CHAU TOD@S -- Next stop: Chile!!

Chau everyone, my spring break is starting in t-minus 2 hours, when I will be boarding a bus at Retiro station that goes to Santiago, Chile. Twenty hours until arriving at noon tomorrow. Then for checking in at the hostel (really, a beautiful apartment), a day of exploring and rest to prepare for LOLLAPALOOZA 2012.

Being from Milwaukee, I have always meant to go to Lollapalooza's original site in Chicago for quite some time now being the music freak I am, but it was always too expensive. This is the perfect opportunity to get the Lolla experience, but in a perhaps EVEN COOLER spot! This is the second annual Lollapalooza taking place in Santiago in Parque O'Higgins.

After Santiago, it's off to Valparaíso for a couple of days, then hopefully renting a car and driving more south for some adventuring... a lot of stuff is up in the air right now, and I say playing it by ear will make it spontaneous and fun.

Hopefully will report back when I'm back in Buenos Aires next Saturday with awesome stories!!

Cariños,
Meg

A Space and Place of Flavor: Heladerías as hangout spots in Buenos Aires

(The Art of Travel, post 9, Great, good places)
                            
Ice cream (helado) in Buenos Aires gets its own category in the food culture of Argentina.  It is an art of a dessert and is insanely popular, with there being an heladería on almost every block (or so it seems).  I’ve been to several different chains and unique shoppes here in the city, and I can honestly say it is the best ice cream in the world.  I can also say that I would consider myself a connoisseur of this sort, coming from America’s Dairyland, the good ole Dairy State of Wisconsin, where our dairy products are supreme and we don’t mess around when it comes to ice cream, cheese, custard and the like.  So I’m almost shocked to say that the delectable ice cream comes from their milk (which tastes totally and completely bizarre to me, almost sour, or curdled, yet it produces great dairy products, so who can complain?) and of course, the help of Italian immigrants and their art of gelato.  Ice cream here in Argentina is not even ice cream, per se, but the perfect blend of how ice cream and gelato are made, for a type of helado unique only to this country; the best helado in the world.

  

   

And when I say that ice cream culture is a culture, I mean it.  Argentines are serious about getting their fill of ice cream, particularly of the flavor dulce de leche (similar to caramel), another dessert of national pride, pictured above.  Right off the bat of my arrival, my homestay sister recommended an ice cream place that is just at the end of our block (too convenient) that she says is the best in the city.  And I dare say she is definitely right.  Tufic: Espacio de Sabores in the barrio of Palermo SoHo is an artisan ice cream shoppe with a list of standard flavors always present, but also several daily changes to this list, so there is always something new.  Every time I go I try something different, dazzling me even more than the last.  It is all so thick and creamy, and somehow doesn’t melt in the hot sunshine: the perfect savory summer solution.  Or perhaps the perfect always solution, since it has started to get cooler and Tufic is still constantly packed.

Tufic is definitely a neighborhood hangout spot, a prime “great, good place” for anybody, any lover of ice cream.  It is a family spot at all hours of the day, a place for dates, or even a place to meet up and discuss business over a coffee (they also sell a selection of coffees and beautiful pastries).  It’s open until 2 AM, and thus gets packed on the weekends, late at night.  My roommate and I know some of the workers there, one of whom tries his broken English on us, in which we reply and converse in our somewhat broken Spanish.  I chose this spot to write about because it is definitely the place I have frequented the most in all of Buenos Aires, since it is right outside my door.  I have taken friends here, and when my parents came to visit, took them to this spot after dinner.  I like to consider it as ‘my spot’, my “great, good place” to show my friends and family, and of course, to keep coming back to for the awesome staff and the more than awesome ice cream.
               
For my ensueños blog here... I will be having a post (including pictures) of my FOOD experience and other AWESOME RESTAURANTS in Buenos Aires soon!!!

LBV Argentina: Legión de la Buena Voluntad

This past week I've been really sick, and had the interesting experience of calling a doctor to my house (which apparently is very common here), but am finally getting better.  On the cusp of getting my energy back, however, it was completely strung out of me with yesterday's events: a day of volunteering with children ages one to five years old.

