words, words, words

I just returned from a weekend with my friend, who we’ll call, Bubba Tribunales (hereinafter:BT), to Buenos Aires, Argentina.

I thought I would put up some notes and thoughts about the trip.

After a few false starts with my Spanish, I got into the groove of the language again.  At first, the swirl of Spanish/Portuguese was pretty bad.  It wasn’t that I  that I felt like I couldn’t speak, I was starting to feel like there was something wrong with my brain.  I wasn’t even sure I could speak English after a while.  But eventually I started shifting gears and was able to communicate, even if I had to hack a bit and had forgotten some words.  It’s funny how the effort of trying to communicate can make you sweat!    I could understand everyone, but flipping through the files in my brain for the right words when speaking was taxing.

Buenos Aires is geographically fairly near Porto Alegre, but it is not very similar.  Primarily, BA is a metropolis, and it seems to change character with every corner.  Sometimes it feels like Manhattan, sometimes like Madrid, sometimes France, and other times, like no place else in the world but BA.  So whatever it feels like, it is certainly not POA.  The shoes are one of the first things you notice.  Shoes seem to be all about elevation here in Porto Alegre. The higher the better.  However, in Buenos Aires Chuck Taylor All-Stars seem to rule the day.  Oh and in BA, people tend to look a bit like members of the Ramone’s.  (Possibly adding to the band’s huge popularity.  Perhaps the band is a bit more accessible, since the members look like your neighbors — but that is a PhD in itself, just waiting to be written.)

There is a lot of art in BA.  And there is really great music played on the streets there.

We met some fellow travelers in the La Recoleta cemetery joined them for coffee and then went to a milonga.  Now, I didn’t know much about this before we went, but from what I gather, a milonga is a place where people dance tango, and it is also a type of tango.  These people were incredibly talented.  A lot of the people dancing were actually instructors at some of the schools in town.  It was not a place to “give tango dancing a shot”, so BT and I were on the sidelines watching.  Like watching any masters of a craft it was awesome and inspiring.

BT and I met up with a longtime friend of mine, Gabi.  She is Argentinian, but I met in Madrid when I was living there, a long time ago.  She is a musician, amongst numerous other skills and her
band site is here.  It was great to catch up with her.

If I can be allowed a bit of navel gazing.  I seemed to notice a trend with Aregtines.  It seems like they have less fear of economic uncertainty, perhaps because the majority of them have already lived though the type of things that scare the crap out of USAians and Western Europeans.  As things decay more rapidly in the USA and UK we could do well to take a page out of their book and try to figure out how to weather our own economic storm.    This type of can-do-ish-ness, dedication to the arts and desire to do things that make them happy rather than sitting in an office was great to see.

An interesting development that is happening right there are some problems with “el campo”.  These have been caused by the government of Cristina Kirchner.  I believe the problems started with the introduction of a sliding scale of taxes on agricultural goods.  This has resulted in a number of “cacerolas“.  The cacerola is a Argentinian type of protest in which people go to the streets and bang on casserole pots with sticks.  While we were in BA there were roadblocks set up by farmers as well as “Cacerola”.   In short, this means trouble for the government and everyone agrees that something has to change: not only that the people are taking to the streets to bang pots and demand the change.  Again, I only wish that Americans would do the same thing. *sigh*

Here are some photos:

Buenos Aires