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Monday, January 30th, 2006
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10:05 pm - Death By Dumplings
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Right now I'm eating mushrooms, bamboo shoots, slightly wilted bok choy and red and yellow peppers out of a big mixing bowl. I'm working through the last third - or thereabouts - of the leftovers from my hugely successful (if I do say so myself) Lunar New Year party. My current dinner is a compendium of two dishes: mushrooms/bamboo shoots/bok choy and pork with yellow and (Mao's Little) red peppers. And I'm drinking a glass of chocolate milk. Am I going to have weird dreams tonight?
I had 15 friends over for Chinese New Year and made five dishes on my own. Melissa and Laura came over to help with the handmade dumplings. Melissa joked that hers didn't resemble ours and she was afraid it wasn't very Socialist, but I assured her that my party was all about Reform and Opening. Lucky for her! The city was a freaking furnace this weekend and the air outside refused to move, which meant that the guests on my balcony were no cooler than the ones inside. Still, it was a great time and I had another eight friends - plus our new office intern, fresh off the plane - over for leftovers on Sunday night.
The title of this post refers to a gross little incident on Saturday night. I had left my kitchen window open to get a cross breeze (wishful thinking in this humidity) and as I was cleaning up, a humongous moth flew into my apartment. We are talking mutant size. It landed on the wall right next to my stove and I wapped vigorously at it with a rolled-up magazine as Melissa looked on. The moth, maimed, fell into the huge pot on the stove where the dumplings had been cooked. There was just a pool of water and some congealed bits of dumpling wrappers on the bottom of the pot, and that's where the moth landed. I peered into the pot and the critter was flailing around, trying to get out of the dumply mess. I grabbed the pasta spoon that was lying nearby and started to finish off the job. It was a vomit-inducing process of beating a gigantic, determined moth into the remains of my dumplings. Melissa eventually took over, all the while saying things like "Okay, it's okay, you're going to be okay," and flung the moth out my kitchen window with the pasta spoon.
Happy New Year, everyone!
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| Monday, December 19th, 2005
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12:55 am - Weekend Round-Up
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The best part about having friends over for dinner is that they fix things around your apartment. This is what I discovered tonight. My place was just near perfect, with two glaring exceptions: I couldn't get two of my burners and my oven to work, and I couldn't lower the shade in my bedroom. Well! Santi figured out my stove. Um, it turns out I was utterly mistaken about the burners and just needed to properly match up the unmarked dials. I think I'm an idiot. As for the oven, you have to turn on the gas, light the bottom and press a little, unmarked white button for 30 seconds. Slightly complicated.
Rob, who's the most handy person I know down here, figured out that the little swingy compartment door hiding the cord for the bedroom shade had been painted over. So he took a knife to it and got the door open, then helped me lower the shade. Best ever. And for free, he set up a limited account on my laptop in case people want to use my computer, but I don't want them accessing my files and whatnot.
Tonight's menu was Thai: a radish and cucumber salad in a rice wine vinegar dressing; coconut curry chicken with green beans, onions, bell peppers and scallions; and a slightly bleh mango mousse that everyone still liked and I had Laura pick up ice cream on her way over anyway. No leftovers! After dinner, the guys huddled around the TV to watch the all-important Boca Juniors game and the girls ended up washing dishes in the kitchen. Classic division of labor - and we're all supposedly progressive young folks. I guess all bets are off when Boca is playing the Mexico Pumas and the...something...cup is at stake.
Earlier this weekend, I was in Colonia, a little historical town in Uruguay that's just across the Río de la Plata. It's a popular destination for Buenos Aires visitors and residents who want to see something different for a day - and also ideal for people with 90-day tourist visas that need to get them renewed. Amanda fell into the latter category and needed some company, so off we went.
The best part of the trip was not Amanda chewing out the desk clerk at the first hotel and then having us leave in a huff to find a different hotel, nor was it my eating two chivitos in a day and introducing Amanda to the wonders of Uruguay's finest culinary treat. It was renting a scooter and tooling all over Colonia! Amanda drove, obviously, as I would be utterly useless driving anything but a Dodge Aries K-Car. We rented a bright orange Yamaha and scooted to the beach, then scooted to ice cream and back to the rental place. We had lots of guys hooting at us and a lot of families of four crammed on a single scooter, drinking mate and passing us. Our only close call was with a double-decker coach bus. But Amanda accelerated a little and we zoomed through the intersection before the bus flattened us. Praise the Lord!
Also, at my Chinese lesson this afternoon, I learned the word for "strong wind" because the cute cushion that came with my plastic deck chair flew away, off my balcony, and landed on the roof of an adjoining apartment building. I will never get it back. The wind was particularly strong tonight because the other cushion drifted off during the dinner party. I guess I'm headed to Easy/Jumbo to find new cushions, and this time I'll tie them down more securely.
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| Tuesday, December 6th, 2005
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2:08 am - Hello House
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The Big Move took place this weekend and it was one of the easiest relocations I've ever done, mostly because I hired professionals to do the (literal) heavy lifting for me. The lead-up to the move was not good, as the disorder in my apartment led to chaos in the rest of my life, culminating in me forgetting my keys at the office and not realizing until I arrived home at midnight. I ended up sleeping in my work clothes in a friend's extra bedroom, then waking up at 7 am so I could go to the office, retrieve my keys and head all the way back home in time to let in the plumber, who was fixing a leaky sink I had neglected to repair for months.
