Promises I must make!!

1. Finish my post about my spring break in Chile (it is currently in draft format, not quite yet done).

2. Write about my weekend in Uruguay (Colonia del Sacramento, Montevideo).

3. Tell you, when I return, about my trip to Patagonia this weekend (El Bolsón, San Carlos de Bariloche)!

These are promises that I promise to keep!!

Chau, todos. Que tengan un buen finde :)

The Ethnography of Language (of Self): A complicated, and perhaps not fully realized epiphany on language, people, and place

(The Art of Travel, post 13, Epiphanies)

An epiphany is something that cannot be forced.  But certainly a realization is something that can be discovered via writing.  Or rather, a further understanding of one’s grand thoughts, one’s moment of recognition defined by the epic and overwhelming word ‘epiphany’.

So here I am, in Buenos Aires, in Argentina, in South America, a predominantly Spanish-speaking continent (save Brazil, the Guyanas and Suriname).  And this place I’m in is defined by all of these characteristics.  And the inhabitants of this place are here because they speak Spanish, or this place exists because Spanish is spoken.  A reciprocal relationship reigns; language, place, and people are inextricably connected.

I suppose one could label that my ‘epiphany’ of sorts, particularly because it is something that can only be noted once placed outside of one’s home country.  I am from the United States.  I speak English.  I am a student, I learn Spanish; I travel to Argentina, I use that Spanish.  I live in Buenos Aires, I adapt to the porteño, castellano accent.  It’s all very simple, with some parts inherent and others a process (and others still an inherent process).  But what are the further implications of being in a place where they speak Spanish, a language I struggle to perfect?  I’m sure several language and travel theorists have explored this exact issue, but I am far from being well read enough to know just whom they are.  Thus the attempt is my own.

Knowing a second language is extremely beneficial, and encouraged in education globally.  Learners are able to construct different realities within these different languages, without even knowing it.  These different realities are primarily based off of culture associated with the language… for example: if I were to say the word lunch one would think of generally a sandwich or a salad or something of that sort, but if I were to say almuerzo, one may think of something more common for lunch in either Spain or Latin America.  Beyond these cognitive, linguistic abilities, however, there’s another branch to linguistics directly related to this: linguistic anthropology, or the “ethnography of speaking.”

So I go to a café and have my respective almuerzo and I go to school and I run errands and I take the bus and I am speaking Spanish within all of these daily activities.  And the people I know and see are formed in my mind as being who they are because they speak Spanish, because I speak Spanish with them, whether they are originally from Argentina or not.  I have travelled to Chile and Uruguay now, and the Spanish there is different, and of course differs anywhere you go.  But the Spanish here in Buenos Aires is now my Spanish, and porteños and travelers alike can attain cultural identity via their special way of speaking the language.  And so I have come to realize that all the Spanish I learned has been completely altered, to a new reality, because I finally exist within a Spanish-speaking place and interacting with its inhabitants, and that reality constructed and based on my first second language is now my own, personal reality.  And so this ethnography of speaking I am undergoing reaches beyond cultural and social identity, and touches upon my own identity.

Marina, Mi Vida: My house mom, once a stranger, but now no longer

(The Art of Travel, post 12, The comfort of strangers)

I can’t imagine the difficulty of giving up one’s home for a bunch of rowdy, North American teenage girls every semester.  Those who host students in a homestay program must have hearts of gold, and a wealth of patience.  This ‘virtue’, however, must be reciprocated, or the chance of a homestay running smoothly falters.  Cesare Pavese says, “Traveling is a brutality.  It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends.  You are constantly off balance.”  Being placed in a porteño home upon arrival and knowing it will be your place of residence for four months is a bit overwhelming, but when the home you enter belongs to a family of truly kind spirits, the stress of being somewhere new is instantly alleviated.

In writing of the comfort of strangers, I find the need to dedicate this post to my house mom, because she was undoubtedly a stranger in the beginning, and the first porteño I met coming to Buenos Aires.  I had had some email exchanges with her before arrival, asking what her house was like, what her family is like, what she is like.  Even so, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but looking back at her emails and knowing her now, it really is quite fitting.  The first month here, however, was mostly about trying to settle in, and find comfort in a routine, and accept that this stranger’s place was my new place of residence in a foreign country.

