Don't Cry For ME

Just after a week in Argentina in late May, I stopped blogging and shaving my legs. I’ll start by posting about my time in Argentina before I forget it happened this year.

The week I spent in Argentina was bittersweet. I spent it with two great college friends and wandered around the city sometimes alone and never got lost! I stayed at the apartment of an insane lady just a couple of blocks from some giant government building. I shared a room with a really nice girl from Holland who wanted to visit South America for several months and was spending a couple months in Buenos Aires to learn Spanish.

In a nutshell, Buenos Aires is a city with beautiful European reminiscent architecture from colonial times, but the only thing to remind you of South America is the sometimes tasteful graffiti making urging you to take some kind of social stand with either scrawled succinct commands or a colorfully elaborate depiction. I did not feel like I was in South America, save for the one night spent at a tango bar and the classic argentine accent of which most y’s and ll’s slurred as a Spanish “j” or English “cho” that kind of makes me think the argentine’s European ancestors learned Spanish while they were piss drunk and it passed it on through the centuries.

The first day there, Elena took me to the Pink Palacio to a protest held by some old women’s group who lost their kids to some militia group in some kind of social mishap many many years ago. That night we went out to some bar where ALL of the study abroad students from U.S. went to hang out, and I got to see a few more familiar faces from Trinity like Alyssa and Jahn, yet the ambience of the bar was off key. I felt like the only one far removed and outgrown from college life even though I was not the only college graduate or the youngest, and on my first night I did not feel like sipping drinks with other Americans, I could do that in the USA anytime! I wanted to get out and meet some locals!

We then went to a club where they had a sweet break dance couple competition and Elena and I went to the balcony to observe man and woman couples face each other off with some impressive popping and locking of joints I wasn’t even aware one could move more than 180°. Shortly thereafter, more kids from the first bar joined us, and the floor opened up to dance. So I went with a couple girls to the floor, thinking it would be normal and we could enjoy the music, but really creepy drunk guys started to try to get us left and right and sometimes were too pushy. I have the impression that some were local guys, but the worst were probably under 21 tourists, completely drunk who thought that in Argentina you can just instantly get with anyone who seems of the desirable sex, so that a few times, a guy would come up to me and try to make out within seconds. It was in short REVOLTING and we were out of there less than half an hour after the dancing started.

I spent the rest of the week visiting places and stuffing my face of alfajores and delicious food with Elena and Mike, Alyssa, and Sanne (the really cool girl from Holland). One of the highlights was being an observer at a Tango bar, where both young and old men and women sat behind little round tables around the perimeter of a dance floor. A tango song would come on, and the women would wait to be asked by a man for a dance, and so would ensue the dance and small talk to fit the length of a tango or two before each would retreat to their respective little table to start over with a new partner. To me, it seemed both much more refreshing, romantic and professional (especially in light of my experience at the club earlier in the week).

Buenos Aires was not as romantic as I imagined it to be. The people were too often rude, though I did find some nice eclectic people to chat with while exploring the city’s cemetery, zoo, arboretum and garden. The lady I lived with expressed how many argentines, especially in BA still ride a high horse about their European ancestry in an attempt to alienate themselves from the indigenous and mestizos, to consider themselves above them. In another occasion I heard, (and did feel it through my visit) that Paraguayans are not warmly welcomed, and their situation is much like that of Mexicans in the U.S. displaced from their home country in plight and search of an economically viable position elsewhere. On the other hand Bolivians are considered much worse than the already plebeian status of Paraguayans, twice hearing that they are lazy and dirty in comparison to harder-working Paraguayans. I met both some Bolivians and Paraguayans while visiting some of the tourist hotspots, and all were incredibly friendly (I got a mini tour from a cemetery employee) and respectfully hardworking (magnitudes more than the lazy Argentine host lady I stayed with). I left with the impression that any reason why Bolivians would be less regarded is due to their general more indigenous origin. With that said, I am not at all crazy about ever visiting Buenos Aires again. I had a taste of it, and once was enough, and look forward to Bolivia and Peru in September!!!