my name is jonah

Where The Week Went: Christians, Muslims, Museums

2010-10-08T19:10:00.003-04:00

Eliza Griswold A week ago today, I had a chance to speak with journalist, poet and author of the recently published book The Tenth Parallel, Eliza Griswold. Deftly balancing on-the-ground reporting with a very broad understanding of the religious and political landscapes of some of the least-understood regions of the world, Griswold’s book follows the eponymous line of latitude (the tenth parallel is ten degrees north of the Equator) from Nigeria eastward, making trips to Sudan, Somalia, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Griswold tells her story from the inside -- at one point, her father’s role as the head of the American Episcopal church becomes very relevant -- but The Tenth Parallel is not a memoir, and people are paying close attention. (My interview with Griswold ended when the camera crew from ABC’s 20/20 was ready to shoot a segment for their recent show about Islam.) And even though Griswold’s story focuses on Islam and Christianity, the book has major implications for members of the third Abrahamic faith, Jews. Look for a forthcoming article in the Jewish Journal about our conversation.

Holocaust Museums
Speaking of my employers, the Journal ran my piece about the history and significance of some of the world’s best-known Holocaust memorial architecture. I tried to put the soon-to-open Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, designed by Hagy Belzberg, into the context of museums and memorials in Washington and Berlin. I could’ve mentioned other building projects -- the ones in New York City and in Israel are of equal interest and exhibit some of the same built themes.

MOT
And having just visited the Museum of Tolerance for the above-mentioned article, I found it hilarious that one of the characters on Modern Family -- the nerdy daughter, Alex -- is obsessed with going to the MOT. I can only imagine what they’re thinking over there in the offices on Pico Blvd. I guess they’re probably just happy that the shout-out they got this time around was better than the one they got from South Park a few years back.

"Israel is on the verge of losing Turkey's friendship"

2010-06-24T11:47:00.002-04:00

That's what Turkish Consul General R. Hakan Tekin told me in our conversation last week. Check out more from him here.

Disaster is the mother of comic invention

2010-06-14T23:38:00.002-04:00

This is absolutely amazing.

Published: Q&A with Peter Beinart in Jewish Journal

2010-06-14T23:31:00.004-04:00

I recently had the chance to talk with Peter Beinart, the writer whose recent essay in The New York Review of Books ("The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment") has taken the Jewish blogosphere by storm. My conversation was published in the most recent issue of the Jewish Journal. (And, since good things come in threes, I had two other articles in the same issue--though these were decidedly more community-based stories.)

With the promise of more to come.

Those Confusing Yellow Flags...

2010-05-25T18:02:00.003-04:00

Every time I see a car approaching flying one of these:

I actually expect it to turn out to be one of these:

And then I remember...I live in Los Angeles.

Published: Not my Grandmothers' Chicken Soup in Remedy Quarterly

2010-05-16T18:50:00.002-04:00

Sometime last year, friends of mine Ari and Jillian Bergman started Remedy Quarterly, a journal of writings about food. This week, the second issue arrived in mailboxes across the country.

The issue's theme is "Cravings," and the book includes a short story about my learning to make chicken soup from scratch in Argentina. It's only available in print, but copies and subscriptions are available here.

Remembering Kent State

2010-05-04T12:00:00.002-04:00

Many news pieces about the 40th anniversary of the shootings at Kent State University have been popping up lately; I wanted to draw your attention to my own contribution to this public remembering of a particularly dark day in our country's history.

It made the front page of The Forward this week, and I was happy to be able to help tell part of this story that's been overlooked thus far.

Published: Four Profiles of LA Jews & Israelis

2010-03-31T21:06:00.004-04:00

In the last month, I've had the chance to meet and profile a number of semi-prominent Jews and Israelis for the Jewish Journal and its sister publication, Tribe. Meeting these people was privilege enough; getting to tell readers about the exciting work that each one is doing is even better.

Michael Lehrer is a talented, passionate, and publicly minded architect.
Ori Dinur has managed to bring the best of Israeli culture, drama, and music to Los Angeles.
Shawn Evenhaim is perhaps the ideal embodiment of Israeli leadership in Los Angeles.
And Professor Judea Pearl, father of slain journalist Daniel Pearl, is impressive in too many ways to summarize here.

Please, take a look.

Los Angeles Gang Tours

2010-01-12T13:01:00.002-05:00

I can't say exactly what I was expecting when I went on the "LA Gang Tour" of South Los Angeles this past Sunday. The Political Correctness Brigade had already lambasted it as exploitative, sight unseen. What I found was, well, surprising. Check out my complete review for Los Angeles Magazine's Spyglass Blog here.

New Year, Not-So-New Clips

2010-01-05T22:10:00.005-05:00

I'm going to work on keeping this blog more up to date in 2010, but I've still got to do a bit of catch-up on 2009. So, here are my last two entries to the Los Angeles Magazine Spyglass Blog.

The first one, an impassioned review of an important photography exhibition at LACMA, is definitely worth a look, even though that show came down a few days ago.

The second one is not as special, but it did give me the chance to walk through the door - er, I mean bookcase - into LA's Magic Castle.

Gob Bluth, eat your heart out.

A Pair of Published Posts

2009-10-22T10:41:00.003-04:00

Forgive the alliteration. The Spyglass blog for Los Angeles is the latest venue to feature my writing. I covered a book-signing by Brian Wilson two weeks ago and a night of futurist excitement at UCLA last week. So it's official: I'm an LA-based writer now.

Just Published: Florencia Troisi Profile in The Argentimes

2009-09-11T12:34:00.004-04:00

Just before leaving Córdoba in June, I met Florencia Troisi, a young artist/entrepreneur who was all over the city's art scene. Now the Buenos Aires-based biweekly, The Argentimes, has published my profile of her.

Just Published: Danny Cepero Profile in Pennsylvania Gazette

2009-09-04T12:07:00.004-04:00

Earlier this summer, I got to meet one of the cooler graduates of the University of Pennsylvania, New York Red Bulls goalkeeper Danny Cepero. Check out my profile of him in this month's alumni magazine.

On the Road with Etgar 36

2009-07-08T03:20:00.007-04:00

A lot of you know about my other job: When I'm not writing, I'm an informal educator of teenagers. Here are a few pictures of our current journey. We leave Denver tomorrow, and I'll be on the road for another four weeks, just about. More pics to come.

Leaving Cordoba (4 of 5): Signs Signs Signs

2009-06-05T16:47:00.000-04:00

Almost every day, I go to the bakery. It’s less than a block from our apartment and the elevator ride down from the sixth floor takes longer than the walk along the street. And most days, I go twice; first, at around 8:30 am – medialunas for breakfast – and then again at around four or five for a bag of criollas, the crusty square biscuits that make for a perfect merienda, the third of an Argentine’s four daily meals. The sign above the bakery has faded over the years, but the name – Panaderia Gizeh – is still legible. (The Egyptian motif is limited to the name and a framed piece of papyrus with hieroglyphics that hangs by the oven.)

For months I didn’t know the bakery even had a name; I was too busy shaking my head at the sign above the Evangelina hairdresser next door, which has a picture of Brad Pitt on it. The actor stares off into the distance, his eyes shaded by dark sunglasses, a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

It’s the kind of sign that could only exist here. Like those of most of Córdoba’s businesses, the bakery and the hairdresser signs are printed on a waterproof fabric that is then stretched over a metal frame. I have to believe these are at least somewhat expensive, for two reasons: First, Bien Casero, a shop near our apartment that sells prepared foods to go, has two signs that hang on either side of their front gate that get taken in every night at the close of business. Secondly, the signs of most other small businesses here are sponsored advertisements for the products of much larger companies.

