Wet bank holiday Monday in Montevideo

I arrived in Colonia de Sacramento, Uruguay by ferry on a rainy Sunday morning. I’d had a very scanty night’s sleep  – you could hardly call it a night, just a couple of fleeting hours following a tango show, dinner and drinks, some unsatisfying calls to banks (my cards had been stolen on the Friday evening ) and a hasty dawn packing up of my apartment. The former Portuguese colony is tiny, picture-postcard pretty and immediately lifted my tired spirits. There is a palm-draped square, evocative cobbled street and a collection of small but sweet museums. For some reason you also frequently come upon tropical flowers sprouting from classic cars and old-fashioned carts like colourful pink cress.

 

I felt under-dressed and scruffy compared with the immaculately turned-out day-tripping portenos, but I bought my museum pass, pulled on my waterproof and roamed around. Most of the museums are converted colonial homes (the Portuguese occupied the place in the early 18^th century), faithfully preserved and proudly displaying a range of artefacts from crockery, silver and paintings to pinned butterflies and dinosaur bones. My favourite exhibits were the glyptodont (a sort of giant armadillo) in the Museo Municipal de Dr Bautista Rebuffo and the beautifully illustrated 16^th century maps in the hushed downstairs rooms of the Museo del Periodo Historico Portugues (once a geographer …).

 

A dazzling white lighthouse broods alongside the old city walls, and I made the scramble to the top to stand alongisde the admirably solar-powered lamp to peer into the wind at the Rio de la Plata separating Colonia from Buenos Aires by 40 muddy brown kilometers. That evening I drank an overpriced sauvignon blanc in the delightful arty-photograph lined 1717 cafe bar, listening to jazz while the owners watched Frank Sinatra and Audrey Hepburn in ‘Face of an Angel’ with the sound turned off. He was unselfconsciously wearing a smart Panama hat and told me they had a huge collection of old films.

 

The next day I arrived in Montevideo on a wet bank holiday Monday. The city was not at its best and everything was closed. I scurried through the old town, where litter whirled in the wind-whipped rain and down-and-outs lurched and loitered in doorways, to the Mercado de la Puerte. I’d wanted to visit this place since I read about it in Colm Toibin’s The Story of the Night (a great read, meticulously written) and it didn’t disappoint. I perched on a bar stool opposite the grill at La Chacra del Puerta . There I happily whiled away most of the afternoon eating juicy swordfish and drinking the market speciality media y media (half ordinary white wine, half sparkling white wine, a light, slightly sweet fizz that seems very at home alongside the hot coals of the parilla) with the extremely entertaining John-Robert (from Austria but now living in Cordoba in Argentina and running his own software business)  and Pascal who had flown in that morning from Switzerland. The stout Don Pascual commanded the grilling of huge chunks of meats and fish, while handsome young waiters in red T-shirts dispensed huge platters of food and refilled an endless stream of media y media glasses. The vaulted roof held captive the sizzling smells of grilling meat, the enchanting sound of popping corks and the rumbling of countless conversations, trapping the faintly medieval atmosphere in a smoky fuzz. Montevidean magic.

 

 

On the mean streets of Buenos Aires

When you sit in a café here, usually within a few minutes an itinerant peddler will edge in and sidle round the tables, leaving a small item or trinket on each – a pen, a plastic game of the sort you might win in a Christmas cracker, a packet of sweets crammed with artifical colours and flavours, the internationally ubiquitous briefcase of watches. They tend to deposit their wares off-handedly, almost stealthily, and then circulate back in the hope that someone will buy. The same thing happens on the subte (the underground: efficient, clean, hard to believe it was the first in Latin America and is older than both Paris´s and Moscow´s metros). These roaming salespeople are sometimes annoying, often heart rending, especially if they´re children. You have to steal your soul or else before long you´ll have enough useless junk to set up in business yourself. Perhaps surprisingly, locals do buy: just the other day I saw a guy dip into his wallet and pay 10 pesos (just less than 2 pounds), for a clip-on reading light – great impulse buy between stops on the daily commute!

