Don't Cry for Me, Argentina

So when I said that my next post would be “tomorrow” I guess I meant “more than a week from now.” I’m not all that surprised or worked up that I haven’t posted; it’s been a crazy, crazy week, what with packing and travel and coming home and running around seeing people and enjoying being home. But here I am, finally, sitting in my dining room at home, typing away and watching Merlin preen himself (while typing…multitasking is fun! Fixing typos, not so much…Merlin, you cause so much trouble!). I think this is the first blog entry I’ve written from home (I can’t remember if that’s actually true and am too lazy to check, sorry).

My last blog post ended rather unceremoniously with my arrival in Santiago, Chile. My four days in Santiago staying with my friend Molly passed without any more unfortunate incidents (yess), but that doesn’t mean I have nothing to say about Chile! Chile is sooo different from Argentina; I sort of assumed that going to Chile would be like going to Canada if you’re from the US, but in reality the two countries (or cities, as honestly I can really only compare Buenos Aires and Santiago) felt SO dissimilar.

I think the major difference right now is that Chile is doing much better economically than Argentina, and thus Santiago had a very different feel from Buenos Aires. It just felt, in my limited experience, like there were fewer unemployed, unhappy people in Santiago than in BA; very little graffiti (as opposed to BA, where every building is covered with angry political slogans) and I didn’t see any demonstrations while I was there (while in BA, there are massive protest marches multiple times per week).

In Buenos Aires, a thriving occupation since the economic meltdown in 2002 has been picking through the trash that is put out nightly looking for recyclable/valuable items. Because of this practice, Buenos Aires is a very litter- and trash-filled city, unfortunately, and in that respect Santiago felt cleaner. On the other hand, because of geography (Santiago is nestled in the foothills of the Andes) Santiago has a terrible smog/pollution problem, while BA has no noticeable air pollution. Furthermore, Santiago is the much uglier city, as much of its colonial architecture has been destroyed in earthquakes or by the Pinochet dictatorship and replaced with Soviet-bloc style concrete monoliths/non-descript high-rises.

Santiago also lacked Buenos Aires’ European feel, both architecturally, as I mentioned, and more generally. In the most concrete terms, I saw very few other tourists in Santiago, and got a lot more attention for my blonde hair/white skin than I do in Buenos Aires. Culturally, too, Santiago felt much less European than BA. Walking around Buenos Aires and going to cafes and sights in BA often feels much like walking around Madrid; I saw fewer similarities between Santiago and Spain, and Santiago definitely doesn’t have the Anglophile culture of Buenos Aires.

The other major difference that made my experience in Santiago feel SO different from my experience in Buenos Aires was that I was hanging out with someone I know REALLY well and who knows me REALLY well, and I was staying with her host family. These two simple facts really made the weekend incredibly special. Getting to see Molly and talk with her—about everything, not just the here-and-now experiences in South America but about memories from Boston and high school, about Yale (she’s a junior at Yale studying abroad), and our families and mutual friends, about America and politics—was SO nice, and SO completely different from spending my days with people who barely know me. What a lovely change! Not that I haven’t met some pretty cool people in Buenos Aires or anything—I have—but it’s just a completely different experience when you’re traveling with someone who knows everything about you, and who is serving as an amazing tour guide and knows exactly what to tell you and where to take you and what you’re interested in. I was SO spoiled by Molly. It was absolutely lovely.

Staying with her host family was absolutely incredible as well. After staying in the volunteer house-hostel situation for seven weeks, it was really cool to experience the host family thing again, however briefly. Molly’s host family is a little nuts, but in the best possible way. I loved seeing them interact and listen to them talk (another thing: the Chilean accent/way of speaking is SO DIFFERENT…there are all these words they just use in Chile, and they cut off the ends of their words…oh wow…). They were all so welcoming to me, and I loved getting a peek into Chilean life.

My trip home from Santiago went completely smoothly (no extortionary exit fees!), and I got home to five fun-filled, action-packed days in Argentina. Among the highlights (from the last couple of weeks):

- The best steak I’ve ever had (and one of the best meals I’ve ever had) at the restaurant La Cabrera in Palermo. The only problem with this meal was that they gave us SO MUCH food that we (me and some of the other volunteers living in the volunteer house) couldn’t finish it all. We asked to get it packed up to take home, which the waiters seemed a little bemused by but seemed to understand; we then accidentally walked out of the restaurant without claiming our doggie bag. We returned, however, and asked for our meat and were given a package wrapped in white butcher paper. The next part of this story is not for the queasy, and should give you some idea of how much of a penny-pincher I was trying to be in BA. The next night back in our hostel, we decided to eat our left-over steaks for dinner. Upon opening the package, however, we discovered that we’d been given random cuts of meat that DEFINITELY weren’t ours (the package included some completely random/foul looking pieces of pork which we did NOT order…). UGH. Facing having to give up on our visions of another steak dinner, however, we…..decided to eat the meat anyway. So we fried it…and ate it in pasta…and didn’t catch some frightening disease. Luckily. Disgusting, but delicious! Yum.

- I bought myself a beautiful leather jacket, completing the boots-bag-jacket ensemble that will probably get me attacked by a rabid vegan or something back in the States. Ah well.

- I went on a few long walks to my favorite places/buildings in Buenos Aires and got some great pictures. I definitely think that I said a sufficient good-bye to the city, and I also rounded-off my BA To-Do List pretty well. It’s a nice feeling to leave after eight weeks with few regrets/pieces of unfinished business.

- May 1-2 (a long time ago, I know, but I never got around to talking about it) was my final full weekend in Buenos Aires. Saturday of that weekend, May 1, was International Workers Day (a Communisty thing…?), so lots of interesting people were out to play in Buenos Aires! Lots of red T-shirts and banners and drums and stuff. Many shops were closed, and the city had a very festive/holiday atmosphere. This atmosphere was heightened by the presence of the Feria del Libro, the largest book fair in the Spanish-speaking world, and a free outdoor concert by Brazilian crooner Caetano Veloso. The concert was definitely a highlight of my time in Buenos Aires; I now LOVE an artist I had previously never heard of, and have a heightened appreciation for the truth of Buenos Aires’ reputation as being an artistic/cultural center. Caetano Veloso’s music is sort of cool jazz with a Latin twist; it’s romantic and relaxing and beautiful, but not necessarily what I would think of as crowd-pleasing music. The outdoor concert was completely PACKED (like, oh-my-god-I-can’t-sit-down-or-really-even-breathe packed), and the crowd was singing along to these soft, lullabye-like lovesongs. It was lovely and different. The Feria del Libro, in a huge convention center right next door to where the concert happened, also sort of showed me how cultural Buenos Aires is—a reputation I had read/heard but hadn’t had a chance to really experience on a non-tourist level. The Feria, which was open until 1 am on May 1, was also packed; Argentineans take their books seriously, and you could see that in how many people were browsing at midnight, and how extensive the collections where in the stalls in the Feria. Very cool.

That’s all for specific updates. Now that my international travels are over and done, I’ll be posting much less frequently. Sometime in the near future I will be posting some thoughts about Argentina and China and Egypt in general; just some comparisons and thoughts and observations. I’ll also probably post some gap year reflections as well, things I would do differently, highlights, take-aways, etc. And then maybe I’ll post a couple times this summer, depending on how busy I get with my job and everything. And then…that will be it! Thank you for reading this as I’ve traipsed through continents and countries and mishaps and adventures! It’s been an amazing nine months!