Tiny kiosks usually announce their presence with ads for either Beldent or Topline chewing gum. (Beldent is made by Cadbury; Topline comes from Grupo Arcor, which, with 27 factories across Argentina, claims to be the biggest candy company in the world.) Small restaurants and food shops mostly get topped off with Coke or Pepsi signs. The beer companies seem to have more or less complete control over the look of the bars here, and their names appear everywhere. (The most popular are Argentina’s Quilmes and Brazil’s Brahma, both of which are owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev.) Folding chairs, umbrellas, ashtrays – every conceivable surface is plastered with the name and color of a particular brew, to the point that the names of the bars themselves seem secondary, if not completely unknown.

Which isn’t to say that the names aren’t occasionally clever. Near Córdoba’s central courthouse, for instance, right next door to the Justice Cyber internet café, is the El Veredicto kiosk. Across the street, El Codigo restaurant serves lunch to the lawyers. But more often than not, the corporations take priority, and nowhere is this clearer than at the unbroken string of seven bars along the canal in the city center. The sign of each bar advertises a different alcoholic drink (Fernet 1882, Warsteiner, Cordoba Cerveza, Jim Beam, Budweiser, Brahma, Quilmes, Heineken), and hardly anyone refers to a single watering hole by name. “Let’s meet at la cañada,” they say.

One of the seven – Morrison Bar – manages to upstage the name of its patron company (Brahma) by plastering its façade with a huge portrait of its namesake, Jim Morrison. Which brings us back to Brad Pitt, and to this country’s rampant disregard for intellectual property rights. The Coffee and Tea Cafe, an upscale café that serves Cabrales-brand coffee at its two Córdoba franchises, has not only adapted the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf logo to make it their own; they’ve also incorporated a Starbucks mermaid into the shop’s décor.

Pizza stores seem to be particularly enthusiastic “borrowers,” and Córdoba has a MoMA Pizza (as in the modern art museum in New York), a Cerebro Pizza (as in the brainier half of that animated duo, “Pinky y el Cerebro”), and Charley’s Pizza (as in Chaplin).

But when it comes to decorating the signs of otherwise unremarkable businesses, nothing can compete with the United States’ most famous animated family. The Simpsons are huge here – this despite the fact that Rebekah assures me that much is lost in the translation – and images of Homero and the clan are used to sell everything from cell phone plans to locksmith services.

Hamburguesas Krosty in Nueva Córdoba is a genius bit of marketing, although I wouldn’t eat there if you paid me – making the shop even more like its animated counterpart than its owners might have intended.

It’s important to know, though, that these are the exceptions to the Argentine urban landscape’s general repetitiveness. On every block of every neighborhood in every city, the businesses start to look almost identical, and the things they sell are even more similar still. I state this with confidence, because I spent part of last month writing a guidebook chapter about the province of Córdoba, and finding restaurants that didn’t look or taste like all the others was not that easy.

For better and for worse, every barrio has just about everything it needs within a few blocks – a bakery, a fruit & vegetable shop, a butcher, a kiosk, a newsstand, maybe a restaurant or two – with the result being that people stay in their neighborhoods, just like I’ve been staying in mine. Nobody travels across town to get a pizza from the place with the pretty sign, or the clever name. There’s little reason to: the Pizza Napolitana (tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, roasted red peppers, green olives) is just the same.

It’s the people who own, work at, and support these businesses who make each one unique, and this is probably the aim behind what would appear to be a very unusual guerrilla ad campaign. Large, handwritten signs have been popping up around Córdoba recently, and they look like messages from one person to another.

“Fernando: I am waiting for you at McDonald’s so that we can make a toast with Coke.”

This is how the world’s most popular restaurant is promoting itself here in Córdoba? Another:

“Ana: I’m sorry for standing you up when we were supposed to meet at McDonald’s. I hope you forgive me.”

Very uncool, dude. But now that you mention it, I could go for a Big Mac…

Leaving Córdoba (3 of 5): Hombre de Casa

2009-06-02T18:21:00.008-04:00

Let’s go back to the mall for a second. It has all the standard stuff that you’d expect to find in a North American mall – a food court, a department store, lots of mid-aisle kiosks selling crappy jewelry – but there are a few surprises too. You can buy medical insurance. You can book a trip at the travel agency. You could even lease a car: In four small corners on the ground floor are four smaller cars – a Chevy, a Peugeot, a Citroën, and a Fiat – and each is accompanied by a man in a suit sitting at a desk, waiting to answer your questions.

The home exercise machines and fine leather products notwithstanding, the most luxurious item at the mall is the mall itself. The charms that have already worn off of similar malls in the U.S. still draw many people to spend parts of their weekends here. With wide stretches of polished stone floors and no sputtering cars to avoid, the mall is the perfect environment for parents, children, and baby carriages. Yet strollers are a rarity in this land of narrow and cracked sidewalks, so the mall has a fleet of loaners, and each is emblazoned with the Nuevocentro Shopping logo.

A word about “shopping”: What was a gerund in English turns into a noun en castellano. Shopping is not an activity; it is a place. The word, as far as I can tell, is always preceded by an article, and is used in sentences like:

Vivimos en la esquina de Duarte Quiros y Rio Negro, al frente del shopping. (We live at the corner of Duarte Quiros and Rio Negro, right across from the shopping.)

No, no vendo cospeles. Vas al shopping. (No, I don’t sell bus tokens here. Go to the shopping.)

Strange syntax aside, the mall is effectively just another Córdoba commercial street. Never mind the Lacoste, Timberland, and Puma shops. Never mind the Garbarino electronics store with its wall of flat screens playing nothing but futbol and Foo Fighters music videos. And don’t be fooled into thinking that only in the magical world of the mall do cafe waiters run around to the different shops with silver trays of coffee. No, this morning ritual takes place all over Argentina, the only difference being that on the streets outside, the trays are mostly plastic and are usually covered to prevent dust from settling atop the cafe con leche.

Nuevocentro Shopping is also home to shops that play essential roles for the barrio. These less glamorous, quotidian businesses are clustered around the mall's western end, the one furthest away from the Sheraton (and closest to our front door). There’s a newsagent, a supermarket, a shoe repair shop, an ice cream stand; I once bought a plumber’s snake to unclog our shower drain at the hardware store. And the shop on this row that we patronize most regularly is – perhaps not surprisingly – the laundry.

Every day, from 10am to 10pm, they’re there, the team of white-uniformed laundresses, always in plain view, always washing, drying, folding, pressing, and steaming, and always ready to drop whatever it is to receive our weekly two-baskets-worth of dirty clothes. The kids hanging out at the bottom of the cinema steps don’t concern them; they smile at me as we count out piles of remeras, pantalones, y ropa interior.

Having someone do your laundry anywhere is a privilege, but here, even though it’s cheap by U.S. standards (about four bucks a load), it's a genuine luxury, and I am pretty sure that we’re their best customers. It’s gotten to the point that they no longer ask me my name (they just write “JONAS” on the little green ticket) or for my phone number (which I still have not memorized). They’ve stopped raising their eyebrows at the number of t-shirts I bring them, even if I’m still a bit embarrassed by the gargantuan size of the plastic bags in which our clothes are returned – cleaned, folded, and smelling strongly of chemicals.

Recently Andrea – she’s the one who pulls her hair back with a thick headband that makes her baby face look even rounder – remarked to one of her co-workers at the lavanderia how funny it was that I was the one who they saw all the time. “Hombre de casa,” I heard her say, laughing. The words translate to “man of the house,” but it seemed clear enough that what she meant by them was quite the opposite sentiment. My command of this language may not be great – I later found out that what she probably said was “amo de casa” – but my read of the speaker was dead-on: that phrase literally means "a male housewife."

To these women playing their gender-appropriate roles, I am a source of amusement – the guy who takes care of his and his girlfriend’s laundry. But even if it doesn't make sense, I'd rather think of myself as the hombre de casa, the man who is of the house – this means cooking, cleaning, and laundry, sure – but both inside and also around it. Being of a house, after all, is way more fun when that house is in a neighborhood like this one, even if the laundresses occasionally laugh at you. Everything I've been writing about our life here in Barrio Alberdi derives from the simple fact that I genuinely enjoy the errands I run around here. I go happily from shop to shop, talking to the owners, understanding less than half of what they say back to me, smiling at them awkwardly and feeling thankful that there's a script for what my response should be most of the time.