I always feel a flush of guilt as the unwanted objects land on my table and a stab of sympathy as I imagine what the circumstances of their seller might be.  But I have more than enough stuff with me already so I usually refuse.  I just couldn´t resist Pedro though. He was wearing a black and white checked shirt and had a round face like a chipmunk, topped by a bald crown. He handed round snall books (librettos) of poems, made from paper torn from a school notebook, the type with squares ruled on, tied together with narrow velvet ribbons in different colours. Mine was pale blue (the colour they call celeste here, which I think is just delightful). Pedro is a patient in a local psychiatric hospital and had written the poems himself. He had an open face and a modest manner, and the fact that he was selling poetry struck me as enterprising as well as romantic (in the Wordsworthian sense). It appealed to my literary tendencies, so I bought one, to Pedro´s obvious delight. His poems were touching, and I translated them into English as a way of practicing my Spanish. I wanted to put a sample or two here, but a few hoodlums in La Boca put paid to that by stealing my day bag, complete with contents, including Pedro´s sweet little libretto.

It was my last day at school, and my last day at the comedor where I´d been volunteering. Outside the tourist police patrolled zone of brightly coloured camnionetas (wooden houses initially constructed by Italian immigrants constructed with whatever materials were to hand and in a mix whatever colours were available), the barrio of La Boca is a notoriously dodgy area, though I´d been going in and out of there on my own for a month with no problems at all. On that final Friday, class had gone uncharacterstaically well, and Anne, the American teacher who´d  been working on the same programme, and I were feeling almost proud as we handed over the reins to Chris, a young Korean American who´d be taking over from here on. We were in high spirits and to mark the occasion, we shared a quick beer in the pizzeria opposite the comunity centre before standing at the bus stop outside – we all had plans for the evening and wanted to head back into the centre.

Before we knew what was happening we were being jostled by a group of young men in their late teens/early 20s. At first it all seemed a bit of a joke, but any sense of fun quickly faded as we realised these guys meant business and were intent on stealing mine and Anne´s bags.  I held on to the straps of my backpack as long as I could, being dragged a little way down the street away from the other two. Fortunately for me, this meant I didn´t actually see the gun being drawn and pressed to Chris´s neck while Anne was relieved of her bag (a brightly patterned roomy number she´d bought in Vietnam, where she´s spent many years teaching). My guy got bored of struggling with me in a bizarre tug-of-war over my bag and made a threatening lunge forward. He grabbed me by the throat and at this point I gave in and he sped off.

There were lots of bystanders but nobody did anything: after all, robbery is a common occurrence in La Boca, and not just of tourists  - a companero of the centre had been mugged just outside a few weeks before and as we waited in the police station later for our so-called crime reports, a young porteno looking distressed came in to report his own attack. Unluckily for him, the street where the theft had occurred wasn´t covered by that particular police station so he had to go elsewhere. Before long news had got back to our friends at the community centre and various people were milling around, concerned, but rather ineffectual: Roxanna, the volunteer coordinator who suggested that if I couldn´t get back in to my apartment I could sleep at the volumteer centre and she´d lend me a dress to wear for the Halloween party the next day: missing the party wasn´t uppermost in my mind at that point, I must say, but I´m sure she meant well, Ricardo, an aspiring poet and politically active member of the adult classes, who assured us that the police were corrupt and would do nothing, and Pedro, who said that it was only to be expected and anyway, these guys didn´t have any other way of earning money. Despite his slightly annoying assessment of the situation, Pedro did later on show up at police station to provide us with moral support and Roxanna with a running commentary of proceedings on his mobile.

