Alas.
I´m typing this in a Locoturio (internet cafe, not source of craziness) in San Telmo, a few hours away from my flight to Miami. Which will be five hours longer than usual this year, but it´s been worth it.
Goodbye, Buenos Aires. Goodbye, Ayres Porteños, the enormous, loud, garishly coloful but somehow endearing hostel that has been home base for the past two weeks. Final Submarino has been quaffed, last museum visited. So far, I´ve avoided in stepping in the ubiquitous piles of dog crap that are almost as emblematic of this city as tin roofs and tango, but it´s a walk back to the hostel, so there´s still time.
BA is an amazing place, and I have barely touched my toes on the surface of the universe that is Argentina. Reciprocity visa lasts for ten years after purchase: I´m hoping to be back.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Monday, August 9, 2010
The Tour Less Taken
So, we´re in Mendoza right now, which is Argentina´s wine country, home of the world-renowned Malbec and other allegedly mind-boggling elixirs. Just got back from a group tour of two wineries and an olive farm, which was good fun and would have been deeply, deeply educational had I A) attained that ever- elusive Spanish fluency before embarking or B) come to this wine tour with, like, ANY prior knowledge of wine.
Again, folks, I am not a fluent Spanish speaker. Baby steps, though; I now understand almost every single word said in my presence, as long as everyone near me shuts up for at least five seconds after every sentence said aloud. Whisper to your neighbor, turn on the radio, or speak your second sentence while I´m still gnawing on the first one, however, and I´m toast. I also find that recognizing every single word in isolation is NOT the same thing as understanding what´s been said: I sometimes feel like a kindergartener who, having finally mastered the alphabet song, is thrown a book of Dostoyevski because the letters are the same. Today´s best example would be my initial understanding that the kindly lady winemaker had made changes to the tour after dozens of tourists were torn to pieces in the past; Andrea informed me that, actually, we just weren´t supposed to toast with our glasses because the bodega was sick of replacing the broken ones.
So, that´s column A working against me. In column B, we have my absolute ignorance of All Things Wine. It comes from grapes, it sits around for awhile before you can drink it, and it plays some kind of pivotal role in a crap Keanu Reeves movie. Also, people talk about it smelling like things that can´t possibly be in it; the more wine snobbier you get, the more and weirder things you recognize. This, my friends, was the sum total of knowledge I brought with me on Wine Tour.
Nevertheless, it was fun. I followed all instructions for swirling and sniffing as best as I could, and, although it´s the freaking dead of winter here and we didn´t get to actually see a single grape, I did appreciate a closer connection to the people who make the stuff I don´t understand. I perked up significantly for the olive oil tour, as well, as I had a toehold on what made it complex and delicious.
Bringing me to my modest proposal for another kind of Tasting, also featuring a treasured part of Argentina´s cultural heritage. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me on the Tour de Submarino.
We will not, on this journey, be going underseas. The Argentinian Submarino is simply a bar of chocolate, sunk into a glass of hot milk. Bringing us not one, but TWO products to sample and obsess about!
First, the milk part. If people spend hours waxing poetic about the many varieties of grapes and the complicated fermenting process, I think Tour de Submarino can become equally obsessed about sub-species of cow. According to Wikipedia (granted that I Googled ¨beef¨. but the ladies must be doing something while we barbecue the menfolk...), there are six main breeds in the country to choose from; I´m thinking that each would yield a milk which can be described with different ridiculous adjectives. Ideally, participants could try their hands at milking at least one sample cow before proceeding to the Whisking Room to discover how best to froth it. Whole milk or low fat? Perhaps a touch of cream? And in which direction does a TRUE afectionado stir it? So many areas for discussion and study.
And next, of course, the question of chocolate. I imagine two seperate tastings here. For the first, one samples tiny perfect shavings off of six different chocolate bars, possibly using fancy silver tweezers to lift and inspect without melting them in your hands. Since I´ve been reminded today that wine often tastes of chocolate (alas, one slight misunderstanding of that led me to EXPECT a bit of chocolate at the end of the tour), it´s obligatory at this point to compare the chocolate to wine. The better shavings, I think, would have a slight hint of Malbec.
