Write Standing Up

I’ve been meaning to write a post about money in Argentina for awhile but things keep getting in the way. And then about a week and a half ago I had an unpleasant experience that wiped everything else from my mind–I remembered that I’m actually in school. I know, I know, I thought I was just here to ride my bike and try to figure out the bus system (which by the way IS a full time job). But no, academics poked up its ugly head and tried to ruin my carefree Argentina existence. But, don’t worry, now that I’ve crammed half of a semester’s worth of work into five days and survived my first set of parciales, I can go back to getting on the wrong busses and writing the occasional blog post. Phew. I know you’re all relieved.

And so, money in Argentina. Sometimes it’s hard to buy things here. Why? Because no one ever, ever, ever, EVER has change. This has something to do with the government taking money out of circulation in an attempt to stop the peso in its spiral of devaluation doom. Something like that, but I’m not an economist. The point of this is that if all you have is a 100 peso note (~$25)…sorry ’bout it, nobody wants your dough.

Feel free to try. You’ll be met with sighs of exasperation and eye rolls and questions of “¿no tenés algo más chico?” or “¿un pesito tendrás?” Answer no and there’s a decent chance you’ll be sent packing without whatever it is you were so naively trying to buy. If you rack up a bill of, say, $61.17, you will first be asked if you have 2 pesos so the cashier can give you two twenties and not have to part with any sacred small bills. Refuse this and you will be asked to donate your 83 centavos to the firefighters or the children’s hospital or insert-random-charity-here. I have my doubts as to whether my centavos make it the bomberos or not but seeing as that’s less than a nickel, how can I refuse? And besides, if it’s save some poor sap from counting to 83 then I’m all for it.

Or so I’ve convinced myself. And over the past three months I have made an effort to pay in small bills, count out monedas and apologize profusely if I ever pay with anything larger than a 20. Macky and I even tried not to get too annoyed when gas station attendants overfilled our gas tank just to get the amount to an even number. But just a few days ago a friend and I tried to take a taxi. Actually we did take a taxi and then when we got to our final destination and then realized we both only had 100s. Naturally the taxista had no change. It was Sunday morning so no kiosks could change our bill (assuming they had small bills in the first place). Luckily, the friend we were visiting was willing to pay up…

This was when I realized that this DRIVES ME NUTS. It must be my overblown United States of American ego, but I don’t want to spend 20 minutes trying to change a bill. I want my change. I want my 83 cents. All I want to know is, WHERE MY MONEY AT?

I’m not sure what this says about me but for the moment I’m just going to file it under interesting-insight-into-my-cultural-entitlement and leave it at that.

This blog post is a few weeks late but as they say, better late than never. And in this case it might actually be better late than on-time because I’ve had some time to reflect on the experience and post something a little more nuanced than I’m really tired.

My first week in Cordoba I started volunteering with Un Techo para mi Pais, an organization that builds emergency housing in poor and marginalized barrios (neighborhoods) and then continues to support these communities after the construction by funding daycares, helping kids with school work and investing in local projects.

Two weeks ago I joined about 300 other volunteers in a construction weekend. We spent two nights in an elementary school in Pueblos Unidos, a barrio half an hour outside of Cordoba. For two days we dug post-holes, nailed together boards and got to know each other and the families we were building for. Over the course of the weekend Techo built 30 houses, providing 30 families that most basic necessity of shelter.

My cuadrilla (work group) built a house for a Peruvian man named Lester whose house collapsed in the huge storm that rolled through Cordoba in late January. Lester is going to school to be a chef and the tuition is expensive so he hadn’t been able to repair his house. Since the storm, he’d been living with neighbors. Lester and his father-in-law Victor helped us out with the construction, and they put all of our shoveling skills to shame. Victor impressed/scared everyone by scrambling around on the roof and hauling heavy boards and sheet metal in flip-flops.

Lester’s adorable 4-year-old daughter Jasmina and a pack of neighborhood children also joined in on the fun, running around barefoot and playing with hammers and other dangerous construction equipment. This got me thinking about the Argentine attitude towards safety which goes something like “survival of the fittest” or “just don’t be stupid.” You know you’re not in the USA anymore when you take the machete away from the seven-year-old and say “Here, have a hammer instead.” (Contrast this with working at Mary Johnson where you’re not allowed to throw snowballs or climb up the slide and you have to record carrot-stick-for-carrot-stick exactly what everyone ate for snack.)

