I leave tomorrow

There are some cities that are just magnets.  NY, LA, BA and even little Boulder.  I think they attract people who have an agenda, that want to do something, or think they have what it takes.  I think this creates a pool of people with more energy ambition and probably good looks.  If you think you have the looks and or brains to get a better significant other or job or modeling or acting spot than you are likely get where you are, you move to a magnet city.  I don’t know if this is part of how BA got the reputation for having lots of attractive women, but it does have lots of attractive women and a lot going on. 

I don’t know how long it will be before I come back here.  Mexico and Guatemala are next on the Spanish speaking tour.  I leave tomorrow and the primary feeling I have is that there ought to have been some way to get more from my time here.  The real challenge will be keeping the momentum going on el espanol.  I bought rosetta stone on ebay, but the folks at ebay are telling me what is now being shipped my way is likely a forged copy.  Figures…  Tonight I will take my housemates out for dinner and perhaps I will hone my oversized todo list for tomorrow before my flight at 10:30PM.

Gay bars in BA are much like the gay bars in Atlanta

I went to a transvestite show with some of the folks here.  I should have figured the venue would be a gay bar.  The show was somewhere between "Pricilla Queen of the Desert" and "Kinky Boots".  The music played, the costumes changed and changed and as usual the Spanish beguiled me.   One performer (I don’t know whether to use he or she here) was actually a pretty talented mime.  I think she may have been famous in France.  The other was a comedian who appeared to be pretty funny to everyone else, but of course all I could follow was the physical comedy which went along with the music.  Her shtick was the over the top "I'm sexy in women's clothes" routine.

I have noticed that BA is rather like Puerto Rico when it comes to clothes- women are apt to go sexy to a more advanced age than stateside.  The women also wear their clothes tighter than in Puerto Rico.  I suppose many of you might prefer not to see camels toe on a fifty something woman, but as you might guess, I am always curious.    

I have actually only been in one gay bar in Atlanta.  -Again for a transvestite show.  There it was less about costumes and more about the gospel singing.  I guess they aren’t welcome singing in the local Baptists churches, but there were some great gospel singers there.  In BA I did have surreal conversation with a guy where 5 minutes in he said "your gay right?"  I just figured for an engineering type like myself it would be obvious I was not. 

He said he could tell right away I was American.  I figured it was the clothes.  He said no, it was the blond hair and blue eyes and angular features under pale skin.  I thought I was fitting in pretty well.  When I get to Guatemala “fitting in” will no longer be possible.  I imagine it like being black in Utah, or Colorado for that matter.  You just can’t hide in the crowd.

The pics are from my cell phone.  Not great, I wish you could see them better because it was pretty entertaining.  Sometimes I almost feel sorry for my poor little cell phone which is now just a wifi email client / web browser and a camera.  It is always "searching" and never finding.  Service that is.  Kind of like being in small town UT on your bicycle trying to find a decent panini for lunch.

I also visited the modern art museum.  This is not usually my kind of exhibit but it was close to where I am staying.  It was the best modern art exhibit I have seen.  It was very whimsical and had a number of installments on the second floor that used light and motion to good effect.  One piece had a fish tank built into it with a live fish.   Another had metal hoops that were squished and pulled against one another so that at any given moment they were in a unique state of ovality.  They had built some benches into the place where the rungs extended out over the wall and roped around like vines on the walls.  There was a whimsical dime store looking sculpture of a female mannequin being devoured by a crocodile like monster.  So that was an unexpected bit of fun.

The second pic is the mime oriented transvestite doing Lucille Ball's vitameatavegimin routine in spanish.  Very well done.  I didn't know people's faces could be that plastic.

Civilization

One thing I definately appreciate about Buenos Aires is that you can drink the tap water.  My folks lived in a place outside Chicago where you could not.  It feels less like you are camping out in a home when you can drink the water.  It isn't quite as tasty as in CO.  But it is good.

