Que Kilombo!

Hola! I apologize for not posting in so long! The title of this blog is one of my favorite expressions I've learned while in Argentina, and it basically means, What a mess! The last two weeks have definitely NOT been a mess, but they have been SUPER busy and crazy, so I haven't had a chance to post. I’ve also sort of been waiting to post an update because I’ve been writing (in my head...), or formulating, I guess, a post comparing Argentina to China because I have A TON to say about that. But I’ve been so busy that I haven’t sat down to write THAT post and in the mean time so much has happened that I feel the need to write a purely newsy-update-post. Hence the two week hiatus. Get ready for some newsy updates!

Let’s start at the very beginning (it’s a very good place to start). Or at least let’s start with the week after my illness and day trip to Tigre. That Thursday, a couple days after my last post, I spent the day exploring one of Buenos Aires’ outer neighborhoods called Belgrano. Belgrano, interestingly enough, used to be a separate town and briefly served as Argentina’s capital during a period of conflict about something or other...I don’t really understand what happened. But the point is that Belgrano has always been a very distinct place from the city closeby/that rapidly enveloped it. There aren’t many stand-out, must-see sites in Belgrano, as it’s a mostly residential neighborhood. I did go to a couple museums, including one that used to be a mansion owned by a guy obsessed with Spain with a beautiful Andaluz-style garden. The other highlight of Belgrano was wandering around Buenos Aires’ Chinatown. Yes, BA has a Chinatown. Yes, it was weird to see Chinese characters and hear Chinese (not a dialect I really understood, however) being spoken. Definitely a bit of a mindboggler, to see translations of Chinese characters in Spanish. Worlds collide! Woah.

My next excursion, on the following Sunday, was slightly further afield (but only slightly) to the city of La Plata, the provincial capital of the province of Buenos Aires, about an hour away by bus. La Plata is home to a university and a lot of government buildings, and is basically just a normal small Argentinean city. Its claim to fame is that it played a major role in the same conflict that somehow involved Belgrano and that I don’t really understand. I think basically there was this big fight over which city would be capital of the new country. But because La Plata was miffed (I think?? ) that it wasn’t the capital, the leading citizens built a lot of beautiful public buildings to sort of try to show BA up. Or at least that’s what my guide book said. BASICALLY La Plata was sleepy and quiet and filled with gorgeous buildings and I saw like zero other tourists and it was a lovely day away. I went to a great craft market and bought some presents and there was an amazing Gothic cathedral and I read my book in the central plaza where there were TONS of Argentine families out and about and it was just really really nice.

The highlights of the following week were many. Tuesday night, Voluntario Global hosted a Language Exchange as a fundraiser in a cafe nearby. The Language Exchange was basically language speed-dating; every English speaker sat opposite a Spanish speaker at tables, and every 5 minutes we switched languages, and every 10 minutes the English speakers moved 1 place to the left. It was really really fun, and really good practice for my Spanish. And now VG is making it a weekly event! Yay. Tuesday I also went shopping all day and spent far too much money BUT ended up with a very very cute pair of very nice leather boots. Mission accomplished! The boots weren’t even that pricey, I just bought a lot of other stuff I didn’t need but love anyway along the way haha.

In furtherance of my quest to explore every far-flung corner of BA and the surrounding area, last week I spent an afternoon in Caballito, a neighborhood geographically in the center of the city, but one that still feels somewhat like a residential outskirt. I passed a whole afternoon sitting in a park reading and writing in my journal, and then visited a natural history museum where I learned about Argentina’s.....DINOSAURS (and other extinct creatures). ROOOOAR. It was so so so cool to see all the skeletons and read about the natural history of South America, which I never really knew anything about before. Did you know that giant sloths were alive only 10,000 years ago??? That seems like a really low number to me. ALSO that South America was where a lot of the really giant herbivore dinosaurs lived (think Land Before Time), and that T. Rex was from North America but may have migrated south just before the big extinction??? HOW COOL ARE DINOSAURS. I hadn’t been to a natural history museum in a long, long time anyway, so this was just super cool on a lot of levels.

To continue the list of REALLY AWESOME THINGS I’ve done in the last two weeks, last Thursday most of us who live in the VG Volunteer House went to a free tango lesson at a hostel down the street. The major lesson I took away, however, was that I am really not very good at tango. At all. I mean, I knew I was no good at dancing before this lesson....now I know, for sure, that I am absolutely no good at tango. Ah, well. It was still fun though.