I arrived at Saturday morning having slept just three hours, as the pile of things I've accumulated in two years would simply not disappear, no matter how much I put in boxes. My moving boxes, by the way, were lovely lime green-striped cardboard ones that I bought at Easy/Jumbo. I went into the home improvement store expecting to find regular fold-up cardboard boxes, and it turns out the only ones they carry are cute and green. I must have looked so prissy with my stupid novelty moving boxes because all my friends who came over this weekend commented on them. I'll be known around town as the Girl with the Fancy Moving Boxes.
Fernando, the fletero whom Beth had recommended to me, arrived promptly at 8:15 am with a partner. I had told them that the bed would need to go out the balcony window, as this is how the fletero who delivered my bed had done it. Fernando shook his head sadly at me and said that moving guy had duped me into believing the mattress wouldn't fit up the stairway so he could charge me more for the delivery. As it turns out, the mattress went easily down the stairs. The boxspring was a different story, however. Fernando and his partner got the thing all the way down to the first floor landing before realizing the ceiling there gets lower, and the boxspring wouldn't fit down the last flight. I didn't know they had run into this problem until I peeked out the window, wondering what was taking them so long with the boxspring, and saw it being lowered out the balcony window of my first-floor neighbor, whom I've never met. They seem to be nice folks, though, as they didn't mind two moving guys knocking on their door at 9 am and asking to shove a large boxspring out the window.
Anyway, the truck was loaded by 11 am and everything was moved into my new apartment by noon. The boxspring was once again too large for the elevator, so they had to haul it up eight flights of stairs and I instantly felt like a degenerate for being a small, single person with an enormous bed. Anyway, Fernando was only going to charge me 125 pesos (about $42) for the entire move because he had forgotten that he originally quoted me 150 pesos ($50). He then explained that he normally charges 5 pesos per floor when he has to carry items up the stairs, but that he would just charge me for one floor. I balked at this, remembering how grim they looked when they finally dragged the boxspring into my apartment, and paid Fernando 250 pesos for the job. I still can't believe it cost me less than $100 for nearly four hours of labor and two burly men. An even better bargain was the plumber I mentioned at the beginning of the post - he fixed my leaky sink for 8 pesos. Inflation might be running at 12% this year, and I can no longer afford fun clothes at the stores I used to shop at all the time two years ago, but there are services around here that are still ridiculously inexpensive. It just shows you how screwy the Argentine economy is - and how screwy the global economy is - but that might be a rant for a time when I'm more lucid.
I love my new apartment. It has a lot of light and I'm making much better use of space than I did in my old place, which in retrospect was too big and might have felt a bit lonely with all the unused space. I had also forgotten what a pleasure it is to have a spacious, airy kitchen. The best part about living here is that I'm near my friends - I'm no longer the one who lives farthest away! I got a great preview of what it's going to be like living here - on Saturday, Amanda came over right at noon to see my place and we went out to lunch. When we finished eating, I headed home to wait for the cable modem technicians (God forbid I go one day without high-speed Internet access at home) and Gisela popped by to keep me company. That night, Gisela, Santiago, Paul and I went over to Amanda's (an easy, eight-block walk for me) to grill homemade hamburgers on her outdoor terrace. When I lived in Recoleta, all of these various hangs would have required advance planning and bus trips. Now I have most of my nearest and dearest within walking distance!
Then on Sunday, I finished unpacking and cleaning and had seven people over for dinner. Even Joe stopped by to eat, and he's getting over a bad case of dysentery! That's true friendship. I made a spinach and strawberry salad with raspberry vinagrette and linguine with pesto and broccoli. My garlic bread plans fell through because I couldn't figure out how to work my oven, sigh, and I couldn't make peach crisp because my grocery store was out of peaches. But Amanda bought Persicco ice cream and was also in charge of seating and lighting. She did a far better job than I ever could have done.
We kept the balcony door open during the dinner party and by the end of the evening, I had approximately 80 billion little bugs gathered around the lights in my living room. This never used to happen in my old apartment. I was pretty grossed out, but everyone just shrugged and said this is a regular fact of Argentine life. Hello, why did I never get these bugs before? And why don't any houses or apartments have screens? I've only ever seen one apartment with screens, and that was a beautiful place on Scalabrini Ortiz that a Reuters reporter (who has since moved to Mexico City) was renting. Anyway, I asked everyone what happened to the bugs overnight, and no one gave me a good answer.
I posed the same query to my colleagues, who informed me that the bugs just die around your apartment and you have to be a vigilant sweeper. My boss says they die in his bedroom and he has to clean them off his sheets. Sick. At least my bugs are staying in my living room. I found all of the dead ones clustered around my balcony door today when I got home from Alexia's birthday dinner at Sudestada.
And since I'm already on a sleep-deprived ramble, I'm going to take a second to rant about Argentine cleaning implements. You know those rubber things that people use to clean windshields? They have kind of a flat edge? Everyone here puts one of those rubber things on the end of a pole, then loosely wraps a big woolly rag-thing around the rubber thing and pushes it around the floor. You soak the rag first, and you can take it off, rinse, wring and slap it back on the rubber thing.