The ice cream (helado) here is good

Who says you can't buy happiness.  You can even get it in a cone.  Aside from a bunch of office work, I went into the shopping district with Tom to buy some boots for the next leg of his trip.  He was hoping to find something more pedestrian looking than the black Royal Air Force approved kit he has back home.  But, he will now have two pairs of shiny black leather boots.

The last obnoxious people I wrote about were Americans.  The obnoxious person I will write about now is Russian.  She has what I would call a peter pan personality.  You never grow up and you can fly as long as someone helps you keep stocked with fairy dust.  She would sing in the study lounge with her headphones on while others were at the computers or working on assignments.  Then to go a step further, she put the speakers on on her netbook to share the music with everyone.  Then to go a step further, she left the room with her music going to get cell service to talk on her phone.  I was about to step over to her netbook to plug her ear buds back in when she returned.  On the one hand, being a person who provokes others is bad.  But on the other hand, we probably need more people who stand up and say "you are not the only person in the universe" and less that say "god can you believe her nerve" after she leaves the room.  Which is what I am doing right now.

Speaking of obnoxious sounds.  I also encountered some BA women, all sixty something, whooping it up.  You know how ten year old boys are into vocal sound effects.  We are always trying to simulate the sounds of bombs and motors and guns and choppers.  I don't know exactly what these women were trying to describe, but it was entertaining to watch women that age being animated enough to use vocal sound effects to describe something was ringing while falling while who knows what.  I wish my spanish were better.

Subte D

The subway line between my room and the school is Subte D.  Perhaps you have seen pictures of the professional pushers in the Tokyo subway.  In Buenos Aires the pushers are not pros, just regular riders of Subte D who want to get to work on time.  It is an amazing experience.  It reminds me of being near the front of the stage when a mosh pit breaks out.  Near the stage you already have a push and a crowd, but a mosh pit generates an opening in the audience behind which pushes even more against the rows of people between the mosh pit and stage. 

I shudder to think of a mosh pit breaking out on Subte D.  But everyone is wearing an iPod and who knows what they are listening to.  The iPods are part of a larger veil of impersonality.  Porten’os, as the natives of BA are called, are similar to Americans in their preference for personal space.  So when my head is 6” from another guys on the subway, he does his damndest not to make eye contact; even as his hand is pressed into the side of my hip by the packing force of the lattice.

Some days, you can feel people physically pushing on you from all 4 sides.  Once a woman shouted in Spanish to people outside the car what I think translated as “no more in, I can’t breathe”.  The starts and stops aren’t particularly smooth, which is actually good when the train is this packed.  I wind up pressed in different places and my weight is no longer centered.  When the train bumps off the start line, it is like the little shake you give the frying pan to level out the location of all the contents.   It helps you get everyone upright and evenly spaced, if there were space anyway.

The other issue is air quality.  They have windows open and fans that run in the top of car.  But that level of people dander and hair products still activates my allergies.  This is a problem when you can’t easily move your arms.  I can lift my collar without needing to move my elbow away from my body.  This is useful to catch a sneeze inside my jacket.  But getting one’s hanky out in this environment takes logistical planning similar to starting a typical engineering project.  Thank goodness for my training.

Prostitutes in Buenos Aires

One interesting aside is the use of English words in Buenos Aires.  One of the guys at the house has renamed Ale's dog "prostitute".  From the broken english and rapid spanish I gather it had to do with the dogs amazing efforts to get out and hook up with the male dog elsewhere in the apartment.  Still it is entertaining to hear a thick spanish accent in the house calling "prostitute, prostitute".

And for those of you who worry about all the references to sex in this blog, I just try to keep it real.  If you hadn't heard, men think about sex and a lot.  I suspect I think of it more than many guys, and when Murray isn't around the frequency goes up still.  For those of you that worry about Murray.  She has me on a strict look but don't touch diet.  And hey, it's zero calories.

Confidence

Tom and Ale and I were talking at a restaurant and on our walk and my thoughts on confidence brought the topic up.  Ale has a teenage son and all the issues that go with ownership of said item.  I suspect that many of the issues younger guys, and a lot of older guys, have stems from lack of confidence.  It is difficult to connect and have any level of intimacy to a relationship if you aren't confident enough to be vulnerable at times. 