Chris, not surprisingly after his close encounter with the gun, was in deep shock, and Anne was vacillating between wanting to run after the hoodlums and slumping into short faints against the window of the pizzeria. I managed to get her and Chris inside and spotted, luckily I thought, a policeman. He said he would be over to help and then I saw him walk out to his van with a stack of pizza boxes, open the side door, slide them in, then calmly walk round to the driver´s door and move off. Apparently the police not just turn a blind eye to theft in the area  but are actively involved in it by receiving a cut from the theives in exchange for doing nothing. Previously, this had seemed to me a bit of an exaggeration but now I suspect it´s true.

I´d asked the restaurant owner to call the police and when a second officer appeared and started propping up the pizza bar I persuaded him he needed to take us in his squad car to the police station. He was very reluctant and insisted it was close enough for us to walk, but I wasn´t about to let another one get away – I needed a crime report for my insurance claim and also needed to get back to my apartment soon to have any chance of getting back in: my keys were in the bag and Hector, the doorman at my building, would finish at 8pm for the weekend. I was due to catch a boat to Colonia in Uruguay first thing Sunday morning, which added an extra layer of complication: I couldn´t just hole up at a friend´s, I needed to get my stuff.

Eventually he let us all pile in and we spent a frustrating hour at the police station, pleading for the whole tiresome process to be got through quickly so we could try to get home. But the policeman had more pressing things to do, like texting his girlfriend and selling documents to ´customers´ who arrived after us (obviously we had no money to bribe him ourselves), so it was about five to eight when we finally left. Poor Chris was traumatised by his experience but at least he still had his wallet, so we got a taxi into town, the others dropping me at my door at about 8.15. I loitered at the gate, until the kindly Alfonse and his wife – I´d never met them before – turned up, let me into the building, called Hector, gave me a spare key to the front entrance and, perhaps surprisingly, a brief tour of the apartment they were having renovated on the ground floor as a rental property. Very kind of them, and without their help I don´t know how I would´ve managed. Hector said he would meet me at the apartment block at midnight to see if he had a spare set of keys (as it turned out, he didn´t, but he drove me to my landlady´s house, we woke her up and to my great relief  she produced some keys) and as I had my bus fare in coins still clutched in my hand, I was able to take the subte and still make my 9pm drinks date with my friend Esther.

I was safe and it could´ve been much worse, but I´d lost my camera with all my pictures and this was definitely a Friday afternoon I could do without repeating.

PS I´ve since bought a replacement camera and have been out taking pics: if anyone would like to take a look you can see them at:

http://picasaweb.google.com/lizgooster/BuenosAires?authkey=Gv1sRgCIq6hLHNrJToUQ&feat=directlink

http://picasaweb.google.com/lizgooster/Uruguay?authkey=Gv1sRgCLOL9_6S9-qFrAE&feat=directlink

http://picasaweb.google.com/lizgooster/Iguazu?authkey=Gv1sRgCKbwofu_793r6wE&feat=directlink

Kissing, Late Nights and Rubbish

Kissing is a mania here. Everyone kisses everyone hello and goodbye, a single, chaste peck on the cheek, or a quick press of the faces while kissing the air. Less elaborate and more widespread then the double or triple kiss European greeting, you can greet pretty much everyone this way, even if you´ve never met them before. Apparently it´s not the done thing to kiss your dentist though. Or your dustman. And my landlady looked a little taken aback when I kissed her. It´s hard for non-Argentinians to pull this off with a natural air, but the porteňos do it with an easy grace that´s delightful to see. Women kiss men, men kiss men, women kiss women, children kiss everyone. When I arrive at the community centre in La Boca where I´m helping with after-school English classes (in the loosest possible sense: the kids colour and play snap, while I encourage them to name the colours of their crayons and the animals on their snap cards in English), the children offer their lovely grubby little faces up for a kiss. And if they forget to do it again when they leave, Roxana, the stoical centre coordinator, chides them to ´saludenle al seňor´. That´s not a mistake: teachers of both sexes are addressed here as seňor, which the American teacher Anne who I work with and I both find immensely amusing and endearing.

