Mike Down South

Due to some fairly inept food planning on my part, I’ve eaten through all the food in my house four days ahead of my move out. I’ve been kind of lazy about going to the supermarket, so I ordered take-out the last two nights. The issue with ordering take-out is that it requires me to talk on the phone in Spanish, which is much harder than talking to someone in person. I can’t hear as well or guess responses based on the other person’s facial cues. The last time I had to speak Spanish on the phone was a month ago when I booked the hotel Jeet and I stayed at and it ended in humiliating defeat (the person switching to English).

Last night I was ready for my next attempt at phone Spanish. I called an Italian restaurant and here’s how the conversation went down:

Guy: Hola. San Ceferino.
Me: ¿Hola. Puedo poner un orden para llevar? [Can I put[sic] an order to carry out?]
Guy: Sí. ¿Que dirección? [Yes. What address?]
Me: No, para llevar. [No, to carry out.]
Guy: Bueno, necesito tu dirección. [Right, I need your address.]
Me: Umm… voy a vos. [Umm… I go to you.]
Guy: Ohhh, bueno. [Ohhh, alright.]

So I put in the order and go down there to pick up my food.

Me: Hola. Llamé. [Hi. I called.]
Guy: ¿Ah, hablas muy poco espanol? [Ah, you speak very little Spanish?]
Me: (in my head) Hey! I’m trying!
Me: Mas o menos. [Sort of.]
Guy: Ah, sí. [Ah, yes.]
Me: ¿Como se llama esto? ¿No es “para llevar?” [What do you call this? It’s not “para llevar?”]
Guy: No, decimos “delivery.” [No, we say “delivery”] “Delivery” it’s the same, no?
Me: ¿Esto es “delivery?” ¿Cuando estoy aca? [This is “delivery?” When I’m here?]
Guy: Yes, delivery.

So according to what this guy was saying “para llevar” (for to carry) means delivery and “delivery” is what they call take-out. This couldn’t be right. There was another guy there who turned out to be American and was fluent in Spanish (purely to shame me, I’m sure) and he says, “Yeah, they just call it delivery.” I said to the guy, “No, me picking up. What do they call that?’ The American guy understood and asks the chef in back. After a brief exchange, he comes back to me and says, “He says they don’t have a word for it. They just call it an order.” Okay, I’m pretty sure that’s not right either, but I didn’t think I was going to get to the bottom of things in this place, so I left and ate a lot of Italian food while watching Jersey Shore.

Having learned from last night’s “para llevar” fiasco, tonight I called a Chinese restaurant careful to not say “para llevar” but they still kept asking for my address until I somehow conveyed that I was going to go to them. I thought it was smooth sailing from there, but then we got to this:

Girl: Tu total es treinta y uno. [Your total is 31.]
Me: Sí. [Yes.]
Girl: ¿Cuanto me pagas? [How much do you pay me?]
Me: ¿Umm… treinta y uno? [Umm… 31?]
Girl: (impatiently) ¿No, como? [No, how?]
Me: ¿En efectivo? [In cash?]
Girl: ¿Si, pero cuanto? [Yes, but how much?]

At this point I realize what’s going on. She wants to know what denominations I’m going to pay with because she wants to make sure she has the right change to give me. I’d seen this occasionally in Peru. But now I was confused because I didn’t know how to say “exact change” so I just said 31 again, which annoyed her. Finally we came to an understanding and I ate Chinese food and watched The Fighter (which is admittedly a less complementary pairing than I’d done last night).

I feel a bit off in Buenos Aires at this point. I’m still enjoying it, but I’ve realized I’m having fewer adventures than I was having earlier my trip. I guess a side effect of having a consistent place to live and is that I explore less as part of my daily routine. On the upside, I’m getting a lot done. I finished my first software pet project, started my next one, got a lot of Spanish studying in, and I’ve been going to the gym a lot.