It takes confidence to say "I don't know", or "I don't think I am ready for that", or to express fear, doubt or uncertainty.  As a younger guy I experienced all of those more frequently.  Unfortunately anger and frustration appear to be on the approved list for male emotional display and sharing.  But if you want to look confident, you work to suppress that.  You try to appear that you have it all together on the outside.  This severely retards your ability to bond with others, which creates a deeper sense of loneliness.  At least that was part of my experience.

Of course one could argue who I to opine on confidence.  Many folks would say I have more than is warranted.  I am not sure exactly how I got to that place.  Perhaps it has to do with testosterone- that same chemical that gives men the confidence to do brilliant things like jump their dirt bike over a canyon in a stiff cross wind or ignore reports of icebergs in the north Atlantic while piloting your big, shiny new ship.  However, it seems that, at some point, I just decided to be confident.  However, I haven’t talked to anyone else that believes you can decide to be confident. 

I don’t know how you communicate to a teenage guy that if he was really tough he would show some vulnerability.  I don’t know that machismo can be stretched in that direction.  I expect women don’t experience the same social pressures to “be a man” and perhaps that is part of why they seem to socialize and bond more readily.  Even the non-physical differences between men and women still fascinate me, but it seems like an even more fraught topic than politics or religion. 

Another thing I have noticed that translates between languages is the differences between men’s and women’s voices.  It seems like it must be more than just pitch.  Perhaps I will research that topic.  Another thing that spans languages is abrasive voices.  There is a woman in my class that sounds like fingernails on the chalkboard to me when she speaks.  And her voice is low in pitch.  Her voice is abrasive in Spanish or Portuguese.  Poor woman.  Hopefully for her preferences in female voices in Brazil are different than the preferences of one overconfident American. 

One other interesting labial phenomenon I have observed involves my friend Tom.  The guy has an open mouth expression more often than most folks and probably more than any other engineer I have met.  He credits it to a sense of naiveté.  This has a negative connotation.  I don’t think he lacks for worldly experience, especially compared to other engineers.  I would describe it more as a sense of wonder.  More things, surprise, delight, interest, disturb and otherwise provoke a response from the guy which usually starts with a big open mouthed expression of “WTF”.  It is fun to watch.  I wish I still had such an active sense of wonder.  At any rate, despite the pictures, he is not a mouth breather.  He is an intelligent guy who makes interesting conversation and had some interesting confirmations of the smoothing role of actual vs. contrived confidence in young men.

Pics from Tigre, the islands getaway of Buenos Aires

It is sort of like a pastoral venice out here.  All river taxis and river buses, not really any paved roads since each island is too small for cars to be useful.  Just sidewalks and rivers.  Pretty cool.  I went with Tom and Ale.

The famous Tom "not mouth breathing" look.

Looking down into the abyss

The teatro colon, one hell of a cool theater.

Teatro Cologn, a local hell

Last night I went with Tom to the musical at the Teatro Colon.  The place is amazing inside.  I waited till a few days before to buy tickets so we were in the standing room only, nosebleed seats.  There were layers upon layers of people on each level as you looked down until finally you could see the mass of people sitting at floor level.  The higher up seats, go up vertically level to level and the floor is fairly flat, so it is an abyss of souls you look down into.  As if hell were nicely lit with good ambiance and acoustics.  Speaking of looking down, I could look straight down into the orchestra pit, which was a cool view.  In fact, I, and 2000 other men, got an amazing, canyon within a canyon, view directly down the blouse of one well endowed female trumpet player.  I had to wonder if she took into account those 2000 guys and the vantage when she selected that bra/blouse combination.  Viva Argentina!

It was a very nice place though.  We went in the wrong entrance at first and I began to worry about having worn jeans and a long sleeve T-shirt directly from the school.  At least my underwear had been ironed and folded by the women at the lavanderia.  They always do that.  Now I know why.  If you get caught pants down at a nice place like the Teatro Colon, at least you can maintain a shred of dignity in your neatly pressed shorts.