For the final tasting, one receives an eyedropper and a miniature shotglass. Following the careful and elegant instructions of an impeccably dressed Submarinero, participants combine various varieties of milk with various tiny squares of chocolate, testing for such crucial qualities as Floatiness and Sweet.
Who´s with me?
Again, folks, I am not a fluent Spanish speaker. Baby steps, though; I now understand almost every single word said in my presence, as long as everyone near me shuts up for at least five seconds after every sentence said aloud. Whisper to your neighbor, turn on the radio, or speak your second sentence while I´m still gnawing on the first one, however, and I´m toast. I also find that recognizing every single word in isolation is NOT the same thing as understanding what´s been said: I sometimes feel like a kindergartener who, having finally mastered the alphabet song, is thrown a book of Dostoyevski because the letters are the same. Today´s best example would be my initial understanding that the kindly lady winemaker had made changes to the tour after dozens of tourists were torn to pieces in the past; Andrea informed me that, actually, we just weren´t supposed to toast with our glasses because the bodega was sick of replacing the broken ones.
So, that´s column A working against me. In column B, we have my absolute ignorance of All Things Wine. It comes from grapes, it sits around for awhile before you can drink it, and it plays some kind of pivotal role in a crap Keanu Reeves movie. Also, people talk about it smelling like things that can´t possibly be in it; the more wine snobbier you get, the more and weirder things you recognize. This, my friends, was the sum total of knowledge I brought with me on Wine Tour.
Nevertheless, it was fun. I followed all instructions for swirling and sniffing as best as I could, and, although it´s the freaking dead of winter here and we didn´t get to actually see a single grape, I did appreciate a closer connection to the people who make the stuff I don´t understand. I perked up significantly for the olive oil tour, as well, as I had a toehold on what made it complex and delicious.
Bringing me to my modest proposal for another kind of Tasting, also featuring a treasured part of Argentina´s cultural heritage. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me on the Tour de Submarino.
We will not, on this journey, be going underseas. The Argentinian Submarino is simply a bar of chocolate, sunk into a glass of hot milk. Bringing us not one, but TWO products to sample and obsess about!
First, the milk part. If people spend hours waxing poetic about the many varieties of grapes and the complicated fermenting process, I think Tour de Submarino can become equally obsessed about sub-species of cow. According to Wikipedia (granted that I Googled ¨beef¨. but the ladies must be doing something while we barbecue the menfolk...), there are six main breeds in the country to choose from; I´m thinking that each would yield a milk which can be described with different ridiculous adjectives. Ideally, participants could try their hands at milking at least one sample cow before proceeding to the Whisking Room to discover how best to froth it. Whole milk or low fat? Perhaps a touch of cream? And in which direction does a TRUE afectionado stir it? So many areas for discussion and study.
And next, of course, the question of chocolate. I imagine two seperate tastings here. For the first, one samples tiny perfect shavings off of six different chocolate bars, possibly using fancy silver tweezers to lift and inspect without melting them in your hands. Since I´ve been reminded today that wine often tastes of chocolate (alas, one slight misunderstanding of that led me to EXPECT a bit of chocolate at the end of the tour), it´s obligatory at this point to compare the chocolate to wine. The better shavings, I think, would have a slight hint of Malbec.
For the final tasting, one receives an eyedropper and a miniature shotglass. Following the careful and elegant instructions of an impeccably dressed Submarinero, participants combine various varieties of milk with various tiny squares of chocolate, testing for such crucial qualities as Floatiness and Sweet.
Who´s with me?
How the Other Half Busses
Hello from Mendoza, via a Nightbus De Lujo. Aka luxury night bus. As in, 15 ridiculous hours spent drinking fancy wine, nibbling snacks, and reclining almost 180 degrees in a posh leather seat. Even the movie was a step above: yes, in true South American fashion, it had to be a high-octane bloodbath, but there were Samurai instead of drug runners.
Mendoza is wine country, so we´ll be looking into tours and tastings. Starting...now.
Mendoza is wine country, so we´ll be looking into tours and tastings. Starting...now.