I carry my purchases in a reusable nylon shopping bag – I call it my “abuela bag” – and it’s coming back with us to Los Angeles, flexible plastic handles and all. Made of tight-knit nylon, its light-blue and white stripes are reminiscent enough of the Argentine flag to remind me where it came from. Here's hoping I can bring a bit of this barrio to wherever it is that we live next.

Leaving Córdoba (2 of 5): Raul

2009-05-22T14:12:00.004-04:00

Raul, who looks about sixty and always wears a black knitted ski cap, is without a doubt the smallest of the small businessmen in our neighborhood. Every day except Sunday, directly across the street from the door to our apartment building, Raul sets up his spindly metal table, lays out his wares, and sells to the cars and people passing by.

This corner is a good one for him. Duarte Quiros runs straight from the center of Córdoba, past our shopping mall, and eventually out to the air force bases on the city’s Western outskirts. The intersecting two-lane calle – Rio Negro – takes cars from the south of Córdoba towards one of the city’s main avenues (Colón), its hideous central police station, and to the grounds of one of its better football teams (Belgrano).

Although I’ve never seen him make a sale, Raul says he’s been on this corner for the last twelve years. His business doesn’t seem to have a niche: Today, for instance, the red metal table was arrayed with tubes of flame retardant for fabrics and scrubbers that could’ve been for cars or bathtubs. It was pretty sunny today – nobody expected a 26-degree day in May, let alone three such days in a row – so most of Raul’s merchandise was propped up in the shade against the wall. On either side of his chair, from the door of Rebekah’s pilates studio to the door of the art-framing store, Raul had lined the wall with the following: A number of steering wheel covers (available in red or blue), two rubberized motorcycle cable locks (both blue), four stand-up air pumps for bike tires, ten tubs of a generic-looking pain cream, one large-button calculator, at least five unique wrench sets (both crescent and socket), and one of those beaded car-seat cushions that New York cabbies used to have. There was other stuff too that I can’t remember, but between what was on the table and what was against the wall, Raul couldn’t have had more than 150 products for sale, and he probably wasn’t stocking more than ten of any particular item. One thing I did know: All of it would fit into a single black plastic garbage bag at the end of the day.

Raul used to be a carnicero, a butcher – a not-uncommon profession here in this land of beef. But when he was hit by a car twelve years ago, he had to have a metal bar inserted into his lower right leg, and this left Raul unable to stand for long stretches of time. His career bagging, cutting, weighing, and flinging different cuts of Argentina’s best-loved food was over. Raul left his refrigerated display case in the city center behind, began selling here, and has been on the corner ever since.

Leaving Córdoba (1 of 5): Man about the barrio

2009-05-19T23:28:00.008-04:00

Today, standing on the curb of the busy two-way corridor between our apartment building and the mall across the street, I watched a new-looking taxicab zip by. I don’t know why it first caught my eye, but as it sped away I noticed it had the words “El Sueño de Luis” written on it in black plastic letters stuck onto the trunk. Clearly the car’s owner had dreamed of the car before he could buy it, I thought, and now that he had it, he was announcing his dream-come-true to the world.

Or rather, to the people he had already passed by. This was Luis’s Dream, but only the very rare passenger would ever know it. Who manages to flag down a taxi from behind? And who watches a cab drive away after getting out? A young girl, dropped off at her door after a particularly good date perhaps – she might watch the car spirit her companion away into the night – but even if she could read the words in the low light, what of it?

No, those who ride with Luis – and since the vehicle's name betrayed a pride that only an owner-operator could feel, I have to believe that Luis was the driver as well as the owner – those who ride with him likely have no idea how important the vehicle is to the man behind the wheel.

* * *

We haven’t been taking all that many taxis in Córdoba. The city center is pretty compact, and from where we live it only takes about twenty minutes to walk to just about anywhere you’d want to go. But back when we were going to Buenos Aires every other week for rabies shots, we were in cabs all the time, going to and from either the bus terminal or the airport. Once, on our way to catch an early-morning flight, we found ourselves in the back seat of a cab we’d apparently been in before. The driver remembered us; he’d taken us to the airport on another morning, picking us up at the same spot, right around the same time of day – maybe a little earlier that time, he said. (It was true. We were running late.)

That’s how small Córdoba sometimes feels. This is a city of a million and a couple hundred thousand people, and at least 10,000 taxis, and yet if you stay in your neighborhood, if you cultivate a routine, if you go back to the same kiosk for a coke in a returnable glass bottle on two successive Mondays, people will start to remember you.

* * *

I was thinking about all this while waiting for the light to change, outside the Nuevocentro Shopping mall, holding two large plastic bags of our clean laundry. It’s pretty convenient to live right by a mall. We see movies at the cinema, we print out our documents at its two locutorios, and when we’re feeling too lazy to cook, we sometimes go out for dinner in the food court. There’s a Disco supermarket there, so we end up shopping a lot in the mall, too.

Over the last months, though, I’ve been trying to avoid it. The mall is impossible to ignore: it has a three-sided Coke-and-McDonalds advertisement that is just about the tallest structure in the neighborhood. But I’ve been trying to run almost all of my errands at the local shops in our neighborhood, and the owners have begun to get very friendly, very talkative. It’s partly because I show up every day, partly because these businesses don’t see all that many foreigners, and partly because I finally have mastered enough castellano to actually be able to engage people here in some conversation. Whatever the reason, it’s been fun to get to know a little bit about a few of the neighborhood's fixtures, and it makes me sad to be leaving it so soon.

* * *

I hope that I get to meet Luis the taxi driver before we leave Córdoba, but I wouldn’t bet on it. So instead, over the next couple of weeks – our last weeks in Argentina for the foreseeable future – I’ll try to tell you a bit about the different places and people that I see around here in Barrio Alberdi.

Bariloche & Mendoza

2009-05-09T23:34:00.003-04:00

For those of you keeping track, we went to Bariloche and Mendoza for a bit recently. These are two of Argentina's biggest tourist destinations, and we certainly found out why. Check out some of the pictures to see for yourself. (Apologies for the silly captions. It started to feel very "children's book-esque," and I just decided to go with it.)

Murciélagos!

2009-04-10T15:20:00.014-04:00

At about 11:30 on our second Saturday night together in Alicia’s apartment, Rebekah and I lay down to watch a DVD we had rented from the shop downstairs. The titles had just finished when a tiny creature swooped in through the door and dove towards the foot of our futon. It came to rest atop the untucked sheet, and lay completely still.
We sprang out of bed.

“What is it?” Rebekah asked me.
“Turn it off,” I said, pointing to the television. I ran out of the room to get something with which to trap this intruder while Rebekah fiddled with the remote.
“Is it a bird?” she asked.
“It’s a bat,” I said.

* * *

Only hours before, while preparing what turned out to be an unexceptional pasta dinner, we were listening to an old episode of This American Life. When their scary-themed Halloween show first aired last October, Rebekah hadn’t wanted to listen to it alone. Now that I was back in Argentina, she cued up the episode. In the second act, Alex Blumberg tells the story of a woman bitten by a rabid raccoon in New York and, responsible reporter that he is, he decided to share “a quick public service announcement”:

“A bat can bite you in your sleep without you even knowing it and without leaving a mark. So if you find one in a room with a sleeping person, you have to catch it and have it tested. And if you can’t catch it, you should go to a doctor. I’m serious. I learned about this, it freaked me out and now I want to tell people.”

It worked. We freaked. We weren’t asleep when we saw the bat, but it was in our room, wasn’t it? None of the windows in the apartment had screens, but none of them were open at the time, either – too many bugs at night. Which meant the bat had been living with us! I mean, he could have spent many nights in our room! Couldn’t he have bitten us already? We wouldn’t have known a thing!

