I know, I know, you've given up this blog for dead. Well, I'm in a blogging mood. I've got a new post fresh off the press, but to keep this chronologically-tidy I'm going to post these first--"these" being two posts I wrote months ago (with a third lumped in to this first one), back in March and April, which I never got around to publishing for whatever reason. The dates when they were written will be noted at the top of each post. It's particularly funny for me now to look back at the one I wrote six weeks in. These were all things I consciously noted?! I think I stopped noticing any of these things back in May or so. It's certainly interesting for me as an "artifact" I can chart my cultural-integration development by...
3/24/16
Last night and this morning I had a few very uniquely
Argentine experiences.
Last night, I went with two of my roommates here at the
hostel to a tango show put on by the city, part of a four-day tango festival
here. (I only heard about this through my roommates.) One of my roommates, a
fifty-year-old woman named Susanna, had apparently come all the way from
Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world (it’s the gateway to Antarctica,
down on Tierra del Fuego), to dance tango in La Plata. It’s a little
incredible. But, as she was telling me last night, she does things like this
several times a year: takes off work for a week to go to a tango festival,
dances and recharges (“I don’t see a psychiatrist. I never get sick. Tango is all
I need.”). Susanna, me, another roommate (I never learned her name!) and her
boyfriend, Gonzálo, both in their early thirties; and Juan Carlos, a
seventy-five-year-old gentleman, went to the show at 8 o’clock. It was held in
the Dardo Rocha Cultural Center, a really lovely historical building that used
to be the city’s train station however long ago. (Dardo Rocha designed the
city, making it the first planned city in South America.)
The night had two parts. The first was the “espectáculo,” or
performance, and the second was the milonga. The hall we were in was gorgeous,
with a polished, alternating black-and-white tile floor, Neoclassical columns
and a very high ceiling--unfortunately, that high ceiling was terrible for
acoustics. Anyone speaking or singing into a microphone echoed unintelligibly
and the tango band (a keyboardist, guitarist, violinist, and accordion player)
was impossible to make out. For the espectáculo, they alternated orchestral
performances, a singer accompanied by the orchestra, and dancers accompanied by
the orchestra and sometimes also the singer. Since the acoustics were, as I’ve
said, awful, I definitely got the most out of the dancing performances. They
were absolutely wonderful, all put on by professional tango dancers, dressed in
striking dresses and tuxedos, high heels, kicking their legs high and
interlacing them quickly and even doing many lifts and drops. I thought it was
impressive, and awesome to watch; my fellows at the table, however, found it
repellent. Juan Carlos kept shaking his head dismissively: “This is an ugly
scene,” he said. “This isn’t tango.”
The show lasted probably only half an hour; we clapped, and
then all the chairs around the stage were cleared away and the audience changed
over, with most people leaving and new people arriving. After a break of maybe
an hour, or an hour and a half, it was time for the milonga. A milonga is
basically a dance hall where regular people come to dance tango. The
orchestra had left, so the soundtrack was tinny recordings.
The way it works is
this: you come with your friends and partners and sit around a table to the
side of the dance hall. You get food and alcohol for your table. Women can come
dressed in anything, but the vast majority wear a skirt or dress and absolutely
high heels. (Designated tango heels are the ones that have a little strap
running from the middle of the toe cap up to the ankle strap—it helps them stay
tightly on your feet when you’re flashing them around.) If you’re a woman who’s
shown up in her Converse, you’ll have to stand on your tiptoes while you
dance. Men can absolutely wear anything (though a few did dress for the
occasion, one guy in a black and white suit to match his partner’s outfit), but
they also should step lightly on their toes while dancing.
Tango songs,
which are the slower of the two kinds, last about 2.5 to 3 minutes, while milonga
songs, which are much faster, are no more than 2 minutes. So the songs are very
short! And they always seemed to end so unsatisfactorily, cut off in mid-thought, with the dancers
themselves never seeming to be able to predict when the music would suddenly die. Tango songs are played in batches of three, milonga songs in batches of four (there’s a word for these groupings but I don’t remember it). You can choose
to change partners either after a batch or after a song. There were several husband-and-wife pairs who only danced as a couple the
entire evening, but for everyone else, the majority of whom had also come with
their significant others, changing partners was part of the game. Nobody
declines an invitation to dance, no matter whom it’s from. (There are lots of extremely subtle cues people use to signal interest or the lack thereof in a dance with a particular partner, but regardless, the
dance itself never lasts long.) We stayed for four hours at the milonga. You do the math: about 100 songs in that time period = the potential
to have a hundred different partners! Of course people do sit some songs out,
and don’t necessarily change after every song, but definitely everyone got
around and danced with everyone else multiple times.
