¡Bienvenida a La Plata!

[This post was written in two installments (easier that way, in terms of time), so this first part was written yesterday.]

Well, I’ve made it to La Plata! I arrived here by private car (Fulbright arranged for it) yesterday at a quarter to 11. It was only a 45-minute drive by the time we got on the freeway and felt very fast. One of these days, sooner rather than later, I’ll have to figure out the bus system so I can go back and forth from BsAs whenever I want or, more importantly, need to. The bus system in BsAs, especially as compared to the simplicity of the metro, seems pretty complex, but the bus to La Plata comes every ten minutes.

Check-out from the hostel in BsAs was at ten, but check-in at the La Plata hostel wasn’t till 1. So, after dropping off my luggage at the hostel, I had about two hours to kill. It’s amazing how much you can do in two hours! I didn’t have a map of La Plata, but the awesome thing is La Plata is entirely on a grid, and the streets are not named, but rather numbered. I noted my hostel was at the corner of 16 and 50, and I was good to go. The only confusing element to the system are the dozen or so diagonal streets that cut through the otherwise rectangular grid. I noticed that where they would intersect the other streets, the numbering would get off somehow (as in, I would be on 46 and want to get to 47. But then instead of 47 there would be a diagonal intersection, and on the other side was 51. No idea how that worked).

Within a block I found myself at the cathedral, which is the town’s biggest landmark. It really is a very nice cathedral. I went inside, and it turned out it was 11 o’clock on the dot, and mass was beginning. I was tempted to stay (the great thing was the priest was speaking into a microphone, and the acoustics of the echoes with the vaulted ceiling were awesome), but after a couple minutes of waffling I decided I could come back basically anytime.

I passed at least a dozen parks and plazas in the course of my wanderings, but definitely the highlight was the park with the zoo at its center (I don’t know its name). Lush is the only word I can think to describe it. It was huge, far more than just a neighborhood plaza, and basically a very dense forest of immense eucalyptus trees, which are one of my favorite trees, and pines. There was also (and this is something that had never shown up on the maps I’d seen of La Plata) a gorgeous water area. It looked like a riverbank, the river itself wide and a perfect shade of Nile-green, dense and wild tropical plants shading out both sides. Huge palm trees, aloe vera plants, blooming hibiscuses and eucalyptuses; the air smelled like California, sweet and dusty and fragrant with flowers. It felt like I’d stumbled into Macondo from One Hundred Years of Solitude. Now this was something you could never find in Europe, absolutely South American.

I got lunch in the outdoor asado café facing the zoo entrance. The menu was divided into two columns in terms of price: “sólo” and “completo.” I was guessing that the “sólo” options were either half-orders of the “completos,” or that the “completos” came with sides like fries or lettuce. So I ordered a hamburger, “sólo.” The waitress looked a little incredulous and repeated the order back to me, but I didn’t think much of it because she looked even more incredulous when she asked if I was going to order anything to drink and I said no. (The beverages are often more expensive than the food. I’d rather just drink my tap water out of a water bottle between meals than spend $2 on mineral water with the meal.) Less than a minute later my order was brought to me. The waitress tapped the bun with her finger as she set it down. “Una hamburgesa sólo,” she declared. My thought: Wow, yeah, that is sólo una hamburgesa. It was just a slab of meat on a bun, nothing else. I looked incredulously at the pictures they had hanging up of their food, all with veggies spilling out deliciously, and then realized those were obviously the “completo” versions. Why have the two price distinctions at all? Does anyone ever just want meat on bread? Oh well. The meat itself was very good, definitely not a flavor or texture of meat I’ve ever had before.

Yesterday was Saturday, and it turned out there were so many fairs going on everywhere! There was a big one in the square across from the cathedral, a young-person-oriented Christian Rock festival, and I also stumbled upon a very large, clearly weekly, crafts market in a different plaza. Later in the night, I was trying to meet up with a girl whom the guy who was in La Plata with Fulbright last year had put in touch with me (long story why it didn’t work out—anyway, we’re getting lunch today), and wound up at a huge St. Patrick’s Day festival in still another plaza, called a “beer party” with lots of food stands and a live band on a big stage. I stayed almost an hour there to enjoy the band, who were great; I left once it got dark, because I don’t know how it’s like on the streets after dark here. Don’t get me wrong, La Plata feels very safe, but you never know about after-hours.