Also on Thursday I went to watch the weekly march by the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo through (wait for it...) la Plaza de Mayo. Before going, I was pretty excited to get to see a historic and inspiring group in action. The reality (and, hindsight being 20/20, this was predictable) fell far short of my expectations. At this point, the Madres are sort of just a tourist attraction, and I found it discouraging to watch their small group march with their iconic white headscarfs, dwarfed by the crowd of tourists standing in front of them snapping pictures (I, of course, among them....). The Madres, for those who don’t know, began to stage silent, peaceful protests during the military dictatorship to draw attention to the thousands of desaparacidos, their children, who had been killed or otherwise made to disappear by the regime. They became international icons and drew tons of media attention to what was going on in Argentina and brought tons of international popular support to overturning the dictatorship. Now, however, they seemed less genuine, without a purpose other than just putting on a play. The Madres have also splintered into two rival groups at this point, so there were two small groups marching, and one of the groups had a big sign that said in Spanish “We oppose the oligarchical landowners” and behind them were marching some members of a workers union of some sort. On the one hand...OK they’re an influential group that is putting their weight behind other issues. On the other hand....it felt a little cheap and fake and made me sad. But still, interesting.

Another highlight occurred last Sunday, when I, along with a bunch of other volunteers, went to a futbol game! And not just any futbol game, but a Boca Juniors, the incredibly fanatical team from the neighborhood where I volunteer, game. I was a little stressed before going to the game because I’d heard horror stories about violent fans/riots/lots of crazy drunken scary men, but it ended up being super fun! We were in a spirited but not too spirited section, and everyone around us was singing Boca songs and shouting chants for the whole game. And Boca won! So it was all in all a great experience—and it felt like a very genuine one, too. I haven’t been converted to caring about soccer, but I loved getting a glimpse of the phenomenon here.
Tuesday I went on another excursion, my favorite one so far (maybe even better than Tigre, I can’t decide). This time I went to Colonia del Sacramento, a small town in Uruguay an hour by highspeed catamaran from BA, and a UNESCO World Heritage site. Colonia is still, yes, incredibly colonial...in fact, I think it basically fulfills my definition of “Spanish Colonial”. It was just SO CUTE. Touristy, but in the best, most authentic way. Located on a peninsula, Colonia’s Barrio Historico has beautiful old buildings made of adobe bricks and tile roofs, cobblestone streets, gorgeous palm trees and bright flowers, lots of sun, and the beauty of the Rio de la Plata (which is so wide it looks like an ocean). I spent a day on my own exploring and relishing the quiet and slow pace. I sat in the sun by the water and listened to waves; I wandered around and took tons of pictures; I rented a bike and rode by the water a couple of kilometers to the abandoned Plaza de Toros or bullfighting ring, which has been closed since bullfighting was banned in Uruguay many years ago. I picnicked on the remnants of the ancient city wall, I read, I wandered down narrow side roads, I relished silence and nature and history and beauty man-made and natural. SUCH a wonderful day. There were many fewer people than in Tigre, and it felt much better preserved but also much more fossilized in the past than Tiger, which is very much still a modern-day destination for modern-day pursuits. Colonia was a base for the Portuguese, and then for the Spanish, and is now sort of a giant museum to those days. Of course, there is also a modern part which is also cute, as it’s a little, slow-paced town catering almost entirely to tourists. My verdict from the day: Colonia defines adorable, and is perfectly lovely. If you’re ever in Uruguay or Argentina, it’s a can’t-miss.

I have to rap this entry up and end my long list of doings from the past two weeks because I have to go make a Bingo! Game for the kids I’m teaching tomorrow. Sophia and I bought a bunch of games for the afterschool program, and the kids really enjoyed them. Their favorite by far is Jenga (the game where you make a tower out of blocks and everyone has to remove a block using only one hand until the tower falls down). It’s so cute watching the really little kids play Jenga because they actually get so emotionally involved and excited. When the tower looks like it’s about the fall, a bunch of the little kids cover their eyes and refuse to watch until they know it’s “safe.” SO CUTE. I wish I could make a recording of the sudden in-breaths and loud sighs of relief involved in playing this game with these little kids! So basically their enjoyment of this fun but essentially non-educational game inspired me to come up with some fun but directly educational games. I decided that they all really really need to practice their basic adding and subtracting facts (for the little kids) and their multiplication tables (for the older kids), so I’ve devised a bingo game around that. Hopefully they’ll enjoy it! If anyone has any ideas for fun, educational games to play with kids between the ages of 6 and 14, let me know!

Hopefully I’ll get my act together and post something a bit more intellectually stimulating than this update soon. Until then, adios!