Hace un Mes...

As of Friday, I've officially been in Argentina for a month, but it does not feel like it. The world around me seems just as new and the challenges (almost) as challenging. To that end, this weekend, like every other, was full of firsts.

I spent Friday wandering around San Telmo, and it was lovely. I can't believe the amount of new things I continue to discover in my very own neighborhood. I went to a café and did homework for awhile, and then ended up at El Museo de la Ciudad, a small museum with rotating exhibits about life in Buenos Aires in various time periods. Although I encounter few museums I don't like, I have to admit that this one did not thrill me. The current main exhibit is about toilets through the ages, and, well, it was a lot of toilets. However, the other exhibit showed a bunch of huge, old doors from the mansions that used to populate parts of Buenos Aires, and I enjoyed that thoroughly. It's crazy to think of this city filled with European elites in mansions, since I haven't seen a house of any size in the city since arriving. The museum also displayed the winning entries in a photo contest that seemed to involve pictures of kids all over Argentina. They were very cute, and some of the pictures were really good.

After leaving the museum, I ambled down cobblestone streets, poking my head into churches and taking mental notes about the cafés and museums to which I wanted to return. The most exciting part of my day occurred when I stopped in a "kiosco" to buy a snack, and the two very chatty old men running it told me I spoke "castellano" very well. Although communication still frustrates me on a daily basis, it made me realize that I had understood and responded to all of their questions without a second thought - a major improvement from my first day here. I went to dinner at an Uruguayan restaurant with my friend Elaine, and we ate Chivitos, delicious beef sandwiches with vegetables and, in our case, fried egg, that are apparently typical to Uruguay.

I spent Saturday in a similar fashion, seeing various parts of the city. My favorite part of living in a big city is that, once I've left the house, the day just seems to take me, and I wander from place to place, following whims and crowds. I set out in search of a library in which to study, but when I arrived at the Congressional library someone had recommended it was closed. However, my walk there had been lovely; it was a sunny day and I took a new route down a street I'd never seen. There was a small fair in front of the library, and I bought what I thought was a hand-painted skirt (aren't you proud of me, mom?). When I got home, I realized they were actually bombachas, very baggy gaucho pants, that, according to my host mom, have recently become fashionable for girls to wear in feminine styles. So apparently I'm becoming a hip porteño without even trying.

When I got home, my host mom suggested we go to La Boca, the neighborhood with all the colorful houses that seems to have become emblematic of BsAs. To be clear, La Caminita, the two block strip of colorful houses, artist shops, cafés, and tango shows is not the same as La Boca, the poor, dangerous, soccer-obsessed neighborhood surrounding it. However, despite the astonishing number of hokey tourist attractions, my host mom managed to convince me that it really was a worthwhile cultural site. Up until twenty years ago, poor dockworkers, mostly Italian immigrants who got off the boat and never left the neighborhood, actually lived in those houses, only leaving because the government condemned the decaying houses. The buildings have since been repaired, and the dock work has gone. La Boca, though still poor and quite dangerous in some areas, is now a trendy neighborhood for young artists, and apartments in the colorful buildings deemed safe enough for residence are quite expensive. Gentrification, it turns out, is an international phenomenon. Incidentally, La Boca today is quite a bit like my neighborhood, San Telmo, just a few years ago: a poor and dangerous area with great architecture that hip young porteños were making their own, and bringing tourists with them. Who knows, in a few years La Boca might be the home to some of the best nightlife in Buenos Aires. While walking around, we bought sausages on the street, cooked in a tasty and typically Argentinian way whose name escapes me now. After over a month here, I'm finally jumping on the meat bandwagon; a lot of it just tastes really good.








This is a ship graveyard on the docks that used to be the center of La Boca's economy. It smelled really bad here.

Last night, I went to some bars in San Telmo with Jenny, and we befriended three Argentinian guys who play in a band together. We ended the night sitting on the roof of the hostel that one of them runs, watching to them play Nirvana and Oasis on their guitars. It was quite surreal.