It turned out that the streets felt safe (lots of people of all ages out everywhere) but it was so dangerous navigating them. All the streets that aren’t big thoroughfares (and even some of those that are) have no stop signs or traffic lights to regulate them at their intersections. (And given the grid design, there are a lot of intersections.) The way cars work it is they just go, and if there’s traffic coming from another direction, they kind of interlace themselves, one car by one car. As a pedestrian, the cars aren’t stopping, so you just have to get in the street and walk when there’s a big enough gap (that’s me, at least—everyone else, including ancient old ladies, just walks and assumes the cars will slow down. They haven’t for me, yet, so I’m not going to push it). All of the streets are one-way, so it makes it a bit easier, except where the diagonals come into play—then you’ve got four lanes going in different directions and a middle area where they’re crossing that’s a no-man’s-land where cars can do u-turns and head off in the opposite direction. And no one uses their indicator. So that’s tricky. Anyway, coming back to the hostel after dark (only at 7:45 pm) was so tough because many of the cars didn’t have their lights on! I saw several other pedestrians almost mown down because they couldn’t see those cars, either. And I was dressed in black… Whew. Had to be careful.

Surprisingly, it’s chilly here. Well, yesterday morning was quite toasty, but in the afternoon the weather turned cold; I put a light sweater on, but I would have been more comfortable in my peacoat. It feels like late September back home. And it is definitely Fall here. I didn’t see this in BsAs, but at least in La Plata there are brown leaves on the ground everywhere, and people out raking them up. Layers are definitely essential to the weather here: one minute it’s torrential downpour (but warm), then the sun comes out and you start sweating heavily, and then a cloud passes over the sun and suddenly it’s freezing.

[Second part of post, written today: ]

I really like La Plata so far. It has its city center which suddenly, in a matter of a couple streets, gets really bustling and feels more like a metropolis like BsAs, and then just five or ten blocks in the other direction are the quietest little residential areas. I love the mix. Giant, beautiful trees everywhere, of course. I came across one that was particularly lovely this morning, on a little island between lanes of traffic by itself, like a tulip tree and in full bloom, but instead of tulip flowers, it was putting out something like pink hibiscuses. And all over the tree were enormous (to the point that they make you a little nervous), jet-black bees. They really filled up the flowers when they were inside them! A wonderful sight to see.

Naturally, I’ve been getting errands done these last couple days. (The best thing being, of course, that by having things I have to do I have destinations to walk to, and that helps me chart out everything in between—noting where the fruit stands are, where are the supermarkets, the parks and the public schools.) Yesterday, purely by accident, I came upon an ATM that accepts my card! You can take out up to $1500 pesos at a time (= $100 USD). For a $6 fee. The fee is outrageous, but I’m so happy to have cash. Paying for the private car to La Plata (Fulbright is going to reimburse me, but I had to pay upfront) and for my weeklong stay in the hostel really ate up my cash reserves. Whew. This is good. I also went to Movistar today (after asking some Argentines on their opinions of the different main brands) and got a SIM card for $20 pesos ($1.30). I’ll figure out how that works and send you guys my new phone number so we can Viber very soon. And then I’ve been looking at apartments on a listing website, and emailing the landlords of all the properties that look promising asking to set up tours with them. Several have responded to set up times with me, but the issue is then I have to ask where exactly is their property’s address (the website shows general maps, but doesn’t give the actual number of the places), and none of them have gotten back to me in that respect. (E.g., “Let’s get together today at noon.” “Okay, where exactly is the address?” No response, and noon came and went.)

