Author Archives: rkl5023

Surrounding myself with tango

One of the things Buenos Aires is best known for is its tango. In the last couple weeks, I’ve been trying to surround myself with tango. Here is some of the evidence:

1. My tango shoes. I bought these for my tango class (which once again was cancelled this week due to strikes, but oh well). Yes, they are incredibly high to dance in.

2. The world tango museum. I went here a couple weeks ago to see exactly what it showcased. It wasn’t very big, only a couple rooms, but it was good to see that someone was preserving tango artifacts.

3. Cafe Tortoni tango show. My friends and I went to a tango show at this historic cafe. It’s a little hard to navigate through all the tango shows here in the city. They range from very expensive to very cheap and I’m pretty sure their quality corresponds to their price. This was a somewhat cheap show. There was one guy and one girl dancer, an accordion player, a piano player, and a singer. It was relatively good quality, but most of all just gave me a taste of tango tourism.

3. Milonga. Last Friday, my friends and I went to a milonga, where locals go late at night to dance tango. Unfortunately, no one asked us to dance, although supposedly my friend went the night before and was asked multiple times. I still have yet to figure out exactly how to work the milongas, but it was fun to see. This picture is from around 11:30pm, before the milonga really started filling up.

4. Carlos Gardel’s house. Once again, a very small museum, but nice to see that it exists.

5. Probably even cooler than the actual Carlos Gardel museum was the surrounding area. There was Carlos Gardel street, pictures of Gardel on buildings, and music written on buildings. I can truly say this part of the city was obsessed with Carlos Gardel.

6. Tangoing at an estancia. Last Saturday, I visited an estancia. These two dancers showed some traditional folk dance and afterward, joined in a tango. It was cool to see them enjoying the dance.

All in all, I still have a lot of tango to experience, but this shows I’ve at least gotten to see a little bit of the dance born in this city!

Location: Scalabrini Oritz 1331, Buenos Aires, Argentina

The Inconveniences of Living in Argentina

I’m starting to really enjoy living in Buenos Aires, but I must admit, there are quite a few inconveniences to living in a country where the government doesn’t work all that smoothly.

First, for the past two weeks, my classes at IUNA have been cancelled due to a strike. Apparently it’s quite common to have a strike at a public university down here. It’s not even the professors who are on strike; apparently the students are protesting. Public universities here are free for anyone to attend. According to my Spanish professor, although their price used to be an immense asset, as the public universities were high quality, now, they have disintegrated to the point where they don’t have heat, all of the classes are huge, and the quality of education is supposedly not near what it used to be. This has caused a number of private universities to emerge, and apparently a number of student strikes. While I appreciate students’ rights, right now I’d really just like to learn tango and not miss more classes. One of my friends here got an even closer view of the strikes at a different university, UBA. Here’s his blog entry, which shows some awesome pictures and stories.

Then, there’s the money inconvenience. “M�s chiquito?” (“Smaller?”) is becoming one of my least favorite phrases. None of the stores like to give you change for a 100 peso bill. I completely understand that they don’t like counting the change and would rather you pay with a smaller bill, but 100 pesos is about $25 usd, which we would give change for in the US without thinking twice. Sometimes they get very grumpy about having to give change for 100 pesos.

It seems people have come to accept that life in Argentina is going to be filled with inconveniences. It’s not uncommon to hear people say things along the lines of “…but that’s life in Argentina.” Yesterday, in literature class, we were watching a documentary about a part of Buenos Aires. One of my classmates pointed out that even while riots were occurring, the movie continued to focus on the day-to-day life of the characters. Their lives weren’t stopped, there was just a passing mention of the tumultuous circumstances. It’s crazy that this inconveniences are simply a part of their routine lives.

Location: Sanchez de Loria 443, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Settling into a routine

As I’m starting to settle into a routine here in Buenos Aires, I’m finding two things to be large parts of my experience:

1. Coffee at Havanna along with schoolwork. For some reason, I’m currently obsessed with a cafe latte negro from Havanna. I can spend hours at this little coffee shop, reading papers, taking notes, and drinking coffee. It’s a good thing servers in Buenos Aires aren’t in the habit of kicking people out of cafes!

2. Exploring the city. Whether it’s the Recoleta Cemetary or the San Telmo Fair (shown above is a traditional set up for a tango orchestra), it’s always fun to wander around and take pictures. When I first arrived in Buenos Aires, I was a little nervous about wandering around a big city by myself, but I’m starting to become more comfortable with this. And of course, I’m not always wandering by myself. Oftentimes, I’m walking through the streets or perusing the items at a fair with friends.

I had no idea my semester would look like this. I didn’t think I’d have time to just wander through the streets or leisurely do my work. But I’m becoming more used to it, settling in, and starting to enjoy this routine.