WHY DO WE USE THESE? First of all, the rags are barely absorbent. I know this because when I defrosted my freezer, there was a bit of water that pooled at the bottom and I laid the rag there. It floated on top of the water and refused to soak up anything. So useless. Secondly, the rags fall off the rubber things when you push it around for longer than two seconds. Thirdly, every time I've used one of these contraptions, I just end up pushing dirty water around the floor with a non-absorbent rag.
Amanda says there's a whole technique involved and that you have to practice. Whatever. I hate the rag on a pole. I tried to circumvent the system this weekend because I found a rag on a pole in my new place, and thought I'd re-use the pole and ditch the rubber thing and the rag. I went to the grocery store and bought a broom head and a mop head, thinking all cleaning implements were created equal. Well, I was in for a treat because neither head fit on the pole. The mop head kind of fit, so I was able to push that around my floor if I did it carefully. The broom head was a total disaster and I ended up just using my vacuum to clean my hardwood floors, which was not that bad. Certainly better than the stupid rag on a pole. It's really time to start importing Swiffers from the U.S.
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| Thursday, November 17th, 2005
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1:13 am - Orientation
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Friday noon. That is when the real estate brokers are coming to my office to sign a new two-year lease for a one-bedroom apartment at Arce and Ortega y Gasset. This apartment was the second of three that I visited over the weekend. The first, a cute little loft also on Arce, had already been reserved. The third was a two-bedroom whose living room was sponge-painted an unsettling tone of muted orange. The apartment I chose is a 60-square meter one-bedroom with a new bathroom, spacious kitchen with lots of cabinet space and a big balcony. I won't have nearly the space I have now, and I'm paying significantly more, but I realized during my brief apartment search that I've been living in a fantasyland for the last two years. Now I'm joining the real world - well, as real as Las Cañitas can be. Dan describes it as a soul-less neighborhood, which is not entirely fair, but there is a disproportionate number of toothpick-thin Argentine yuppies in nearly identical outfits that pack the trendy restaurants and spill into the sidewalks every weekend. I will be the girl going to Sushi Club in elastic pants to take full advantage of their 40-peso all-you-can-eat sushi deal.
Two nights ago, I was also the bewildered girl wandering beneath the overpass at General Paz and Cablido that marks the border between Capital Federal and greater Buenos Aires. I boarded the wrong 130 bus to go to Saavedra for Bible study and failed to notice until we crossed General Paz and Cabildo turned into Maipú. Realizing I was now in Vicente Lopez, and not in a particularly great area of Vicente Lopez, especially for someone in a skirt and pumps and carrying a large shopping bag from a snobby wine store (I was bringing dresses for Martha to try on after Bible study), I hopped immediately off the bus and made a hasty retreat back to Buenos Aires proper. Thankfully, there were cabs everywhere and I flagged one immediately while texting Andrea to say I was en route but would be late because of a "problemita de transporte."
When I got into the cab, my cell phone rang and the voice on the other end saying, "Cómo estás?" sounded just like Andrea. I launched into a long and harried explanation of getting on the wrong 130, traveling all the way to the General Paz highway and needing to backtrack but now being fine and safely in a taxi. There was a pause and the caller said, Um, that's fine, but I'm actually calling about a story you wrote... Right. It was not Andrea but rather the chief spokeswoman at one of Argentina's largest companies, calling me at 9:30 pm because she wanted to clarify something about the article I had helped write about 30 seconds before running out of the office. There were fortunately no factual errors with the piece, but there were some tonal issues. (Tonal issues? I'm making my story sound like a music composition. Sorry.)
After eight rounds of profuse apologies (me for confusing her with someone else, her for calling me so late after the workday), we got off the phone, which was just as well because the cab driver was confused and needed directions to Martha's apartment building. What an evening.
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| Thursday, November 10th, 2005
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3:25 pm - Upchuck
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I'm taking my very first sick day ever today. Last night, Dan and I ordered a spicy chicken dish and white rice from Cinco Corderos, whose food has proven reliable in the past, even if it takes forever to deliver. We watched The OC season premiere, chatted and he went home around 2. Three and a half hours later, I woke up feeling a bit funny, and spent the next hour and a half alternating between attempting to sleep and kneeling in front of the toilet with my head in the bowl.
I called my boss at 9 am and said I thought I could make it in, since by then I had gone about two hours without throwing up, but he sounded appalled and told me to get back into bed immediately. Then I called Dan, and it turns out he was perfectly fine. Ah well. I feel like this is payback from several months ago, when we went out to an overpriced restaurant in Palermo with a group of friends and I wanted to order spaghetti with mussels. Dan was so insistent that I would get food poisoning that I ordered spaghetti with mussels out of spite, and woke up peachy keen the next morning, while Dan ended up with food poisoning from his fish. I spent a fair amount of time laughing at him about that, which in retrospect was not very nice, and now I am the one throwing up water in my bathroom.
I guess the lesson from last night's debacle is that I should just stick to cooking my own Chinese food.
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| Tuesday, November 8th, 2005
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6:48 pm - Marital Bliss
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I left everyone hanging about my landlord situation, so here is the short version of the story: I am moving out by January 16. The medium version is this: My landlord said my counterproposal was a joke and made me cry. If you want the long version of our disastrous break-up, which took place several weeks ago at the Aroma Cafe on Plaza San Martin, I can e-mail you the weepy epistle I dispatched to Dan and Linda that day. Suffice to say that I had a completely infantile breakdown at the office and it was neither pretty nor professional, though none of my co-workers seemed to mind and one of them even offered to take out my landlord for me.