 

I´m getting vaguely into the rhythm (is that spelt right, Steve?!) of the porteňo lifestyle, though it´s beyond me how these people get enough sleep to survive. Work seems to start at 9 or 9.30ish (though punctuality isn´t sacrosanct or even particularly desirable: as I was advised by the owner of the tango centre when I went for my solitary tango lesson and arrived before the teachers: “If you want to blend in and become more argentina , you have to learn to be late!”). There´s no afternoon siesta. You eat dinner at 10 or 11 at night, then go for drinks afterwards. If you want to dance, no self-respecting Buenos Aires-dwelling club-goer would arrive before 2.30. The clubs are open until 6 or 7 in the morning and then of course there are the after parties. While people claim it isn´t so, my theory is that they must snatch a life-saving cat nap after work and before dinner. Otherwise this is a zombie city of the waking dead. I haven´t ventured into the club scene, but even a couple of consecutive nights arriving home at 4.30 after various jazz, tango, flamenco and drumming events have left me feeling like a husk hollowed out by wakefulness. You´ve got to admire their stamina.

 

Along with the kisses and the late nights, another constant feature of BA, a sad and depressing one, is the cartoneros. These unfortunate people quarry the rubbish bags left out in the streets every night for cardboard, paper and bottles to sell to recycling companies on the fringes of the city. It´s an organised industry and there are said to be around 100,000 cartoneros in BA. It´s horrible to see people, including young children, systematically trawling through rubbish in search of their livelihood. The first time I saw a professional cartonero, I couldn´t work out what he was doing: a young, very cool man resting his arm on a supermarket trolley-full of folded cardboard, nonchalantly chain smoking (a packet costs a mere 3 or 4 pesos). You can of course argue that it gives people an income who otherwise would have nothing – and even that it contributes to the environment by recycling materials that would otherwise go straight into landfill – but it´s a dirty fact of life here that is painful to see.

Desperately seeking gauchos

Not having seen the famous gaucho display at the Feria de los Mataderos, I thought I couldn’t fail to spot some in San Antonio de Areco, a tiny town 120km north west of Buenos Aires which prides itself on being the capital of the gaucho tradition. So I went to the bus station. Like bus stations the world over, it managed to be set in an anonymous muddy field, despite being on the fringes of some of the most upmarket areas of the city. It was heralded by flotillas of stalls selling socks, pirate DVDs and general tat and by barracks of cheap cafes selling smoking sausage meat sandwiches (the ubiquiitous choripan). After navigating the 100+ different bus companies – this is a civilised country, there’s no one screaming out destinations and trying to entice you into their office, as there would be if you were in Guatemala or India – I found myself on an unexpectedly comfotable Pullman bus pulling out of gate 42.

Once out of the snarled-up streets of the city, we hit RN 8 and I grew impatient to see the open expanse of the pampa. Maybe you have to get further into it to properly appreciate it, but it wasn’t quite what I was expecting. I thought it would be an endless vista of grass. And there was plenty of grass, glowing green like an English landscape doused in summer rain. It was the trees that suprised me. They could be seen not just in solitary windbreaks hovering protectively over remot estancias, but in great clumps and veritable woods. There was no mistaking the source of money out here: all the roadside billboards were for horse medicine or cattle insemination or livestock feed.

San Antonio itself is a sweet, clearly prosperous little place with clean wide streets smelling of jasmine. Even on a bank holiday Sunday when the fast-talking, scrawl-writing woman at the tourist office smugly assured me that all the rooms in the town – and indeed in all the surrounding villages – were full, it oozed a lazy languor. I left the main square with its low-slung buildings crouched round a tree-filled oasis in the centre and headed down a dusty track to the Museo Gauchesco Ricardo Guiraldes. A bird of prey (who knows what kind: I’m no ornithologist) wheeled overhead. I think it must’ve been a young one practicing low-flying manoeuvres, because as it whooshed over a power line its feet brushed the cable.