I was “forced” to trust her cooking, since she provides meals for me every night.  This was of no effort, however, because all of her cooking is out-of-this-world delicious and full of variety.  My roommate and I eat separate from the family, since we live in a beautiful guesthouse across the courtyard from the main house.  Thus the traditional experience of long porteño meals is lost, and I am found “off balance” by not knowing what is genuine or not.  I really do not have room to complain, however, because if sacrificing conversation to still be able to eat her glorious food is what is a stake, then I will take it, and take it gladly.  Having this sort of distance at dinnertime, however, makes it more difficult to strike conversation with her, so the bridge between strangers to friends to house mother and house daughter is lengthened, maybe even lost. But not entirely so.

I have definitely come to know her now, in my two months that I have been here, even if this knowledge is derived from conversation-in-passing.  We have shared things about life on a deeper level than I ever would have expected, told each other stories about our pasts, talked about music, food, love, travel, family, death, anything and everything.  She has a heart so big and so full of love that this woman who was once a stranger is now, truly, my house mom (I now refer to her as mamá).  And thus, inevitably, she has giving me the greatest comfort of all: a house I feel comfortable in, and can return to, and truly feel that it is my home when placed in a completely foreign South American country.  There is also the inevitability, however, that every now and then I still feel that notion of being “constantly off balance.”  And whenever this happens, I have someone, once a stranger, to turn to, to help me sort things out, within the comfort of what is now my own home.

(The picture above is of the view of our guesthouse from the courtyard.)

ONLY IN ARGENTINA...

... your ENTIRE NEIGHBORHOOD erupts into either screaming: "GOOOOAAAALLLL!!!" or shouting in defeat and anger on a Saturday, midday.

And when I say the entire neighborhood, I mean it. This happens all the time, actually. I don't even have a clue who's playing. I just love how, without even watching or knowing, I am signaled by all the apartment complexes around me when a football game is on.

My homestay sister just went out running in our courtyard, screaming. That was a sight to see.

La Maison of my Heart: Valparaíso’s genius loci as the spirit of a place of return

(The Art of Travel, post 11, Genius loci… this week’s prompt: “The first condition of understanding a foreign country,” wrote Rudyard Kipling, “is to smell it.”  In the ancient world, the genius loci was the deity who protected a place, its guardian spirit.  The term now refers to the “spirit of place”—its characteristic atmosphere or feeling, as embodied in its architecture, environment, food, the people’s manners, etc.—and smells.  Write about the genius loci of the place you’re living or a place you’ve visited this semester.  What embodies the genius loci for you?  It could be an individual, a food, a drink, a place.  Use lots of concrete details in your description.)

Sitting in the dining area of our hostel at a table with a blue and white checkered table cloth, my travel companions and I take a slow start to the morning, eating our bread and assorted jams, drinking coffee, writing in our journals. My friend suddenly comes out and says: “it’s like, almost stressful not being able to capture this place when I write. It’s just so beautiful and unique and I want to include every detail, but even then I feel like it wouldn’t be enough.” I responded asking whether or not that is the entire challenge of writing, when writing about a place. Sometimes it does feel impossible, especially when there are so many wonderful things surrounding you, so many special experiences detailing one’s journey, and so many to come. I experienced the same stress of wanting to remember everything, every detail, absorbing all the wonderfulness around me within only my first moments of arriving in Valparaíso, Chile, one of my destinations during my spring break.

The city is located on the coast of Chile, and is an important seaport and cultural center for the country. It is known to be the “San Francisco of South America,” and although there are certain parallels between the two cities, I find this to be an unfair comparison. There are steep, winding hills with raised sidewalks made of stone steps, brightly colored houses, and a view of the sea, all like San Francisco, but it’s still so different. Making the hike back up to our hostel on one of these rigid hills, in between the houses you can get a glimpse of the other hills that lie beyond, and the pop-colored rainbow of structures, lingering in the fog from the sea, effortlessly resting on dangerous dirt edges; it seems that only a huff and a puff would be enough to blow them off the cliff. Thus I think it could be easy to say that the genius loci, the spirit of this place, is embodied in all of these beautiful houses up on the hills, the guardians of the sea. But then I could say that the smell of the sea embodies that the town is a port, or that the people who live in the houses embody the town as a whole. And a loop could continue forever.

