You need to head to this address [three blocks away] and pay [about $110 U.S.]. Come back tomorrow after 4 PM with your receipt and the visa will be ready."

"That`s it?" I asked.

"That`s all."

I went and paid the money, then picked up the visa the next day in less than five minutes. How simple and incredibly easy.

"I am Fluid"

In the first few disturbingly funny pages of Jonathan Safran Foer`s novel Everything is Illuminated the narrator, a Ukranian university student, obliviously relates the time when his father asks him whether he is "good and fine at" the English language. "Yes, I am fluid," he responds. This is how I feel sometimes. I have the basics of Spanish down, but this just means that I am able to mangle the language and make an ass out of myself in far more complex ways than I could before. I get my point across, but I lack finesse. Still, because the Argentinians are relatively laid back, they let things slide and talk freely with me. This of course helps me learn and I find I am better able to understand them speak than I am able to express what I want to say. In fact, I found that I have recently gotten to the point where I can even understand parts of "South Park" dubbed in Spanish, which is the whole reason I wanted to learn the language in the first place, of course (trivia fact: the one character who is NOT dubbed over at all? "Timmy!").

My language skills came in handy when, in a cab, the driver (a gentleman in his 70s, who came over from Italy when he was a child) complimented me on my pronunciation. Then, after asking me the usual stuff about myself, he began to question me on U.S. politics and tell me about the economic problems in Argentina and how the country has declined since he was a young man (although I think he did admit that the lack of a ruthless military dictatorship was a bit of an improvement). After a few minutes he turned the meter of the cab off and when we reached my destination he absolutely refused to accept any more than 1 peso (about $.35) whereas the ride would have cost about 10 and the initial fare for the cab alone is 1.6 pesos.

Yo Estoy Chillin´

The last few days have been relatively inactive and slow. I`ve studied and gone to class and otherwise had plenty of time to read in my favorite cafes (Tortoni, Dorrego) and walk through my favorite neighborhoods (San Telmo, Palermo). I`ve just about finished Christopher Hibbert`s The French Revolution (which I propose was neither French, nor a revolution) and have started on a history of South America from the time of Columbus to the 1990s as well a collection of short stories by Argentina`s most celebrated author, Jorge Luis Borges. I had something of a "farewell" night out with some friends from the IIEE a few days back but have otherwise been relatively unoccupied. As the time comes for me to leave, there isn`t anything I really want to do that I haven`t already done here. However, I am still very reluctant to leave.