Location: Carlos Pelligrini 1001, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Pollution and Poverty

Now that I’ve been in Buenos Aires for four weeks, I feel as though I’m starting to see the city as a little more than just a vacation destination. Last weekend played a large role in waking me up to the reality of city life, especially in a developing country. Up to this point, I wouldn’t have called Argentina a developing country, mostly because the places I have been (the affluent parts of Buenos Aires, the tourist destination of Iguazu Falls) have done a good job of disguising hardships. However, my trip to the “Ecological Reserve” and repeated trips on the subte (the subway system here in Buenos Aires) are proving me wrong.

Last Saturday, in an effort to escape the never-ending sight of buildings and sounds of car horns, some friends and I headed to the Ecological Reserve. Only a couple miles from my house, I was excited to see whether this could be a place to which I could escape. Upon arriving, though, I started to wonder whether it really deserved its name. There were some plants and wildlife, but more than anything, there was trash and dead fish. The whole place smelled like dead fish. There were dead fish bobbing up and down in the water and dead fish littering the sand.

Can you find all the dead fish in this picture?

On the subway that night, once again I saw homeless children begging for monedas (coins). It breaks my heart every time I see them. Small girls, maybe seven years old, try to take care of screaming toddlers. They hold the babies like sacks of potatoes; the babies are at least half their size. They go up and down the subway cars, giving out papers to make you feel bad and give them money so they can buy food. They never did anything to deserve a life on the subway, a life where their only playground is the metal bars attaching the seats to the subway car and their only education is what they can glean from interactions with strangers. They deserve to be in school, or playing sports, or eating dinner with families. Instead, they live underground, hardly ever seeing the light of day.

I compare my use of the subte to theirs. For me, the subte is an amazing convenience, because it gets me to my final destination in a timely manner. But for them, the subte is their destination. There is nowhere else to go, no one to meet, no experiences waiting to happen. I don’t know how they manage that life, besides the fact that it is all they’ve ever known. I wish time after time that they didn’t have to experience that. And every time I get on the subte and see them asking for money again, it breaks my heart one more time.

*Necessary disclaimer: Although I believe the facts in the last two paragraphs to be true, I have never asked the homeless girls their stories. I don’t know how long this has been a part of their lives, and I don’t know the specifics of their circumstances. However, I do know that I see them all the time on the subte begging for money, and I can only assume their lives are spent in this pursuit.

Location: Suipacha 1092, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Nutrition, más o menos

Here in Argentina, carbs and proteins are more than plentiful. From empa�adas to ham and cheese sandwiches to steak and potatoes, an Argentinean diet seems to be somewhat restricted. It’s not that other food groups can’t be found; on the contrary, there are many fresh fruit and vegetable stands along the streets. However, for some reason, an appropriate dinner for them consists of rice and hot dogs or potatoes and steak. While this could also suffice in the United States for dinner, in the US this is more of an occasional meal with an abnormal balance of food groups rather than a regular habit.

I’m not really sure if they know much about nutrition in general. One of my friends has a host mother whose “diet” consists of finding the recipes for the foods with the least calories and putting those foods together. Many of them don’t eat breakfast and eat dinner as late as 9 or 10 at night. Perhaps their strength comes from drinking lots of mate (filled with caffeine and supposedly a hunger suppressant).

This caffeinated drink leads to my next confusion, however: How do they manage when they barely drink any water? Argentines seem to be dehydrated, at least by my standards. They don’t walk around with bottles of water, and compared to my host mother, I drink a ton of water. I respect that they can make it through the day eating and drinking so little, but since I have control over my lunches, I’ll continue to eat my fruits and vegetables and down my water.

The biggest surprise for me in terms of taste was the corn. One night, I excitedly sat down to corn as a part of dinner. Anticipating a sweet, milky corn, I was quite surprised and confused to taste a very different flavor. Perhaps it was different growing conditions, perhaps it was the season, or perhaps it was the variety. Either way, it was not very sweet at all and almost tasted dirty to me. Normally, I can eat my corn without any butter, as it is sufficiently sweet in itself. However, this night, I had to slather on the butter, in order to make up for the lack of sweetness.

Also, their bread is not as soft as bread in the United States and tends to fall apart much more easily. Many of their breads have almost no flavor. However, their pasteries and ice cream are delicious, and make up for this.

Foods found plentifully in Argentina include:

-dulce de leche (in ice cream, sold separately, in cookies, on pasteries)

-empa�adas

-steak

-ham

-alfajores

-mate

Another interesting drink: a submarino. They bring you hot milk and a chocolate bar, and you dip the chocolate in the milk to make a drink resembling hot chocolate.

Location: buenos aires, argentina

Finally!

Today, I finally got a chance to dance tango! I’ve been dying to go, but hadn’t quite found people to come with, and wasn’t ready to tango with Argentineans without other Americans around. However, tonight my friends and I headed to the Tango Festival, where a beginner class was offered. I finally learned the basic step for the tango, but the most interesting time came after the class was over. They left the music on, so while people were milling around for a while, an old Argentine man in a white suit, about 9 inches shorter than me, asked me to dance. He started leading steps I did not know and expected me to just follow. Somehow he had gotten the impression that I actually knew what I was doing. I’m not really sure how that happened, but even when I told him it was my first day of tango, he just kept going. We danced for a good 15 minutes, me smiling and trying to figure out exactly how all this was happening.