So then I turn to look at my own experience in the city, instead of viewing what the entire location has to offer as a generalization, I think of what it offered me in my short time there. And I discover that I think my first inkling was right… it is in the houses. But it’s also in the people in the houses, the smell and sight of the sea, everything… but specifically it is in the hostel I stayed in, ‘my house’ when I was a temporary Chilean living in Valparaíso.

La Maison de la Mer, or “the house of the sea” in French, is owned and run by a wonderful, spirited old man who originally is from Normandie, but has lived in Valparaíso for over 40 years now. And his Spanish is perhaps the most beautiful I have ever heard, where instead of rolling his r’s, he uses his natural, closed-throat hack for r’s… an elegant mix of my two second languages, so fluently spoken. He explained to my friends and I that he has lived there long enough to be able to speak perfect Chilean Spanish, but he chooses to keep his strong French accent, just as he said we should keep our porteño accent, so as not to lose where we come from.

There were days when we would spend hours in the garden (pictured above, with a lovely, little framed view of some houses on a distant hill), relaxing, playing cards, talking, eating. I would sometimes have little conversations with the owner in my lost French, and explained to him I knew more Spanish than I did his native tongue, malheureusement (“unfortunately”). Upon our departure, I left him a note in French saying that when I come back to this very unique city, I plan on spending my time at La Maison once again.

And so, in the end, I physically and visually consider the genius loci to be the beautiful hostel I stayed in for those few days. But when I left Valparaíso, I think I realized that the true spirit of the place, for me, was that it isn’t just a city I can say I have visited, and recount my stories for you here, but rather a place where my stories will continue, because that place is a place of return. And I cannot wait to be back.

Borges’ Buenos Aires: Literature and the complication of Argentine identity

(The Art of Travel, post 10, Book #2 [of choice]
for this class we had to chose two books about
our site from a list and do one post discussing
each choice -- this is the post I wrote for my
second book, which I find to be an essential
not just for those who want to learn about
Argentina, but for those who love literature
as a whole... Borges is king)

Jorge Luis Borges is an internationally known author and poet… an icon and ambassador for Argentina, and above all for Buenos Aires.  In a place where literature was the art form that allowed for a people to shine and be recognized by their former colonizer crown, Borges is a name on the top of the list.  Below is a picture of a street sign in my neighborhood, the barrio of Palermo, where Borges was known to have lived.  Literacy as a whole skyrocketed in Argentina in the first half of the 20^th century. There are bookstores, librerías, all over every city.  This generalization really came into perspective recently, since I just returned from my spring break in Chile, where the amount of book stores in Santiago seem minimal to nonexistent in comparison to Buenos Aires. This is not to say they are any less literate, or do not have their respective artists that represent their country (Pablo Neruda and Gabriel Mistral to name a few Chileans), it’s more that Argentina paved the way for all Latin American writers to become read worldwide and known worldwide for where they’re from.

Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings is a collection of Borges’ works, translated and organized into categories: Fictions, Essays and Parables. His short stories (Fictions) dip in, develop, and end with a complete drawing of a character and that person’s story. And in what I have read, twists, secrets, murder, religion, dreams, history, truth and identity are frequented themes, the last holding particular importance. Cultural heritage and actual legal identity like that of “The Shape of the Sword,” or family identity in “Emma Zunz,” and even existence of identity in “Everything and Nothing” seems so Argentine to me. Defining a culture can be so difficult, especially when that culture is made up of so many others, like in Argentina and many other countries in Latin America. Writing helped define Argentina and allowed Buenos Aires to shine to the point where even Spain could not ignore the city.

But what does it mean to be Argentine, and thus an Argentine writer? Who is Borges, really? What does he tell us about his nation, his self? Does not one’s writing always let this trickle between the words? Borges himself addresses such questions in his essay, “The Argentine Writer and Tradition.”  He notes that much of it, as others have claimed, begins with the “gauchesque,” or the writings and poetry of the gauchos, or those of the countryside that could be considered the ‘cowboys’ of Latin America.  Yet, he then turns around and states that his belief is that writers do not necessarily need to define themselves in terms of themes or national traits. “The idea that Argentine [writing] should abound in differential Argentine traits and Argentine local color seems to me a mistake” (180). And thus this further complicates what makes an Argentine writer truly Argentine.

