22 Septiembre 2009
Buenos Aires, Argentina

Yesterday was the first official day of spring! Second summer in 2009, here I come! It's still cool, in the upper 60s and lower 70's for the most part, but we've had some beautiful sunny days and it's nice to be here to see how the city wakes up from it's winter hibernation.

Last week I graduated from my 3 week course at the Ibero Language School. They gave me a diploma and everything, which I think is really funny!

Yesterday I started private classes with a small spanish school run by two women, called Native Tuition. The prices are reasonable and I'm able to buy a block of hours and schedule them as I want so it's really convenient. My first class was really difficult! The women I was with for 2 hours yesterday doesn't speak english but I know that this is the best way for me, even if challenging. A lot of people can understand another language before they can speak it but I've learned over the years that I learn the opposite way. I'm able to speak earlier than I am able to understand when others are speaking, which seems less helpful a lot of times! Ayway, the class went well and I will try to do maybe 4 or 6 hours a week for the next few weeks.

Yesterday I also started an internship with an artist collective here called WUBA, which is an acronym for Whats Up Buenos Aires. www.whatsupbuenosaires.com. Its a bilingual (spanish and english) website which focuses on the emerging arts scene her ein the city, and aims to make it accessible to an international audience. I discovered their website through a blog I was reading before I came and they need all kinds of help so I'm in!

I think it will be a great way to meet some people here and to get to know the city. They've asked me to help them with grant and funding research and I'm also going to help out with the record label, ZZK Records, that they started a year ago. I'll work with them about 10 hours a week.

So things are going really well and I'm happy to have some projects to work on!

There are so many fun things to do in this city and I know that I'm just scratching the surface! A week ago Ezequiel and I went to see a play called Pura Cepa at this performance and cultural space called the Konex. On of his coworkers was acting in the play, and her australian fiance was singing as a part of the play's soundtrack. It was a really interesting show and we're having them over for dinner this week. It will be good to know another person who has been a successful expat here (the aussie!) and I'm also excited to know some people who are making creative projects here in BA.

Last Friday we went to a jazz club called Thelonius Club. It was fantastic and the place was small and beautiful with an exposed brick ceiling and beautiful square light fixtures on the walls. Actually, it was really interesting to hear jazz music that's not based on American jazz standards. The songs they played were using the same pattern of playing that is traditional to American jazz, but the songs themselves were their own compositions. Excellent musicians and beautiful music! I loved to hear another culture's interpretation of a style of music that is traditionally and uniquely American!

The food here is getting better thanks to suggestions from some classmates at Ibero who have been here several times before. For quick food, it's easy to find empanadas, pizza and sandwiches "de miga". De miga just means that it's a sandwich made with thin white bread with no crust. This is really popular here and it's funny to me that Argentines don't like bread crust..

The dogs are doing well but I'm upset with them right now becuse they dug up my herb garden that I planted last week. I was so excited about it! To add insult to injury, they nosed a bunch of dirt out of the planter and then peed on it. How rude!

Last week I had my first adventure with the public buses, the colectivos. There's a guide here to help you figure out how to get where you need to go, called the Guia T. BUT. The city has several hundred bus lines for in the city and around the outskirts. And all of the maps here are oriented differently, with non of them showing true north. And you have to have exact change to ride the bus, which is difficult because there's a shortage of change, monedas, here and nobody wants to give up their coins! Tricky stuff.

So it took me about an hour of flipping through the Guia T and my other map to try to figure out which bus to take home. Then I had to figure out where to pick up the bus and which side of the street to take it...and I got it wrong of course! Normally the bus driver would tell me I was going in the wrong direction when I got on and told him where I was going, but he misunderstood me so off I went in the wrong direction. Anyway, I got to see the University of Buenos Aires campus, and the hipodrome, and we also drove through some beautiful parks in Palermo. It took me about 2 hours to get home, but what can you do? I know this is all part of finding my way here.

Here are a few pictures. I'm still waiting for a nice sunny day to take pictures of the house!




