Pat and Becca came to meet us at our hotel early in the morning with the hopes that we could sneak in a museum visit before out Tango lessons at noon. Some last minute research revealed that the museum didn’t open until noon, so we just wandered around the theater district and downtown area until we were supposed to tango. In pure South American style, the tango professor never showed up, so instead we grabbed lunch at the foot of their version of the Washington monument (ours is much better, not to worry).
From there, we caught a cab up to the MALBA, Buenos Aires’ most famous museum of modern art. In spite of all the rave reviews in both the Frommer’s and the Rough Guides guide books we had, perhaps the most impressive part of the museum was the building itself. There were a few pieces of interesting art, but for the most part it was a lot of what one comes to expect from modern art these days: a few pieces of burnt toast on a plate; a box with a number of objects that vibrated when you touched the corresponding button; a pair of sticks each fashioned with a set of dentures and wrapped with some sheets and splinters painted the color of blood.
A group of obnoxious older women oblivious to the existence of other human life in the museum provided the final impetus to cut our cultural experience short, so with a flourish (read: bathroom break... you can’t spell flourish without F-L-U-S-H) we headed for the exits. Pat and Becca stayed true to their plan for a mandatory nap-time, while Lindsey and I went to see a little more of the city on foot.
We made a brief stop at an amazing ice cream place called Volta and then hit up the Japanese Gardens. After being at once impressed and digusted by the over-sized gold-fish (a.k.a. koi), Linds and I just wandered around this tranquil little refuge from the city. Almost as if providing me a reminder to heed my long time obsession, I saw a guy standing on the footbridge across the pond with a fat pair of Atomic freestyle skis. Too overcome by excitement at seeing a pair of skis to make note of the curious inconsonance of the situation, I approached the young man to ask him if he skiied... Brilliant question, I know...
Harry: “Those your skis?... Both of ‘em?”
Being that he was a freestyle skier by trade, he is probably used to being surrounded by imbeciles, and I don’t think he even noticed how dumb my question was. He ended up telling me that he was filming a freestyle ski program for Argentine TV, and that he and his buddy were sponsored by Atomic. I wanted to hug him and punch him at the same time. In spite of that deep-seeded solidarity and respect that pretty much the whole of the skiing/riding community has for each other, I couldn’t help but be a little jealous that this kid was getting paid to make ski videos with his buddies during his free time. Before leaving, I jokingly asked him if he wanted to give me his skis, since, after all, it’s not like HE paid for them... He didn’t think it was funny. Empty-handed, Lindsey and I left the gardens to continue to kill time until wine-tasting at 5pm.
We walked by the zoo, and maybe for a moment entertained the idea of stopping in, but the graffiti-covered advertisements that made the happy-looking animals sad and crying made us think twice. That, and it was closed. Instead, we stopped into the botanical gardens to see all sorts of rare breeds of fichus, fern, and feline. Apparently, the cabal of stray cats in Buenos Aires designated the botanical gardens as their central headquarters at the last town hall, because more than the cacti, chrysanthemums, or cyprus, I just remember the cats.
Having gotten our fill of flora and fauna, we made our way up the street to the place where the day before we had seen signs for wine tasting. The gentleman greeted us at the door and did everything he could to dissuade us from the gustación (gestation) until later so that he wouldn’t have to open three new bottles of wine just for the two of us. In retrospect, perhaps we should have paid deference to his suggestion, but, then, hindsight is 20/20. As I mentioned, since we were the only two people who showed up for the 5pm wine tasting, they had to open three full bottles of wine. Also, because they were simply going to throw out what was left in the bottle anyway, they decided just to leave them on the table for us to continue “tasting” as much of it as we desired. Empty stomach + little sleep in the past 3 days + 3 amazing bottles of wine = BAD.
In the end, Lindsey and I killed off about 2.5 bottles of wine between the two of us, and the plate of meat and cheese that accompanied the wine tasting did little to mollify the effects of the alcohol. SO, for the first time since I have been in Chile, I stood up from my seat without my camera bag.... Dah-dah-duh (dramatic cello music)....
We ended up buying a couple of bottles from the place, and I guess that my carrying the bag of wine helped me to forget that I WASN’T carrying my camera. We caught a cab back to the corner where our hotel was, but when I got out of the cab, Lindsey asked me where my camera was. Thinking that I left it in the cab, I made a mad dash in the direction of the cab. Unfortunately, the cab was gone before I could even catch the number of the cab, the company of the cab, or any relevant information whatsoever that might lead to the recovery of my camera.