We trapped the bat under an overturned bucket and then started googling frantically. Everything Blumberg had said was true. Rabies is basically 100% fatal, and though bats aren’t generally rabid animals, the ones that act strangely – those that enter buildings or lie on bedroom floors motionless, for instance – are more likely to have rabies than others. And the disease, which exists on every continent except Antarctica, had reappeared in Córdoba only one year before.

We called our Argentine friends, Pamela and Martin, first. Then we called Candy, our landlord’s friend who had come to visit us at the apartment earlier that week. They were unfazed, neither by the fact that it was midnight, nor by our story. After all, the bat hadn’t bitten us. Pamela and Martin kindly indulged our yanqui paranoia, offering to take us to the hospital. Candy calmly told us that she had once seen a bat at the apartment before, but that they had managed to get it out of the house.

“Have you gotten rid of it?” she asked, as if it were that simple.

Rebekah was convinced that we should get rid of the bat. Alex Blumberg, however, had told us to keep it, to have it tested.

“What are we going to do?” she asked. “We’re going to go to a hospital, and they’re going to look at us like we’re crazy, coming in with a bat. And do you really think they’ll be able to test this thing?”

She had a point. I hadn’t yet seen the inside of an Argentine hospital, but from the stories I had heard, my confidence in the system wasn’t all that high. In fact, for precisely this reason, many American travel doctors recommend that people spending long stretches of time in developing countries (in other words, us) get all the vaccines they might need in the US before they leave. Including the vaccine against rabies. Neither of us had done this.

We slid a piece of cardboard under the bucket, walked it over to our kitchen window, and let the bat fly away.

We called my sister Lea (a 2nd-year med student) and Rebekah’s friends Puneet and Gurmukh (both doctors) for advice. “Our professors tell us that we shouldn’t get stuck with any needles unless we’re in the US or Canada,” Lea said. “And not really in Canada, either.” Puneet and Gurmukh were convinced we could find a private hospital that catered to rich people and foreigners, and encouraged us to get the vaccine.

We also called my parents, who began working their rolodexes. Within minutes, we were cc’ed on an email from a close family friend at the State Department, to the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. We later talked to the “duty officer” at the Embassy in Buenos Aires who gave us some names of hospitals in Córdoba. He assured us that Argentine hospitals – especially the private ones – were well equipped to administer vaccines. My mother began exchanging emails with a prominent medical anthropologist and medical doctor who runs an NGO that builds hospitals in developing countries around the world. He also suggested we get the vaccine.

* * *

At the infectious diseases hospital the next morning, the waiting room seemed unusually full. A woman came out of one of the examination rooms, crying. She breezed right by us and out the door. Rebekah was talking to the receptionist. A man was sleeping in one of the molded-plastic seats, his nose sticking straight up in the air, mouth open, nostrils on full view. He looked the way Charlie Brown does when he sings. I noticed a young boy nearby who was covered in some kind of rash, probably a symptom of another disease I should be (but am not) vaccinated against. We presented our passports to the skeptical woman behind the desk, and took a seat near the window.

The man sitting next to me was holding something in a plastic bag, some kind of bug. From his explanation it sounded as though this bug had bitten someone, the woman sitting next to him, probably. She did not speak or do much of anything. Occasionally, she would massage her ankle. I turned to Rebekah.

“We should have kept the bat.”

* * *

When we finally met with him, the doctor at the hospital informed us that the only place in the province of Córdoba that had the vaccine was the Anti-Rabies Institute, and it was closed on Sundays. So on Monday morning, thirty-six hours after the bat entered our lives and our bedroom, we got in a cab and gave the driver the address of the Instituto Antirrabico. He didn’t recognize the street name, but he said he knew where it was.

The institute turned out to be in one of central Córdoba’s poorer barrios, set in the middle of a scrubby grass lot. The only sign of any sort is the iron lettering above the entrance, but the first indication of what purpose this building serves is the unsettling sound of dogs barking. Whether the dogs were particularly angry, actually rabid, or just tired of being cooped up, I couldn’t tell. There were even a few dogs milling around – no leash, no chain, no enclosure – and one came up to me and sniffed my crotch. I was not thrilled. Dogs may be “man’s best friend” . . . but at an anti-rabies institute?

Carlos, an agricultural engineer with a grey mustache and a horseshoe of white hair around his head, greeted us at the door with a smile. He told us he didn’t deal with “la rabia,” but with Chagas disease. Only endemic to the Americas, and primarily found in poorer communities, Chagas disease is a real concern for health workers in Latin America. Rebekah, a medical anthropologist by profession and an activist on behalf of those less fortunate by disposition, immediately began peppering Carlos with questions.

The building hasn’t been updated since 1970. Carlos’s office is separated from the rest of the space by thin wooden walls about ten feet tall, and every surface is covered with stuff: maps of the province hang on the walls, drawings of insects are draped over filing cabinets, and crammed onto the desk in the center of the office is an array of used food service containers that contain Carlos’s specimens. He jiggled some bugs out of a styrofoam cup onto a white paper plate. “Chagas,” he said, knowing that neither Rebekah nor I would know the name of the insect that transmits the disease. One of them was still moving, but Carlos didn’t seem all that concerned. Another worker who had been following us around (it isn’t every day that two extranjeros come to the institute and take pictures) picked up a glass jar labeled “ajies” and showed it to me. The brown thing inside was definitely not a pickled pepper. “Escorpión,” he said, jabbing his fingers at the air in front of my face, to simulate stinging.

At this point the doctor came into Carlos’s office, so we didn’t find out what poisonous creatures were being kept in the coke bottle or the empty Quilmes beer can. Like everyone else at the clinic, the doctor was male, mustached, and over fifty, and all that distinguished him from the others was his white coat, which didn’t look like it had been cleaned all that recently.

He didn’t ask too many questions.

“Did you get bit by the bat?”

We tried to explain that we had heard that a person can be bit and not know it, but he wasn’t buying any of it.

“Do you have the bat with you?”

* * *

Summer in Córdoba is famously hot, so much so that during the hottest month – January – many businesses close their doors, and people head for cooler climes in the surrounding hills. But the hot weather sticks around, and it was still with us in March.

It wasn’t just the heat that was keeping us up at night; it was the uncertainty. We vacillated countless times over the next three days, trying to decide whether or not to get this vaccine, and eventually, when Rebekah began complaining of mysterious itches, headaches, a cough, and feeling feverish, our rational thinking broke in the face of our fear.

We got on a plane to Buenos Aires on Thursday morning and headed for the wonderful (and private) Hospital Aleman and began our series of vaccinations. This was more for our peace of mind than anything else, but it was well worth the 250 pesos a shot. The traveling back and forth to and from the capital (because the vaccine our friends at the Centro Antirrabico had was an older one that had a greater instance of negative side effects) is annoying, but it did allow us a few days to visit some shops in the Jewish barrio of Buenos Aires so we could stock up on food for Passover.

We’re getting our fifth and final rabies shot on Thursday. But we’ll still be sleeping with the windows closed. Especially since there is now officially a dengue epidemic in Argentina.

Published: Review of Two NYC Architecture Shows

2009-02-03T22:34:00.004-05:00

"The Muni-meter. It won’t ever make it into MoMA’s design section, but here it is, on a pedestal, pushed up against a white gallery wall, accompanied by an explanation of how the increased cost of Muni-metered parking in Chelsea discourages people from driving into Manhattan and circling around looking for a spot on the streets, resulting in an improvement in the city’s air quality."

That's just a pull quote designed to lead you, dear reader, to the New York Art Beat blog. There you'll find an article I wrote about two current architecture exhibitions. It's on the site's front page now, but you can skip directly to the article from here.