The museum is in the former estancia of Ricardo Guiraldes, an Argentinian author inspired by the gaucho way of life to write a novel, Don Segundo Sombra, about these hardy denizens of the pampa which is described as one of the epic works of Argentinian literature. http://tinyurl.com/yzsdoos After being thoroughly convinced of the benefits of life on a bucolic estancia, I decided to track down the other unmissable museum the woman at the tourist office had marked on my map. I couldn’t remember what it was, its location didn’t correspond to anything in my guidebook and I couldn’t read her writing, but I thought I’d give it a go. While I pondered the map I met a middle-aged couple from Buenos Aires who had the same map, with the same ‘x marks the spot’ from the same scribbling woman – the difference being they knew what they were looking for. She smiled encouragingly, he pointed out the orange trees in the street (my heart always does a tropical filip when I see oranges growing wild in a town) and said my English-accented Spanish was ‘charming’ and we found the museum together.

It turned out to be a new gallery (just 4 months old, the security guard told me), the Museo Molina Campos, displaying a collection of the whimscial, cartoon-like works of the artist Florencio Molina Campos, who depicted the folk traditions of the pampas and the gaucho, painting pictures sponsored by the espadrille manufacturer Aspargatos as well as independent works. http://www.museomcdeareco.org/la-coleccion.html He also collaborated with Walt Disney in the creation of characters for Bambi. His horses are wide-eyed, his gauchos wear surprised expressions and have ruddy cheeks, suggesting the wind biting their face as they canetr across the grasslands. The museum also serves great coffee, with a mini medialuna (croissant).

I wanted to try the local boliches, traditional corner shop/bar combos much vaunted by the guidebooks. I tried two, the first, Los Principios, an authentic relic smelling of dust and stocking an odd range of chiclet (chewing gum), cinzano and unidentifiable tins and packets whose sell-by dates were surely way back in the ‘50s. Encouraged by a man in a red jacket, who was propping up the bar and drinking a Fernet Branca (suprisingly popular here) and soda, I perched on a chair and rested my beer on a cardboard box (there were no tables), displacing the white-haired owner, who when he wasn’t tending to his small coterie of customers, was using the box as a desk on which to do his accounts. He moved to a chair on the other side, popped on his round, metal-framed glasses and scribbled some numbers on two scraps of squared paper. On the far side of the bar, a couple of local guys who sounded as though they’d been in there for quite a while, discussed the price of beer at length. An old man wearing faded blue canvas shoes came in and sat on a chair. He didn’t buy anything. Some tourists wandered in, gawped around a bit, and left.

When I reached my next boliche, I found out where they’d gone. Puesto La Lechuza is more a tourist reconstruction, less authentic, certainly, but it has tables. And when I visited, it had a gaucho! Leaning against the bar, drinking red wine and chatting with hisb friend was a chunky man wearing a wide belt, boots and an unmistakeable gaucho hat. Granted, there was no sign of his horse, but I downed my beer and left to catch my bus with a distinct sense of satisfaction.

Death of ‘La Negra´

At the Feria de los Matadores in the far west of Buenos Aires  last Sunday, there was a distinct lack of gaucho (cowboy) displays, my main incentive for making the long trek out there. But in the prettily colonnaded Plaza de los Mataderos, charismatic Juan in spotless white shirt and cloud grey felt hat, compered a lively set of regional singers, bands and dance troupes. There was no shortage of audience participation. As the beats revved up, a skein of sheer handkerchiefs in blue and white appeared and were whipped and fluttered around in time to the resonating guitar rythms and the spirited hand clapping they stirred up. The feria was started in 1986 to create a permanent space to preserve and celebrate Argentinian traditions and it was refreshing to see people of all ages participating unashamedly in what could be seen as the Latino equivalent of the Morris dance (though much more tasteful!).

