Good Winds: Part III

So that dramatic pause was slightly longer than I had originally intended. I promise, I’m not getting lazy… I’ve just been busy. In the meantime, I hope you were anxiously awaiting this, the long-awaited finalé of my weekend in Buenos Aires.

Before I start, I just want to direct your attention to the two pictures at the right, which are just a couple of the many examples where BsAs seemed to be (literally) calling my name...

Where we last left off, I was just about to meet with Matt for dinner. I took one of the incredibly cheap buses to his place, got there a little early, and wandered around for about 20 minutes, to avoid showing up unfashionably early.
When I got there, he introduced me to his friend Patricio (aka Pato), who was “Argentine” (quotes to be explained shortly). Stumbling through conversations with Pato in Spanish, Matt and I first went to his grandparents’ house to hang out and drink some Maté, which is what Argentines drink in place of coffee. It is a very bitter, very herbal tasting drink, that leaves you feeling both energized and focused (think coffee + Ritalin). The taste is definitely acquired as it tastes more like you are chewing on some sort of medicinal balm for a burn or a rash than it does like a recreational beverage.

After a round of maté, and the accompanying instructional course on proper maté etiquette (courtesy of Pato), we chatted for a bit with his grandparents, and then left for a very upscale restaurant nearby. At the restaurant, every member of my digestive cycle threw a little party as I finally received the kind of meal that had been wanting since I arrived in South America. We started with amazing bread, amazing cheese, and amazing sausage. The sauces they gave us were amazing, and so was the salad. When the actual steak entrée arrived it was, you guessed it, AMAZING! We washed everything down with a bottle of wine, and paid our bill: a staggeringly inexpensive $20 each. For Argentina, this meal was definitely on the pricier end of things, but with the ambience of the restaurant, the service, and of course the food, anything close to this in the US would have been AT LEAST $60 per person (probably more).

Toward the end of the meal, Matt and Pato revealed to me that Pato was not actually Argentine… Well, sort of. He was born in Buenos Aires, lived there until he was 11, but then moved to the US, went to UVA, and was currently working in DC. He (obviously) spoke fluent Spanish, so I guess I didn’t feel that dumb for not catching onto their little ruse. Still, I probably should have known something was up when he often reverted to US slang when answering some of my questions.

Ok back to the matter at hand. From the restaurant, we were heading to an area with a few bars where we could relax, maybe meet up with some other jóvenes, and have a drink of fernet (the unofficial Argentine alcohol of choice). Before we could get there, though, the sky opened up on us just as we were walking under a awning of a building. Not wanting to brave the wall of water a few feet from our faces, we waited for the storm to pass… To no avail. As the rivers in the streets breached their concrete banks (formerly the curbs of the street), we decided to make a break for the pizza joint about 30 feet away. In the process of leaping over newly created creek, Matt lost a sandal, which was quickly swept downstream. Pato and I made it to the shelter of the bar only mildly soaked (oxymoron, I know), while Matt continued to wander aimlessly through the monsoon outside. Conflicted by our desire to want to help our friend and the desire to allow evaporation to run its course on our hair, clothes, and bodies, we compromised and decided to yell loudly at Matt from inside the restaurant. Our plan worked, and he soon joined us, missing one shoe, soaked to the bone, but otherwise no worse for the wear.

We joined the rest of the restaurant’s employees in laughing at ourselves, and sat down for a couple of pitchers in order to let the clouds see through their kamikaze mission to drench the earth below. After a little while, a very inebriated gringa walked over to us and, speaking far too loudly, asked us where we were from. We proffered the requested information and nothing more, hoping our brevity would convey our complete lack of interest in continuing conversation. It did not, but apparently the long awkward pauses later on did, as she only stuck around long enough to ask a couple more questions before returning to the more inviting familiarity of lewd subject-matter and gratuitous laughter between her and her friends.