Words of Inauguration Day

2009-01-20T15:16:00.005-05:00

“The world has changed, and we must change with it,” President Barack Obama said in his inaugural address. It was one in a number of statements in the passive voice that characterized first speech as President. He used this mode not only when illustrating our present difficulties (“homes have been lost, jobs shed, businesses shuttered”), but also when assuring Americans about the challenges we face:

“Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this America: they will be met.”

No sooner had the words passed his lips than he quickly shifted gears. This generation of Americans would have to meet these challenges, and to inspire his people, Obama praised “the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things,” and brought as a reference the accomplishments of emblematic Americans throughout history: immigrants, farmers, slaves, sweatshop workers, pioneers, and soldiers who fought in wars of all eras.

As the speech went on, the President’s sentences became increasingly activated, and not with the hopeful “yes we can” of his campaign, but with an expression of greater confidence: “We will.” He didn’t shy away from poetry either, even when talking about subjects as down to earth as alternative energy sources: “[W]e will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.”

In his closing paragraphs, he succinctly summed up, better than any of the moronic talking (white)heads who have been proclaiming the start of a new “post-racial” era, the meaning of this moment:

“Because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger, and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass, that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve, that as the world grows smaller our common humanity shall reveal itself, and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.”

* * *

Can we all agree that Rick Warren was lucky to have been assigned the invocation? The uncomfortable task of speaking immediately after our Poet-in-Chief fell to Elizabeth Alexander, and her poem couldn’t help but fall short of Obama’s oratory. Its references to American workers fell flat, and because she spoke each syllable distinctly – as in “Any thing can be made / any sen-tence be-gun” – her reference to Obama’s comment about “the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables” felt stilted. (Almost as if it were being repeated by Senator John ‘I don’t quite know how many houses I have, but I can relate to your economic difficulties’ McCain.) If Alexander’s poem were given a public rereading, she would do well to ask someone else to do it.

* * *

Every good event needs a clear coda to let the audience know that it is over, and Rev. Dr. Joseph E. Lowery provided just that with his moving benediction. He began, his face half obscured by the podium’s microphones, by quoting a verse from James Weldon Johnson’s poem “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The rhymes that inspired those who struggled for civil rights felt completely appropriate, as did the other diverse sources upon which Reverend Lowery drew. After lifting lines from traditional songs (“Because we know you got the whole world in your hand”), adapting from scripture (“tanks will be beaten into tractors”), and invoking Obama channeling the Constitution, (“yes we can work together to achieve a more perfect union”), Reverend Lowery concluded with a gently humorous reiteration of the message of inclusion:

And in the joy of a new beginning,
We ask you to help us work for that day,
When black will not be asked to get back,
When brown can stick around,
When yella will be mella,
When the red man can get ahead, man,
And when white will embrace what is right.
Let all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen, say amen, and amen.

Unlike Rick Warren, who seemed to ask for forgiveness for our personal and national failings, Reverend Lowery asked god to “deliver us” and to “help us” to do right. With the wisdom of age, he imbued in age-old proverbs renewed wisdom.

* * *

It was clear that Reverend Lowery’s words hit home. Thank you, CNN, for showing us our new President’s head nodding in agreement, for showing us our last good President’s head bowed in prayer, and for not showing us (except when absolutely necessary) whatever it was the Departing Dude was doing.

Just Published: Art Review on NYAB Blog

2008-11-26T18:00:00.001-05:00

My latest published piece of writing just hit the blogosphere today. It's a review of a new photography exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York on the NY Art Beat Blog. For now, it's on the blog's front page, and I've provided a direct link to it here.

Calmness @ JFK

2008-11-19T18:58:00.005-05:00

The American Airlines terminal at JFK airport is calm by design. Gently curving trusses of white metal swing over the check-in counters, framing the top of a detailed mural of a world brought closer together, presumably by air travel. Seattle’s Space Needle sits just meters away from San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid, which is itself not far from the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the Eiffel Tower, and the Brooklyn Bridge. The color palate is very light, and looks even lighter under the ceiling.

But it’s calm for another reason, too: It’s completely empty. Even if my flight is full (and with the calculations that airlines do in these days of expensive energy to make sure not to fly with light loads, it very well might be), the experience I’ll remember is of a single line of very quiet travelers waiting to pass through one metal detector. The woman staring at our x-rayed belongings called out in a desultory voice “Please remove all jackets and shoes.” Her eyes never moved from the screen. On my way to gate 3, I must have walked by eight hundred empty black leather seats.

P.S. On my way to London yesterday evening, I had an empty seat next to me. Rough times for airlines might mean good times for fliers. For now.

Love (1): Political Culture

2008-09-03T22:00:00.001-04:00

On Wednesday of last week, every business in the province of Cordoba closed for the day so that a census could be conducted. All citizens were supposed to remain in their homes and wait for someone to come to their door.

The governor of Cordoba, Juan Schiaretti, organized this provincial census because his administration believed that INDEC, the national organization that conducts censuses every decade and estimates the rate of growth for the intervening years, was underestimating the actual population of Cordoba. This would mean that this comparatively wealthy province, a net-donor to the national government’s coffers, was getting short shrift on federal monies disbursed from Buenos Aires.

This was no theoretical exercise. Schiaretti, upon finding that he couldn’t balance his province’s budget, cut some (or all) of the pensions that had been held in the province’s pension fund. Understandably, this action was met with protests in July and August, parts of which became violent. It’s unclear who was behind the violence, but it is clear that the governor was, in part, responsible for his situation. He had been a vocal opponent of President Cristina Kirchner’s proposed taxes on agricultural producers, the controversial taxes that were voted down in a dramatic late-night Senate session in July. Had the tax hike passed, the additional revenue available to Cordoba might have obviated the need to cut these pensions.

I’m not totally certain of all the details here, but the preliminary census results came out two days ago. There are officially 3,216,993 people in Cordoba Province, a number that is 123,000 lower than what INDEC had estimated. So in addition to the complaints people had about the cost of the census, the questions that were asked, the way in which it was conducted, and the fact that not all workers were paid for the forced holiday, the basic goal of the census was undermined by its unanticipated results.

So although I'm heading back to a country in the midst of a heated presidential campaign, I will miss the lively public political culture here.

Love and Hate (Intro): The Trick Question

2008-09-01T00:00:00.002-04:00

A few months ago, back when we were living in Buenos Aires, an Argentine asked me:

“So, what don’t you like about Argentina?”

This, I now know, is a trick question. Argentines are famously proud of their country, and Portenos even more so. The correct response, I have since learned, is something along the lines of “I love Argentina; the best things about it are the food and the people.” Had I been speaking in Spanish, I likely would’ve stuck to these standard talking points. But at that particular moment, against my better judgment and ignoring the plaintive look on my girlfriend’s face, I let fly a list of complaints (in English), a litany that had been brewing for weeks.

I thankfully can’t remember what I said then. I remember backpedaling intensely afterward, trying to undo the damage that my ignorant, arrogant North American invective, had done.

Since I’m about to leave Argentina for an extended stateside-stay, I’d like to throw caution to the wind and tell you a few things I will and won’t miss about living here.

Choquequirao

2008-08-08T00:00:00.005-04:00

Got back on Tuesday from a week-long visa-renewal trip to Peru, four days of which were spent hiking to and from an Inca site called Choquequirao (pronounced Choke-uh-key-raoh). It's about 100 kilometers west of Cusco and not too far from its more famous neighbor, Machu Picchu.

Although they are close to one another, of similar styles, and were constructed virtually contemporaneously, there are many distinctions between these Inca settlements. I've not visited Machu Picchu (yet!), but was told repeatedly that it is an "intact" ruin, while Choquequirao was plundered by French treasure hunters in the early 20th century. Furthermore, Machu Picchu was rediscovered in 1911, and its buildings are far more completely (if not entirely) excavated. Only over the last twenty years has Choquequirao been the focus of archaeological study, and to date less than one-third of its ruins have been uncovered.