But I’ve started to get that feeling like I had when I was working full time; each day feels like the last and time is just sort of drifting by. That was alarming because I got out of my last rut by quitting my job and traveling. What do I do when I’m already in South America? I thought of that episode of The Office where Michael Scott quits Dunder-Mifflin to found his own paper company, only to get frustrated there as well. After an argument with his employees, he says, “I should leave. I should go and… start my own paper company!”

A big part of this feeling has to do with the culture here. I’d heard before I got to Argentina that the social scene was very clique-y, but I didn’t think it’d be a huge deal. As it turns out, it really is very hard to meet people here. The first couple weeks I was here, when I’d approach people at bars, like 75% of the time they just refused to have a conversation with me at all.

I eventually found some bars here where the crowd was more open to odd, yet lovable foreigners approaching them, but then I had a new problem. I’d go out to the bars, meet a cute girl, get her number / facebook info, message her the next day to invite her to drinks and… nothing. I’d either never hear anything back or I’d get a “yes” followed by an, “oh wait, something came up” shortly after. That in itself isn’t particularly strange; I’d say that in the US it happens about 1/3 of the time I meet a girl in a bar. In Argentina this happened twelve times in a row.

I was getting worried that it was the isolation. When I’m staying in a hostel, I’m interacting with more people during the day, whereas in my apartment I sometimes go days without having a conversation with anyone in person. Was all the time alone making me unsociable on the nights I’d go out?

Finally, last weekend I met a girl and we did end up going on a date that went well, so I stopped worrying about whether Buenos Aires had turned me into some sort of socially backwards hermit. I was even more relieved when I was reading travel forums yesterday to research Cordoba (my next stop) and I found a ton of people bemoaning how hard Argie girls are to date and reporting experiences very similar to mine. One even said, “If you meet an Argentinian girl at a bar and she gives you her number, you might as well just throw it away because you’re never seeing her again.”

I’ll be leaving Buenos Aires next Tuesday when my apartment lease ends. Feelings on Buenos Aires are mixed. On the surface it has so much I like. I have enjoyed my time here despite the difficulty in meeting people, but I now realize that getting to know people is what made me feel “connected” to cities like Lima or Peru. I’ve liked it, but I can’t say I feel connected.

In the US, I see a lot of live comedy. I’ve been in comedy withdrawal the past few months, as I never hear of any comedy shows in South America. That was why I was so excited last weekend when I was having dinner with my friend Agustina and she told me that Buenos Aires has a comedy scene. Not only is there a lot of stand-up, there’s improv too! No sketch, sadly. I was really curious to see what Argentinian improv would look like, so last night I went to check out Misión: Improvisación in Capital Federal.

It’s a two man show, consisting of a little guy with a lisp and a tall guy who may or may not have been Javier Bardem.

I was expecting shortform improv (short scenes/games), lots of broad jokes / physical humor, lots of audience participation. Not that I think Argentinians entertainment would necessarily be really unrefined, but Buenos Aires is the first city I’ve been in that I’ve heard of any live comedy at all. I figured there’s probably not a comedy nerd audience that has patience for longform improv and they’d have to do sillier stuff to draw in normal people.

The show actually was longform. There was absolutely no audience participation except for little notecards they let people write phrases on for suggestions before the show. I was a big fan of this because I hate the improv shows that cater to the “improv comedy means I’m in the show!” kind of audience member. The first two scenes they did, they’d pick a style, then draw a notecard and do a twenty minute scene based on what the notecard said. The last scene was just as long, but had a more shortform feel because they were just plowing through all of notecards they didn’t use and injecting them into the dialog. The last scene actually got the best response, which is what I had expected and makes me more surprised they were doing longform.

I got the sense that the improvisers themselves were experienced actors but inexperienced improvisers. They were really comfortable on stage, but they’d make a lot of rookie improv mistakes like pausing awkwardly in the middle of a sentence to think of a line, laughing at their own jokes, or walking through imaginary props and scenery they established a few seconds earlier. Regardless, I was just so delighted that they were doing longform that it was easy to overlook a lot of the flubs.

