In honor of the fourth addition to this blog series I am going to make a heroic attempt at not once mentioining anything political. Ha ha!! It will be a real feat, but I do think that it is do-able! Also, be forewarned, the apostrophy key on this computer doesn t work, see. That said, I will begin this episode with a brief reference to fate...In The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera introduces upon his characters the philosophic concept of fortuity. The playing out of this concept goes on and on in the book, but at the moment, the relevance is this: At times ribbons of this fortuity float down on us like feathers, or light, slow moving snow flakes. We may or may not notice this happening, (I would wager that most people are in the dark as to what is happening on the fortuity plane) nevertheless we can probably all remember times when things just seemed to be lining up the right way. It is also likely that we can all remember times when the Commander Of Fortune took a big shit in his hand and wiped it all over our brand new white t-shirts and we then spent the next day or so trying to wash it out. This is a crude implied comparison, but hopefully clear all the same. Much to my glee I have had almost nothing but the good kind of fortuity thus far in my stay here in Argentina. Walking the streets it seems as if I could actually reach up to grab a handful of it, such has been my luck. Since the last blog I moved into my new home with a new set of Spanish speaking parents. (Or "padres" as they are called here. I thought, "Oh wow, is my host family a couple of gay guys?" No. It turned out that the word for parents here is padres, which seems like it would mean "dads". But it doesn t. Whatever.) They are named Alba and Miguel de Altube and they are both totally frickin rad!! She is very latina with a sing-song italian-spanish accent and a flare for talking with her hands. She has a lot of energy and talks a lot with me which is great for my comprehension. Miguel, too, has a ton of energy for conversation and he at times displays comedic flair from the realm of Mr Bean. He does these impressions of people and things that get me laughing hard. His eyes get really big and he does these crazy voices. He is well read and has a good sense of philosophy and history. What does he think about Argentinian politics? (Ha ha, trick question, I am not doing politics this time!!) But they are both great, bottom line. I have a lot of homework from my school and with these two I end up way beyond understanding the different subjects. They are like extra teachers that turn up where I sleep. Oh wow. The only thing that I need to get used to is that they live on the third floor of a building that faces this giant block-wide street called Avenida de Carlos Pellegrini, and it positively roars at all hours. (Would I expect less from a city with more than ELEVEN MILLION inhabitants?) Not kidding about the word roar. I wake up sweating and I am positive that the world is in the final stages of ending. I have taken to wearing earplugs and now, ironically, I can still hear the street but I am sleeping through the alarm. Mierda! But all is good, no worries. My school is really cool too. It is bigger than I thought it would be, there are many classrooms and shiteloads of people from Switzerland study there. The classes are five students to a teacher. My teacher is named Guillermo, pronounced Gee-djermo. He is from Havana de Cuba and you can tell immediatly that the dude is a dancer/musician. He is constantly moving, almost dancing as he teaches. He may be the most captivating teacher that I have ever had. He is constatnly cracking jokes and drawing grand pictures all over the whiteboard and then interacting with them and then erasing them and drawing more. Then he goes into ultra-serious mode and dials in the point of discussion. After class one day I played him some Sergento Garcia on my iPod and he started dancing just like I thought he would. Turns out he is a conga player. Perfect!! I can say with confidencia that I have learned more in the last three days than I have in the past year, in the realm of spanish. All this stuff is happening in a neighborhood called Recoleta. This locale is in stark contrast to the place I was staying before. Large wide streets, stores with gold watches, fat white men with light blue sweaters draped over thier shoulders, and green green grass at every turn. The apartments have grand facades and the architecture is very european. Churches and edificios all seem as if they were carved from stone. At first I panicked, and then I realized that even here they have cortados and empanadas. So now my ritual is getting these things and maybe a sandwich on the way to class at about one, stopping to eat them in one of the greenest, most beautiful parks ever, and then cruising up through the chic-ness to my school. At night Miguel makes dinner and he gives himself no credit but he serves up some magic for sure. Tonight he made a pasta dish, last night it was Argentinian beef with tortilla española, and sunday he did whole roasted chicken in this local chile rub with roasted potatoes. Rad. The final, non political part of this chapter will be a brief description of one of the funnest nights I have had in years. After my class on monday night I met up with Miranda and Erin from San Francisco, some of you may know them. Miranda is one of my best homies from the SF era. They have been travelling in Peru and then more recently here in AR. So we met up at a bar on Carlos Pelligrini and drank beer from these liter glasses that looked like something out of a laborotory. We were joined by another gringo who lives here and from the bar we cabbed up to a cool little neighborhood called Palermo. We arrived at a restaurant that was rumored to be muy bien and there was quite a wait but being the cool cats that we were the head waiter said that if we hung around he would make it worth our while. I am coming to relish these moments, despite my inherent skepticism about such offers. He continued to keep us topped off with champagne and we were barraged by tray after tray of sausage and olives stuffed with almonds and parmesan cheese. An hour later we were way drunker and way hungrier and finally being seated. The onslaught that followed will go down in Matteo Del Norte dining legend. No joke. We ordered two steak dishes, (if anyone reading this isn t aware, Argentina is prized, the world over, for its beef.) and one plate of roasted potatoes. What we got was one giant skewer with probably two pounds of tenderloin on it, a giant steak -freaking hugely giant- that had been butterflied but still had about two inches of thickness on each side. It literally looked like a giant peice of wood and it was cooked perfectly. The potatoes ended up being a giant ceramic dish-full that we maybe ate half of, and then they served us no less than fifteen side dishes full of things like roasted garlic, olive tapenade, peas in mustard sauce, pureed squash, and many other crazy things. It was fantastic. I ordered a bottle of Atilio Malbec for the table that was "expensive" by argentine standards but incredibly well priced by ours. (Watch me skip the shitty, unfair international trade deficit comment!) It was perfect with the meal and incredibly nuanced on its own...it was pretty close to food nirvana actually. Then, as is true of most nirvana-like states, it slowly faded away leaving its existence as but a memory. And goddamn were we full. But, this was the ladies last night in town so we were out to paint it red and what with all the champagne and beer and Malbec, drinking a lot more seemed like the right thing to do at that moment...so we went to another bar. In my rational mind, which was riding in the backseat at this point, I was thinking "school night". But in my drinking mind, which was in full control of the vehicle, (bad drunk driving metaphor, I realize this) I was ready to go. We ended up befriending a cab driver who, to the best of my recollection, gave us a great deal on the ride home. I ended up home at two something in the madrugada and Miguel, who stays up really late cause he can t sleep due to his bad liver and the cacophony outside the window, was chillin watching tv. He wanted to hear all about the gran noche and all I remember was feeling like I could speak spanish completely fluently in that moment. I probably made no sense at all. The next day was as rough as my rational mind imagined that it might be. But it was all good. Such is the price of glory in certain instances. And that is my story for tonight. I was telling Cuppies in an email yesterday, that this whole going-to-learn-langauge-in-Argentina-idea is the best thing I have done in many many moons. If anyone out there is entertaining the idea of living in another country for while, do it as soon as you can!!! It is such an amazing experience...all ups and downs considered. I wouldn t exchange these experiences for anything en el mundo...buenas noches mi gente...
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