The symbol of the city of Buenos Aires, in front of their President's house - La Casa Rosada

One of the dogs, Cuca, sunbathing on the patio. Blissed out!

Our intersection! Castro Barros y Venezuela.

We're about 5 blocks from this metro stop.

A typical fruit and vegetable stand...they're everywhere! We have like 5 within a 3 block radius.

9 Septiembre 2009
Buenos Aires, Argentina

Week 2 of spanish classes is going well so far. But we´ve started past tense and I´m wondering why so many people have dared to tell me spanish is an easy language to learn! I´ve found some notecards and am pulling out my old techniques from art slide memorization in art history classes at JMU.... there are so many new words and verbs every day that there´s just no way around it. I´ll start studying for at least a couple hours every day to make the most of my group classes, which aren´t cheap!

Restaurants alone are very tricky so far. There´s so much vocabulary on a menu that in general, I don´t really know what to expect when I order something. Always an adventure, and so far I´ve eaten mostly things that I don´t particularly like! I don´t really mind though and I eat whatever it is anyway, even as I memorize what it´s called to avoid ordering it next time. Trial and error seems to start with more errors!

I took a long walk yesterday from the neighborhood Congreso to Palermo. The sun peaked out a couple of times but other than that, it was a really cold day! I´m learning that my sense of direction is vastly improved when I hoof it. It seems that it´s mostly behind the wheel of a car that my internal compass goes spinning. I pulled out the map yesterday and had an easy time of getting where I needed to go. I found the Swiss Medical office and they gave me my health insurance paperwork. It seems to be a good plan and they have an english speaking rep who is sending me a list of doctors in all specialities who speak english. Mental health doctors are included in health insurance here, so if I start to lose it, I can go talk to a shrink for a $4 copay!

Last Sunday Ezequiel and I went out to the country, to a small town called Villa Elisa. We spent the day with his parents and another family that is like Eze´s second family. They prepared an asado and we spend all day outside talking, eating and playing foosball - ¨metegol¨. It was so nice to get out of the city, which I´m noticing has really smoggy air. We had a good time and the other family is from France so between english and french I was able to have some conversations and not feel like a total bore. Learned lots of new vocab and tried only the tiniest bit of morcilla (blood sausage). mmm....I can´t get past the idea of it! I´m leaving it alone for now I think.

Last night I met up with a couple of Ezequiel´s girlfriends who are really nice. We all have various studies going on so we´re going to meet up once or twice a week to study together. Between my own few connections and those of Ezequiel and his coworkers, I hope to start spending some time with new people this week and next. I need some of my own friends and projects so I´m going to work more on this now that I feel a bit more like I´m getting my bearings. I´m missing my girls back home and am looking forward to a girls´night with some people here on Friday.

How does one build a new life? You don´t think about it until you have to do it! All of these little things that create your identity and fill up your time, how did you develop them, when and why did you start doing them? This is what I´m thinking about these days and what I need to work on. It´s kind of fun to start from scratch though! It means I go about these tasks with more thought and more purpose.

This is such a big city, and really feels like it after having lived in DC! It´s very spread out and there are so many neighborhoods to explore. This week I´m wandering around Palermo, which is filled with interesting shops and fun restaurants and cafes. Ezequiel took me out to dinner there last Thursday and showed me the square where he used to hang out when he was just a punk kid. He said back then that the neighborhood was pretty rough. Now it´s the trendiest area in BsAs and has areas that people call Palermo Soho, Palermo Hollywood, etc. Funny how things change, but not surprising I suppose. The same thing is happening in an obvious way in DC now.

Things are happening and it seems we´ll have internet at the house, fingers still crossed!, maybe by next week. Once I have home internet access I´ll be able to post here more often and also include pictures! I´m waiting for a sunny day to capture casa Chorizo at it´s best.

Buenos Aires, Argentina

4 Septiembre 2009

Today I celebrate my one week anniversary of being here in BsAs!

In this first week I have tried ¨facturas¨and ¨achuras¨, experienced my first Argentine ¨asado¨, learned how to take a dog for a walk here, and experienced ¨mate¨for my second time (nope still haven´t developed a taste for it!).