Admittedly, I was probably especially aware of the imaginary set pieces because I could only understand about half of what they were saying. In the longform scenes, I was able to follow the stories, but I usually missed the jokes. I did catch a few that made me laugh. In one of the scenes, there was a king complaining that his kingdom was being overrun by dwarves. A few minutes later, he enters the stage while strangling a dwarf to death and as he walks away, says wistfully, “¡Ah! ¡Que linda matarlos a los enanos!” (“Ah! How wonderful to kill dwarves!”). I don’t think I’d find it funny in English, but for some reason it was hilarious to me in Spanish.

One of the parts that got a big laugh from the audience was when the actors played Mexicans. Like, before there were even any jokes – just the idea of being Mexican got a big laugh. I thought it was really funny because they were trying to do a Mexican accent by drawing out the penultimate syllables of their sentences (“estoy muy cansaaaaaado”) but they still pronounced their “y” sounds like j’s, which made them sound distinctly Argentinian.

The improv show lasted about an hour and as I was leaving, I saw that the theater had a stand-up show starting in a few minutes, so I figured I’d check that out too. I assumed I’d understand more of it, since it’s a lot easier to understand a single person talking than a conversation between multiple people. Apparently not so in stand-up. If I was understanding 50% of the improv show dialog, I was getting maybe 5-10% of the stand-up. All of the comics spoke extremely quickly, especially when delivering the punchline.

Even without the punchline and 90% of the words, I could usually piece together the general idea of the routine. It was basically indistinguishable from American stand-up except for the fact that it was in Spanish. Same premises: being poor, dating, sexual inadequacy, self-deprecating observations about their physical appearance.

There was a guy hanging out by the side of the stage watching other comics wearing a shirt that said “JewTube” and looking conspicuously Jewish. I was really hoping he was a stand-up waiting to go up because, as a Jew, he was guaranteed to be funny. I don’t think of Jews as fast talkers, so I was hoping he’d be more intelligible as well. I was excited when they announced the last comic and he walked out, but he actually spoke the fastest of anyone. I got virtually nothing except a snippet where he talked about how Jews are always being persecuted and how Christmas sucks. He got a huge response – the best of any of the comics there. One guy near me laughed so hard, he picked up a chair and started slamming it on the floor. I wish I could understand what the comic was saying, but it was nice just knowing that at least there’s a place in the world where Jews can succeed in comedy.

Coming home is still many months away, but I was recently talking to Al about the stuff I’m looking forward to doing when I come home. He told me that listening to me talk about my coming home fantasies made him understand how people feel when they listen to him talk about what he’s going to eat when his fasts end. So let’s start with food.

I’m going to make oatmeal with old fashioned Quaker oatmeal, fresh blueberries, and Nestle chocolate chips. I’m going to get a chicken cutlet sandwich from Remi’s (in Pelham, NY). I’m going to get nachos with cheese and three cheesy gordita crunches from Taco Bell (I really hope they’re still making these; they start and stop offering this item at random).

I’m going to catch up on all the TV I missed. I calculate 50+ hours of TV I want to watch (in descending order of priority):

I’m going to get a cool Android smartphone to replace the $30 LG stupidphone I’ve been using while I travel. I’m not sure which phone yet, but it will have Swype, which impresses me every time I steal someone else’s phone and insist on playing with it. I’m going to build a badass computer with water cooling built into the case and hook it up to two huge monitors. Then I’m going to buy Duke Nukem Forever (I’ve barely played computer games for years and never FPSs but it’s a remake of a game I loved as a kid and it’s coming out soon) and Portal 2 (have you played Portal? It’s great!).