NYU Buenos Aires tries to include students in one-day volunteer activities over weekends throughout the semester (there are some kids here who have, through NYU, been signed up to work with a specific program either as an intern or as a volunteer. But since this set-up had very limited spots, these weekend opportunities are primarily for those students who are not regular volunteers elsewhere, i.e. me!). So the NYU faculty set us up with a day of helping with Ronda de Juegos, a program that works with both hospitals and kindergartens / daycares around the city to help provide socialization / social inclusion for kids, usually involving donating toys to them and organizing fun activities, etc. Our original plan for Friday was to go to a hospital in the Floresta barrio (a little out west from the city; southwest from where I live) and give toys to sick children and play with them for a bit, but staff realized that going to a daycare would be more a little bit more active, as the hospitalized children are much more sensitive to work with (this is understandable).

So, 12 other students and I ended up taking a bus to Jardín de los Colores, a daycare also located in Floresta. They divided us amongst the different rooms of children: infants, two-year-olds, three-year-olds (this is where I was) and then the four-year-olds. I had a constant sense of the facility being understaffed, and I sincerely wondered how all these women function when there aren't volunteers around to control the criers, to help the ones who fall and smack their head get back on their feet, to keep them from making vicious messes at snack time, to make sure they don't run out the door and wander around, etc. As is the case with any group of toddlers, there were the shy ones, the bullies, the angels, the mischievous, and the ones who cried the whole time wanting their mommy and daddy. It was a babysitting nightmare, but I was more than happy to be there (I sure do miss a couple... Augustín loved to play peek-a-boo, Sofía always gave me her toys, Facundo, who can't quite walk yet, was always grabbing onto my leg and wouldn't let go when I had to leave). I was also more than happy to help these incredibly sweet, young women (no more than mid-20's I would say) who do this everyday as their job. You could seriously tell they needed the help. And I miss playing with kids! It had been a while! It was also such a great group because the 3-year-olds are just old enough to understand you (my level of Spanish was perfect for them, haha, which is a comfort I s'pose), but not yet old enough to form words, yet, so it was a perfect harmony of communication.

At the end of the day, when we had to leave, the children started crying and were genuinely upset that we had to be on our way. It was so touching, and I wish I could go back. It was a truly interesting experience to see how daycares in this city function (as best as they can) and to be able to help in any way that I could. I hope to volunteer with any other programs NYU offers throughout the semester.

“Caminito que el tiempo ha borrado”: Little road that time has erased, yet the art you hold lets history and culture endure

(The Art of Travel, post 8, The "art" of travel

required reading: The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton)

I’m currently enrolled in a class entitled “Arte y Cultura Visual en América Latina” taught by a lovely professor who also teaches art history at la Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA).  Every week we visit a museum in the city to experience directly the art we’re studying at the time.  Thus far we’ve explored colonial art, castas paintings, the beginnings of Romanticism and landscape painting, and are moving on to the start of the twentieth century.  And Buenos Aires is filled with this art and much more in various locations and museums throughout the capital.  Exactly where the art is housed is inevitably art itself.

How galleries are organized is a technical art, and the buildings that act as museums are architecture, and thus also art (a favorite in the city so far is Museo de Arte Hispanoamericano Isaac Fernández Blanco, which used to be the Blanco family mansion; a beautiful building of neocolonial style with a glorious patio one could spend hours in).  The walls of buildings, even when they’re not museums, can house public art, as is the case with graffiti.  Having been to a slew of large cities in the states known for their graffiti (New York, Chicago, Austin) I can honestly say that the graffiti here in Buenos Aires is unrivaled by any other city I have been to (I’m not going to discuss this in my post, but to see what I mean, check out Gaby’s post on the brilliance of street art in this city).  The best and most unique example, in my opinion, true to Buenos Aires life and culture that is both art and the housing of art is Caminito in the barrio of La Boca, where the houses are the art.

Caminito today is an incredibly touristy area that is a quintessential, postcard image for the city of Buenos Aires.  What many people do not know beyond it being a stretch of brightly painted houses is that Caminito is actually a museum, a street museum (una calle museo).  Caminito itself in Spanish means “little path” because it occurs in an alley / small, pedestrian street in La Boca.  I previously had no concept of what a street museum was before visiting Caminito, and frankly had never heard of one anywhere else before.  There’s no entry of any sorts, and there is no label anywhere explaining that it is a museum.  There are simply the houses, and signs labeling all shops and restaurants are solely marked as being located in Caminito.  Stranger yet, beyond the houses, the entire walkway acts as an artisan market (or really, since so many of the items resemble souvenirs, perhaps more of a ‘gift shop’).  So people are selling art, while amongst the art (the houses), and more often than not the art is of the art (the paintings one can buy are of Caminito).  So it acts as a museum, albeit a very informal one, because there is art everywhere.