Juan Carlos was right: the milonga was very different from the tango show. I still think professional tango shows are incredible, but
milongas are very special in their own way as well. There were people of all
ages there, from teenagers to seventy-year-olds, and everyone was a skilled tango
dancer. They didn’t, however, dance tango the way you probably think of it,
with the kicking legs and legs wrapping around other legs up to the thigh, the
dips and all that. It was much more subtle. The man gives all the directions
through different hand movements on the woman’s back (the woman closes her
eyes—and often the man does, too). It’s basically just a serious of steps,
forwards and back, sometimes pauses where the woman will cross her foot over
the man’s or something like that. There are occasional twirls. There’s
definitely room for personal style, with some of the younger dancers swaying in
a kind of bachata-inspired way, and some dancers who would flash their hips
much more, or slide their legs longer. There’s a lot of passion in tango in
general, but I think this metaphor is pretty accurate: a tango show is sex, and the milonga is romance. (In Susanna’s immortal words: “Es la historia
del amor en menos de tres minutos.” ["It's the story of love in under three minutes."]) I didn’t dance at all (everyone dancing was
at a very high skill level—absolutely no room for beginners), so I was just
sitting watching for four hours. It was lovely to watch, but it also felt almost invasive to do so, watching
something extremely intimate.
We stayed until 2 am. I was yawning at 8 pm. Yes, that was a
very hard six hours to get through. Very beautiful, and also very tiring. (It
would have been more fun if I wasn’t just sitting the whole time.) But I
definitely wasn’t going to walk back to the hostel by myself, and nor did I
want to pull the group away from their dancing early. I finally got to bed at
3:30—whew!—and set my alarm for 8:30.
I wouldn’t set my alarm unless I had to, and so yes, there
was a reason; one of my Fulbrighter friends who lives in Buenos Aires emailed
me yesterday to tell me that today, to commemorate the 40th
anniversary of the country’s military coup, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate
Adolfo Pérez Esquivel was going to be speaking here in La Plata. So I got up early, and got
there at 9:30 when it started. They had set up rows of chairs in a blocked-off
side-street in the downtown area around a small stage in front of the Centro
Provincial por la Memoria (CPM). I didn’t know this, but apparently the CPM
here in La Plata houses all the archives of the relatively-recently (early
2000’s) declassified government documents surrounding the last dictatorship. So
that’s pretty huge. The building blends in well with the supermarkets and
mobile phone kiosks around it, so much so that walking down the street I
probably wouldn’t even notice that the front of it is covered in a blown-up iconic black and white photo of the Madres and others protesting the dictatorship in
the Plaza de Mayo back in the seventies.
I got there at 9:30, but it didn’t actually start until
10:15. In that waiting time, I tried to avoid eye contact with people, lest
they start a conversation with me; I felt a bit uncomfortable being there, as a
foreigner intruding upon this very Argentine trauma. After opening remarks from
the CPM’s director, the microphone was passed to one of the two guests of
honor, one of the original Madres de Plaza de Mayo. She was tiny but very spry,
with her white handkerchief around her head and a placard with a photo of her
disappeared son around her neck. (A cultural note here: The moment everyone
realized that she would be sitting to give her speech, everyone suddenly stood
up, pulled their rows of chairs closer with a deafening, collective scraping
noise, and got out their phones to snap pictures and record video. It was really
hard to see her between all of that!)
Then it was Adolfo Pérez Esquivel’s turn to talk. I left
afterwards, hungry for breakfast. Two empanadas, como siempre.
4/13/16
Yesterday a nice Peruvian guy I met here a few weeks ago
invited me to an event on Facebook that was a kind of weekly foreigner meet-up
at a bar downtown. I thought, why not, and off I went. But…I couldn’t find the
bar. I really don’t know how, because I walked up and down the street it was on
at least three times, but nope, I didn’t find it. (Sure, I could have asked
someone, but I hadn’t been too gung-ho about going anyway, so it was my excuse
not to. Maybe next week.)
But I wound up walking around for two hours just
having a lovely evening stroll; happened to find the only Mexican restaurant I
have seen so far in the city (dinner tonight? You know it!); and to my surprise
was catcalled for the very first, and then the second, time in this country,
about fifteen minutes apart, both times by the guys hanging off the backs of
the garbage trucks. (The catcalling—or lack thereof—has really pleasantly
surprised me. Even in situations where there is no way I would not get
catcalled in the U.S.—you know, walking alone down a dark street, three guys
hanging out the side of a bar watching me—it simply doesn’t happen here. Everyone
minds their own business, and I love it.)