At this point, I was so filled with anger and self-loathe that I couldn’t even see straight... Or maybe it was the wine. Either way, I was well beyond apex of the “Language Laffer Curve,” my title for the relationship between alcohol and your
foreign language speaking ability that shares a similar graph to the square root of X, only with an asymptote at some value of X (different for every person; my graph peaks around 6 beers and plummets before 8). I have provided a graph to the right in order to better understand this complex mathematical relationship. I returned to the hotel utterly despondent and unable to string together any set of words that might otherwise be used to make an intelligible thought. A few concerned bystanders asked me if there was anything they could do to help me, but in my state of disrepair the best I could do was send them distress signals to steer clear of this reprobate and derelict waste of carbon. I moped up into the hotel room and tossed myself onto the bed in despair, completely oblivious to the fact that Lindsey had not yet returned to the hotel. When Lindsey did return a few minutes later, she helped sprinkle some guilt and shame into my noxious stew of emotion, and things went from bad to worse. While we were only about a block from the hotel when the cab dropped us off, I failed to realize that Linds had been following me around all weekend, so when I ran off to chase after the cab, she was clueless as to where to go. In essence, not only did I leave my most valuable object behind, I also abandoned Lindsey on the street corner in the middle of a big city in a foreign country. Definitely not one of my better showings.
When considering that in a few short weeks I would be traveling to the dryest desert in the world, Machu Picchu, and Easter Island, losing my camera was literally the end of the world in my eyes. So in my wine-induced, hypersensitive, and melodramatic state I decided that the best way to solve the problem would be to escape into my dreams, the only place where the reality of my stupidity couldn’t reach me. I proceeded to konk out on the bed where I had fallen, while Lindsey decided to follow through on our plans to meet up with Pat and Becca at their apartment a few streets down.
After leaving me in my self-imposed coma for a couple hours, the three of them came back to wrest me from my slumber and make good on our dinner reservations. On our way out the door, the concierge delivered me the best news I have heard since Chipotle went public: apparently, I left the WINE in the cab, not my camera. The cabbie realized that it was ours and doubled back to bring it to the hotel. The concierge at the hotel then called the name of the store on the wine bag to see if they knew of the whereabouts of my camera. They told her that I had indeed left it there, and they would keep hold of it for me until I came by tomorrow when they opened. In essence, my two wrongs made things right, for if I hadn’t left the wine in the cab, I might have never known that my camera was still at the shop where we went to go wine tasting.
An awkward relief hit me like the first breath of air when you get on the New York subway in the winter: you are relieved to finally catch the train after waiting underground in the freezing cold but sickened by the putrid stench of cabbage and B.O. As happy as I was to hear that I would be able to recover my camera, my stomach was doing backflips at the thought of what a needless spectacle I had put on when I thought I had lost it.
Nevertheless, this WAS good news, and as such, I was willing to forgive myself for the last couple hours of dementia. Unfortunately, my company was not as forthcoming with their pardons. So Pat, Becca, Lindsey, and I sat around a singularly unique and comical restaurant chewing our food the appropriate amount of time before swallowing and talking around the huge elephant sitting in the middle of our table. By the time the check came and we had to decide whether or not we would continue the night out on the town, we surrendered faster than a French battalion and headed back to our hotel.
After perhaps our first real night of some very much-needed sleep, Lindsey and I got off to a later start than expected. We still tried to squeeze in a quick tour around the nearby shops to look for shoes and sweets. Without seeing anything really inspiring in any of the shops until we were just far enough away from our hotel to make us late getting back, we ended up delaying our departure by about 15 minutes.
Tack on the unanticipated additional travel time needed to go pick up my camera, and we had done a pretty solid job of assuring that we would miss our flight. Sure enough, when we got to the ticket counter, it was already too late to check in. So, armed with a few iTunes episodes of some popular TV shows and a little tax-free refund courtesy of Argentine shopping, we managed to kill off the 5 hours before our new flight back to Santiago no worse for the wear.
I won’t bore you with the mind-numbing details of the rest of the week, but once back in Santiago, Lindsey and I made our rounds to some of the nicer parts of towns and tourist attractions in some of the best weather that we have had in months. Some stops included the Cerro San Cristobal, La Chascona (one of Pablo Neruda’s houses),the Central Fish Market, and a fantastic tour of the Concha y Toro winery, which included a glass of perhaps the most amazing Cabernet Sauvignon I will taste until Kamens banks his first million.
I later found out that the weather was the product of something they call “Veranito de San Juan” ( “Little Summer of San Juan”), which comes like clock-work every year right around the 24th of June and lasts about a week, bringing a refreshing and much needed respite from the rain, cold, and general greyness of the city. So, in spite of
the fact that I was a little busy with schoolwork at the end of the semester, Lindsey could not have picked a better week in the winter to come, especially since the weather has since returned to the usual wet, black and white oil painting that makes Santiago in the winter so utterly forgettable. In all, it was a terrific week, and hopefully one that might inspire a few more houseguests in the future... Only next time, I promise I will hang onto my camera!
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