Patagonia 2006

Did you know that if you took your credit cards from home and started using them in a foreign country, you could be subject to having your transactions refused and your card ripped up by a suspicious salesperson?

Before you go, call the customer service number on the back of the credit cards you intend to take with you and notify them:

• What countries you are planning to visit
• The start and end date of your trip
• The type of expenditures you plan to use it for, such as hotels, restaurants, transportation, museum admissions, shopping, etc.

It’s never nice to suddenly lose access to your principal source of funds on your vacation, especially when a couple of phone calls will do the trick.

On a related topic, I usually get an extra ATM card to take with me in case a machine chews up one of them. (By the way, if a machine chews up your primary card, there is a good chance that it’ll do the same to your secondary card: Look for another ATM to be safe.) Several weeks ago, I told an officer at Bank of America that foreign machines sometimes like to chew on American cards (must be the trans-fats), and he readily had an extra one sent to me.

It all started with an article in the New Yorker Magazine more than thirty-five years ago. There was an article about a new crop of South American writers, most particularly a blind Argentinian from Buenos Aires named Jorge Luis Borges. Two new collections of his work, containing some overlapping of content, had just been published: Labyrinths and Ficciones. I bought copies, read them, and was entranced.

In the years following, Borges has been perhaps the most influential guide to literature, philosophy, and history. Because of him, Argentina suddenly became an active place on the world map that resides in my mind.

Next after him came Paul Theroux with The Old Patagonian Express and Bruce Chatwin with In Patagonia.

Now, when I go fly to Buenos Aires in November, my first priority will be to visit the places where he lived and which he talked about in his poems and stories. I will walk around the suburb of Palermo and the area just north of the Microcentro looking for places that remind me of his work. The old working class districts full of knife-fighters and sleazy dives is long gone, but even a little will go a long way.

There is also a Centro Cultural Borges founded by Borges’s widow Maria Kodama, but I am not altogether sure they have any exhibits about the author’s life. Also interesting is a museum dedicated to the painting of Xul Solar, a friend of the author’s who is mentioned by name in some of his stories.

Right now, I have only the most sketchy information to go on, but I am doing some research that will enable me to put together some walks in the city.

If you are interested in learning more about Borges, here are some web references:

• The Garden of the Forking Paths
• The Wikipedia entry on Borges
• The Kirjasto entry on Borges from Finland
• The Borges Center at the University of Iowa

When I reach Buenos Aires, I hope to give you the results of what I have found.

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