As most of you already know, my brother got married on Saturday in a lovely, lovely ceremony. I actually saw very little of it because the bridesmaids had to stand in a line, and when I poked my head to the side for a better view, my mother gave me a frowny face from the front pew and motioned with her hand to get back in line. But I still cried buckets, and cried even more at the reception when the fathers gave touching, heartfelt and funny toasts.
So there was laughing, crying, precision assembly line production of programs and namecards, loud conversation by out-of-town Chinese relatives, arbitrary redistribution of family heirlooms by our matriarchal grandmother, traditional Chinese tea pouring, two outfit changes by my fashionista Aunt Rita on the wedding day, unexpected delights like my parents dancing to Cotton-Eyed Joe and weird hiccups like the reception hall coordinator being arrested for alleged embezzlement in the week before the wedding.
And now I am back in the Buenos Aires spring, dealing with corporate earnings season while trying to find time to hunt for an apartment and fix my leaky (more like gushy) sink and catch up with friends. My brother and new sister-in-law are in town for their honeymoon, so I also be clearing room in the schedule for mass consumption of steak and ice cream. It's great to be back!
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| Monday, October 17th, 2005
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8:58 pm - Wake-Up Call
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I was sleeping peacefully on Saturday morning when the phone rang at 9:30 am. It was my landlord, Isabel, calling to double my rent. Yes, you read that correctly. My two-year lease expires this month and Isabel is bitter over the undervalued rent I've been paying. I live in a snooty neighborhood in a classic French building with an antique cage elevator, and my apartment is beautiful and spacious with hardwood floors, molding in my dining room and enormous closets. When I moved in, Isabel gave me a surprisingly low rent and I also talked her into a single, one-off increase at the end of one year, as opposed to the "landlord can review the contract every six months" clause that is usually included in Argentine leases.
Well, hell hath no fury like a landlord who underestimated the value of her own property and had to sit idly by while apartment prices in the neighborhood went up more than 30%. Still in a sleepy haze, I asked Isabel to repeat the figure she quoted me. She then embarked on a long rant about housing prices, inflation, how the contract I talked her into made her lose heaps and heaps of money, and how unfair my rent is to her. She even threw in a reference to the 2001 economic crisis for good measure. I'm sympathetic to the plight of Argentine consumers and businesses who saw their savings wiped out in 2001, but housing prices in my neighborhood were already approximating their pre-crisis levels when I moved here. So it was Isabel's bad math that locked her into the contract in the first place, and now she is trying to recover all of her lost value in a single increase.
As a finishing touch to the conversation, Isabel told me the U.S. Embassy rejected her application for a tourist visa to visit her daughter in Miami, and then began talking at length about her utter dislike of Americans, the American government, the United States of America and George W. Bush.
I spent this morning consulting with my wise boss, researching some numbers and then drafting a counterproposal. I am pretty pleased with my handiwork, but I'm not optimistic that the rent negotiations will go well. Isabel and I are operating on completely different planes of reality. She wants to start at a figure double what I'm currently paying, and raise the rent every six months from that point. I have a plan where we arrive at her starting figure through a series of increases over two years. Also, Isabel is a freaking lunatic and hates Americans. I think that might be a problem.
Isabel and I will sit down on Wednesday morning. I am already emotionally preparing myself for a move within six months. It will break my heart to leave this apartment - my very first grown-up apartment! - but no amount of vintage molding is worth paying exorbitant figures or the stress of a landlord who sees me as an extension of the Bush administration. So if you're thinking of visiting me here, do it soon!
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| Wednesday, October 12th, 2005
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12:01 am - Comings and Goings
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Much has happened in the last few weeks. My dear friend Erin got married in a beautiful ceremony, and the first floor of Willard/1116 Foster reunited for the first time since graduation to kick off the dancing at the reception - to Madonna's Like A Prayer, of course. The matron of honor's husband asked me if Argentina is a "tropical island." Temporarily stunned speechless, the best answer I could muster was "No, it's like a country," so I'm not doing the geographically challenged any favors. On the way back from Chicago, I was stranded in Washington D.C. for a full day, and United Airlines lost my luggage. When my suitcase arrived in Buenos Aires, it was missing $300 worth of personal belongings. Angry letters have been mailed to the airline and I'm still waiting for a response.
Meanwhile, two new interns have arrived at the office. Amanda's website has gone live and the e-commerce component is being installed soon, so check it out and buy some high-quality leather accessories. Harry Potter was deemed gay, and then not. Simone's play got a rave review in the Chicago Sun-Times. Cindy and Michael left Buenos Aires and I inherited three pairs of shoes, a purse from Ann Taylor, Mexican spices and some Febreeze. I saw Wedding Crashers and was disappointed. I saw Crash and was so impressed that I invited Laura over and watched it a second time.
