Food, Futbol, and Protests

Happy day after Thanksgiving!!

I've left the land of cow and tango to spend a wonderful Thanksgiving with my brother and friends at Evan Parker's house (thanks Evan!) in California. I flew in the day before yesterday and am attempting to adjust to the time change while hanging out with Chris and Cheryl - my friend from Ningbo who's magically at Stanford! I'm also still walking off the extra chub I've gained from a tasty exploration into Buenos Aires ice cream. The Lonely Planet lists 6 top ice cream stores in Buenos Aires, and I decided that my last week in BA would be a good time to sample all of them.

Jimmy and Katie and Ice Cream

Mmmmm.... Ooooooohhh.... Owwwwwww..... They give you itty-bitty little cones here and pile them super artistically high with two flavors of ice cream! And at a fair we went to last Sunday (more about that later), they sold a 1/4 kilo of ice cream for 2.50 pesos - about 80 cents. I think I've decided that the fruit ice cream here is fantastic, the mint is terrible (a different interpretation of what mint is supposed to taste like, I guess), and if you like dulce de leche (caramel) then BA is certainly the place to be.

Marlboro Man!

So, the "Feria de los Mataderos" (Fair of the um, killers?) - there were horses and lots of leather and dances in a very different vein than tango (folk dances with scarves). Supposedly it's about gauchos (like, cowboys) and there were costumed and wizened old Marlboro men looking guys on horses. The horsemen (no girls) were playing a game where one at a time they'd race their horse down the street as fast as they could, holding a metal stick-like-thing which they were supposed to get into a tiny tiny ring hanging from a stand. If the stick goes in the ring then the ring pops off and the horsemen holds up his prized ring-on-stick and the crowd cheers, yay!

Little Boy on a Big Horse

My favorite was a tiny boy riding a big horse - he must have been about five years old (they had to lower the ring a few feet for him because he was too short to reach the big people height) - and the first time he hit the ring, while the second he perfectly skewered it on his stick, hurrah! Definitely skills I don't possess...

Jimmy Meets Argentine Food

My last week in Buenos Aires Jimmy Chu also came to visit me! Well, maybe he came for work, but eh, same thing... Jimmy, a friend of mine from decadance, came down to BA with Google and discovered that the Argentine tax system is ridiculously complex. Aside from that though, we went and saw an amazing Boca Jr. game.

We All Love Boca Jr.

Boca Jr. is the big soccer (or futbol) team in Buenos Aires and the fans are crazy! We sat in the cheap seats with the rest of the hooligans and therefore got an excellent view of the BA fans at work. They didn't seem to care very much about watching the game, as there were blue and gold banners hung strategically to block one's view of the field. Everyone was also standing up on anything they could (including bars about four feet off the ground), singing (yes, yes, for 2 1/2 hours) Boca Jr. songs (the only one I really understood was about how much we all loved Boca Jr.) to the beat of drums (yes, real drums), and jumping at intense moments. There were also a number of fans who were turned around, facing away from the field the entire game. I'm not sure what the score was, but the Boca Jr. songs are still stuck in my head.

Protesters Coming

We had the opportunity to hear the same melodies again at a protest a few days before I left BA. I wonder if the protesters were the same crowd as the Boca Jr. fans? Between 1976 and 1983 (yay wikipedia!), there was a state-sponsored "Dirty War" that left 10,000 - 30,000 people "disappeared." The generals from the military government of that era are now being tried for their crimes. However, the day before a key witness, Julio Lopez, was supposed to testify, he "disappeared." Hmmmmm.... On the 2-month anniversary of his disappearance, Jimmy and Google coworkers, and me and Dustin, were hanging out in downtown BA when an enormous protest headed our way down the street. I have never seen a protest this huge. We must have watched it go by for about a half an hour, and there were still people pouring in. They were marching to the "Casa Rosada" - or the Argentine equivalent of the White House - with signs and stencils that said basically, Make Julio Lopez appear alive! I am doubtful that it will happen, but I'm impressed at the involvement of people. The people in the protest were also a lot browner than the average person I see on the streets of BA every day (who are by and large very European looking) - making me wonder if more indigenous people were effected during the Dirty War, or if the protest just drew people from other areas of BA where people are browner (and if so - why the color distribution of pale at the city center to brown on the outskirts?).