What he eventually gets at, however, is that an Argentine is truly a mutt, and adopts different ideas culturally, just as Shakespeare and other examples of great writers and poets. A text is “no less Argentine for having accepted such influences” (182). I find that the city of Buenos Aires is no less Argentine for having Italian influences mixed with Latin American vibes. And the presence of Italian and other European influences are felt strongly, because history here in Buenos Aires is felt “profoundly” (183). Borges said it, and in my experiences thus far, I only know it to be true. And because the history is profound and abundant in different cultures, the country of Argentina, “our patrimony,” should thus truly be “the universe” (185), and this I feel, too.

Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1964. Print.

El cielo del paisaje de la Argentina (the beginnings of a journey)

I´m currently located in Valparaíso, Chile, using the computer in my hostel to write this piece. I already have so many things to say about my time in this country, so it´s hard to know where to begin...
... except, perhaps, with the beginning.
I´m going to take an excerpt from my journal about a bit from my journey from Buenos Aires to Santiago via bus (that ended up being a 23 hour ride). I plan to write later about the rest of the journey, Lollapalooza, and this magical place I find myself in that I never want to leave... a San Francisco of South America... an analogy that does no justice to this charming town.
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 I swear my back-of-the-shoulder muscle on the right feels bruised. I´m sitting incredibly uncomfortably on my ´semi-cama´ seat doing anything but fulfilling the cama´s purpose. I think I just woke up from some sort of dream, but it took place on the goddamn bus for goodness sake, so who knows if I was in my subconcious or just daydreaming with eyes half-closed. It was embarrassing and painful, however. I hope it wasn´t real. Nonetheless I woke up from what was my two-hours night´s rest to something illegibly recognizable outside my window.

Through the glass that reflected the lines of miniscule bulbs of blue lights along the overhead compartment of the bus, I could see blotches of hazy, pale white. They were everywhere: infectious freckles that speckled the sky. I was suddenly attentively awake and reached for my backpack to grab my glasses, then put them on to confirm my suspicions... the milky way was effortlessly floating just beyond the glass of my lenses and the glass of the bus windows.

After my few moments of intial shock that I could even see that many stars from where I was sitting, travelling at a fast pace, I realized this was a sky I had never seen before. It was the sky of el paisaje, el campo de la Argentina. The lands that lay below seemed to stretch on to an infinite pool of black, where the darkness made it a game of never-knowing. I looked at my watch: 4 AM. I looked up agin, and after lingering on Orion´s belt, spotting Gemini, a planet (I think Saturn) and watching a shooting star go by, I pinpointed why the sky was new to my eyes.

They really were floating. They, the stars. These stars. The stars I almost finally understood. My view was a snowglobe, where someone took a snapshot admist the falling of the flakes, and it seemed as if they would continue to trickle towards the ground and I could catch them on my tongue. But in that moment, they were still. And in that globe, they were truly objects, celestial beings, that lied beyond the globe, our globe.

It was also the first time I think I noticed la profundidad (the depth) and placement of the stars.
(by this time I glimpsed another shooting star in the bottom left corner of the frame of my window)
The ones that were closer were obviously bigger and brighter, but the ones that were far away I knew, somehow, from a different point of view, occupied their own place in the vastness we call space. I´ve always been a stargazer (I have the overwhelming desire to blame my mother for this), and usually when I look to the sky I like to imagine the stars as they are up close and personal, as the giant balls of gas made of recycled star stuff that are incessantly sending us their luminosity, despite the amount of time it takes for their message to finally reach us. And in my new recognition of depth and lightyears put into perspective, even the little guys got this practiced imagery, too.

(and now a satellite has made its way across my frame, slowly but surely)
I desperately wanted to remove the glass, run towards the fields and see the interstellar clouds more definitively. I knew I couldn´t, but still remained dazzled by what shockingly was my very clear view through a bus window. I also had the urge, from the moment my vision was corrected, to yell out to everyone: "Guys! Look! Look at the sky right now! Miren, miren! El cielo, las estrellas!" There must have been a scattered few awake, but I also didn´t mind pretending everyone to be asleep. Because this was a whole new sky for me, and I wanted to keep it that way. I wanted to keep it as my own, as just mine.

I swear I´ve never seen a sky so blue until I came to South America. I swear I´ve never seen the stars so true in space until I sat uncomfortably on a bus, moving West through Argentina. I swear my shoulder really is bruised. I swear another shooting star just passed by.