Each day we ate lunch with Lester, Victor and the neighbor family, stuffing ourselves on salty chicken, pasta and polenta and sucking down several liters of Coke. Turns out it’s hard to find any other liquid in the barrio. If I ever said I wouldn’t drink Coke even if my life depended on it I now take that back, because it did and I drank it.

We put the last nails in the roof after dark on Sunday night. I watched the sunset from on top of a house that had been only a dream 36 hours before. I finished the weekend dehydrated and exhausted (sleep isn’t high on the list of Argentine national priorities…probably because highly caffeinated mate is) but exhilarated. It was fulfilling to build something real and to have the callouses on your palms and the dirt under your fingernails to prove it… And it’s an incredible feeling to know that that real something you built helped someone. Not in an abstract way like donating money, or registering voters, or the million and ten other important, but distant, things volunteer organizations do, but in a real way because someone has a place to sleep tonight. And not an abstract someone either, but someone you got to meet and talk to and someone you enjoyed spending time with.

What struck me most about this weekend was how easily conversation and laughter flowed between people from different backgrounds and diverse corners of the earth. And really, isn’t that what volunteering (and also traveling) is about? Finding not the differences but the similarities, understanding what connects us, not what drives us apart, embracing the common human denominator and using that to build a better world.

***Disclaimer: I love Argentina, and when it comes to college students, more things are similar than are different. Regardless of what continent you are on, everyone goes out of their way to not have class before noon and no one does the reading. However, I’ve catalogued some of the amusing differences between Middlebury and the Universidad Nacional de Cordoba, for your entertainment***

YOU MIGHT BE GOING TO SCHOOL IN ARGENTINA IF…

-Stray dogs wander into the classroom and go to sleep under the professor’s feet.

-Your professor is drinking mate.

-So is everyone else.

-Your professor leaves for a 5 minute break and comes back 45 minutes later…or not at all.

-You’re surprised if class starts earlier than 20 minutes after it’s supposed to.

-Your 2 hour class routinely gets out 1 hr early.

-Your class is interrupted more than once by people organizing marches and/or selling socialist newspapers.

-Every inch of wallspace in your classroom is papered with banners advertising said marches.

-Someone walks into the middle of your class and starts ranting about police corruption and the professor lets it go on for 20 minutes before politely suggesting that he is trying to teach a class.

-You ask someone how to drop a class and they look at you like you’re from Jupiter and say “Just stop showing up…”

-There are so many desks in your classroom you can barely get in the door.

-There are no desks in your classroom.

-Students start questions with “che…” or “che profe.” (The closest English equivalent of “che” is “dude.”)

-There is only one bathroom on campus with a toilet seat.

-Young children walk into your classroom and try to sell you scented pens.

-You ask your professor when the final exam is and they tell you you can take it anytime in the next two and a half years.

Sarah and I spent the last week bumming around Buenos Aires, eating an unholy number of empanadas and pastries, watching tango and generally livin’ it up as turistas in Argentina’s biggest city. The title of this post is kind of a misnomer because I’m not actually going to talk about the tango or the boliches although we did both. (Okay, we didn’t really tango. But we’re going to learn! Honest!) For this post, I’m going to focus on our hostel experience which was very hostel-ly, and therefore, my favorite.

We stayed at one of those uber-youthy youth hostels with weird cartoons painted on the walls, a full bar and a kitchen where you have to write your name 80 times on your food and even then it will still probably disappear. It was the kind of place that organized everything from Spanish lessons to historical tours to getting hammered, with group outings to a different boliche every night of the week. Obviously, it was not the kind of place to stay in if you wanted sleep, but hostels almost never are. The great thing about these places is always, first and foremost, the company. I swear, people at hostels walk right off the pages of edgy post-modern novels and suddenly become real. I find this fascinating.

On our first night in the city we met a guy from LA in the hostel bar. He will be hence-forth known as LA-Guy since we never caught his name. LA-Guy informed us, in a mysterious Eastern European accent which disappeared after this first encounter, that he sold his business in the states and moved to Argentina in 1999. “I was in cosmetics,” he told us. “Haven’t you ever heard of Hard Candy? It’s nail polish, I made nail polish.” After covering these basics we moved on to discussing the bartender who was from Estonia. “Ask her where she’s from,” LA-Guy said, “it’s a country no one has ever heard of, it’s called Estonia. I thought that was where Stonehenge was, but apparently, it’s like, by Denmark.” The nail polish magnate story seemed slightly plausible until the next morning when he started serving breakfast. Neither of us had the heart to ask if he’s been working in the hostel since ’99.