Yesterday was really fantastic. I had such a good time. The Fulbrighter who was in La Plata last year has really helped me out, and one way was he put all his Argentine friends in contact with me through Facebook. There’s a semi-official group of maybe seventy people or more here in La Plata, made up of some Argentines and some international students from elsewhere in Latin America, all of the ones I’ve met so far in their early thirties, who hang out all the time and who have been friends with every Fulbrighter in La Plata going back something like five years. I had been messaging on Facebook with a girl from this group, and I got together with them yesterday. Two of her friends picked me up from the hostel, we walked a long ways to someone else’s house, and there we met up with other people and had lunch, delicious ravioli with a meat sauce that one of the guys had been preparing. That was about six hours. Then we went to sit in the park and drink mate, another two hours. And then a guy from the group took me and the French girl who was there (she’d met one of the girls in Bolivia, and now was staying with her for a couple of days) to a bar for dinner and drinks, another three hours. It was just so much fun. The people were awesome, my Spanish flowed so naturally and well, it was all really relaxed. I really liked the French girl, too—she didn’t speak any Spanish, so we spoke in English and really hit it off well. Hoping to see more of these people soon. Apparently next weekend is a giant kind of convention for their group, so we’ll see how that goes.

In terms of Spanish, I’m amazed at how easy it is. I’d always heard so much about how tough the Argentine accent was, and I had had trouble watching some Argentine movies without at least Spanish subtitles. But here I’ve really had no problem at all. I’m probably at 90% in terms of understanding, but that last 10% is cultural/contextual more than anything else. (For example, getting some empanadas for lunch today, the woman at the restaurant handed me my change and then a slip of paper that she said I could go deposit. It was old and yellowed, with the number 728 printed on it, and on the backside someone had scribbled something in pen. I asked her what it was for, and again she said I could go deposit it, something about the lottery… I guess it’s a lottery number for the provincial lottery, but how that works, I have no idea.) The accent is really very easy to understand, and the “vos” is intuitive; it only gives me pause when some asks me something using “sos,” which is the vos-conjugation of ser, “to be.” Something like, “¿Sos de dónde?” (“Where are you from?”) just totally takes me by surprise; I always forget that “sos” is actually a verb (rather than “¿Eres de dónde?”).

One other thing I have trouble with is when people say terms in English. I can’t understand them! And when I finally do, I feel really bad—I’m not trying to make it seem like their English accents are bad, I just honestly can’t understand. For instance, yesterday at lunch the people I was with started talking politics, and they started talking about “don eltram” in particular a lot, which was something I wasn’t familiar with. Then they turned to me: “What do you think of don eltram?” “Uhh, I don’t know…What is that?” They were incredulous. “You don’t know about don eltram?” “Uh, no…” “He’s running to be president of your country!” “OH!!! Donald Trump. Okay. Yeah, I have an opinion on that…” They must have said the name a dozen times and I hadn’t gotten it at all. I’ve had a few things like that. Pretty awkward.

I have just been absolutely loving it here. It’s so fun to be in a new country, free to do whatever I want, meeting lots of great people (at the hostel, too, I’ve made friends with a few Brazilians). Let’s hope I can find good housing soon, and then I will feel all set.

Probably the best thing about this hostel, which is very comfortable and has a good community vibe, is the TV in the kitchen/nook area of the place that runs an MTV-equivalent music-video station around the clock, 24/7. The music is SO GOOD! Every single one of my favorite Spanish-speaking artists ever, all the time. So when I have to be on the computer, checking email or the apartments website or blogging or whatever, if the weather’s nice I’ll sit outside (like now), but if it isn’t, or everyone’s smoking on the patio, I sit at the table and get to half-watch the videos. One night I just sat there for probably three hours watching the music videos with this sixty year-old guy from Valencia, Spain, and a fifty-something year-old Brazilian woman (both very nice people—that’s one strange thing here I also noticed at my hostel in BsAs, is that older people stay at hostels here, too). Listening to music that I love in Spanish really makes me remember how much I love Spanish and how glad I am to be able to speak it. To conclude this blog post, I’m enclosing my two favorite new songs I discovered that night. ¡Que disfruten!

Love,