Thursday, August 5, 2010
In Which Someone ELSE gets to screw up the language
As I continue slogging my way through the Spanish language (today, I asked the airport officer when the ¨Room of Faithful Hoping¨ would be available to us...), I feel equality demands that I also report on the most hilarious English translations I´ve come across in my travels. These are wildly more common here in Argentina, I think because Ecuador really hasn´t gotten around to translating many things yet.
At any rate, Tuesday´s lunch menu was truly a thing of beauty and a joy forever. One could enjoy pizza with a wide range of toppings, including ¨sauce, chicken, crash, onions, and mozzarella¨. Crash was also available on a pizza without chicken, but I couldn´t be sure that meat was not involved. For dessert, one´s choices included ¨sucker in syrup, with cheese¨ and a complicated sampler platter including both ¨salad of fruit¨ and ¨one rejects of ice cream¨, lovingly enveloped in ¨sauce frit and sauce snare¨. However, the menu´s piece de resistance was clearly in the meat section: a savory meal of ¨language of cow, to the vinegar.¨
We had to know who created this linguistic masterpiece, so I asked the waiter how, exactly, the menu came about. He was hilarious: ¨Well, this woman who used to live here translated it for us, but I think she just ran it through a computer program. None of us read English, so we have no idea what it says, but we see people laughing at it all the time. I was watching you both a few minutes ago, and I told my buddy over there, look, they´re laughing at our menu again.¨ He enjoyed the explanation about, where, exactly, the cow tongue had gone a bit awry, but seemed quite happy to leave well enough alone with the menu.
At the farewell dinner for the Project in Quito, we discovered that the menu had been recently translated as well. I don´t remember most of the mistakes, but very much enjoyed the description of quimbolitos, which are like sweet fluffy tamales, as involving a ¨sweet corn feeling¨. Adam was reminded of a cafe he´d visited once which attempted to translate ¨te¨ (tea) into English: because that seemed very very close to the second person possessive, the end result was a delicious glass of Ice You. Rumor has it there is a burger joint outside of Cuenca which offers a wide variety of ¨fats foot¨.
Ah well, we all more or less manage to get our points across.
At any rate, Tuesday´s lunch menu was truly a thing of beauty and a joy forever. One could enjoy pizza with a wide range of toppings, including ¨sauce, chicken, crash, onions, and mozzarella¨. Crash was also available on a pizza without chicken, but I couldn´t be sure that meat was not involved. For dessert, one´s choices included ¨sucker in syrup, with cheese¨ and a complicated sampler platter including both ¨salad of fruit¨ and ¨one rejects of ice cream¨, lovingly enveloped in ¨sauce frit and sauce snare¨. However, the menu´s piece de resistance was clearly in the meat section: a savory meal of ¨language of cow, to the vinegar.¨
We had to know who created this linguistic masterpiece, so I asked the waiter how, exactly, the menu came about. He was hilarious: ¨Well, this woman who used to live here translated it for us, but I think she just ran it through a computer program. None of us read English, so we have no idea what it says, but we see people laughing at it all the time. I was watching you both a few minutes ago, and I told my buddy over there, look, they´re laughing at our menu again.¨ He enjoyed the explanation about, where, exactly, the cow tongue had gone a bit awry, but seemed quite happy to leave well enough alone with the menu.
At the farewell dinner for the Project in Quito, we discovered that the menu had been recently translated as well. I don´t remember most of the mistakes, but very much enjoyed the description of quimbolitos, which are like sweet fluffy tamales, as involving a ¨sweet corn feeling¨. Adam was reminded of a cafe he´d visited once which attempted to translate ¨te¨ (tea) into English: because that seemed very very close to the second person possessive, the end result was a delicious glass of Ice You. Rumor has it there is a burger joint outside of Cuenca which offers a wide variety of ¨fats foot¨.
Ah well, we all more or less manage to get our points across.
Monday, August 2, 2010
Eating My Way Through Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires, the largest and probably most interesting city in Argentina, has a lot of things going for it. It´s the Tango capital of the world. Malfalda, the scrappy little protagonist of one of Latin America´s favorite comic strips, hails from here. There are many truly excellent museums, nice leafy parks, and absolute shit tons of historical things to see.
I shall write, in this post, about none of those things. What has been most compelling to me so far about Buenos Aires has been the utter unexpectedness of the local cuisine.