But what really distinguishes Choquequirao (and what initially attracted me to visit) is that, when compared to the mega-attraction of Machu Picchu, Choquequirao is all but empty. While Machu Picchu can be reached by a Peru Rail train, Choquequirao sits 32 kilometers away from the nearest town - and that route is only accessible by foot or by mule. So it's not surprising that Machu Picchu gets 100 times as many visitors in a year as Choquequirao does. And the trail, although it was hard, incorporating five vertical miles into its 24 horizontal ones, was quite peaceful and quiet, aside from the occasional passing mules and a few other trekkers. That's a far cry from the parade of 400 tourists who start the classic four-day "Inca Trail to Machu Picchu" every day. Depending on whom you ask, it takes somewhere between a week and a month for the Choquequirao trail to see that many hikers.

More on Choquequirao to come; in the meantime, I've put up a bunch more pictures here.

Learning Spanish in Argentina Today

2008-07-02T00:00:00.002-04:00

The last time I began studying a foreign language, I was in a classroom on the Upper East Side of Manhattan watching a heavily made-up sixty-year-old play out conversations between hand puppets she had named, cleverly, Pierro, Pierrete, and Papa Pierre. Papa Pierre kept getting angry with Pierro and Pierrette for being late to school, but it was our fault. The puppets had to wake up, shower, get dressed, and have breakfast, and it took us, 14-year-old Americans just beginning to learn French, way too long to conjugate all of the reflexive verbs.

My classes in castellano, the dialect of espanol spoken in Argentina, started off in a familiar way, albeit without puppets. My teacher in Buenos Aires, Natacha, quickly taught me a few verbs: to be, to go, to have. I learned a few simple conversations by heart – about who I am, where I’m from, what I do – and armed with that and a few more basics (numbers, letters, food and drink, clothing), I was ready to take my castellano to the calle. And although everything had to be happening in the simple present tense (yesterday I watch a movie; today I walk to a cafe; tomorrow I work at home) I managed to get around.

Everyone always says that the best way to learn a language is to go and live in a place where it is spoken. What they don’t always acknowledge is everything else you’ll learn about that place, besides the language. My lessons here haven’t only been a means to acquire the language in order to better understand the culture; they have offered me a window onto the culture itself, albeit a window with a very specific point of view.

What follows is a vocabulary lesson from Argentina today. Hopefully, in these few words, I can show you what I mean.

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Inflacion

When Natacha taught me how to order food in a restaurant she pointed out that although the menu reproduced in our textbook was very typical of Buenos Aires, the prices of the items had changed remarkably since the textbook’s publication. She looked with nostalgia at this relic of 2004, when a milanesa (a breaded piece of meat that is a lot like schnitzel, but which is made more often with beef) cost four pesos.

At the time of that class, about six weeks ago, four pesos bought only a café con leche. (Now, in Buenos Aires, the price is probably closer to five pesos.) Sitting in the restaurant where we had our one-on-one classes three mornings a week, Natacha and I compared the real restaurant’s menu with the outdated one in the textbook. Sure enough, the prices of nearly every item had doubled in the four years since the textbook’s publication.

Inflacion is on everybody’s mind in Argentina, from the newspaper reporters who are tracking its effects internationally to the shoppers at the grocery store finding that the prices of basic foodstuffs keep going up. While the sticker shock news from the US appears to be primarily focused on the price of gas, here the focus is on food, and I’ve been noticing the different ways in which restaurants change their prices here in Cordoba. Some have the foresight to use ink that can be easily removed. Others put opaque stickers over the original prices listed on wall-mounted signs. When looking for a nice restaurant to take Beki to for her birthday, I came across a well-dressed maitre d’ working in his off-hours, erasing the penciled-in prices on the leather-bound menus and penciling in new ones.

I had seen reports of changes in the price of food here before, but never one as concrete as the one La Voz del Interior published this past week. They listed the prices of an imaginary basket (la canasta) of typical foods collected the previous Saturday (June 26th) in four major Argentine supermarkets, and compared them to the prices of the same foods on March 1. Nearly everything an Argentine family of four could need had gone up in price over the four-month period. Ground beef (a kilo was up 39.3%), spaghetti (500 grams, up 31.9%), butter (200g, up 7.4%) Coca-Cola (2.25 liters, up 10.5%), and toilet paper (six rolls, up 35.7%) had all risen in price. Even if fruits and vegetables were a mixed bag (the prices of apples and lettuce rose by more than 30% each, while those of potatoes, carrots, and oranges all fell by 10% or more), the overall effect was that the basket now costs 16.5% more than it did when the farmers first struck.

That farmer’s strike (huelga) will bring us to our next word, but first one more new word, one I thankfully haven’t heard in a little while: desabastecemiento. Though it has no English equivalent, it could be defined as “the inability of a society to adequately supply or provide for its citizens.” Perhaps you’ve seen newspaper reports of the food shortages that have been afflicting this country. Perhaps you’ve heard about the rationing of certain products. Perhaps you’ve seen pictures of bare refrigerator shelves in supermarkets, shelves that would normally be stocked with fresh bags of milk and dairy products, with kilo upon kilo of the grass-fed beef for which this country is famous, the beef which also once made it rich. The roadblocks (paros) have been lifted, and the most recent of the three farmers’ strikes has been called off, but the disagreement between the major farmers’ associations and the government of Cristina Kirchner over how to tax exports of soybeans – the crop that is currently making some people in this country rich – and how to distribute the wealth the beans bring, is far from over.

Something worth considering: When there’s a stoppage in the usual provisioning of Argentina’s population with food and other necessities, there’s a long and technical-sounding word for it, desabastecemiento. People in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods bang pots and pans in protest. But not too long ago, tens of thousands of people gathered to draw attention to the fact that many of their countrymen, the ones who live far from the wealthy capital, far from the soybean-stuffed provinces of Cordoba and Entre Rios, go without food on a regular basis. The words were much shorter and simpler: Hambre. Pobreza. And, as is evidenced by the ever present garbage-pickers who roam the streets of our neighborhood here in Cordoba, their situation hasn't improved much in the past year.

- - - - - - - -

Huelga

This week is my last in a month-long Espanol Para Extranjeros class at the National University of Cordoba. Three hours a day, five days a week, for four weeks. To learn the past tense, our teacher Veronica had us read a postcard that describes a trip to Bariloche. The writer devotes her last paragraph the delay she experienced on her return: “Tuve problemas para volver porque había huelga de personal de aeropuerto así que llegué a Buenos Aires dos días de demorra.” What kept our fictional speaker from reaching Buenos Aires on time? A huelga, or strike. “Just like the one being waged by municipal workers here in Cordoba,” Veronica explained.

Wait, wait. I had known about the farmers’ recurrent strikes. But the municipal workers of Cordoba?

When Beki and I first arrived in Cordoba, one of the most unusual things was to see street vendors selling choripan, a local sandwich of chorizo and bread (pan) on the main city square, the Plaza San Martin. “Chori, chori, chori,” they would call out from their hastily erected stands, usually no more than a table of ingredients, a grill mounted on two metal sawhorses, and a ring of linked sausages, cooking slowly. The lines of people were long – just like the lines for the buses, and at the banks, and waiting at the kiosks where bus tokens were sold – and when the wind changed, the line would waver as everyone in it moved to try to avoid the smoke from the grill. By 11am every day, the plaza was filled with the smell of chorizo, and felt vaguely festive.

Like most festivals, this was short lived: Most of these food vendors are now gone. The municipal workers have returned from their strike – the patrolmen who write tickets for illegal street peddling included.

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Colador

Life has been, by linguistic necessity, pretty basic. Then you need to buy things.

How would you describe a strainer if you didn’t know that word? What about a metal collapsible drying rack for laundry? Trying to find the simple necessities that don’t come with your “fully furnished” apartment (departemento amoblado) in Cordoba isn’t easy. I described what I later learned to call a colador as “a thing that is something like a spoon, but which is used for tea, where the water goes through it, but the tea leaves do not.” And after nearly five minutes of hand gestures, broken Castellano, and explanations that I was not looking for an electric clothes-drying appliance in a supermarket, I finally managed to find a drying rack that holds a load of clean, wet laundry. I can’t remember what the word was, but now that we have one, I don’t think I’ll need to discover it again.