The last highlight would be my trip to Uruguay this weekend. Six of us headed to a little town called Punta Gorda, which is about 18 kilometers from Carmelo and right on the Río Uruguay. "Little town" is actually an overstatement, as the only thing in Punta Gorda is the hotel and a small, deserted beach. We sat on the sand, reveled in the first truly springy weekend of the season, laughed together and played poker. I learned Texas Hold 'Em and even won a game! And I ate a lot of chivito, which is a popular Uruguayan dish and a particular obsession of mine. Chivito is a flat little piece of goat meat or beef, topped with ham, cheese and a fried egg. All of this rests on a bed of French fries, and it's served with lettuce and tomato and a Russian salad. Bread is optional. I tell ya what - Uruguay doesn't have too much going on, but chivito is one of the finest foods ever conceived. I could eat it every day...until I keeled over from massive heart failure, of course.
After a long weekend in the Uruguayan countryside, it was a shock to the system to return to the bus exhaust and crowded streets of Buenos Aires. But I would wither away without city life, and it is always eventually soothing to get back to the noisy rhythms of work and home and play. I have two weekends until my next trip back to Chicago. If you'll be at my brother's wedding, I'll see you there!
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| Wednesday, September 14th, 2005
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4:21 pm - My Kind Of Town
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This is a rare workday post to announce that I'm leaving today for Chicago and will be there through Monday afternoon. Hurrah! My dear friend, fellow ace reporter and former roommate Erin is getting married on Saturday, and I am so so SO excited. The seamstress, a slightly flaky but quite sweet and talented Uruguayan grandma named Sofia, has wrestled the unwieldy tent of chiffon that was my overlarge bridesmaid dress into submission, and I've gotten my highlights retouched, my face profesionally exfoliated, my brows shaped and my flight confirmed.
So here's a slightly early congratulations to Erin and Charley. May your refrigerator be always full of mysterious-looking samples that Erin's picked up at the local Whole Foods and brought home in napkins for future consumption! Just kidding.
Oh, and just to clarify the rumors that are flying around the neighborhood, I am not pregnant. The women at my laundromat told me over the weekend that I stopped in the other day with a belly like this [mime pregnant woman in third trimester]. Gah!
My car for the airport comes in an hour and a half. In my absence, I encourage daily viewings of the National Zoo PandaCam. (Yes, I know San Diego has one too, but I like DC better.)
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| Monday, August 22nd, 2005
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10:16 pm - It Takes Two
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Last week brought the 3rd Annual World Tango Championships to Buenos Aires and I watched the semifinals and finals of the stage competition. (The other category was salon tango, which was described as old people shuffling around a ballroom, dance marathon-style. Pass!) I went with some other friends to the semifinals on Friday night and Laura and I were the only ones who really enjoyed it - Rob fell asleep and Santi was convinced he was the only Argentine in the room aside from the dancers. Hee. So Laura and I went back for the finals on Sunday. I started off in high spirits, but around 11 pm (three hours after the projected start time and two hours after the actual start time), I started to fade. It didn't help that just weeks earlier, the convention center hosting the tango competition had also housed the country's annual agricultural fair and the hall still smelled strongly of cow. My allergies kicked in around 11:30 pm. When all 16 couples finished their routines, we waited while they tallied the scores...and there was a five-way tie. A five-way tie! That is some screwy point system. So then all five couples had to reprise their routines. Laura and I watched, our eyes glazing over, and then waited again for the new results.
Shortly after midnight, the emcee returned with judges in tow and said the eliminated 11 couples would be called back onstage for final recognition. They announced the names and hometowns of each couple, and each pair twirled onto stage amid polite applause. Then the emcee said the committee had gifts for each couple. So each pair was once again announced by names and hometowns, and we applauded - again - as they received large bouquets. Finally, finally they named the top three couples. My favorite pair - an Argentine girl with a sparkly gold dress and her partner - won first place, so that partly made up for my congestion and fatigue. A Japanese couple took second place, which I thought was a good showing for an international contestant, and another Argy pair took third. There had been several Colombian contestants that really knocked my socks off, but none of them made it to the top five. Travesty!
So around 12:30 am, the competition was over and a massive downpour had started outside. I got home dripping wet and having seen enough tango for the rest of the year. Oh - and still no desire to learn it. Ha!
Oh, one other thing. Shortly before the competition started, a woman speaking English with an Argentine accent thrust a camera with a bright light in my face and asked me why I was at the tango competition. It turns out she was from CNN. She didn't identify herself before launching into her questions, however, which made me realize I might seriously dislike journalists. Yikes! But I obliged anyway and that's why you might have seen me on CNN. Sigh.
And one last item. If you are not watching the PandaCam, you don't know what you're missing! Jump on the bandwagon already.
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| Thursday, August 18th, 2005
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9:36 pm - Matchmaker, Matchmaker
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My co-worker was recently a featured guest on one of those talking head shows that air during the evenings here. Truth be told, I never watch those programs because they're usually, erm, mindnumbing. There are rarely temper tantrums or hilarious exchanges, just middle-aged men talking in low tones on a boring set. But when my co-worker made his television debut, we all tuned in to the daytime rerun during work hours and paid rapt attention.
It turns out we weren't the only ones. My landlord, who is a cantankerous 50-something divorcee, came by this morning to collect the rent and said she saw my colleague on television. He's so knowledgable, she told me with uncharacteristic enthusiasm, and so young! And so good-looking! Yup, so it turns out my landlord has a huge crush on my co-worker. I wonder if rent negotiations for my upcoming lease renewal will go more in my favor if I subtly dangle the prospect of a fix-up. Hmmm...