There was an added poignancy last week that (almost) made up for the lack of daring cowboy feats: Mercedes Sosa, widely beloved Argentine folklore singer and political activist, had died just that morning, at the age of 74. Later I watched the tributes on TV as fans and mourners, including the President, filed past Congreso (the parliament building) to pay their respects. Mercedes as known affectionately as La Negra (literally the dark, or black, one), which seems to be an endearment quite widely used here. Laura, though nobody calls her that, at the community centre in the barrio of La Boca (also home to the famous Bombonera football stadium) where I´m volunteering, also goes under  the name of La Negra. As one of her colleagues wryly observed as Laura/La Negra bellowed out greetings and instructions, “yes, she´s got the same name, but she shouts, not sings”. 

At the feria, several groups dedicated songs to Mercedes,  Juan delivered a grave eulogy to her and the crowd rumbled respèctfully. In La Clarin newspaper the next day, there was a full page homage to her, with the simple message “Gracias a La Negra. Hasta siempre.”  inscribed over a colour photo of the revered singer. The same paper published a poll a few days later that canvassed the public on their favourite song by ´La Negra´: the winner was Alfonisina y el Mar, with 23% of the votes. It was touching to be at the feria and see the emotion stirred up by the death of ´La Negra´: I can always see gauchos another time …

How to tie your shoelaces in Buenos Aires

If it hadn´t been for Señora Zapato, as I´ll call her, I´d have thought what happened to me yesterday morning even more bizarre. As a back drop to yesterday´s encounter with the quasi-foot fetishist, I met Sra. Zapato the other day as I was striding down the street minding my own business. A vaguely elderly and immaculately dressed woman (Sra Zapato), stopped me. I assumed she wanted to ask me for directions: it happens to me wherever I am, from Lisbon to sub-Saharan Africa. I must be an undercover chameleon, and somehow manage to look like a local even when I haven´t the slightest clue where I am. Running total of misguided requests for geographical assistance on Buenos Aires: three. Misguided because, despite my numerous qualifications in geography, I have a very limited sense of direction and often get lost myself. The doorman in my apartment block here says he is going to put on arrow on the wall because I keep turning the wrong way when I get out of the lift. Ironically though, I´m often able to help the dislocated strangers.

Sra Zapato didn´t need to know where she was going. Instead, she said something to me in a very civil tone, undoubtedly polite, but inexplicable. When I continued to look blank – I was listening out for a street or place name to hang the hook of my groping Spanish on – she gesticulated firmly at my feet until I eventually understood that she wanted me to tie my shoelaces. They weren´t undone. They just didn´t meet her standards of safe neatness and had too much trailing lace, which was clearly causing her some concern. I thanked her and went to move on, but she wanted to watch me tie my laces tighter, so like an obedient child I propped my feet one by one on a doorstep in Calle Peru and retied my laces under her piercing inspection. It took several goes to get it right, but when they were done to her satisfaction, she gave me a big thumbs up, an endearing grin, and went on her way.

An unusual one-off, you´d think. But well-done laces may well be a national, or at least a Porteño, preoccupation. Yesterday morning, having dropped off my washing at one of the many local launderettes (¨Don´t forget to come back today, because we´re closed for the bank holiday on Monday¨- these places don´t mess around, your washing is in, whirled, tumbled, and out), I was scurrying along to one of the equally numerous, ploddingly connected, internet cafes. Impatient to hook myself up to the IV line of gmail, I overtook a young man on the pavement. As I brushed past him, he inadvertently trod on the back of my shoe and it half slipped off. I shoved it back on and shrugged off his apologies. He carried on talking but my mind was already composing an email to my estate agent and I was barely listening. Yet the guy was being very persistent about something and I realised that somehow part of his phone charm had fallen off and become lodged in my shoe. He wriggled my shoe off and reclaimed it. Odd, but fine. That wasn´t the end of the episode though. Oh no. Like a salesman in a child´s shoe shop, he crouched on the ground, doggedly relaced my shoe, and then, despite my bewildered protestations, pulled off my other shoe, tenderly replaced it and then retied it securely with a firm double knot. I felt like a bemused modern-day Cinderella, in scruffy Skechers rather than glittering glass slippers. My shoes now both tightly and symmetrically laced, he stood up, said goodbye, and walked off.