And then there was Peanut-Butter-Lady, who tortured us each morning by bringing a jar of peanut butter down to breakfast. I have yet to find peanut butter here in Argentina and this was driving me crazy. On our last night, we finally engaged her in conversation, which we knew at the time was dangerous, but we had bets as to whether she was from Vermont or California so we had no choice. Turns out she’s from Canada, loves horses and is, in her very humble opinion, really really really good at tango. I made the mistake of asking her why she came to Argentina and I’m pretty sure she sniffed at me and said “everyone comes to Argentina for tango.” Kay, thanks, good advice.

And then there was Didn’t-Like-the-Fan-Girl, my bunk-mate and arch-nemesis. We got off to a really good start when I dropped my purse off the top bunk. This is a problem I have with top bunks and it’s especially problematic at hostels, when your bunkmate is fast asleep and the item in question wedges itself under her bed. It usually results in awkward questions like “what are doing slithering under my bed?” Things went from bad to worse because Didn’t-Like-the-Fan-Girl really didn’t like the ceiling fan. In my mind, the fan was an absolute necessity. It was hot and stuffy and loud and sleep was not going to happen for me without it. Unfortunately the lower levels of the fan didn’t work so we were at an impasse. I would turn the fan on and she would wait until I left to go to the bathroom and turn it off. It took awhile for me to detect the pattern and by that point the situation had escalated to a veritable battle of wills.

Lastly, Slasher-Music-in-the-Shower-Guy and Epic-German-Poetry-in-the-Shower-Guy. I don’t think these need a whole lot of explanation. As for the former, it’s pretty unsettling to hear death metal coming out of the shower at ten in the morning, especially when it’s played at such a low volume that the screaming sounds like creepy, hissing whispers. And as for the latter, I don’t speak German so I can’t say for sure if it was epic poetry or not, but it was certainly an impressive recitation and I like to think it was Beowulf.

Last weekend I made the trek to Mino Clavero, about 3 hours outside of the city, for the Vuelta Altas Cumbres, an 84km race that started in Ambul, climbed several thousand feet over the beautiful sierras and descended into Mino Clavero on rocky trails and gravel roads.

I got a good idea of how hard this race was going to be in the first few kilometers, which naturally were straight up hill. I had decided to wear my heart rate monitor, a decision I now question. It’s a little daunting to see numbers like 198 in the first 15 minutes of a five hour race. Macky is going to comment on this and say I should have warmed up, so I’m going to go ahead and lay out my excuses. This is how bike racing in Argentina goes:

Wake up at 7. Or 7:40…
Shuttle to the start arrives at 8. More like 8:20.
Loaded and reading to go by 8:15. Errr 8:40. And wait, so-and-so forgot to put his bike in. Make that 8:50.

We didn’t get to the start until 9:30, leaving me half an hour to look for bathrooms, discover there were none, find a suitable patch of forest and arrive at the largada (start line) with approximately two seconds to spare. But really, it’s a five hour race, who needs to warm up?

Me, it turns out, especially when the first three hours are subida. Aka, going up hill. I spent the first half hour of the race wanting to die and wondering what happens when you exceed your calculated max heart rate. Like, okay, 220 minus my age is 199, so does that mean I’m one bpm away from dropping dead? Is this like the tree-in-the-forest-paradigm? Like, if my heart rate goes over 199 and I’m NOT wearing my heart rate monitor, do I still die? Is this all in my head? And if so, to quote Dumbledore, does that make it any less real? Please leave any thoughts on this matter in the comments section.

After the first half hour, I realized that I was still alive and began to enjoy the race. The scenery was sublime–the road curved through green pastures, wound around giant boulders and hugged tightly to the edge of a rocky mountain face. I passed men on horseback in full gaucho get-up and startled several herds of horses and cows as they ambled across the road. Every now and then we would pass through somebody’s yard (begging the question of how long it takes them to get to anything remotely resembling civilization) and the whole family and a passel of goats and farm dogs would be out cheering.

The bajada started on a rough, rocky trail for several kilometers and then turned back into a gravel road for another 40 kilometers of harrowing descent. The hair-pin switchbacks on rutted gravel were a bit nerve-wracking but the view was marvelous–I could see Mino Clavero, our destination, about an hour and half before I got there. All in all, a good day on the bike.