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| Saturday, July 23rd, 2005
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6:55 pm - Diario de Una Loca
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Earlier this week, I got it in my head that I really wanted to see The Notebook. I'm not sure where the fixation came from, but I suspect it has something to do with my repeated viewings of Mean Girls and then seeing Rachel McAdams on the MTV Movie Awards and remembering I had read good reviews about her performance in The Notebook. (Also, Ryan Gosling is dreamy.) So on Friday after work, I made a beeline for my local DVD store and rented the movie. I popped it in after dinner and...the disc didn't work. I messed with the disc and my laptop for about an hour before giving up and going to bed.
This morning, I tried the disc again, thinking it might have miraculously repaired itself overnight. No dice. So I walked the DVD back to the store at noon and asked for their other copy. I got a glare from the clerk (probably because the last movie I rented also didn't work and they had to give me a free rental, which I used on The Notebook, and...you get the picture) but he handed over the other copy. I brought it home and...nothing! I tried all my other DVDs and they were fine. So I chalked it up to irreconciliable differences between the DVD and my laptop.
At that moment, Dan called to see what I was up to. Even though he had been out until 6 am and just gotten up, I talked him into watching The Notebook on his laptop. I walked over there, he ordered lunch and we sat down to watch the movie and...nothing. Confirmation that the problem lies in the disc. So Dan, who by this time had lost all interest in watching The Notebook, offered to rent the movie from his video store. He called and they were out. Obviously.
So then I walked to Blockbuster, which I felt guilty about because - as my mother once pointed out - it makes zero sense to give a multinational monster even more of my money when I can support the small-business video stores in my neighborhood. But I was desperate. I wandered around Blockbuster, trying to figure out what titles were in Spanish so I could make sense of the alphabetized shelves. As my horrible Notebook karma would have it, all four DVDs of Diario de Una Pasión were rented.
I am freaking out. I have now spent almost 24 hours trying to watch a super-sappy romance from 2004 that is based on a book by an author whose work - or at least movie adaptions of said work - I think I might hate. What am I going to do? I think I might buy it, even though it would violate my informal policy of not buying Zone 4 DVDs. So ridiculous.
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| Monday, July 18th, 2005
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9:42 pm - Your Head on a Platter
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I know everyone stayed up all weekend reading the Harry Potter book and has already moved onto high-level analysis of the novel, but I won't be able to read my copy until September. And I'm only home for a few days in September, and I have enough good breeding not to bring the book to Erin's rehearsal dinner and wedding ceremony. So this means I won't be able to crack open the book until the plane ride back to Buenos Aires.
Ergo...no one is allowed to tell me ANYTHING about the book! I'm declaring a moratorium on all Harry Potter-related discussions that take place within ear or eyeshot of me. However, if Katie Leung pulls out of the filming for Goblet of Fire and you are the casting director and need a winsome Asian replacement who can pass as a high school student, please do not hesitate to contact me. References are available upon request. My past roles include Mrs. Gloop in my fourth grade gifted class' production of Charlie & the Chocolate Factory and a munchkin (a munchkin with an important speaking role, darn it!) in my junior high production of Wizard of Oz. Hey, some people are just into lavish dwarf entertainment.
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| Saturday, July 16th, 2005
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2:20 pm - Fuzzy Wuzzy
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I am mesmerized by the PandaCam at the National Zoo. Mei Xiang, the giant panda who gave birth last week, hasn't really moved in the last 10 minutes, but I love pandas so there's something very comforting about staring at a big lump of stationary, black-and-white fur, and seeing the ears twitch once in a while.
Mei Xiang and her mate, Tian Tian, are on loan from a Chinese research center, and their baby will probably be returned to the motherland after two years because it's technically Chinese property. I wonder how pandas are shipped around the world? By boat? On a plane in the cargo hold? I personally like the idea of a giant panda sitting in coach, buckled into a regular seat for the long journey abroad. And maybe he would have the middle seat, and I would have the window seat, and he would try to get up when I needed to go to the bathroom, but it would be too hard and I would just have to crawl over him. And I could lean against him like a big pillow if I needed to sleep.
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| Thursday, June 30th, 2005
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11:17 pm - Return to Regularly Scheduled Programming
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All right, simmer down. I'm still around and trying to get my schedule back to normal after Joy and Sarah's action-packed visit. So far, I've managed to eat mostly at home instead of out, which was easy enough. But I'm having more trouble in the departments of sleep (missed my alarm this morning and woke up 10 minutes before I had to be out the door, which meant no shower and frightful hair during the work day) and exercise (couldn't get up for Pilates either day this week) and household chores (all my suits need to be drycleaned and my entryway lightbulb has been burnt out for 2 weeks). I also haven't kicked my rampant overuse of parentheses.
The week since the girls' departure has been pretty uneventful. But here's a quick recap:
Last restaurant visited: Olsen for girls' brunch. It was my first-ever Belgian waffle in Buenos Aires and I didn't mind the absence of maple syrup because I had some excellent French fries and smoked salmon on the side.
Last CD purchased: Fijación Oral Vol. 1 by Shakira. I love this album. Shakira should never sing in English, ever. Her Spanish-language stuff is too good and her English lyrics are always ridiculous.