So unless you enjoy strangers fondling your feet in the street, make sure yu lace your shoes carefully if you visit Buenos Aires, as sloppy lacing clearly offends the fashion sensibilities of the Porteños!

Spanglish

Spanglish is like speed dating, but for people wanting to pick up a new language rather than a new partner. We gathered, a gaggle of eager beaver foreign students and calmer, more sophisticated locals, in a dark basement bar during happy hour on Friday night (áfter office´as after work drinks to celebrate the beginning of the weekend are known here).  The lights were low, the music was high: not an auspicious start. With our names tagged to our chests with little sticky badges, we were assigned to our tables and hesitantly introduced ourselves to our first conversation partners.

The format is simple. Each table has a mixture of Spanish speakers and English speakers. You chat for 5-10 minutes in one language, then the organisers swoop round, barking ´change languages´, and you switch to the other. It´s a neat idea: everyone gets to practice their language skills with native speakers, always the holy grail in developing your talking and listening abilities. Then you move tables and repeat the process with a new group.

On Friday there were some fascinating people on the merry-go-round of chat. A very poised, petite, middle-aged woman called Ester, who spoke English beautifully, told my first table how she´d originally learned the language through her passion for Elvis songs. We also discussed the Argentinian penchant for late dining and socialising, with Ester regaling us with the tale of a New Year she´d spent in the US as the guest of an American friend. They´d eaten inexplicably (to Ester) early, gone to the cinema and by midnight were home in pyjamas waiting for the clock to strike 12 on TV. She marvelled at the difference with her home town, where no one would eat before 10, and where they chat at the table for hours afterwards.

Then it was on to Monica, who described how to enjoy mate, the bitter local tea made from herbs, which is the focus of an almost ritualised practice here. On a weekend stroll along the promenade edging the Rio Plata, I witnessed the flasks, the squat gourd-type mugs with perforated silver straws, the special leather bags to carry all the mate-making paraphernalia, like bigger versions of old camera cases. According to Monica, the key is to drink your mate tepid, not hot, and to add plenty of sugar. And never refuse it if you´re offered it, as it´s an overture of friendship, welcome and courtesy. At the next table was Leandro, who had spent 18 months working in Ibiza, and despite having a steady job in Buenos Aires as a tour operater, was missing the glittering night club spectacles he´d got used to on the most raucous Balearic isle. He urged me to go there as soon as I could.

On the English-speaking side, there was Laura, a university language student from the south of England, who had a year to ´just go abroad and speak Spanish´and who´d decided that the best way to practice would be to go to as many night clubs as possible. And Demming, the wonderfully fervent Californian was staying with a welcoming young local couple, who the previous night had invited to him to an intimate birthday dinner party. Then there was Su-Ming from Singapore, who worked on a cruise ship and had a month in Buenos Aires before heading off to her next ocean-side stop.

At times it was hard to hear anyone in any  language above the áfter office´melee on the other side of the bar, and I left with a head full of half-formed impressions, a dribble of new words and a handful of conversations cut short by the ´move table´rhythm. But I´ll definitely be giving Spanglish another go, if only in the hope of hearing more from Ester about how to learn English from Elvis!

Home from Home

I take my hat off to the photographer at the apartment rentals agency. From the “loft style” description and the craftily composed pictures of exposed brick, sweeping glass rimmed terrace and open plan elegance, I was expecting minimalist Docklands style. Instead, it seems I´ve rented  a weary concrete box, with cheap, unstable furniture and threadbare, floral bed linen that harks back to the ´70s. No Philippe Starck inspired design here. With a different landlord it could have been chic and cool. But no. It smells overpoweringly of cigarette smoke and has a stained carpet and a lumpy, grubby bed cover. When I haul the grimy blinds up and down I feel my lungs groaning with the passive smoke that oozes from them.