Cacerolazo in Cordoba

2008-06-17T00:00:00.001-04:00

Over the past three days, a long weekend that included a Monday holiday called “Dia de la Bandera,” the flags came out, although probably not in the time or manner some people might have hoped. Despite a stadium in Buenos Aires full of fans clad in sky blue and white, there was no cause for celebration on Sunday when the national team barely eked out a 1-1 tie in a World Cup qualifying game against lowly Ecuador. But the flags did fly tonight when, at precisely 8pm, a cacerolazo started in city centers across Argentina. A form of protest typified by the banging of pots – in Spanish cacerola, hence the name – this cacerolazo, organized at least in part by text message, showed that even on the 97th day of the conflict between the government of Cristina Kirchner and the group of agribusinessmen known here as el campo, this disagreement that began with a hike of export taxes on soy and corn looks very far from a resolution.

We heard the car horns first. Our apartment is in a section of the city called Nueva Cordoba, which is packed with new high-rise apartment buildings, many of which are owned by members of the campo. As our nighttime doorman Marco said with a grand gesture, “All of this is made of soy.” From our balcony we could see people standing on terraces banging pots and pans, clicking away with cameras, holding up cell phones, and yes, waving flags. After half an hour of noise, Rebekah and I headed to the shopping mall in the center of Cordoba which fronts onto a plaza and a prominent six-way intersection. I’d seen fans of the River Plate football team celebrating their national championship there two weeks earlier.

We found what might have been five or seven thousand people thronging the streets, armed with drums, empty plastic coke bottles, whistles, party noisemakers, and pots, pans, and other kitchen utensils so battered and dented that they must have been set aside for this very purpose. Parents carried children on their shoulders; cars roving the side streets were filled with entire families, and they honked their horns, flashed their lights, and trailed waving flags from their windows. As we got closer to the mass of people, which had halted the progress of, and then surrounded, a line of cars, trucks, and even an empty bus, everyone became very quiet. I noticed an eerie plume of smoke rising from the middle of the throng, the place where moments ago, the flags were being waved most wildly. A number of people had both of their hands raised, reinforcing a silence and stillness that was unsettling. Suddenly, waves of a song, the national anthem perhaps, swept through the crowd, which began to bounce, clap, and make noise even more energetically than before.

Two-and-a-half hours later the television was still broadcasting live images of city squares around the country filled with people. Here on the corner of San Lorenzo and Chacabuco, though, only the occasional car horn could be heard passing by.

Our Palermo Apartment, Before Leaving

2008-06-01T23:11:00.005-04:00

Our next-door neighbor in apartment #5 had been watching TV for twenty straight hours. It started at around 5am on Friday night/Saturday morning and didn’t stop until after midnight the next night. Until that point, we had only thought ill of our other neighbor: She sings warbling songs with her band twice a week and uses an annoying “all major scales, all the time” method to teach her voice students. She is also training her dog in an unusual manner; from here it sounds like she’s saying the Spanish word for “bitch,” over and over.

Life here isn’t perfect but I’ll be sad to leave our little loft in Palermo.

The bedroom and bathroom are perched atop a flight of stairs, yet to call it a “loft” oversimplifies this compact and complicated pile of materials. Opposite our front door, a brick wall rises from the sunken concrete floor. It’s one meter wide, one brick deep, and it runs almost the entire height of the apartment. The bricks are a pinkish color and seem even pinker surrounded by thickly applied pink mortar. The wall nominally buttresses the kitchen ceiling/bathroom floor, but really its role is more symbolic than supporting, announcing a bit too proudly: “This is a Loft!”

Despite this not being the most beautiful wall ever built, despite the apartment’s being put together in a way that is less than exact, it is cleverly constructed. Por ejemplo: On the loft’s upper level, a bridge connects the wood floor of the bedroom to the tile floor of the bathroom. A square-shaped panel of gray metal wire reinforced with a few metal bars, this bridge is connected to the brick wall on its third side and has a waist-high metal railing on the side that overlooks the front door. This floor panel creaks when you step on it, but only yesterday I realized that this translucent bridge allows more light to pass from the skylight above through to the kitchen below than an opaque surface would.

Clever, no? This way, at least some filtered daylight falls onto the kitchen’s twin marble countertops. The marble and the brick are two conspicuous material displays of luxury in this otherwise unremarkable concrete apartment, and they help the owners market the place to us extranjeros. To rent this furnished apartment in Palermo Viejo for a month costs a little more than seven hundred US Dollars. As with so much else in this country, what to us seems reasonably cheap looks shockingly overpriced to the locals.

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Before we go to a new city and a new living situation with new idiosyncrasies, I’d like to mention a few more details from our apartment that have added dashes of unexpected color to our life here.

Garbage goes out to our metal garbage tree, a wire box mounted on a steel post stuck into the sidewalk. The Buenos Aires city government’s TV commercials tell us to bring our basura to the curb between 8 and 9 pm, Sunday through Friday nights (and never when it’s raining) so official trucks can make their pickups overnight. Far more frequent are the cartoñeros, people who troll the streets at all hours collecting cardboard and paper. The carts vary from smaller pushcarts that look like converted supermarket models to larger rickshaw-style ones mounted on car tires complete with hubcaps. These latter carts are often laden with impossibly large nylon bags brimming with paper, cardboard, and broken-down boxes of all sorts. Occasionally a group of garbage-pickers will ride by in a horse-drawn cart, retrieving metal and other recyclables from this city’s refuse heaps.

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Let’s talk about water. Our water heater is a 30-liter gas-powered cylinder that sits under the kitchen counter; every time it starts working, we can hear it fire up. This is one of my favorite sounds ever since the week when we didn’t hear it. We saw our handyman Ricardo every day that week when he came to relight the heater’s pilot light.

Opposite the water heater is a small washing machine. It takes all day to (loudly!) wash a load of clothes, and the better part of another day to dry them. Rebekah found a laundress on our block, Cristina, and she’s become one of our best friends in the neighborhood.

We have other fun appliances: A bidet in our bathroom that gets dangerously hot when the sink is turned on in the kitchen. (Think about it.) A voltage regulator powering our twin Macs that occasionally sighs mechanically beneath our feet. A stove that we light with matches, wooden stick matches that are sold in red boxes of two hundred and twenty two.

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Much of this will change; some of it will not. In any case, we’re off to Cordoba tomorrow.

Some Pictures of Buenos Aires

2008-05-26T23:44:00.004-04:00

I took a bunch of pictures and put together a few into a slideshow. These are pretty typical tourist sites, except for the few at the end, which are more specific to our neighborhood and our day to day life.

The link is here. Hope you enjoy.

Drinking Coffee in a Maté Culture

2008-05-23T17:35:00.000-04:00

In my neighborhood of Palermo Viejo on Calle Jorge Luis Borges is a café called Brownie. The small store – one table inside and two more on the sidewalk – has its menu of coffee drinks written in chalk on a cappuccino-colored wall behind the counter, and there’s usually a plate of brownie bites to nibble on. It feels like a bit like a coffee shop on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, aside from the brisk business it does selling cookies to the girls from the two nearby Catholic schools, whose plaid skirts and loud conversation remind me more of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. But all of this is beside the point, because if you’ve made it to Brownie, you’ve found what might be the best espresso in Buenos Aires.

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Drinking coffee in BA is challenging. The espresso is quite bitter and it occasionally tastes chewy, even when you don’t find a few stray grounds at the bottom of your cup. Porteños don’t seem to notice: They mostly drink coffee with milk, more of it in their cafe con leche than in their smaller cortado. These two drinks can be ordered anywhere and cortado is a particularly wonderful creation, with a flexible definition: sometimes it’s piping hot, other times lukewarm, and the small cup, mug, or glass in which it is served may or may not be topped with frothed milk.