My home here is Casa Chorizo, an old argentine style of house which is half open patio and half house. It´s so beautiful and Ezequiel, his father and others have done so much work on it. I was stunned to walk in and see how special this place is! The small beautiful tile on the patio, the iron work on the gates, the HUGE barbeque (¨parrilla¨) at the back of the patio. I have never lived in a place this beautiful.

The dogs, Kuka and Canela, are fun to have around and I´m happy to have announcements when someone´s at the front door. Kuka is a little ragamuffin dog whose ears show the marks of her feisty nature. she has already figured out that I am a total softy when it comes to her begging. Canela is still getting used to me so I give her distance for now until she learns to trust me there.

The city is busy, noisy, crowded, beautiful. Old buildings with amazing facades and stonework are everywhere, mixed in with little shops selling a bit of everything. Casa Chorizo is in a residential neighborhood called ¨Almagro¨, which is on the Blue Subte (metro) line at the Castro Barros stop. It´s a real, non touristy, Argentine neighborhood and it´s a short metro trip into the heart of the city.

My spanish classes are in the neighborhood ¨Congreso¨which is where their beautiful Congress building is. Ezequiel works in the Ministry of Economy which is right next to Argentina´s version of the White House - The Pink House - ¨Casa Rosada¨. Spanish classes are going really well so far. I´m taking 4 hours a day, Monday to Friday. The class is small and the other students are really interesting and fun. Everyone has their own unique story for how they came to be here.

Tuesday was Ezequiel´s birthday so Monday night we christened Casa Chorizo´s parrilla with friends of his. I got to see Eze´s friend Pablo, who I know from Paris and haven´t seen in 4 years and I got to meet his girlfriend Michelle. She´s from CA and we´ve been emailing back and forth the last few months. It was a blast and everyone that was there spoke english and or french so it was no problem to communicate. It was a perfect Argentina welcome and a really happy night!

Choosing the meat for the asado was an interesting experience. The quantity of meat and the different kinds, the way it´s prepared and eaten - everything is so different! When Argentines have a barbeque, there is no need for salads, sides, nothing. Just meat. And no sauces really, aside from maybe some chimichurri sauce for the chorizo. No seasonings either. Really, just meat! And. They eat all parts of the animal. Which is good of course. We in the States are very wasteful in eating only the ¨best¨parts of the animal. So we had to make a special trip to find some good ¨achuras¨which as Eze says, are the ¨inside things¨. Not exactly something I¨m used to!

I tried to be a good sport so I had a bit of something that I believe was like intestines. It felt like chewing gum. Maybe not my favorite! There was also some morcilla which is blood sausage. I haven´t tried it yet but there is still some inthe fridge leftover so we´ll see if I´ll try it...

I love these new experiences! There are so many just little things here that are different. They put there trash out on the sidewalks, anywhere, and it is picked up every night around 9pm. Nobody walks their dogs with a leash. Maybe they have it in their hand, but the dog is hardly ever ON the leash. And they don´t run off! The way the meat was handled in the butcher shop was something that would never ever be acceptable to our American health standards. The way people walk on the sidewalks, the way people drive. The way people pack in so tight like sardines on the subte (the metro) without being bothered. I truly feel I´m in a foreign country and it´s fascinating.

The more things I notice as different, the more I also see how we are in the States. I love this type of learning! Experiential.

I´m happy here so far and I feel comfortable even with all the changes and differences. It´s a very good start. But I haven´t even begun to explore yet and next week I think I will spend afternoons visiting Palermo. We went to dinner there last night and there are so many really cute little shops and interesting street art.

We don´t yet have internet in Chorizo but when we do, I´ll be much better with emails and updating the blog more often. And with pictures! I promised pictures of the house and I will deliver! It just might take another week or so. Things like this are apparently especially difficult to arrange here! Well, I guess it´s hard to get a cable man to show up even in the States sometimes...

until next time....BESOS!!!!!!!!!