Dia de la Madre
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Yesterday was Dia de la Madre – Mother’s Day. I guess Mother’s Day is always in the Spring? We spent the evening with the Martinez family in Avellaneda: Diógenes, Élida, Karina and Claudia. And their two dogs, Malevo and Shakira. We ate at around 9 pm, an apparently typical dinner hour here but a bit of a straing for Diógenes, the man of the household, who starts his day of taxi driving at 1 a.m. This didn’t stop him from getting up for dinner on such an import day, of course, but his exhaustion made it even harder for me to understand him.
Of course, with my maybe 500-word vocabulary it’s not particularly easy to understand anybody. Señora Martinez seems to enjoy putting me through my paces, however. When I visited their house last week, for example, she asked me what I thought about President Bush. Yesterday she wanted to know about my family. “And your mother,” she asked, “all of her children have left her”? I said yes. She shrugged. She seemed to think this was a bit sad. She still has her 25 and 26-year-old daughters living with her, which she explained is the norm in Buenos Aires where apartments aren’t cheap and where the University is a short bus-ride away. And where parents maybe give their kids a bit more space?
The Mother’s Day feast felt like Thanksgiving to me, perhaps because my internal clock still thinks it’s fall. It was pleasantly normal. I ate some of everything: milanesa, spinach torte, squash torte, crêpes, salad, French fries, bread, and chocolate cake with dulce de leche. Superb, all of it.
Perhaps I am unable to recognize culture shock, or it has yet to set in, but I feel reasonably at home here. The general layout and character of Buenos Aires are familiar after our visit last May, so I don’t feel like I’m in an alien land. So far, I think life here is more similar to life in New York than life in New York was to what came before – i.e. rural and suburban living.
Not that I know what’s going on here, of course.
People keep asking me for directions, oddly enough. “Do you know where the [insert unfamiliar Spanish word here] is”? On Saturday, a man asked me if there was a baby-changing table inside the bookstore. After I said I didn’t know, it took me several minutes of dictionary exploration to figure out what he had actually said. But then, on Saturday evening, a lost-looking couple asked me if I knew where the movie theatre was, and believe it or not I did! I have learned some things. Let’s see…
20 things I have learned since October 8:
1. Ham and cheese (jamón y queso) are very popular here
2. You have to buy water at restaurants
3. Coke comes in glass bottles
4. Argentine beets taste great
5. Pizza is as popular here as anywhere
6. Wine is often cheaper than water
7. Subways are cheaper than buses
8. Vis-à-vis nyc, the uptown trains run on the downtown tracks
9. 9 degrees Celsius is cold
10. Argentina runs on 24-hour time
11. I still have a talent for choosing the wrong line at the grocery store
12. Commerce Bank may not charge a fee for withdrawing money in Argentina, but they give me a terrible exchange rate
13. Fake 20 peso bills are worth 0 pesos
14. Stuff in the drug stores is far from cheap
15. The University (at least the language part) has no library, but it’s ok to go to a café and stay forever
16. It’s normal to have a cell phone with no monthly plan, to pay using a calling card, and to get incoming calls free
17. The dinner hour is nearly as close to midnight as to sundown
18. There appear to be more Irish bars than Irish people
19. Bars never close, and people seem never to go home
20. What Argentines call “napkins” would be termed “waxed paper” in the U.S.
antes era poesia
despues tenés quick notes on week 2
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