I finally started classes last week. Well, sort of. Technically half of my classes started the week before but somehow I didn’t realize that. If this sounds like a massive oversight, let me justify myself. The Universidad Nacional de Cordoba does not go out of its way to make what is, in my opinion (and I think you’ll agree), critical information, available. That’s assuming the information exists, which I’m not sure about. As far as I can tell, classes start (or don’t start) at the whim of the professor. Finding reliable information here is a little bit like panning for gold. It’s a lot of work, you get really dirty feet and even if you do turn up something shiny there’s a 75% chance you’re a fool.

Moving on, I actually did make it to all of my classes this week and only one of them had been canceled without notice. My idea of an academic victory has changed dramatically in the past week and I’m just really excited when my class turns out to actually be in the classroom it’s supposed to be.

Last Thursday, I stood in line for 2 hours to get my readings. You don’t buy books here, just photocopies of your readings. Somehow copyright violation is not an issue. There are pros and cons to this system. It’s cheap, for example, and if you end up never doing any of your reading you’re only out about 60 pesos (less than 15 dollars). The cons, however, are that there are about 15 fotocopiadoras on campus and if you’re like me and only understand every third word your professor says there is a decent chance you’ll end up at the wrong one. Also, there are lines. Because there are lines for EVERYTHING in this country.

After standing in line at the fotocopiadora for an hour, I decided that if they didn’t have my readings I was going to go outside, sit under a tree and cry for a good solid half hour. After standing in the same line for another 45 minutes I decided that even if they did have my readings, I was still going to cry and maybe extend that crying time to an hour. After about two hours, I made it to the office and ordered my readings. (They photocopy them on demand which rather explains the two hour line since everyone needs about 200 to 400 pages.) Then more waiting. I made friends with the kid behind me, an 18 year old freshman from Santa Fe Province. When a foul smell and greenish smoke started to pour out of the back office he said casually “Será la fotocopiadora, seguro.” That’ll be the photocopy machine.

Sure enough, a harried looking woman came out seconds later announcing that the machine had caught on fire and they were now closed. I pushed myself into the office with about a billion other annoyed people and managed to walk away with half of my readings. The thing had burnt up about halfway through my Historia de la Edad Media packet. Figures. Even at the time, the situation was so absurd that I no longer felt like crying.

Since I got to Cordoba a couple weeks ago, I’ve gone on a few mountain bike rides. These have been learning experiences.

Getting to trails requires about 45 minutes of what my riding buddy Martin calls “medio feo” or “half ugly.” I call it shit-fuck-scary. Argentine drivers don’t pay a lot of attention to lanes or common courtesies like not-merging-on-top-of-you. Red lights are also kind of a joke. Jaja. And then there are the busses, or colectivos, which like to assert their authority by passing you at a hair’s breath and then stopping. I’m slightly less afraid of them now that I’ve realized I can out-accelerate them 90% of the time, but that doesn’t mean I have to like them.

But if you can make it out of the city, it’s worth it. The countryside surrounding Cordoba is gorgeous, very green, lots of goats, and the occasional real-life gaucho. And there seem to be trails and caminos de ripio pretty much everywhere. Not that I could find them by myself, but luckily I don’t have to. As a girl who rides mountain bikes in Argentina, I am having no trouble making friends. All I have to do is walk into a bike shop and I get phone numbers, emails, facebook friends and ride plans. I’ve even been asked to model one bike group’s t-shirts.

Today I went out with a guy named Martin who works at the local Giant Shop. At some point along the line, he asked me if I could read Spanish. When I answered yes, he said, practicing his English, “Okay, do not fear, there is nothing de miedo.” Naturally I inquired what it was I might have miedo of and he explained that we were about to go into a zona militar. “Prohibido,” he said with a grin. Sure enough, we were shortly greeted by this sign, which translates roughly to “ARMY OF ARGENTINA, NO TRESPASSING, GUNSHOT AND EXPLOSION AREA.” Good thing I can read Spanish, right?

You’ll be glad to know that we didn’t run into the army or any explosions. The worst we encountered were the espinillas. I don’t know what the official translation of this is so I’m just going to go with big-mother-effing-pokey-thorn-things. See photo below. As you can probably imagine, I got a pincho, as I have on every other ride in Cordoba. Good thing I always ride with guys who refuse to let me change my own flat tires.