As soon as the rain let up, we left in search of more, less abrasive, people. Affected no doubt by buckets of water falling from the sky, very few people were out, so we just stepped into a nearby lounge and ordered the obligatory (according to Pato) fernet-cola. I quickly found out why I had never heard of fernet before. If maté tastes like chewing on an herbal balm, fernet-cola tasted like you blended up the balm, mixed it with coke, threw in some fermented tea leaves, and served it over ice. I politely choked down the drink and then called it a night.

When I opened the door to my hostel, I was accosted by a wave of heat, humidity, and human funk that could only be described as grotesque. I practically swam to my bed through the humidity and hoped that my exhaustion would outweigh my discomfort. Unfortunately, it did not. I awoke about 3 hours later, my stomach now angered by the new guests that crashed the dinner party. Like an amateur chemist experimenting with unstable elements, I had combined too many combustible materials, the containment of which was impossible. Mom, Dad, if you are reading this, reign in any comparisons to Boston ’02, as the aforementioned result was not a miscalculation in volume (I only had about 4 drinks in as many hours), but rather a poorly conceived equation (maté + red wine + lots of incredible food + beer + fernet + no sleep + lots of sweat = BAD). Having purged myself of my ailments, I felt 100% better, slept for another hour, and began my day anew.

There’s not a whole lot to tell about Monday. Having accomplished the vast majority of the things on my agenda, I was able to get some much-deserved relaxation. I met with Matt and Pato around midday, and we just sort of ambled around the city.
We grabbed another great meal at an outdoor restuarant, spent some time in a huge bookstore converted from an old theater (right), wandered to a couple of the city’s main squares, and fulfilled my desire to play pool in the historic pool that that I mentioned in my last post (you didn’t actually think that I wouldn’t go back, did you?). We walked down the main pedestrian street, wandered around an incredibly upscale mall, and listened to some great tango music at a variety of different stores. Assured of another impending storm by some crass old-expat, we ducked into a tranquil café near the Congress building as a preemptive measure. Of course, the rain never came.

At this point, Matt had to leave to catch his flight, so we all said our goodbyes and parted ways. I was once again on my own, and decided that was the way it should have been all weekend; traveling alone, I do more and pay less than when I join up with my friends (exhibit A: escapades with Marcelo and company; exhibit B: escapades with Matt and company). Tired, but hungry, I walked into a hole-in-the-wall parilla close to my hostel. For about USD 5.25, I got a salad, a 12oz steak, and 3 glasses of wine. Admittedly, the meal wasn’t as good as that of the night before, but the difference was not even close to worth the $15 difference in price, and that made the meal taste that much better.

Rather than sitting in my sauna, I mean hostel for the rest of the night, I went caught a movie and hit the sack.

The next morning, I woke up at around 6am, packed up my stuff, and then caught the 25-cent train to El Tigre, a small marine town about an hour away from Buenos Aires. My short trip to El Tigre ended up basically serving as a tour of what I could have done the day before, if I had stuck to my initial itinerary. The weather was horrible, so everything worth seeing in El Tigre was closed… Well, almost everything. I walked about a mile or so through the rain and stopped at the naval museum, at first glance, also appeared to be closed. Standing in an ever-expanding puddle of my own creation as water dripped off my rain jacket, I waited while the employees of the museum turned on all the lights for me. I was literally the ONLY person in the entire place, free to roam around at will in the quiet comfort of my solitude. I read a number of the signs informing me on the importance of this boat and that, this person and that, this object and that. Besides being the only patron of the museum, my favorite aspect of the museum was the number of shells used by the Argentine Olympic team that were mounted on the walls. My camera died (fittingly) right after I took a couple pictures of the boats, and that seemed as good a sign as any that it was time for me to leave. My time in the museum more than justified the long train ride and the hike through the rain, so I caught my train back to Buenos Aires satisfied with my decision to visit El Tigre. As soon as I was back in BsAs, I grabbed my stuff, paid for my hostel, and like a reluctant lover saying goodbye to his beloved, wrested myself from the embrace of this amazing city.

My sadness at leaving BsAs was short lived, as I quickly realized how blessed I am that I still have plenty of time to live in a city that I grow more fond of each day.

Until next time…