While, after my brief visit with friends and Chris at Stanford, I leave tomorrow night to fly to Taipei and National Taiwan Normal University to study Mandarin! My plan is to be there through the end of May, but we'll see how everything turns out. I also hear that there is a good tango scene in Taipei, which is excellent, because my spiffy new tango shoes need some chances to practice their stuff.

Happy digesting (for those of you in Turkey land)!

Cheese and Tango

Cheese...

Meat...

I'm still in Buenos Aires, where the dancing is prolific, Spanish classes have been found, and the food is Italian and cow-riffic. Buenos Aires seems to subsist on the unfortunate fates of a couple gazillion cows… everything seems to be cow meat, milk, cheese, butter, or some other manifestation of cow. This often makes a restaurant's vegetarian option into a tasty, greasy, ball of cheese (or sometimes a garden of fried chard… maybe that's what the cows here eat?). Sometimes you can even get bits of green in with your cheese... :) Blythe, Evan Parker's cousin who also happens to be in Buenos Aires, informed us that Buenos Aires (or maybe all of Argentina… ) has the second highest rates of anorexia (next to Japan)… although I haven't checked the stats, I could certainly imagine that all these tall and too skinny Argentinean ladies are not eating very much cow product… and I'm not sure what else they're eating here! However, there are at least three vegetarian restaurants with tasty tasty food (mmm…), and thanks to the over-abundance of cow, plentiful fruit and vegetable stands, and our kitchen, I get to create culinary experiments almost every day!

Look, Magazines!

Along with the plentiful vegetable and fruit displays, there are bountiful magazine (aka porn) stands, and incense and flower stands. About every block, this month's magazines are displayed in full-figured form, with sometimes unintentionally hilarious covers (hey, you can't take your pulse there…). Perhaps the flower/incense stands nearby are to increase one's chances of getting to see a real live naked girl? Maybe not by a man , at least where I live though... according to the Lonely Planet, I live in the heart of the gay scene in Buenos Aires (and I found a stack of "hombres para hombres" club cards with websites in the dresser drawer from the last person who lived here). Despite this and all the couples making out in Buenos Aires' many parks and plazas, I have yet to see an openly gay anything here. Evidently Argentina was the first country in South America to legalize same-sex unions (woo-hoo!), but apparently the culture hasn't been as accommodating in its acceptance. And since I supposedly live in the middle of everything gay, either this scene is very underground, or they only party at 5am. I'm not sure which one yet.

Dustin, Me, and tango teachers Rosana and Cacho Dante

I'm also beginning to explore the intimidating world of Buenos Aires milongas (late night tango dances that happen every night all over the city). Sunday night, Dustin, me, and a new friend from China, Scarlet, went to a rock/tango club. The club alternates four song sets of rock music (aka swing) with tango - pretty awesome. "Rock" here is a dance done to swing music that looks a bit like Charleston and makes me really curious about how it got here and from who and when… And, in the back corner of the dance floor, we found about six lindy hoppers, and there's a swing festival on the 18th of this month! I admit, Buenos Aires is not the best place to go for learning swing, but it's nice to dance something familiar after the ego-swallowing experience of watching a gazillion amazing tango dancers, and hearing their occasional sighs of disappointment when they dance with you... I'm not sure if I'm getting any better at tango, or just more confused about what that actually means. I've been taking some really technical (but great) classes where couples stand really close together, there are a lot of subtle movements and small steps to accommodate for a crowded dance floor, and I'm supposed to keep my legs straight all the time (I'm working on it). And then, I've also been taking a bunch of classes in a shiny happy dance studio that teaches a style with couples standing farther apart to make room for kicks and big sweeps or flourishes, with knees always relaxed and bent, and a lot of performance oriented moves. In the dance halls I've been to it looks like people do a mix of both, or maybe neither and I just haven't figured it out yet. I'm not sure where the styles converge, or how, or if they even do, but hopefully with more time I'll figure things out a bit better.

I also found a willing Spanish teacher, who is a font of information on Buenos Aires culture, if not necessarily the most attentive grammatical instructor. She usually goes on rants during our lessons about the lack of iodine in northern Argentina, or over-fishing off the coast, or Argentinean tele-novelas. I'm certainly learning a great deal, even if it's not what I intended to learn.

Well, I'm off to try to get a visa for Taiwan, should be fun! And evidently the mothers who's sons disappeared during the dirty war here still march on Thursdays in the Plaza de Mayo, conveniently located close to the Taiwanese Consulate, so maybe I can see them too.