Last song downloaded: "Bridges and Balloons" by The Decemberists, courtesy Stereogum. If you're wondering if I'm an indie yuppie, the unfortunate answer is that I am actually an indie yuppie poseur, which is far, far worse. Sigh.
Last frivolous purchase, which I made to cheer myself up about the girls leaving: a green wristlet from Lazaro.
Last outing that required use of a green wristlet: N/A
Last "Where else but Argentina?" moment: Going to the ballet at the Teatro Colón and having the pit orchestra be on strike for the first half.
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| Monday, June 13th, 2005
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11:22 pm - Vocabulary Lesson
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My high school friend Joy and her college friend Sarah were due to arrive in Buenos Aires tomorrow morning for a weeklong visit, but I got a tense phone call from Joy this afternoon saying they were stuck at O'Hare with a delayed flight to Miami that was dooming their chances of making a connecting flight to Argentina. It was a hectic few hours as the three of us (Joy, Sarah and I) made phone calls to one travel agency and two airlines to get the girls here as efficiently as possible. When I phoned the local office of Aerolineas Argentinas, the cheery customer service representative asked me to spell Joy's last name so she could look up the reservation.
Joy's last name has a Z in it and when I got to that letter, the Aerolineas rep had trouble understanding me and asked me if it was B as in Beatriz. I said no and repeated Z, but got flustered and said pronounced it "zay" when the letter is actually pronounced "ZAY-tah." The rep then asked me if I was D as in Debra. I said no no, it's Z (pronounced correctly) as in...as in...and then realized I don't know any Spanish words that begin with Z. As the rep kept throwing out possible letters, I reached for my dictionary and turned to the Z section. It was pretty short and I didn't see any words that weren't five syllables and descriptions of obscure scientific terms. Finally I yelled "Zebra!" hoping it was a Spanish cognate and praise the Lord it was.
Well, after all that, Joy and Sarah are now arriving a day later on an American Airlines flight. But I got a good vocab lesson out of the experience.
Oh, I also saw a decent film this weekend: Cama Adentro, or Live-In Maid. If you can track down a subtitled version in the US, I would recommend it. The movie centers on a boozy, upper class divorcee who's had the same live-in maid for 30 years but hasn't paid her in seven months. The film takes place in November 2001, just before Argentina defaulted on its foreign debt and the whole country went to hell. I don't claim to have any insight into the Argentine psyche, as I've been here for less than two years, but the movie gives even the outsider a sense of the enormous lump of pride that well-heeled Argentines had to swallow when their savings and pensions disappeared into the maw of the country's insolvent financial system. In the movie, the protagonist has to take all of her imported porcelain, silver and fur coats to the local pawn shop to settle her debt with her maid. She ends up hocking her jewelry, which she was saving for the wedding of an estranged daughter who lives in Spain. She runs out of money to pay her utility bills and has to move into a smaller apartment.
I suppose a lot of people look at Argentina's rich and play the world's smallest violin for them - these are people, after all, who had belongings to sell and maybe overseas relatives to help them out. But the strength of Cama Adentro is its ability to generate sympathy for a spoiled, arrogant old woman. Yes, it's funny when her maid pours local, cheap whiskey into the old bottles of the imported stuff. And you shrug a little bit when she forks over her gold earrnings, thinking that she should have sold them long ago rather than keep up appearances.
But at the same time, you realize how far Argentina fell in 2001 and 2002, and how painful it must have been for the upper middle class to confront its hubris. Buenos Aires used to be one of the most expensive cities in the world and now its lawyers drive taxi cabs, its children roam city streets by themselves to scavenge for cardboard and its elderly pensioners spend their afternoons banging metal pots on the outside of foreign bank buildings. When you look at it that way, all of the protagonists' efforts to maintain her lifestyle aren't so much desperate as necessary to keep the last shreds of her reality together.
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| Wednesday, May 25th, 2005
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10:51 pm - Luck Be A Lady Tonight
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Tonight, during an otherwise unremarkable conversation, I described something that had happened to me recently and my friend Dan replied, "That's because you're abroad." I, along with my other friend Amanda who was in the car, heard: "That's because you're a broad." That struck me as hilarious and I was halfway through humming the overture to Guys and Dolls - the only place where I've ever really heard the term "broad" applied to a female - before Dan corrected my hearing and mentioned that he had been in his high school production of Guys and Dolls.
I had suggested recently at the office that each week, we should pick a new genre and write all of our stories in that vein. We could have Magical Realism Week, Hemingway Week, maybe an e.e. cummings week. And definitely Noir Week. The fun part about that one is that we could wear trenchcoats and green eyeshades and write our stories in poorly lit offices, using typewriters and growling into telephones. This broad would definitely be into that.
OK, since this was kind of a lame story, I'm going to make it up to you with film noir Calvin & Hobbes strips. Here, here and here you go.
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| Wednesday, April 27th, 2005
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12:11 am - History Lesson
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Do I have a story or what. This afternoon, a woman (I would guess in her late 20s) showed up at the office to introduce herself. Cindy is a reporter from The Orange County Register, a paper at which I once interned myself, and has a fellowship to do research in Mexico and Argentina. She wanted to meet some other foreign journalists and that's why she visited us today. She also did a study abroad in Buenos Aires four years ago. Well, we got to chatting and she asked me where I live in the city.