Our program organized a tour to Alta Gracia, a tourist destination about an hour outside of Cordoba. Somehow I had it in my head that this was some sort of Jesuit ruin site and that there would be hiking involved. Both Sarah and I came prepared wearing sneakers and toting water bottles. Our first clue to the contrary was our guide’s choice of footwear, four-inch wedge sandals. It turns out Alta Gracia is a massive church and monastery built by the Jesuits in I’ve-already-forgotten-the-date-because-I’m-the-worst-history-major-ever. So at least I had the Jesuit part right. We were wandering around the place, taking in the ancient stonework and replicas of 17th century cooking utensils when our guide casually mentioned that, up until the 1960s, the whole place belonged to the Lozada family and their heirs. As in, the family I’m currently living with.

Huh? Whaaaaat? Rewind. Yes, that’s right, my host family used to own a Jesuit Estancia and their great-grandparents (or something) are entombed inside the Church. Apparently, a few years ago they organized a reunion and 800 heirs of the Lozada family came to Alta Gracia. And yes, I’m 90% sure she said eight hundred, as in, eight zero zero. NBD.

We also went to Che Guevara’s childhood home. Sadly, as far as I can tell, no one in my family is related to him.

My life for the past week has been consumed by bureaucracy. This doesn’t make for very interesting blog posts. It also doesn’t make for a very happy Syd. In the past week, I’ve probably spent 5 hours waiting in line, 15 hours wandering around looking for information that doesn’t exist and several more hours meeting with people who actually don’t know anything. I still haven’t registered for classes, I still don’t have a Visa and I’m still pretty clueless. Welcome to Argentina.

We were told that establishing residency in Argentina is a fairly simple process. On reflection, this might be true. The process, in itself, is simple. The problem is that nobody knows what the process is and about 10 million other people are trying to do it. This results in frustrating experiences like waiting in line for an hour and then finding out you’re in the wrong spot or you don’t have this piece of paper or that form of ID or that you printed such and such out on the wrong size of paper or that your nose is too big for you face.

The same tangled mess of red tape surrounds the class registration process, assuming, of course, that there is one, which I so far have no evidence to support. No one knows which classes are being this offered or when they start, much less how to get into them. As no one else seems worried about this, I’ve decided not to lose sleep other it either. It’s just ironic that Middlebury is already sending me emails about registration for fall semester. I kind of wished they’d stop doing that.

On an unrelated and cheerier note, yesterday was Día de la Mujer and about a million people tried to sell me roses. Sarah and I were sitting at an outdoor cafe when a guy came by selling pretty colored pieces of wire (this is pretty normal). “Como se dice ‘feliz día de la mujer?’ en inglés?” he asked our waiter. “Happy day for being woman,” the waiter responded confidently. Naturally, we complimented his English.

Two things of note have happened since I got to Cordoba.

First, three days ago, I moved into my new room in an apartment with an older couple in the center of Cordoba. Today, for the first time, I actually recognized my front door when I walked by. Everything in time.

Second, I got a haircut. It took me awhile to summon up the balls to do this. This is not necessarily because of the language barrier. It’s been over two years since I paid for a haircut and I’m universally terrified of hairdressers. I much prefer having my friends cut my hair. Friends, it turns out, are much more likely to listen to what you want. If you say, “please buzz my head” or “please give me a faux hawk” or “please just chop off all my hair,” they’ll say, “okay, that’s weird but whatever.” Hairdressers however, tend to listen to what they think you want. I imagine it’s a liability issue but it tends to result in lots of primping, fussing, blow-drying and watermelon scented gunk. You can’t tell a hairdresser to “please chop off all my hair.” They will say “okay, but what do you want me to do with this bit around your ears?” and “how would you like the angle from here to here?” and “should I layer this bit or that bit?” All while they wave sharp objects in your face. It’s kind of a lot to ask one person to handle. And trust me, it doesn’t matter how you layer this or that, my hair does it’s own thing and generally the less of it the better.

But still, I was fast running out of options. My hair was starting to resemble a BMX helmet and it felt like one too, especially in hot, sticky Cordoba. It had to go. And so I resolved to get a haircut. After this resolution, I delayed for another two days, thinking, okay maybe I’ll be more in the mood tomorrow…or tomorrow.

Yesterday, I sucked it up, used the 8 keys necessary to get out my front door and went in search of a peluquería. There were a couple false starts as I wandered confusedly into a beauty school and later a wig shop. Once I found one, however, the process was relatively painless–unless of course, you count the fact that the lady put the bib/apron thing on so tight I couldn’t breathe. I spent the entire time trying to think of how to say “Can you please loosen this? I’m choking” in Spanish. The phrase escaped me, due, I imagine, to the decreased supply of oxygen to my brain. Near suffocation aside, I avoided the watermelon flavored gunk and the whole procedure only cost 30 pesos ($8) so menos mal.