Yesterday was one of the most pleasant of the few days I have spent in Buenos Aires. I woke up late (10!) and relaxed for a large part of the morning, and around 2pm I walked 3 blocks down Calle Armenia to Disco, the barrio grocery store, to buy a few necessities. I walked out with a block of Argentine port salut cheese (it’s incredibly delicious), a small loaf of bread, some dulce de leche, shampoo and laundry detergent. I fully intended to come back home and go to the Laundromat to wash some clothes, but instead I received a phone call from Jess, who requested I meet her at the corner of Juramento and Cabildo for some shopping. I made a few other phone calls to invite a few other people and then I took the subte (train). For 90 cents it dropped me off a block away from where I needed to be. The 6 of us met in front of the old El Ateneo, a theater-turned-bookstore that sells everything you’d find at Barnes and Noble and then some. During our 6-hour shopping spree we spanned only two blocks, ambling about the streets, window-shopping and actually stopping at a little plaza for some afternoon tea.
In one corner of the plaza there is a lovely little café with outdoor tables and giant crème-colored umbrellas, where the waiters wear orange wraps around their waist and don’t rush you to leave once you’ve finished eating. Buenos Aires is a fast-paced city and people bustle about their business and ignore you unless you’re in their way, but there is another side to this cosmopolitan obscurity. On any corner of (almost) any street, you can ask someone for directions and they’ll take their time pointing you in the right direction. Sometimes they’ll even walk with you if they’re heading in the same direction.
Last Friday, on our way to a university on Colectivo #141, two friends and I were unsure about which stop was ours. We spoke English the entire time and looked through our maps, confused, trying to figure it out. We did not ask anyone, but the entire front half of the bus smiled at us and informed us where we should get off and exactly how many blocks we should walk. This kind of hospitality is unheard of in most big cities, and people here seem to do it without hesitation and with a cheery disposition. This atmosphere makes Buenos Aires a much less intimidating place, and I can say I feel more at home here than I do wandering around Atlanta.
But I digress. Let’s go back to the little café at the plaza near Juramento and Cabildo. Imagine a cobblestone street, big wooden tables with white umbrellas and ivy climbing up the Corinthian columns of the building on the western side of the plaza. In the center of the plaza, 20 feet away from our table, two handsome Argentine twenty-somethings sit at their own table playing bossa nova and Spanish flamenco on their guitar, loud enough for the patrons of the café to listen while they chat and smoke their cigarettes. On the other end of the plaza there is a feria de artesanos (artisan fair) with displays of jewelry, mate gourds, purses, and other handmade goods.
We spent two hours sitting at the table, drinking our tea and eating our sandwiches de miga (very crumbly and unsatisfactory bread), and decided (somewhat hesitantly) to stand up and do some shopping. For the grand total of $3 US dollars I bought a silver ring and a pair of handmade jade earrings at a booth at the artisan fair. A $3 peso ring and a $6 peso pair of earrings is a good find even by Argentine standards, but coupled with the purchasing power of the US dollar I felt almost guilty for sleeping with the prostitute. You know, figuratively. It's like you know she's there, but it's not a moral dilemma til you pay up and watch her strip. Aaaanyway, that guilt faded quickly enough as I tried on my jewelry and realized that it looks great.
We left the artisan fair and walked toward Avenida Cabildo, where all the big stores are located. I did not buy any clothes, but the experience was valuable nonetheless. Argentines have a definite sensibility when it comes to fashion, and it differs somewhat from what we typically wear in America. Walking into clothing stores helped me get a better feel for the nuances of the Argentine wardrobe and now I feel better prepared to dress myself in the morning. Yes, I’m only kind of serious. I’m comfortable enough in my own skin (and clothing), and I’ve found that it’s easy to pick out the tourists not by what they’re wearing but by how they carry themselves. I’m not as conspicuously American after spending three weeks in this city, a fact about which I’m rather proud.
As for my accent in Spanish, however, I’ve had less luck making it fit in. I have tried pronouncing all my “ll”s like “sh”s like they do here, but traces of my Caribbean background apparently remain. On Wednesday I called FiberTel, the internet leviathan that provides unreliable service throughout Gran Buenos Aires, and spoke with a guy named Rodrigo. I was rather frustrated because someone was supposed to come to install my internet, and at 8pm they hadn’t yet arrived. This was the second day I had spent at the apartment so that I would be here for the installation and I wasn’t happy I’d missed my afternoon run at the Botanical Garden to wait for the internet guy who never showed up. Like an irritable, neglected girlfriend, I told Rodrigo a thing or two and he told me he would put me on hold and fetch his manager. He eventually did, in fact, connect me to his manager, but not before he thoroughly embarrassed himself by forgetting to put me on hold and talking about me to a coworker. In Spanish, I heard him say “Che, this girl wants to talk to the manager…she’s speaking Spanish to me ‘like this’ and I can’t figure out where she’s from…*background noise* she sounds foreign and maybe pretty….” At this point I said “hola?” and mustering his most professional voice Rodrigo apologized and said he’d try to put me on hold again so that I could speak with his manager when he was available. Besides the hilarity of forgetting to put me on hold, which I hope does not happen often at phone-support centers, I was interested in the fact that Rodrigo was frustrated that he could not peg my accent. I’m comfortable with the Argentine structure of speaking, which includes lots of lunfardos (colloquialisms) and the use of ‘vos’ instead of ‘tu’ (you), but the rhythm and accentuation is proving more troublesome. I hope that with time this is something I can imitate, but if that’s not the case then I’m prepared to embrace my Puerto Rican accent wholeheartedly.
