El Kafkiano

I'm attending a Tuesday night adult-ed class with the shockingly broad topic "Introduction to Literature." It's basically an excuse for the very smart teacher, a writer named Marcelo Damiani, to talk about whatever he feels like talking about. Last night it was Kafka. He says that if Kafka had been born in Argentina instead of Prague, we would classify his work as realism.

Plants

OK, lots of pics today to make up for yesterday's word-a-thon.

My friends from Haedo (outside the captial limit, sort of like the Long Island of Buenos Aires), Hector Adrian and Silvana (and their daughter Michaela) took me to a plant store and I got lots of plants. Here's our balcony. The doors on the right lead into the bedroom.



Bobby says they'll all die as soon as I leave. I say there's no reason I can't kill them before that.

This is the balcony from the other direction. The front door is just to the right of the dracena (I thought it was a palm. Nope.) You can see the inner courtyard we face (we're the third and top floor.) You can also see that our neighbors have all closed in their balconies with glass to make them interior spaces. It makes ours nice and private. See those five or so bright leaves on a little plant next to the dracena? That's an avocado I started here last April. It died back in winter, but just sprouted.



Bobby loathes variegated plants, and I've come to mostly agree with him. But I like this one.



I put three shrubs outside the kitchen window.



This is looking in from the balcony to the living room.



And a couple of apartment pics, for those of you who haven't see it. Here's the living room as you'd see it if you were standing on the kitchen counter.



Both sets of doors lead out to the balcony (first pic) and our new plants.



I don't feel like tidying the bedroom right now, so no pics of that today.

Wrong & Wronger (Memory: F, Comprehension: D-)

Close readers of this blog might notice that in a dialogue below, Bobby has been mysteriously replaced by Mickey. I made this change to reflect what, apparently, actually happened.

It turns out it was Mickey who questioned the use of the k in Spanish, not Bobby, as I had recalled. Now, we're not talking about trying to remember a conversation from 1994 here. It happened maybe a week before I wrote that entry. Somehow in that time, my memory converted Mickey into Bobby. So much for my reportial plausability, eh?

I figure it like this: at the time, I thought it was an amusing exchange, but I didn't know I'd be returning to it. Later, as I was blogging, I decided I'd write about it, so I went back to the brain bits that stored the memory. But those bits were already on the conveyor belt to oblivion. I hauled them back, but some were already fried. But the brain doesn't like to admit it doesn't know what it's talking about. So instead of just telling me it didn't have part of the memory, my brain panicked, looked around and found a Bobby bit nearby (after 24 years together, there are lots of those lying around up there) and attached it to the now-exhumed memory.

So, my memory gets an F for the day. I really thought it was Bobby.

Alas, my Spanish comprehension gets a D-. I'm doing quite well here lately, and understand a lot of what's going on. But my brain fills in a lot of gaps by constructing, on the fly, what seem to be reasonable assumptions about what people said.

So, on Saturday, I met Martha and Mickey to see their fabulous home being renovated in San Telmo. As we were walking to lunch, Martha told me that she showed Mickey the blog. She said that he asked what its purpose was, she said it didn't have one, and he joked that in that case he wasn't going to read it any more because it was pointless. I laughed, implicitly agreeing that it is, in fact, pretty pointless.

Except no. That's not what Martha said at all. After lunch, the topic of my blog came up again and something stupid I said made it clear that I'd not understood Martha the first time around. Here's what she really said: She showed Mickey my blog, and when they got to the dialogue, Mickey was insulted because he had actually said the line that I claimed Bobby had said. Mock-offended, he said he wasn't going to read my blog any more.

Rather different, no?

Now here I get points for effort. Enough to pull me to a D-. Although I was 100% wrong, my brain did come up with a sort-of plausible (ok, less so with hindsight) interpretation of a conversation that it knew it wasn't understanding completely. One of the keys here is humor. Martha was telling me something amusing, and that's death to my comprehension. Almost everyone speeds up a little when they're telling a joke or an amusing anecdote. I never noticed this in English, but it's painfully obvious in Spanish. Punchlines are the worst, because they're not only fast, they also often have some sort of wordplay or slang. I always get nervous when I hear someone gearing up to tell something funny. But my cloaking skills are impressive. I am truly expert at finding exactly the right spot to laugh as if I had actually had a clue.

On a going forward basis, I think we should all assume that anything I say in this blog is about as truth-based as any random page from the writings of James Frey.

Election Day

It's an unusual election here, as everyone is sure that Cristina will win. In a more typical year with an unpredictable outcome, there would be heated political conversations steaming through the city. From what I've seen, there's a sort of playful dissing of Cristina's acension to the presidency, but not so much angry opposition.

Voting is mandatory here, with a threatened 2-year jail sentence for non-participation. I assume that the polling places with be chaotic--even the system for finding out where you have to vote is difficult to follow. There are websites and hotlines, but several people I've met didn't know yesterday, exactly where they had to go to vote today. (Lots of people have to go back to their parents' neighborhoods because they never changed their official voting address when they moved away.)

***

ELECTION UPDATE: Yep, it was a mess. The lines for voting were dreadfully long and, worse, a lot of people found that when they got to the polling place, they couldn't vote for their candidate because they had run out of ballots. To vote here, you cut out a literal ballot, a piece of paper with the name of your candidate printed on it. Many people arrive with their ballots already. There are 736 political parties. OK, I have no idea how many there are, but no one here does either. There are scads of tiny parties whose candidates will receive exactly as many votes as they have family members of voting age. Before the election, parties send out or distribute their ballots. But there are supposed to be ballots available at the polls, too. Yesterday, not so much. So if you got there and there were no ballots left for your candidate, you had to leave the polling place, go to an office of the party of your choice, get a ballot, and then return to the polls. The delays were so long that for the first time in Argentine history they decided to extend the voting hours by one hour.