I remember the dumbass that I was six years ago, before I started spending summers in South America: I kind of imagined an entire continent of tacos, with maybe the occasional variation in sauce. Ecuador and Peru shifted my paradigm a bit, kicking out the taco and replacing it with an enormous, bland plate of potatoes and rice. I then saw a Man Vs. Food thing on some ridiculous cable channel or other, which dropped a healthy gob of mesquite-grilled cow offal on the previous mental plate.
Fortunately, I could not have been more wrong. We have yet to hit a parilla for the grilled beef that is a mainstay of Argentinian cuisine: instead, I´ve been happily gorging on homemade pasta, fresh vegetables, and insanely good salads. Today for lunch, we attempted to go to a place that no longer exists and settled on the closest thing to the vacant storefront: I ordered the ¨green leaf salad¨ and received an enormous bowl of field lettuce, topped with sun dried tomatoes, sliced avocado, bits of hard goat cheese, a slice of homemade toast, and the most perfect poached egg I´ve had in my life. I will dream of that salad tonight.
Those who scoff at ¨rabbit food¨ will find much to eat here as well. My guidebook points out a number of all-you-can-eat parillas, which are hilariously named as ¨tenador libre¨. Literally, ¨free fork¨, the term somehow also hints at disinhibition, and I picture a happy piece of silverware cavorting, unleashed upon the world and propelled by its own power. ¨All you can eat¨ is generally about a third of what they serve at many traditional restaurants, where pasta is popular, typically made onsite, and always delicious. It´s a bit odd: you order the pasta seperate from the sauce, and most menus have at least 8 or ten choices for both.
¿Y para beber? The coffee here is inevitably delicious, not a single instant anything anywhere in sight. My new favorite drink, however, is the ¨submarino¨, which involves heating milk to near boiling point and dropping a chocolate bar into it. Caused a bit of confusion for me a couple days ago, as it sounds a lot like ¨su marido¨, which is a polite way of saying ¨the husband of someone who is not the person speaking.¨ I wasn´t entirely sure what the waiter was offering for a minute there.
Ice cream is supposedly very, very good here, but I won´t be sampling it: it´s the dead of winter right now and we´re in the midst of a cold front. Also excellent, as I can personally attest: the coats. Hope I´ll still fit into my new one once I´m done here...
I shall write, in this post, about none of those things. What has been most compelling to me so far about Buenos Aires has been the utter unexpectedness of the local cuisine.
I remember the dumbass that I was six years ago, before I started spending summers in South America: I kind of imagined an entire continent of tacos, with maybe the occasional variation in sauce. Ecuador and Peru shifted my paradigm a bit, kicking out the taco and replacing it with an enormous, bland plate of potatoes and rice. I then saw a Man Vs. Food thing on some ridiculous cable channel or other, which dropped a healthy gob of mesquite-grilled cow offal on the previous mental plate.
Fortunately, I could not have been more wrong. We have yet to hit a parilla for the grilled beef that is a mainstay of Argentinian cuisine: instead, I´ve been happily gorging on homemade pasta, fresh vegetables, and insanely good salads. Today for lunch, we attempted to go to a place that no longer exists and settled on the closest thing to the vacant storefront: I ordered the ¨green leaf salad¨ and received an enormous bowl of field lettuce, topped with sun dried tomatoes, sliced avocado, bits of hard goat cheese, a slice of homemade toast, and the most perfect poached egg I´ve had in my life. I will dream of that salad tonight.
Those who scoff at ¨rabbit food¨ will find much to eat here as well. My guidebook points out a number of all-you-can-eat parillas, which are hilariously named as ¨tenador libre¨. Literally, ¨free fork¨, the term somehow also hints at disinhibition, and I picture a happy piece of silverware cavorting, unleashed upon the world and propelled by its own power. ¨All you can eat¨ is generally about a third of what they serve at many traditional restaurants, where pasta is popular, typically made onsite, and always delicious. It´s a bit odd: you order the pasta seperate from the sauce, and most menus have at least 8 or ten choices for both.