I’m going to go out to bars wearing a suit. My shirt will be wrinkle-free because I used a garment steamer and didn’t pull it crumpled from a packed backpack and try to smooth it out next to a hot shower. My face will be freshly shaved using my old-timey razor and shaving brush. I will meet girls and tell them jokes that make sense because we’re fluent in a common language. Granted, the jokes will still only be funny to me, as they always have been in the US, but they’ll be told well.

I still haven’t decided what I want to do on the second day, though.

Update: Coincidentally, the day I post this is the same day I figured out how to get Hulu working in South America. I guess I’ll have to scratch most of the TV stuff off the list, but I have my next 54.2 hours planned out now.

I’ve been living in a studio apartment in Buenos Aires for the past week and I’m loving it. I’m definitely planning to find apartments from here on out in cities I stay in for more than a couple weeks in. Let me give you the tour.

This is the living room and it’s where I spend most of my time when I’m home. It’s really just so cool to have my computer in one place, always hooked up to the portable speakers and wireless mouse, always connected to the Internet (except now as I type this, my Internet has mysteriously gone out… usually I have Internet). There’s a big window so the apartment gets a lot of light, but I always keep the curtains drawn during the day otherwise the sunlight is blinding and too hot (though there is AC).

This is the bedroom (or the other half of the living room). I thought about cleaning up a little for the photo, but this is how it usually looks and I didn’t want to ruin the authenticity. Plus I’m pretty lazy about cleaning for any reason. I think I have a weekly maid, but I’m kind of confused about the particulars of that. I haven’t seen her yet.

This is my bathroom. The hot water in the shower runs from tepid to scalding, my control over which seems to be minimal.

The kitchen has unexpectedly become my favorite aspect of having an apartment. I tried cooking in hostels a few times but it was such a hassle that it wasn’t worth the trouble. It’s way better having my own kitchen. My go-to meal is steak. It’s fairly easy to cook, incredibly cheap at like $3-4 each steak, and delicious! When I lived in Seattle, it was always a bit of a challenge buying foods that would spoil fast, like fresh fruits and vegetables, but the advantage to being a bum and cooking all my own meals is that I go through groceries pretty fast, so I can buy stuff that spoils and not worry about it.

The big meal I was really excited for was oatmeal. It’s one thing I’d really missed from the US. When I said this to other backpackers, they always thought it was pretty weird because you can buy oatmeal in supermarkets and even order it in restaurants that serve breakfast. But! I make oatmeal in a very particular way that you can’t order in restaurants and I couldn’t make it myself in hostels because it requires a lot of ingredients that come in large quantities. Or rather I could, but I’d be throwing a bunch of stuff away.

I spent literally three hours shopping for the ingredients for oatmeal. Cinnamon and milk were pretty easy to find. Non-instant oatmeal was a bit tougher. Chocolate chips were really hard to find, but chocolate chips and/or fresh blueberries (amazing with both) are crucial to my oatmeal. Blueberries continue to elude me, which is strange because in America, the blueberries I bought were Chilean. Now I’m in Argentina and Chile’s right next door. I feel like they should just send some over. According to locals I’ve talked to, the supermarket I go to does carry them, just inconsistently and it doesn’t correspond to seasons or anything.

The first morning in my new apartment, I sat down for the breakfast I’d dreamed of. Oatmeal with chocolate chips, orange juice, and a new episode of The Daily Show (one of the few American shows I can watch online). Sadly the results were… underwhelming. The oatmeal here tastes pretty weird. It’s hard to describe how. I want to say it’s more grainy than the oatmeal in the US, but that’s like accusing it of being more oatmeal-y. It just seems more processed and bland. It was still tasty – certainly better than the complimentary breakfast (read: two pieces of bread) I got in most hostels, but not quite like oatmeal back home. It just means I have one more thing to look forward to when I return.

Weird oatmeal aside, cooking is a huge perk of having my own place. I was burning up a lot of time and money each day going out to restaurants for every meal, whereas now meals don’t feel like a big interruption. The problem is that now I have to find something else to blame my lack of productivity on.