Dance always makes me smile, and I can’t wait to go back to the festival and learn more about this dance that is a huge part of Buenos Aires!

Location: Bartolomé Mitre 575, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Overrated?

I realize that as I post this, I’m taking a risk of sounding overly critical, pessimistic, or spoiled. I also realize I am in the minority in my opinion of the trip. However, this blog isn’t meant to sugarcoat my experience, so here it goes:

Everyone says you have to see Iguazu Falls when you’re in Argentina. So, this weekend (a long weekend due to an Argentinean holiday), some of my friends and I headed to see for ourselves.

First, there was the 20-hour bus trip. Twenty hours may not seem long upon first glance, but in that amount of time, I was able to read 50 pages of a scientific book and two magazines, watch about two and a half movies, and sleep for about 10 hours. To say the least, it was a long ride, and I was sufficiently stiff when I emerged. We stopped in tons of small towns to pick up other passengers and arrived about two hours after we were scheduled.

Then, there were the falls. Yes, they were majestic and beautiful. Yes, we saw toucans and monkeys. But something about the iron bridge and path made it so unreal. Not being able to set foot on the actual dirt surrounding the falls, not being able to touch the water ever so briefly as it rushed past made it seem so fabricated. It seemed easy to believe this was all manmade, not a natural beauty fashioned by a caring creator. At the time, I chalked it up to tourists. All those other people, scurrying through the park with cameras. And I think that was part of it. But I think the biggest part was how easily we could access it. Just take a bus, walk less than a mile, and you’re there. No climb, no summit–just another tourist attraction, like HersheyPark or Beaver Stadium. I wanted to be awed, and left uninspired.

The weekend proceeded to leave a bad taste in my mouth when I got back to the hostel. After a barbeque, the hostel decided to offer entertainment I would deem less-than-classy. I had no desire to partake and resigned to my room, frustrated that my experience had come to this.

Ultimately, I’m afraid this trip wasn’t everything I thought it would be. The falls were beautiful, but I hope not all of my trips are like this. I hope there’s something coming, only just out of reach, that will truly leave me amazed by Argentina.

Location: Iguazu Falls, Argentina

A beautiful city in love with soccer

All around, there is evidence of immigrants. From the European architecture to the brightly colored houses (using colors from the boats in the harbor), this city reeks of other countries.

Finally saw tango on the street during a local fair! I’m not quite sure if fair is the right word, but it was a sort of art festival, that apparently takes place every Sunday.

Today, we toured the Boca Juniors stadium. I never thought I’d say this, but it made me miss Penn State football. The tour guide told us all about the fans jumping in their seats and rushing to climb the fence whenever a goal is scored. Here, I demonstrated a crazy fan after a goal. We were also strictly instructed never to sit in one section of the stadium–apparently that’s where the hooligans sit and cause mass chaos. The tour guide was incredibly passionate about his team, continuously joking about the other team being smaller and showing off Boca Juniors’ trophies. I guess it is true that people in other countries enjoy soccer so much more than people in the US.

Location: 964 Libertad, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Food and Animals

Today, our IES group went to an estancia (ranch). I hadn’t realized how much I missed the breeze, the trees, and the animals.

The general feel of the day was a day of socialization with friends. It was a very relaxing day, as we sat around drinking mate on the lawn. Argentineans are a little bit obsessed with mate. They put mate tea leaves in a cup, fill it with hot water, and then drink it out of a straw that filters the leaves out. Then, they carry around a thermos of hot water so they can keep refilling it and drinking mate.

Not only did we have mate, but we had a ton of food. First, we ate empenadas (kind of like a really small, flaky stromboli with beef on the inside). When we came inside, we ate the spread shown above: vegetables and fruits galore. We were then offered all types of meat (pork, chicken, and of course beef) on skewers. Argentina is known for their free-range cows and the beef was indeed delicious. There was also a huge array of absolutely delicious desserts, some with the characteristic dulce de leche.

We also saw some awesome animals including armadillos, storks, peacocks, and rheas and rode horses. Below is a link to a movie of the rheas. I don’t know why they started running around crazily, but it was quite amusing.

MVI_1258.MOV

Location: 964 Libertad, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Pictures

Here are some pictures of the city I’m starting to call home. Unfortunately, my photo opportunities are somewhat limited, since I have heard stories of people’s cameras being stolen out of their hands and I’m cautious about taking pictures.

My room in my homestay

The city from the IES abroad center.

This guy has the coolest job! He rides his bike around, ringing a special bell to let people know he’s there. They bring out their knives, he stops, and he pedals in place, using special gears to sharpen their knives.

Location: 964 Libertad, Buenos Aires, Argentina

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Author Archives: rkl5023

Surrounding myself with tango

The Inconveniences of Living in Argentina

Settling into a routine

Pollution and Poverty

Nutrition, más o menos

Finally!

Overrated?

A beautiful city in love with soccer

Food and Animals

Pictures