(I took this photograph, as I'm sure many others have as well, on one of my visit's to Caminito.)

So just as Botton describes how van Gogh’s paintings could easily lead someone to want to travel to Provence, the images I was exposed to (mostly photographs) of Caminito lead me straight to La Boca as a place to see.  What is interesting about Caminito, however, is that the images that came before it and the art that is all about it helped shape and create what Caminito is today, which is a different take on what Botton discusses, for how could van Gogh’s paintings change the cypresses and fields in the countryside of France?

European immigrants flocked to La Boca and made it the first real barrio of Buenos Aires in the nineteenth century.  It eventually became a poor man’s land, yet still full of cultural significance because of the mix of backgrounds present in a confined area.  The neighborhood was restored by a local artist in the 1950’s, giving it its unique style that eventually lead for it to be commissioned by the city government as a street museum.  One of the most famous songs in tango history is titled Caminito, written by Gabino Coria Peñazola (and was eventually recorded by Argentina’s most famous tango singer, Carlos Gardel), whose bust rests on a platform against one of the walls of the houses.  So the song and the photographs on the postcards drew me here.  Despite how kitschy it may seem and how crowded it is with foreigners during the day, I still find Caminito to be the most interesting example of art in Buenos Aires, and sincere to the city’s past of mixing cultures and social struggles, and, of course, what may be the only street museum in the world.    

Where’s That Confounded Bridge?? – The embodiment of both front and back regions

(The Art of Travel, post 7, Authenticity

required reading - "Staged Authenticity:

Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist

Settings" by Dean MacCannell)

As students in our respective locations, do we act as tourists? And what is the distinction between that and a traveler? At what point in our four-month stays do we finally ‘assimilate’ and reach the “back regions” of a certain place?

Dean MacCannell’s deepening on Erving Goffman’s theory about “front” and “back” regions of a visited place provides a structural view of just how tourism functions. Reading this text brought me back to my first week here in Buenos Aires, where everything was new and I embodied everything that was a tourist. I got the cheesy bus tours and guided visits to certain quintessential spots in the city, the so-called stage settings of front regions. But I don’t think that labeling them this way can discount my genuine experience and excitement while visiting them. My initial days here, I just wanted to get to know my way around to gain confidence that I could function in my new home. After the first two weeks or so, I started to crave something more, something beyond those first feelings of enthusiasm, weariness, and wanderlust in the city.

I finally began my “religious pilgrimage,” my “quest for authentic experience” as a way of fixing this craving (593). I wanted to enter new social settings, true porteño ones, the back regions of Buenos Aires.  I wanted to leave “false fronts” and enter “intimate reality” (592).  After a full month of living here, it’s hard to say if I have accomplished this mission or not.  Certain experiences are to my satisfaction, but if it is “very difficult to tell for sure if the experience is authentic in fact” as an outsider (597). So who is to say if my craving has genuinely been fulfilled?

My questions then continue with the following: can a space be both a front and back region? As in, not a front region that appears to be an authentic back region, nor a back region that is “set up to accommodate outsiders” (602), but rather a space that has both poles flowing through it, where the bridge that exists between them can be walked while within one’s surroundings. I sense that some of my time in different places around the city have been of this sort: a social structure where both the tourist (or the traveler, the student) can coexist with the native, where one is not invading the other’s designated space, but rather enjoying each other’s company. I have found porteños to be extremely welcoming, helpful with my Spanish and general functioning, and even telling me of places that could be considered a back region, and thus, by suggestion, a region for everyone.

So perhaps it’s better to resist the “touristic motivation” driven by a desire for the hidden, authentic spaces and just meander until you find a place suited to you, whether it be a front or back region, or a mixture of both.

(The above photograph is of La Puente de la Mujer, a bridge by famous Spanish architect and structural engineer Santiago Calatrava. I love this bridge because it is a little piece of my hometown in Buenos Aires; the Milwaukee Art Museum in Wisconsin was also designed by Calatrava [I recommend looking it up to see the similarities, to really get a grasp on his unique style]. Crossing it was so comforting, it was like being on Lake Michigan, but with dirtier waters; it was a back region of Wisconsin placed in a front region of Argentina.)