Two Followers!

Skype is a great tool for remote IT support.

The ice cream that won't be

Yo estudio espanol!

This is a package of ice cream cones.  I like ice cream cones.  It is sad that 100 ice cream cones won't happen somewhere this week.

Takes two to tango

But I learned you can also tango with 40 other people.  We stepped on a number of toes!

Hot for teacher

Brenda

Distractions

One of the things I have noticed about living in this house vs. living at home is the difference in smell.  I am not talking cats, dogs, or cigarettes.  I keep the door closed and the room has been cleaned so those don’t play too large a role in my room.  I think what I notice is adhesives and lacquers.  

The furniture and floor in this room is probably from the late 50s to the mid 70s.  There was a great deal of activity in adhesives over there period.  Most of the furniture in our place in Boulder is pre 1950.  The smells from the materials used are different.  We have a different mix with only a few modern items.  If you go into a recently remodeled and furnished place, the aroma mix is different still.  My frame of reference is a rather dated mix and a late twentieth century collection of smells is modern by comparison. 

And if this all seems improbably to you, consider that the new car smell, which you can buy in cans now if you want, is largely the smell of the carpet adhesive.

I have also noticed the variance of the cigarette smell.  When I was playing bars, before the ban in Colorado, there was a variety of Marlboros, Camels, Lucky Strikes and Pall Malls.  However, out here the spectrum of tobacco smoke seems much wider.  And I am not talking about ganja fumes either.  It has led me to wonder literally a few times “What is that person smoking?”.

I have also noticed that merchandizing is much more segmented here.  I had to go to a men’s suite store for handkerchiefs.  I couldn’t get them where I bought the hand towel, and none of those items are available at the supermercado which has no panaderia, or pharmacia as a wal mart or even a safeway would.  One odd mix at the kiosks is that you can, in the same very small commercial space, purchase children’s books and pornography.  I suppose they both fall into the niche of popular paper-printed items, but, it is odd to find them that close together.

Tonight my otherwise sublime evening from the gym to the café where I am studying was interrupted by, of all things, Americans.  A grumpy old dude and his over-patient wife sat a few tables away and griped and over emoted about everything and anything.  It made me wish I couldn’t understand English.  I have to say, I much prefer the distraction to study provided by my teacher Brenda’s wardrobe and lack thereof.  I got a pic of her today in her least distracting attire to date.  I really wanted to snap one of her practiced, sexy, over the shoulder eye’s wide open look where she tries to be sexy and monitoring who is listening all at once.  But, I didn’t want to disrupt the class waiting for that shot.  You will have to use your imagination, as I do throughout the lecture. 

I will end this evening’s post here.  It is time to donde the banjo at this café.

Just like the states

You may have encountered this archetype in the USA.  This is the proprietor / manager /owner of the bar who wanders the place wearing a jacket or shirt that says SECURITY.  When engaged with patrons, he smiles and is professionally friendly.  When he isn't engaged with a customer, he scowls and attempts to scare the bad guys.  Funny what translates.

Confidence Game

This is a TMI alert. For those of you who sometimes find yourself saying “Why did he/she have to tell me that? Now I can’t unknow that” you may regret reading this blog.

Today was the first day of class. In some ways, I felt like a kid again. For most people this phrase intones a good thing. I don’t know how you recall being a kid- much of what I recall was a frustrating lack of confidence and ability. It seems reasonable to me now that kids are so wedded to things that are familiar. I, myself, am wondering how long it will be before the Burger King on the walk home piques my desire for something familiar, even if that something familiar is terrible compared to the standard lunch fare in Buenos Aires.

Confidence is a funny thing. Many people would say I normally have too much. Not being able to communicate definitely knocks you down a few notches. Perhaps that is why I am so fond of the gym I joined. All the equipment works the same in English and Spanish and when I go there, there is precious little chance for confusion.