So, basically, two unsurprising winners: Cristina and General Confusion.

Bird Update

The bird I keep hearing (this morning at 4:57 AM!) is a torcaza and apparently they're driving everyone here nuts. Victoria says that its a seasonal thing (mating?) and they'll shut up soon.

Note the Statue of Liberty...

Next month, they're going to start playing Ugly Betty here. Of course, that's our version of the wildly popular Colombian telenovela Betty la fea. The slogan: "In English, she's even uglier."

Kurious

Martha: We only use k to spell kilogram.
Mickey: Then why have a k?
Martha: Because we need it to spell kilogram.



It's true, there a very few k's here.When they do show up, they're always in words borrowed from other languages, like kimono. And you'll sometimes see them spelled with a q anyway, as in quimono.



Which brings me to the kioscos/quioscos you'll find on nearly every street. They're usually tiny, just big enough for the owner to sit or stand inside, and sell candies, phone cards, stamps, and other sudden necessities.

All of which is really a cheap way to introduce you to my favorite store idea in ages. It's a place called Kiosk in New York (in Soho). Every six months the owners visit another country and bring back all sorts of things to sell, from chewing gum to sauna buckets. They have a great eye for the kind of local graphic design I adore. Right now they're selling stuff from Finland. Like this plaster head, which is the "best friend" award given throughout Finnish schools every year. Like Miss Congeniality, it's voted by the kids themselves. The best part? It's fragile and rumor has it that inside is a note that says "Why did you break me?" Your prize is smashed, but the guilt lives on forever.

A Tale of Three Pharmacies

Our apartment is on Paraná between Corrientes and Lavalle and there's a pharmacy on each corner of the block. They make for convenient landmarks. Both old school pharmacies, meaning that there are a few display cases up front and then a counter, behind which stands a pharmacist. You have to ask him or her for whatever you want. This is helpful when you want advice about which medicine is best for your fever or dry skin. It's less fun if you want, say, condoms or Lice-B-Gone.



You can also pick up some old world goods. Many pharmacies here still sell bars of sulfur that are supposed to help with neck pain. According to lore, they "take the air out." When my friend Diego recommended that I use them, I kept thinking I was mistranslating something (usually a good assumption) because, well, I didn't have any air in my neck. But the old porteña wives would have you believe otherwise. Apparently when you pass the sulfur bars over your neck, they crackle, which is proof that they're working.



So I come back here three weeks ago and find that they've opened a new pharmacy just one corner block away, at Paraná and Sarmiento. Of course, it's a Farmacity, an ominous omen of the Buenos Aires to come. This is a chain that's spreading faster than spilled milk on a greased pig. They are completely modeled on US drugstores, with self-serve shelves and a small, discrete pharmacy in back. Notice how they wedged their anonymous flourescent lighting into a lovely old building. Of course I dislike them on principle because they're sucking the soul out of the city I love. On the other hand, I often shop there because it's so much easier. The Spanish word is hipócrita.

Happily, the old world hasn't sold all of its goats just yet. Yesterday on my very block I saw one of the local knife sharpeners, a young man riding a stripped-down bicycle with a grinder attached between the handlebars. He stops, props up the back wheel, shifts a lever, and uses the bike's gears to turn the grinder and sharpen whatever blunt tools you have on hand. And suddenly I'm back in the time of Dickens (by way of Oliver! naturally) hearing street-callers yowling "Knives! Knives to grind!"

Bs As Birds

Birds. It seems they have them here. I honestly didn't notice them very much until Bobby was here. As a big bird fan, he was pointing them out all over the place. Here's a photo of a parrot we saw down in Puerto Madero (that's about the nicest thing I can say about that touristy redevelopment of an old port area. In fact, they managed to destroy the one thing I liked. As part of the project, they decided to leave in place these enormous cranes that used to load and unload things from ships. Well, they're still there, but now they're painted shiny bright yellow, orange and black, which makes them look like giant toys, ruining any sense of age and industry.)

Back to the birds. There's one near my home here (or are there several?) that has a very nice, melodious song, an elaborate set of trills and fillips. Unfortunately, this asinine bird wakes up before dawn to sing it. This morning I was up at 5:21 AM and so was the bird. It's pitch black outside and bird is greeting the day. Very pretty, I think. Now shut up. Shut up. Shut up.

Back in Baires

Hi everybody. Welcome to my blog. The title, as you can see, is a wonderful Spanish word that means "to grumble or grouse" but especially when done through your teeth. It's quite onomatopoetic. Not that I have a lot of refunfuñando to do right now (though I'm sure I will soon enough). So far, all's well with the apartment and I'm well immersed in my circle down here.



I'm very fond of the supermarket next to our apartment, even though it has some corners that may not have seen a mop since my first visit to Argentina two-and-a-half years ago. But I've noticed something odd lately. One of the Asian check-out girls spits into a bucket every time I pay for my groceries. Her timing is always the same: She finishes ringing up my goods, tells me the total, and as I'm looking for the bills, she bends down slightly and spits. It's so quick that the first time she did it, I wasn't even sure it happened. And I thought maybe she was spitting out some gum. But I've tested it at least four times now.

It's somewhat alarming, yet if I have a choice between two check-out lines, I can't resist choosing hers.