Baaaaaa!!

My last ten days in Buenos Aires, or Good Sheep, as Stevo perversely persists in calling it. My love affair with the city is, if not over, a matter of taking a step back from the beloved and gazing at her with the rose tinted spectacles tossed to the ground. I finally see her, warts and all, and need to be away for a protracted amount of time to decide if we are really meant to be.

Busy busy...

On the one hand, I see the appalling poverty that is ignored and/or resented by the well-heeled, the pointless, grinding, soul-destroying bureacracy, the intolerance for those who don’t fit into society’s mold, the political corruption, the ghastly business practices, the spiralling inflation (30% last year and still going) and the soaring crime rate that invariably accompanies such things.

On the other, however, Argentines (and I’m including Porteños – natives of BA – in here) are on the whole generous, curious, creative, courteous, good-looking (hehe), fun-loving, family-centred, loyal, and the most likeable bunch of people I have ever met. And I’ve met a lot of folks. I could back up every one of those adjectives with at least ten examples (and maybe shall some other time if you allow me to ramble drunkenly at you in the bar).

They’re into LIFE with a capital everything. Tango – and where would BA be without its theme music? – wears its heart on its sleeve and is witty and sexy, and damn, I wish I could dance it. In fact, Argentines simply have music embedded in their souls.

 

Street music in San Telmo.

Their malbec has enslaved me and put me off any other varieties forever (ok, rhetorically). Their beef is so good that Graciela has had to forcibly prevent me from singing in our favourite restaurant in San Telmo when taking my first bite of a big, juicy, rare (damn, dribbling into keyboard now) steak.

I prefer Argentine Spanish and lunfardo slang over all other varieties. Show me another country who, when deciding what to swear about, opts for a parrot?! I love the Springtime here, when the jacaranda trees are in flower everywhere and your blood turns to fire in your veins and you dance down the street rather than walk. I love my wonderful, funny friends here.

 

Lovely, lovely ladies!!!

Oh, and I go weak at the knees for bbq-ed pizza.

Guess what am saying is that I do still love the place, I had hoped I was going to live here forever and build a business and a life and what have you, but this time round it hasn’t worked and it’s time to cut losses and get out before the love affair sours. Maybe some places are better to visit than to live…

The Joys of Househunting

House hunting. I hate house hunting. It’s one of those things that saps your will to breathe. However, these things must be done and so I posted a chirpy little ad on a few sites, underlining my Englishness and my state of employment, and received therefore a veritable swamp of offers as everyone here for some reason thinks the English are well-mannered and well-behaved, and they’re almost without exception bat shit crazy about a nice posh English accent. Result! (and who am I to tell them that they’re sadly mistaken?)

Now to winnow the heap. Shared rooms = out. Living with landladies = out, as I won’t accept any limitations or raised badly pencilled-in eyebrows on my comings and goings. Price over US $300 a month all included = out too. It’s a real sellers’ market at the moment. I visited a couple of total non-starters of the dark and dank variety. My favourite was when the landlady put her hand on my arm and reassured me that the place had great vibes as no drink, drugs or men were allowed on the premises. Absolutely my kind of place.

Finally lit upon a big old house between fashionable Palermo and neat Almagro that has seven rooms and lots and lots of light and open-air areas too. It’s currently being redecorated with a move in date of 1 December and I decided to take a decent sized airy room with big windows and a ceiling fan. The very nice owners have asked me what furniture I’d like and have therefore requested as much storage space as possible given my once more burgeoning shoe problem. I think we’re going to get on well. Of course, sharing with 6 other people may turn out to be a total nightmare if there are food stealers/bathroom hoggers/noisy buggers/nosey buggers… but I can always move out in a couple of months if that’s the case.

Still on the responsible front, have been to see my bosses and colleagues at the translation agency and to get the wheels turning for my residency visa. All is well and all is well and all shall be well. Or at least it had bloody better be. We had a chat about general taxation and private health insurance… which, forgive me the pun, will surely shape up to be a major headache sometime soon. I start next week.

On Tuesday I headed to the Thelonius club, arguably the jazz bar in BA, with my charming new doctor friend Ezequiel. His saxophone teacher is in the sax-heavy band that plays there every Tuesday. He had scored us a table super close to the stage and next to the speakers. Kissed goodbye therefore to another few frequencies in my hearing range. Could have been worse. There could have been a tuba. The couple right in front of us were necking so hard that it was going to take a surgeon to extricate the guys tongue from his enamorada’s tonsils. The band was very good. In fact all I can say is if I could write like those guys play I would hit the delete key a lot less.

As this seems temporarily to have become a journal, Wednesday afternoon I pootled over to the La Boca house of yet another insanely handsome and charming doctor friend (God love all this intelligent eye candy) Pedro, to chew the fat and drink yerba mate, which I can only liken to very bitter caffeine-fuelled green tea accompanied by a ritual as complicated as a Japanese tea ceremony, and which is a national obsession in Argentina and Uruguay. I am trying to learn to like the stuff as it’s a major part of the social culture here. Trying many different brands. The nice thing is that all Argies are delighted to share their culture with you, and enter into such an exchange with enormous bonhomie and patience.

Thursday I applied for my criminal records check within Argentina in order to further my visa application. By Argie standards it was a hassle free experience. Long may it last… In the evening, craving a little culture Graciela and I headed to a Bach concert at the recently renovated Teatro Colon. It’s a beautiful theatre in the old tradition. That night it was filled with the great and the good. Or at least the big and the noisy. I’d guess attendance was about 80%. A vast chandelier hung from the incredibly high ceiling and gilded naked nymphs sprawled against lyres above the boxes. On the minus side, the acoustics weren’t up to much and there was no bar which meant no G&T during the interval. A trip to the theatre without gin is a very poor trip to the theatre in my opinion, and I think my mama would agree. The large blonde American lady next to us with hair the colour of (with apologies to Roald Dahl) a female tightrope walker’s tights that have not been washed for the entire circus season got extremely uppity at being told she couldn’t take photos with her giant new SLR camera and grumbled throughout the second half. Only extreme diplomacy on my part prevented Graciela from ramming her programme into the woman’s ear.