The Spanish teacher today was an exceptionally attractive woman. While this was still distracting, it wasn’t as much fun as it might have been due to my experience of nearly insurmountable inadequacy with the language. Again, it takes me back to being 14 years old, when attractive women were just something god put out there on the horizon to taunt you with. Her clothes were tight enough that it reminded me of biking with fit women in spandex. Normally it is fun when you are close enough to estimate the standing wave frequency of the bounce in such a woman’s posterior. Perhaps I will get to take data for that research paper someday. There is certainly a lot to be said for being at home with your own woman. But the possibility for adventure in my own, expanded, 820 square feet of castle is somewhat limited.

At least my nose is no longer dripping like an Argentine faucet. In case you haven’t experience the difference, plumbing here doesn’t just drip, it runs in streams. I expect this is a combination of ready access to cheap (or perhaps free) water and Argentines not being as compulsive as me. Well comparing people’s compulsiveness to my own sets too high a bar. I suspect the initial dripping of a faucet doesn’t bug your average Argentine as quickly as it would your typical American.

I experimented with three different anti-histamines and Afrin before things were under control. I ran out of handkerchiefs and didn’t want to use up the host families entire stock of toilet paper, not to mention waste bin space. So I started using boxer briefs from my laundry bag to wipe my nose. Like you never thought of it, they already have to be laundered. You just have to use the inches closest to the waist band to keep your nose out of contact with any material that may have been in contact with one’s dainty parts.

At any rate, I can breath.  Now if I could just speak!

Social differences

Althogh my host lodgings are not in a class with the ritz, they do offer some ammenities not typically found in the states.  For you Americans who are not sophisticated enough to understand what a bidet is for:

The above pic should clear it up.  One uses a bidet to rinse the little rubber stick-on grips from the bottom of the tub.

Pics from the first days in BA

How did fry sauce get all the way down to Argentina under the guise of salsa golf?

The New Harlem Boxeo Gimnasio

The apartment building where I stay with the host family.

Isaac goes native with his new outfit.

You may not be able to tell with all the mirrors, but this is a 2 person elevator.

And now, the news

Sometimes we are overtaken by events. I will list there here and try to provide some insights on them when I have actual time to think about them. Things have unfolded this way.




Things all started when my mom was going in for elective surgery. My brother ferried me and my bike out to my folks place. I did a week long bike trip from their house to mine.



After the bike trip, I went caving and camping in UT with a friend and his caving group the next weekend. That was excellent fun.

On the way home, we heard Fourmile canyon was on fire. The start of the fire was about three hundred yards from my friend’s house. We tried in vain to get news on the way home. The fire was three miles or so from my place at that time. My friend wound up heading to my place where he is hanging out till the canyon opens again.

I left for Buenos Aires and the language school there. Hooray!

I found out my friend's house was still standing, the wind had pointed away from his place enough that it didn't burn.

The wind shifted and my friend and girlfriend found out they may have to evacuate our house!

I got a spooky email informing me that a very nice and intelligent guy I met on the caving trip had comitted suicide.

We return to where we began with my mom's health. I found out that during the elective operation they found a tumor pushing on my mom's aorta. The tumor is beningn and they have scheduled a removal.


Now for some color commentary-


I decided that being in BA should be no reason to not stay in shape. I got on google to look for local gyms. Fortunately I decided to wander before heading off to the closest google advertised gym. On my block is a gymnasium de Boxeo. Boxing gyms are my favorite. The equipment is always the oldest and most beat up and the level of pretension is always the lowest. Like the boxing gym I used to frequent in Boulder, this one has added some cardio classes and even some treadmills to attract the other half of the potential market. It seems like the proclivities of the founders shine through though. The boxers I have known have been some of the nicest most laid back people you find in a gym setting. There is also less preening and staring yourself intently in the eye in front of the mirror as you do your reps. Funny the things that translate long distances and the things that don’t.

But distances are getting smaller these days I suppose. I got a variety of little packets with my food. After running out of ketchup, I decided to try the salsa golf. Turns out it was fry sauce, I suppose the Mormons have been coming down here from UT for a while now.