Let’s return to my wonderful Saturday; I have a little more to say. After we finished shopping on Avenida Cabildo I headed home for a real shower, though it had been raining for part of the afternoon and I was soaked. At 10:30pm we met in front of my apartment and caught a cab to Osaka, an overpriced Japanese Sushi Restaurant in Palermo SoHo that boasts a full house on a Saturday night and waiters that belittle their patrons. The food was enjoyable though, and the company (6 girls and the social lubrication of an imaginary bottle of wine) was pleasant. After Osaka we took a cab to Thelonious, a classy jazz-joint cozily ensconced on the second floor of a mansion on Calle Salguero, which is dangerously close to the sketchy Red Light District in Palermo. We sat on leather couches and, between 1 and 3am, tapped our fingers and our toes and chatted with Tomas, a well-dressed, twenty-something Argentine with a good taste in wine and an uncanny resemblance to James Dean, black-rimmed glasses included. Yes, he was that handsome. He spoke English in his heavy accent and invited us to a game of futbol next weekend, insisting that “you cannot know us if you do not know futbol.” He added that there was something triumphant about the sport, about the way that the futbolistas “hold ze ball, and then you can hold ze ball, and then everybody wants to hold ze ball!” At this point Amanda inserted her “that’s what she said” joke and we proceeded to laugh for another half-hour before heading home around 3:30am. He got my number.
Normally this would be the point at which my night ends, but alas, I am in Buenos Aires and crazy things happen here. Perhaps this is a story I should leave for next time, but I won’t because it follows naturally from what I’ve been telling you and maybe you will find it interesting. Before I recount it, let me set the stage. My departamento (apartment) is in a pretty ritzy part of Palermo, a barrio in the northwest corner of Ciudad de Buenos Aires. The people in my building are upper-middle class and educated, polite and reserved. They are mostly older and smile and nod curtly when they pass you in the lobby. There appears to be at least one exception to this general definition of Palermo peeps. My building, which is actually a conglomerate of three different buildings, is shaped like a “U”. In the center of this “U” there is a rose garden, which I can see and smell from my second-floor bedroom window. Diagonally from my window (no more than 50 feet away) there is an apartment, on the first floor, where a twenty-four-year-old Argentine guy lives alone. If my blinds are open he has a clear view of the back half of my bedroom, and from what I can tell I have a clear view of the back half of his living room, where he often sits and watches TV. Said Argie doesn’t appear to have a job or any kind of commitments, as he spends a lot of time in his apartment and is awake at crazy hours of the night.
The first night I moved in I was still not used to the time change and, at around 2am, I decided to look out my window. I looked to my right and saw Avenida Santa Fe and the Botanical Gardens, people walking hand in hand and taking their dogs for a late-night stroll. To my left I saw the rose garden and, to my surprise, a young man standing in his terrace looking at me. I was startled and closed the blinds, quickly regretting the fact that I’d been rude to my new neighbor. I didn’t even wave! I resigned to wave hello the next time I saw him, and decided I’d overreacted by closing the blinds so quickly. For more than a week I came home and was in bed by midnight so that I did not have a chance to look out my window during the night, but last week, with the commencement of classes at UTDT, I settled into a schedule and did some reading late into the night.
At around 1am on Wednesday night I am sitting by the window taking a quick break from my Gargarella text when, from the corner of my eye, I see a head peeking through the shades in his apartment. I went back to my reading, looking up every few minutes to see if I’d imagined it. I had not, and every few moments he would peek his head through the window, emerging a little more each time. In an hour’s time he had opened his terrace door and was standing in the middle of the rose garden, throwing a towel up into the air trying to get my attention. I thought it was mildly creepy but he is handsome and the gesture was cute, so I pretended not to notice and kept reading, looking up every so often and skimming the scene for just long enough so that he could tell I was distracted. I was looking everywhere except at him, and he seemed intent on getting my attention. I decided it was time for bed and closed my blinds, turned off the light and went to sleep. Game over.
The next evening I was back at my desk, reading about collective memory and studying for class, and there he is, throwing a towel in the air again. He turns on the terrace light and I now realize he is completely naked. I was half disgusted, half impressed that he would be so bold as to expose himself to a stranger, but I shut my blinds and tried sleeping, a little fearful that I would hear a knock at my window and find him there in the middle of the night. I slept soundly and undisturbed, however, and the next morning I told my host mother what I had seen. She laughed and said that the kid is an exhibitionist and that other neighbors have had trouble with him in the past. Last year, an old woman entered the elevator only to find him standing there naked. When she called the portero to report it, the man knocked on the apartment door and entered, where Mr. Exhibitionist was sitting, fully clothed, watching television.
The word on the street is that his parents bought him a posh apartment to get him out of their hair and he's lived there for 4 years now, perhaps exposing himself to other unsuspecting female neighbors. Anyway, in celebration of this oddity I have decided to invite some friend over this weekend for a free showing. I’ve told them they can bring their cameras and I hope this dissuades Mr. Exhibitionist from exposing himself again in my presence. Maybe.
Anyway, that’s all for now but I’ll write soon to keep you updated on things.
Until then, as they say here, ciao ciao!