¿Y para beber? The coffee here is inevitably delicious, not a single instant anything anywhere in sight. My new favorite drink, however, is the ¨submarino¨, which involves heating milk to near boiling point and dropping a chocolate bar into it. Caused a bit of confusion for me a couple days ago, as it sounds a lot like ¨su marido¨, which is a polite way of saying ¨the husband of someone who is not the person speaking.¨ I wasn´t entirely sure what the waiter was offering for a minute there.
Ice cream is supposedly very, very good here, but I won´t be sampling it: it´s the dead of winter right now and we´re in the midst of a cold front. Also excellent, as I can personally attest: the coats. Hope I´ll still fit into my new one once I´m done here...
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Argentina Day 1
Allegedly wrapping up a busy day of sightseeing in Buenos Aires. It is currently 9:30 at night, which means that Argentina will start eating dinner in about half an hour. Last night, we went out in search of dinner at around 8:30, and everything was deserted. Too late? Hell no. Too early.
I want to write about all the amazing, historic, thought-provoking and/or ridiculous things I've seen today, but I'm actually too overwhelmed by all of it to reduce things to something that makes sense. We saw the Casa Rosada, which is the presidential seat of Argentina-a flamboyant, gorgeous, ornate, sprawling pink building with angels and vines carved into the facade. The Cathedral was equally impressive, down to the thousands of tiles used to mosaic the floor in a flower motif. After all that lavish prettiness, Teatro Colon was a bit of a letdown, but there's still plenty of the good stuff to see tomorrow.
Lunch was a huge plate of house-made ravioli: pasta is serious business here, which is a relief as it allows me to leave the beef alone. After lunch, I dragged Andrea to a truly ludicrous destination, Tierra Santa--allegedly the "world's first religious theme park", and also billed as a chance to "enjoy Jerusalem all yearlong in Buenos Aires". Basically, it's Dollywood for Spanish-speaking Bible thumpers: you go in through a sounds n'lights Nativity scene, move back a bit to the creation of the world, zoom straight to the Last Supper, promenade down the life-sized Stations of the Cross, and conclude with a giant Jesus statue that resurrects itself every hour. Many of the models are 1970s semi-animatronic figures that seem like they were retired from the Pirates of the Caribbean: Jesus typically misses the bread when he lifts his hands to bless it. All in all, good wacky fun: I don't know why, but I'm absolutely fascinated by pop-culture´s attempts to make sense of Christianity, and this was definitely a...unique incarnation.
And now, dinner.
I want to write about all the amazing, historic, thought-provoking and/or ridiculous things I've seen today, but I'm actually too overwhelmed by all of it to reduce things to something that makes sense. We saw the Casa Rosada, which is the presidential seat of Argentina-a flamboyant, gorgeous, ornate, sprawling pink building with angels and vines carved into the facade. The Cathedral was equally impressive, down to the thousands of tiles used to mosaic the floor in a flower motif. After all that lavish prettiness, Teatro Colon was a bit of a letdown, but there's still plenty of the good stuff to see tomorrow.
Lunch was a huge plate of house-made ravioli: pasta is serious business here, which is a relief as it allows me to leave the beef alone. After lunch, I dragged Andrea to a truly ludicrous destination, Tierra Santa--allegedly the "world's first religious theme park", and also billed as a chance to "enjoy Jerusalem all yearlong in Buenos Aires". Basically, it's Dollywood for Spanish-speaking Bible thumpers: you go in through a sounds n'lights Nativity scene, move back a bit to the creation of the world, zoom straight to the Last Supper, promenade down the life-sized Stations of the Cross, and conclude with a giant Jesus statue that resurrects itself every hour. Many of the models are 1970s semi-animatronic figures that seem like they were retired from the Pirates of the Caribbean: Jesus typically misses the bread when he lifts his hands to bless it. All in all, good wacky fun: I don't know why, but I'm absolutely fascinated by pop-culture´s attempts to make sense of Christianity, and this was definitely a...unique incarnation.
And now, dinner.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Hello Argentina: How the hell does ¨ll¨ become ¨sh¨?
Ridiculously quick post just to inform concerned parties (Hi Mom!) that I´ve landed safely in Buenos Aires. More when I´m not navigating a language barrier on four hours of sleep.
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