Import – Export

Folks, it’s time to begin the blog again. After seven months, one operation, two crutches, three (metal) screws, a big limp (that’s a noun not an adjective here please note), a whole lot of fizz, the odd toyboy or two, much good food and a good deal of time with my beloved friends and family I’ve made it back to Buenos Aires!!!!!

Super strange to be back. Spent so long chomping at the bit and pining to be here that once I actually made it back there was this wobbly feeling of, ok… well… now what? After a certain amount of soul searching, quite a few glasses of an exceptional malbec (purely medicinal) and a very large rare steak at my favourite restaurant, La Gran Parilla de Plata (The Big Silver Steakhouse. Love it.) in San Telmo, decided that I do in fact still want to live in this beautiful and wonderful country.

Am staying with my super cool friend Graciela in the downtown neighbourhood of Congreso. She came to collect me and bless her, turned really quite pale when she saw the mountain of impedimenta I had with me (well, a girl needs more than one pair of shoes in a city like this). Her apartment is teeny tiny but she’d arranged all her stuff so there was a bed for me. And we can almost see the floor beneath all my bags. It’s jolly lucky we get on so well…

Graciela is busily learning English because a) she wants to and because b) her masters degree in Environmental Law next year is going to involve a lot of literature in English. I am therefore helping or sabotaging her efforts, depending on how you look at these things, by teaching her my personal brand of verbage. If you want to know how to say “Don’t wade in the ornamental fishpond” or “Excuse me, you’re standing on my skis”, look no further. I’m your girl.

Fabulous to see old chums again. Chicago Rick is still living in his huge and awesomely designer grafitti-ed apartment in Barrio Norte… I forecast more fighting over hot boys. He has set up another internet project… a forum for questions on Buenos Aires www.bafaq.com. Made us all (i.e. bribed us with pizza and beer) go round for a think tank on it. For the record I am happy to be bribed in this way any time… but hold the anchovies.

Saturday managed to score tickets to go and see the Fuerza Bruta show. Maybe you’ve heard of it, as the company tours the globe. They are originally from Argentina so the tickets here are 50 pesos rather than 50 quid. Suits me. It’s a most unusual set up and almost impossible to describe… the space between the audience and the dancers changes all the time. They’re in front of you, behind you, to the side, right above you in a glass-bottomed swimming pool that lowers until you can touch it with the flat of your hand. It’s dynamic and exciting and worth seeing if you ever get the chance.

Saturday was also La noche de los museos,  an annual event in BA in which pretty much every museum and place of interest opens its doors from 8pm to midnight and the public pours in. What a great idea! Mind you, don’t really understand why people would queue for an hour to get into, say, the Fine Arts Museum when it’s free to get into and open every day anyway. We popped in before the line started to get long so I could see if there was anything done by one Leonidas Gambartes, a book on whom I spent the best part of half a year (on and off) translating. There was, and it was very good.

Went out of town on Sunday to Victoria, which is a tube ride and an hour on an old rickety train out of grubby Retiro station. Retiro is a horrible place: situated bang next to a big old slum, it’s grimy, hot and jam-packed with pickpockets, robbers and sundry Charlie artfuls. Expect to get liquid chucked over you and your bag snatched while you try to see through the goo.

Never mind, little Victoria dozes beneath the jacaranda trees and seems a long way away. I was invited for late lazy Sunday lunch with my super sweet hippy friend Nico and a round dozen of his cousins (it is de rigueur in all South American cousins to have approximately 30 first cousins. They find it deeply suspicious here that I only have three). Found them all seated in the shade on the patio around a vast wooden table eating paella and arguing about compost. Nico is something of a green-fingered fanatic and so salad vegetables of all varieties flourished around the walls. I gave him a bag of bird’s eye chilli seeds to grow for me because if I don’t keep my spice levels up I might die and they consider a sprinkling of black pepper dangerously hot here. Nico is also happily growing the biggest pot plant I ever saw. It lives in a bath and obviously enjoys the climate as it’s bigger than its container.

After that we went to the races. Can you believe I never saw a horse race before? I wish it had been somewhere a bit more glamorous than San Isidro hippodrome at 9pm on a Sunday, but you can’t have everything. Races are run three times a week and as there were no major prizes involved that day attendance was limited to the kind of grubby middle-aged man you might find in Ladbrokes any day of the week. The boys evolved some complicated system of betting that involved them losing their money every time. I declined to join them and watched the horses and the muscles bunching under their glossy coats as they stalked round the ring.

There was a fight on the bus on the way home. A strange rather elderly man with too-tight white clothes and a disturbing glassy stare that you felt was fixed on you all the time that he was looking into the middle distance was suddenly set upon by the large, bald and extensively tattooed gentleman standing next to him. God knows what set it off but one moment it was peace and quiet and the next man-in-white is being thrown across the bus and pummelled unmercifully. A woman pulled Mr Tattoo off him in the end, but not before he ended in my lap. Bloody hell these Latinos can all be a bit fiery at times.

Anyway, the evening ended well as a nice old chap with a thick thatch of grey hair and twinkling green eyes leaned up to help the crutch and I off the bus and we got to talking as we were both walking towards the huge Plaza Congreso. After a few platitudes he asked me “Sos importada vos?” which means “Are you imported?”… and I think that is the cutest thing I’ve heard all week.