Finding the Mexican restaurant was exciting not only because
I’ve been having a real need for enchiladas recently, but also because I’ve had
such a hard time finding non-Argentine food in general. (Italian- and
French-inspired places don’t count.) Don’t get me wrong, the empanadas haven’t
gotten old yet, but one of the things I always miss most in foreign countries
is the lack of abundant food diversity from around the world. Nobody has it
like we do, and I’m spoiled as a result.
Also yesterday, I happened to find two
other “exotic” restaurants! I had to meet with a professor at the university,
and along the bus route I happened to see a restaurant called “Bambu” which
billed itself as catering to vegetarians. Sounded good to me! I am definitely
on the hunt for more veggie-heavy food options. So later, once I’d gotten back
from the university, I found Bambu on foot. But I didn’t even stick my head in
the door. I could see through the windows it was full up with people. Next
time.
I did, however, get some Chinese food today! Yesterday,
walking on the usual strip that I walk every single day (the block my apartment
building is on, which passes a supermarket, a fruit stand, a kiosk and the
laundromat where I drop my clothes off to be washed, dried, and ironed for a
paltry sum), to my astonishment I saw a sign I’d never seen before: “Sol rojo:
comidas chinas y argentinas” (Red Sun: Chinese and Argentine cuisine).
I’m not
sure how I’d always glanced over the actual sign, but I do have a bit of a
theory. Here (as in Spain), when shops are closed they draw down thick metal
gratings over their storefronts, in front of the windows and everything, so
that all you see from the street is a wall of metal. When the metal is out, the
shops just blink out of my awareness. Even though the store sign is still there
over the top (though not illuminated, so at night you’ll never see them), my
eyes slide right over them. And although the timing is less erratic than in
Spain, few stores have their hours of operation posted and sometimes they will
be closed and I won’t know why. In Andalusia the siesta was strictly observed,
and from 1 or 2 until 5 or 7 or even 9 most of the city would be closed down
tightly. Here, you don’t feel the siesta much (though in the more traditional
provinces it is observed), but 5 pm a lot of restaurants are closed up tight.
(Which makes sense, considering lunch is over and dinner isn’t until 9 at the
earliest, but really more like 10). This is all to say that I’m always
discovering new places in familiar areas, depending what time of day I go out
exploring, and that’s an incentive for me to go out at different times, and go
to the same places at different hours to see what’s changed. Maybe that’s how
I’d missed Sol rojo before. Anyway, although I’d picked up two empanadas at the
university cafeteria, I was committed to going to Sol rojo for lunch (the
empanadas will be dinner…though I accidentally may have gotten an
eggplant-filled one, so that may be a bummer).
It turned out to be a serve-yourself buffet, a really impressively-stocked one (such a range of so many different foods, and all home-cooked--talk about serious daily preparation involved there), and true to the tagline, it was a mix of Chinese and Argentine foods. There were foods like fried rice and chow mein, dumplings and wontons; and also eggrolls filled with ham and cheese (good ol' Argentine jamón y queso, always a winning combo), flan, and milanesas (thin, breaded meat--considered "very Argentine," until you remember that most cultures have something exactly like this). I loaded up my plastic container and paid by weight. It was delicious. Such a good find.
Epilogue: Present-day (August) Rhiannon speaking here. I would later go on to discover that Sol Rojo is a vast chain, found all over La Plata and Buenos Aires as well, which is only open for lunch. I'm a big fan.
I did wind up going back for dinner to that Mexican restaurant I'd passed the day of that blog post. Little did I know Deirdre's boyfriend's parents' axiom about Argentine cuisine: "never eat fish or Mexican food." True to form, that meal was hands-down the worst I've had in Argentina, and one of the more expensive. It was a plate of three mini enchiladas (each a little bigger than one of my fingers), one cheese, one mushroom, and one beef. It was just dry tortillas with dry filling rolled inside, and then the outside of the tortillas were browned a little to make them even drier. Forget about sauces or any liquids. Forget about salsas and spice. It was dry and tasteless and $11, which in Argentina can buy you an entree, drink and dessert at a respectable restaurant. Plus I had to listen to an hour of the worst CD of covers you can imagine. (I later came to learn that this CD is part of a vast genre of terrible, Muzak- and reggae-inspired covers, often with the gender of the original- vs. the cover-singers swapped, to very bad effect, that plays in many restaurants and other venues throughout the country. Someday I need to ask someone what's the deal.)
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