Avant-Garde Argentina: Seeing the nation through the kaleidoscopic lens of Buenos Aires

(The Art of Travel, post 6, Book #1 [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
first book, which I highly recommend for anyone
who wants to learn more about Argentina via
brilliant primary sources and literature that has
all been translated into English very well)
   

All of the courses offered at NYU in Buenos Aires are very site specific; I plan on receiving a minor in Latin American studies because everything I’m studying here is relevant.  And it’s so interesting to be learning about South American history, culture and politics in the context of location, of my physically being here.  I feel that as a foreigner, it is the only way to truly learn it all, by experiencing it despite my estadounidense view.  And with my classes and my encounters so far, I feel like I’ve learned so, so much.  And on the seventh of March, I will have only been here for a month (it doesn’t seem so).
   
“i am thus in each of these ways
spanish french indian who knows
warrior farmer merchant poet perhaps
rich poor of all classes and of none
and well i’m an argentine” (xi)
  

The above poem, entitled “Argentine to Death” written by César Fernández Moreno in 1963, expresses and delicately summarizes Argentine sentiment and reality for its entire history, a social and cultural image that prevails today.  It is a beautiful and simple illustration of what it is to be Argentine, a concept of confusion to both exteriors and interiors.  It can be found on the inside cover of the book The Argentina Reader: History, Culture, Politics edited by Gabriela Nouzeilles and Graciela Montaldo.
  

The Argentina Reader is a compilation of different essays, poems, paintings, song lyrics, photographs, articles and other forms of text (both written and visual) presented in chronological order and grouped according to important themes in history.  It is extensive in the amount of authors and figures’ views it provides, all together working to challenge the “schizophrenic view” (6) that the international public has for Argentina, and that Argentina perhaps has for itself.  This book will continue to be useful as a supplement for my studies here, as well as a book that can be read for pleasure, for it includes Borges, Cortázar, and so many more brilliant and renown Argentine authors.
  

I feel so much more aware of different facets of Argentine life that were only rumored to me before and upon my arrival.  Psychoanalysis is more than just a fad here, politics will forever be affected by the era of Perón and the subsequent military regime of the Dirty War, people are proud of their European descent in the city considered the “Paris of South America,” etc.  It is all evident in their everyday lives, and all embedded in their past.  And Argentines are proud to be Argentines.  Even if it is hard to say just exactly what it is to be Argentine.  In one essay within the book entitled “Argentina as Latin American Avant-Garde” by Nicaraguan poet Ruben Darío, we are given an outside view of the nation at the start of the twentieth century: a glorified and hopeful outlook.  Darío never explicitly labels Argentina as avant-garde as the title does, but it is evident that Argentina was the epicenter of all things experimental, mixed together, new and leading the way in art (especially literature), society, politics, and more.  The country is a mix of “all the qualities and defects of the conquistadors, together with a collection of new ingredients” (206), all that is traditional alongside all that is non-traditional, the avant-garde.
  

A foreigner’s view can so easily be blurred.  A foreigner’s view of Argentina via Buenos Aires is especially blurred.  Somehow “the postcolonial mirror is cracked” (3) and thus the capital city and the more prosperous eastern provinces hold the most population and wealth, while everywhere else is “backward and chronically poor” (4), an idea that started with the revolutionary leader Sarmiento during the rise to independence at the start of the nineteenth century.  So this “cultural and economic schism” (4) that cracks the mirror makes the reflection of the whole nation impossible to see genuinely.  Yet somehow the cracks make the image as genuine as it can be, because all the shattered pieces add together to make someone “spanish french indian” or all of the above, “of all classes and of none” and thus, with this eccentric mix and awareness of its presence, can be what one may call “an argentine” (xi).
  

(The photo above is one I took of the most famous bookstore in Argentina, called El Ateneo Grand Splendid that used to be a theater but was transformed into a beautiful and unique librería.  My camera had trouble focusing when attempting to take this shot, perhaps a sort of metaphor for my perspective of not only knowing, but also understanding Argentina.  And perhaps the best way to manually focus the camera is to delve into the writings that were in my vicinity of those that came before and struggled in finding yet reveled in having a unique national identity.)
  

Nouzeilles, Gabriela, and Graciela R. Montaldo, eds. The Argentina Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. Print.