For reasons unbeknown even to myself, I chose to rent – nay, insisted on renting – an apartment in San Telmo, one of the oldest parts of the city. It has character, it´s central, I can walk to Spanish school. My guidebook decribes it as full of decaying grandeur, arty and bohemian. In a good mood, it´s urban, gritty, authentic. In a bad mood, it´s dirty, scruffy and downright dodgy. A bit like Walthamstow in fact.

For the same rent, I could have had an apartment in one of the well-heeled, clean (well, relatively) barrios like Recoleta, where immaculately dressed ladies with nicely manicured nails sip coffee in pristine cafes. Or in one of the hipper parts of Palermo, where the young, rich and trendy like to party.  But that would´ve been just too easy, wouldn´t it??

Coffee Break

As a break from tweeting pointlessly about drinking coffee in service stations in uninspiring locations like the M5, I thought I´d blog about drinking coffee in much more interesting places. The coffee break seems to be a bit of a revered tradition here, which I can only applaud. There seems to be one (if not two) cafes on every street corner and the portenos (residents of Buenos Aires) have the enviable knack of whiling away hours in them, often hunkered over a single tiny coffee (cafecito: how cute does that sound), chatting, reading, or just sitting and contemplating life. Such a shame then that the coffee is on the whole pretty awful.

My mission, which I´ve chosen to accept, is to find the best place for a coffee break.  So far the best coffee con leche (a much stronger version of a latte) I´ve had has been in Cafe Classico on a rainy Sunday morning in San Telmo, the old part of town where I”m living.  Bar Giralda comes a close second on the coffee, and wins hands down on atmosphere. It”s on Avenida Corrientes, a major thoroughfare of the central district, packed with book shops, theatres and cinemas and is opposite the wonderfully old-fashioned Cinema Lorca. I saw Julie and Julia there the other day, and I´d thoroughly recommend it to all you foodies out there, though like supermarket shopping, not on an empty stomach. Sweet, moving, funny, mouth watering.  The film, not the coffee. Apparently Bar Giralda is more famous for chocolate y churros, which I love, so I will report back when I´ve sampled them. There´s a lovely old bar in the heart of San Telmo called La Poesia, with a long literary tradition and stocky hams hanging above the bar, but their coffee is bitter, over powering, and not to be ordered again. Nestled in the shifting maze of streets  that is San Telmo is a tiny little coffee and cake shop called Matilda´s, which wouldn´t look out of place in Notting Hill. The coffee there is OK, but the real draw is their absolutely delicious key lime cup cakes: the cup cake craze is clearly international!

My research on this is not over …

Spring has Sprung

Spring has most definitely arrived in Buenos Aires. It was a day or two late, but it´s fascinating to see the responses here. The other day I went to see the amazing Floralis Generica, a 20m tall, 18 ton glistening steel sculpture of a flower, with individual petals that move, controlled by photoelectric cells and a hydraulic system. (I will try to work out how to post some photos soon.) The metal petals open early in the morning and close around dusk: I´d love to see this. It was designed by the Argentinian architect Eduardo Catalano and I thought it was fantastic. Anyway, strolling through the park on the way there, I saw a woman huddled in a heavy winter coat, wrapped in a scarf, walking past another woman lying on a bench wearing grey sweat pants and a bikini top, systematically toasting herself. She checked her watch and then switched round on her bench, to give herself an even grilling. The parks are also full of bouquets of dogs, the stems of their leads held firmly by professional dog walkers (paseoperros). Brave people: what happens when one paseoperros meets another and some of their charges take a dislike to each other? In the delightful Japanese gardens near the Evita Museum, even the bloated coi carp were sunning themselves, only half submerged in the spring rays of the shallows. They looked fairly digusting, but I suppose you can´t blame them for wanting a bit of natural warmth like everyone else.