Judging by the reactions I’ve gotten when I order straight espresso, drinking it solo is a rarity here, and I have taken to smothering mine with one of Argentina’s huge packets of sugar. Except when I’m in the capable hands of César and Ornella, the co-owners of Brownie, that is. How do they get it right? According to Ornella: “We use the best coffee, the best chocolate for our brownies, the best of everything.” Their beans are domestically roasted and are used in other cafes, places whose espresso can’t compare with Brownie’s, which makes César and Ornella seem even more like alchemists. Whatever the reason, I’ll just keep supporting them at it, one tiny glass at a time.

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Brownie has been open for eight months. Its small location in a wealthy, touristy neighborhood, along with its decidedly Norte Americano name and fare mean that it is not only an exceptional joint in this city but an exception to the city’s general rules for coffee. Those rules are changing, however, as is the coffee market. Starbucks has been planning its entry into the Argentine market for over a year and now their future location at the Alto Palermo mall is marked with a sign reading “Muy Pronto.” (The store is set to open by the end of this month, but unless they’re offering soy lattes, I’m not that interested.) The company, which took its time to hone its business model to fit the local palate, has reportedly come up with their answer: the dulce de leche Frappuccino.

Our Lovely Green Lady of the Beans is hardly the only one changing the coffee game in town; Havanna, one of a number of coffee shop chains here, has just started offering coffee-to-go, in convenient and familiar-looking paper cups with plastic lids. Paper cups and plastic lids: just two among many things taken for granted in the US that are, for better or worse, being consciously imagined and carefully introduced here in BA.

This is a big change, and to understand just how big, you’ve got to know that coffee-to-go in this city is presently available in one of two ways: Folks who live or work close enough to a café can get delivery, which comes on a silver platter in a glass or mug. I don’t know how the used dishes get returned but the sight of a waiter walking down the street, as if the desk, cash register, or kitchen counter that is his destination is just another more distant table in his serving zone, is common enough to assume that they’ve figured that part out. Alternatively, you can buy an open-topped styrofoam cup of coffee from one of the many salespeople who troll the streets of Palermo every morning. They work regular beats, pushing wire-framed carts that hold between nine and twelve thermos bottles, the red ones filled with coffee, the blue ones with milk. Once you’ve made your purchase though, you’re trapped with a brimming cup of steaming coffee: It’s more like “coffee-to-stay” – until the level and temperature of the drink have dropped enough that you’re willing to brave the walk down the street.

One can’t say enough about how great the café culture in Buenos Aires is. The number of people sitting at sidewalk tables, conversing over coffee and medialunas at 9:30am on a Friday morning, is, simply put, an urban miracle. One might reasonably worry that if cafe para llevar catches on here, it might detract from that culture in some way. I’ll keep my eyes open.

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No account of Argentina’s hot liquid stimulants would be complete without mentioning maté.

It’s the country’s unofficial national drink, and although not everybody likes it, nearly everyone has an opinion about it. To understand this tea that is drunk throughout Latin America, just imagine the exact opposite of the “high tea” they serve at Chicago’s Drake Hotel. If English tea – that dainty hot drink in a porcelain cup that contains not a shred of leaf – is your WASPy mother-in-law, then maté – drunk in groups through a shared metal straw out of a hollowed-out gourd packed with leaves – is your stoned college roommate.

Walk through any weekend market and you’ll not only find the gourds (called matés) for sale, but you’ll also see them in near-constant use by the vendors. Any supermarket maté aisle (to find it, just follow your nose) will likely stock ten or more different brands of loose maté leaves in brick-shaped bags of varying sizes. The brands’ names and the packaging alone tell you a fair amount about maté: Some packages talk about the tea and its taste (many are called suave, or smooth), the names of others are often allusions, some geographical (one popular brand takes its name, Taragüi, from the indigenous name for Argentina’s maté-growing Corrientes province), others conceptual (Nobleza Gaucha, another brand, translates as “Gaucho Nobility,” the behavior expected of the Pampas’ cowboys as well as the name of an early Argentine silent film). From such an array, how can one choose? Go for a maté that has “less dust,” or one that comes “with stems?” One brand is is so insistent about the quality of its product that it resorts to repetition (“this smooth maté does not relax and does not relax and does not relax”) – is this better or worse than the one that is simply called “Romance?”

I had my first taste of maté one evening last week at the house of two friends of Rebekah’s, Mirta and Oscar. (Unlike coffee, you can’t order a maté in a café, not as far a I can tell.) The tea came with a much-needed lesson; maté may look a bit more laid back than Western-style tea but it has many more rules associated with its consumption. First and most important, the water must be heated but not boiled. The leaves, enough for about twenty pots of tea, are put into the maté and then shaken up to eliminate any air pockets and to evenly distribute big and small leaf pieces. The hot water is then added slowly until the leaves are saturated. There will be some extra watery tea – this is the first maté, and it is not to be drunk. The cebador, the person who serves the maté (this word is not used in any other context), must suck the liquid through the metal straw, or bombilla, and spit it out. Then he (or she – everyone drinks the stuff, and anyone can be cebador) adds water to make the maté and passes the vessel to the first drinker and the cycle begins. Each drinker drains the maté of its liquid and then returns it to the cebador, who then refills the maté for the next person. The cebador is last in the cycle to drink, after which the maté begins its way around again. People sit like this for hours.

We only drank our maté for about an hour, but that gave me enough time to learn a few interesting facts from our hosts. First, because the temperature of the water is so important and must remain constant, the best implement is a thermos, and you’ll see people carrying them all around the city. There are even signs in cafes advertising hot water where they’ll fill your thermos for a peso. I was told that maté should not be drunk on ordinary streets – only in Uruguay and Paraguay, where the drink is even more popular than in Argentina, is this considered acceptable behavior. As our cebador Oscar put it, you need three things to really enjoy maté: “a newspaper, sunshine, and to be sitting in a square.”

According to our hosts, the lower and middle classes favor the drink more than the rich, and the old drink more of it than the young do. Maté can also be flavored with bits of orange or grapefruit peel, coffee grounds, or even chocolate, but we drank ours straight and sweet, with Oscar adding a small spoonful of sugar to the brew before every pass. It had a pleasant warmth and a dull sweetness, and after eight cycles, I felt pretty good. Awake and aware, but not jittery, not buzzed. Not surprising: Maté has a type of caffeine in it, which is called “mateine.”

The taste of maté is tough to describe, but it has a definite burnt flavor, and it can numb your mouth in the same way as strong coffee or red wine. Perhaps I’ll get better at describing it as I get better at making it: I’m incorporating the occasional maté into my afternoons here, drinking it from my very own redwood maté and through a supermarket-bought, stainless steel bombilla. That’s me, Jonah: the gringo wannabe gaucho.

Starting somewhere

2008-05-18T00:00:00.001-04:00

You've gotta, or so goes the saying. So I'm going to start with guidelines:

The writing on this blog will be straightforward and as cleanly edited as possible.

I will only write about subjects and events that are reasonably close to me, with an eye toward direct reporting. I'm going to stick to what I can see, hear, and experience and my posts will contain within them something of the place(s) where they were written.

I will read and research widely and carefully in order to write informed posts.

Written posts will be occasional and thematic.

Lastly, while staying within the guidelines I've just set out (striving for clarity and accuracy; choosing subjects based on proximity and access; ensuring that the occasional posts are coherent and interesting), I plan to incorporate my awareness of "goings on in the world" by referencing the "stuff" that's informing my point of view at the moment. Those references will take various forms: links, quotes, references, pictures.

Is all this too obvious? Did I just over-think something as simple as a blog?

If so, I apologize, and the place to start is here. We're at the end of the beginning. I've cleared my throat long enough. More to come.