What There Is (and Isn't)

Well to be sure, as evidenced above, there is lots of foliage, and of all types. It is so wonderful to be walking down the street and see vines and bushes and trees and flowers. I especially love seeing the balconies of apartment buildings just filled with plants. It's quite different from New York. There, nobody can keep twenty plants on their balcony because 1) they don't have a balcony (but almost everyone here has some sort of balcony and 2) the plants would never make it through the frigid winter. Which brings me to my point. While I absolutely love it here, I am beginning to miss things from New York. This was to be expected, and honestly it's not a problem, it's just that the things I am missing are sort of weird. So here it goes.

These are some of the things that I am missing:

• The Subway. The buses here are crazy, and the subte is limited.
• Gummi candy. As many of you know, I could probably live off of Haribo gummi bears, but they don't really have gummi candy here. It's mostly chocolate and dulce de leche things, and the gummi candy they do have is no good, no good at all.
  
• Coffee. Just a regular cup of drip coffee. You can really only get espresso, or espresso with milk, and heaven forbid you should want an iced coffee. I hear that there are two places to go in town. Two, and that's it.
  
• American Apparel. I know it's silly, but I love their clothing, and while there are places similar here, nothing is quite the same.
  
• Lettuce. The lettuce here is really sub par in my opinion, and it's really hard to get just a "normal" salad here. Salad means tomatoes, carrots, sometimes lettuce and that's it. 
  
• Spicy food. Yep, you have heard true about the lack of comida picante acá. No hay. There's good flavor, but sometimes it all blends together. I mean, you don't even get pepper at your table, heaven forbid some Cholula or Tabasco.
  

These are some of the things that I am not missing (because they are here too!):

• Art Museums. This weekend I went to MALBA (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano Buenos Aires) and really enjoyed it. It's a beautiful new, modern building in a posh part of Buenos Aires that felt exactly like the Upper West Side. Their current exhibition called Autopsia de lo invisble featured a couple of new artists and some great thought-provoking art, including some flashy bling-bling bracelets made of gold, diamonds and shards of glass "from the car of homes of the victims or agressors of violent deaths related to illegal drug trafficking." Needless to say, this stuff was pretty heavy. Then we checked out the permanent collection, saw a Frida (!! very exciting, she was surrounded), as well as a number of switch activated light pieces, which were pretty cool. I also saw a few pieces by an Argentine artist named Léon Ferrari. I had seen a few of his pieces and the MoMA before I left at a show called New Perspectives on Latin American Art. It was really cool to go to right before I left and get a sense of some of the art history down here. I had discovered this guy who I really liked and then to see some more of his work, some pieces that were definitely more experimental and controversial (in my opinion), really expanded and complicated my understanding of his work on a whole. Anyway, below is the facade and the main hall of MALBA. It's a tiny museum, but I really liked it.
  

• Circus. Yep, I am not missing circus here in the BsAs (as they like to abbreviate Buenos Aires here), even though I did miss it in New York. There it was a chichi activity that I really couldn't afford to do very often, if at all. But here, while it is still a chichi activity, the exchange rate is totally in my favor and I can go to classes! I found a place in the Palermo neighborhood and I am going to classes for an hour and a half, twice a week. It is sort of like circus camp at Colorado Academy jammed into one day. We do calisthenics, tumbling, juggling, rolling globe, rola-bola, fabric, trapeze, hoop, and so much more! It really is so fun. I am learning a bunch of new, and mostly useless, Spanish circus vocabulary and doing things that I have never done, even at CA. It is great to see how other people approach circus, their different tricks, and routines. I have been taking notes in case I even return to teaching circus. One of the coolest parts for me though is interacting with the teachers and all the other students in Spanish. Most of the time, so far anyway, I am surrounded by other Americans, and unfortunately we speak English. But there are no other Americans in my circus class, and while I clearly am the foreigner, struggling to communicate, everyone is very nice and patient with me. Maybe I will even make some friends for outside of the classroom. Who knows. 

 

• Cultural Activities. Buenos Aires is just like New York in that there is something to do, all the time. My best, and most recent, example of this was my Monday evening activity. There is a cultural center here called Konex (what an idea! go to a cultural center for cultural activities!) where they seem to host many different events. It is a couple of industrial buildings, hollowed out, and also with a big open space, much like a yard, but with less grass and more concrete. Some of the cultural events must be circus ones because I saw a triple trapeze and a flying trapeze rig as well, which of course excited me. They also seem to be putting on a Spanish language version of Rent at the end of this month, which I am definitely going to try to go to. This Monday evening however I was at a concert for a band called La Bomba del Tiempo, a percussion group whose performances are basically entirely improvisational. There are probably fifteen men in the group and it was really neat to see how they all worked together. The concert was quite the place to be, absolutely jam packed with all of the cool, young people in Buenos Aires, who apparently spilled out and congregated in the street when they were no longer allowed in. For a while I thought I missed hipsters and the Brooklyn vibe, but I totally found it here at Konex. It's a different hipster, because after all the New York hipster is a world apart from other hipsters, but these BsAs kids were definitely hipsters. Konex also reminded me of what the vibe might have been like at the McCarren Park Pool Parties this summer. I personally did not attend, but I can imagine, and I imagine that it would have been like La Bomba del Tiempo at Konex. Also, this is a regular event, every Monday evening, so I hope to return, and have another young, cool, cultural evening.