"In Barrio Norte, Junín and Arenales," I told her.
"I used to live at Junín and Arenales!" she said. "I was on Junín."
"I'm on Junín!" I said.
"I was at 1194 Junín," she said.
"I'm at Junín 1194 !" I said. "What floor were you on?"
WELL, it turns out that she lived in my very apartment four years ago during her study abroad. My very, very apartment, the same one from which I am typing now. When she was here, the place was a two- bedroom with pink walls, and the landlord was a very cranky old lady named Lucía. My own landlord is also a cranky old lady, but her name is Isabel and she got the apartment in her divorce settlement. I think her ex-husband must have bought the place from Cindy's old landlord. Sometime in the last four years, the second bedroom was turned into a second common space and the walls were painted white.
What are the chances that in a city of more than 10 million people, I would end up meeting the ex-tenant of my apartment, and she would be a fellow young gringo journalist from a paper where I once worked? Wow wow wow. I am still completely overwhelmed.
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| Saturday, April 23rd, 2005
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1:45 am - Houseguests
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Wow, I just heard the most horrific story from my friends, and it's so disgusting I had to immediately jettison the anecdote into cyberspace. As usual, I have no interesting stories of my own and am living vicariously through friends, even if I hope to never live through the events I'm about to relate. The story begins with my friends Dave and Angelique and their apartment in Palermo Viejo. Their bathroom wall was getting damp and gross, so a plumber came in and drilled a hole near the bottom. Let's leave it and see if it airs out, he advised. Well, Angelique returned home today and when she opened the door, there were cockroaches everywhere. The cucarachas were streaming out of the hole in the bathroom wall, on the bed, on the walls, everywhere. Dave and our friend Mike arrived home shortly afterward and they called an emergency exterminator. In the meantime, Dave started stomping and they taped plastic over the hole to keep more cockroaches from coming inside.
The building manager showed up to help out while they group waited for the exterminator. There might have been a trip to the hardware store for Raid somewhere in there too. The building manager was holding an unlabeled bottle of what looked like Windex and started spraying around, to little avail. She asked to spray into the hole, but Dave and Mike asked her not to tear down their only line of defense against the advancing cockroaches. She began to slap down cockroaches with her bare hands. Then, while no one was looking, she peeled away the plastic to squirt into the hole. The cockroaches began pouring into the apartment again. The group asked the building manager to leave.
Then the exterminator showed up wearing a gas mask and carrying who knows what kind of poison. He stood at the hole and squirted for a full hour. The toxins knocked down some cockroaches but they just kept coming, hundreds of them scurrying out of the wall and climbing over the dead bodies that were piling up around the opening. After an hour of straight spraying directly into the hole, the exterminator more or less gave up and taped the plastic back. His parting advice to the group was to "Drink a glass of milk to get rid of the toxins you just breathed in." Angelique said she sat down on the living room couch and could hear the cockroaches scratching and tapping against the plastic covering, struggling to get into the apartment.
The story doesn't have a particularly satisfying ending. We went out to Indian food tonight and they had lots of yogurt, which was the closest they could get to milk. They're supposed to call if the apartment is unbearable and want to crash on my sofabed, but it's been a while and my phone has been silent, so I assume the cockroaches are pretty well contained by now. But still: UGH. My dad tells me stories sometimes about how huge the cockroaches were in Hong Kong, and my good friend Charlie who used to live in Phnom Penh used to tell me the Buenos Aires cucarachas were downright cuddly compared to the ones that regularly infested her old apartment in Cambodia. But I don't know - it sounds like the critters at Dave and Angelique's were pretty serious contenders.
Oh great, now I have the willies and I know I won't be able to sleep. I've never even seen so much as a spider in my apartment, but I swear I can hear all sorts of insects scratching at my walls. Eeep.
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| Friday, April 8th, 2005
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1:45 am - Far From Home, Closer To Free
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Last weekend, I was at Gisela's birthday party and was chatting with her cousin Gustavo. At one point, I mentioned I played the violin and he lit up and said, "Do you know who you're like? That girl on Party of Five!" He of course meant Claudia, the dimunitive, hyper, overall-wearing and fiddle-playing younger sister on one of my favorite television shows of all time. Sure, the series was hopelessly melodramatic and the writers never cut those poor orphans a break, and eventually Claudia turned into a somewhat slutty cheerleader poseur who had creepy sexual tension with her older sister's ex-husband. But around early high school, friends started telling me I reminded them of Claudia because of the short stature and hyperactivity and penchant for wearing overalls and playing the violin. So I started watching Party of Five and was immediately hooked, following the show through time slot changes and increasingly bad writing.
Really though, how bizarre is it that a random Argentine would mention the Claudia similarity after knowing me for less than an hour, and after the show has been gone for five years? And how bizarre is it that this random Argentine even watched the show? It used to air in reruns on the Hallmark Channel here, but I haven't seen it in a while. Gustavo had a pretty good memory of the show, and I was so excited to have discovered a kindred spirit that we reminsced for a long time. Do you remember when Bailey became an alcoholic and the family had an intervention? Do you remember when Charlie got Hodgkin's? Ahh, good times. Almost as good as when I would race into the cafeteria on Thursday mornings to parse every detail of the previous night's episode with Megan and Karen before the school day started.
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