I had heard that it was an acquired taste, but it wasn’t as bad as I expected. Florencia, the adult education director, gave me some of hers, and it was basically like very strong, bitter green tea. I asked if it had caffeine and they said it had “mateina” which is apparently stronger. BUT, lots of antioxidants, and then Florencia and someone else told a joke about a doctor and a gaucho singing the benefits of mate together. Sweet.Also at the office on Tuesday, Cintia excused herself from her desk and told me she had to go to a meeting with a coworker. She and Alejandro, one of the head exhibition mounters, then went into this corner, whipped out the day’s Clarin and started jabbing at it and shouting stories to each other. The day before, their football team, Chacarita, had won 1-0 and earned itself a spot in division 1 for the first time in 5 years. Alejandro explained that Chacarita isn’t a huge team like Boca or River, but now it will play against them. And that there are plenty of crazy Chacarita fans who were waiting for this, like the 2,000 who filled plaza San Martin near the stadium celebrating.
Tuesday night for we went to Andres von Buch’s apartment, which was beautiful and overlooked the city. I recognized a lot of contemporary art. He and his family were extremely nice, as well as several 18 to 23-year-old friends of their daughter whom we got to know a little and will hopefully be seeing more of. They were an interesting group. The first girl I talked to was an art history major at the University of Buenos Aires, UBA, and painted, one girl wanted to perform on Broadway, and another boy was German and spoke English with a Scottish accent because he’d gone to a Scottish school in Buenos Aires.Paloma and I talked with two more girls about how they went to Vail to work at ski resorts during one vacation with the idea of bringing money back because the dollar is so much stronger than the Argentine peso (today 1 USD = 3.78 ARS), a sort of societized version of the immigration we studied in ER&M, and also about their opinion of the upcoming elections. The girls think they are a joke. One of them said that going into politics in the university is looked down upon as dirty, and she described Peronism as a movement with a name only and without any fixed values. We were surprised at how down to earth they were considering they looked like they had walked out of Argentine Gossip Girl.
I'm also wondering how impossible the political change that the girls praised the US for actually is in Argentina. I read an editorial in the Buenos Aires Herald, the English language newspaper, about how literally every party leader (because for the upcoming elections you don’t vote for individuals, but for parties who then get to pack the legislature. Neat, right?) was a puppet, which was particularly disheartening.
We also got the sense from a conversation that evening between Andres and Chris’s boss that they ran half of Latin America. We are definitely still in the Yale bubble in Buenos Aires….Paloma and I are looking for volunteer organizations. There’s a neat microfinance group in the city and if that doesn’t work out, we’re going to try for an elementary school in the barrio next to ours, Once. Once (like the number) is a working-class neighborhood that is known for its Bolivian and Peruvian immigrants, wholesale textiles, and the center of Buenos Aires’s large Jewish community.
Tuesday was also Chris’s birthday!
Tuesday was also Chris’s birthday!Two noteworthy things happened on Wednesday. The first was that Fernando, another of the exhibition mounters, brought Cintia some watercolors that he had just finished in the workshop. They were very delicately beautiful. He had done them from hunters’ photographs of just-shot rabbits and a lion, and everyone crowded around and talked about how they made you think about the relationship between sleep and death, and Maraní, the head exposition coordinator, talked about a stain of paint becoming an animal. It was just a lovely moment.
The second thing on Wednesday: POWER JUMP. Elena and Paloma had gone on Monday and loved it, and I went with Paloma on Wednesday night and had a semi-religious experience. Imagine a class of thirty people on personal mini-trampolines doing aerobics in time to blasting Spanish and English pop hits and a shouting instructor. During difficult moves the whole group whoops and hollers, and the front wall of the exercise room is a giant mirror which just quadruples the fun. It is a great workout. I return tonight.
Yesterday morning before work I looked around in the bookstores on Corrientes street which Barbara, Chris’s boss’s daughter, had recommended to me. One of them, Galeria Gandhi, had a great music selection as well and sort of reminded me of Waterloo. I liked the English-language music the staff had recommended so I talked with the guy at the counter and he recommended this CD of Juan Ravioli’s, to which I am now enjoying. Ravioli (only funny to me, apparently) is from Buenos Aires and Paris 1980 is his band—the CD was released in 2006. Gandhi boy made a Ravioli/Nick Drake lyrics comparison that I most certainly did not understand, but I did had a whole conversation with him in castellano without him switching to English!
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