Rachel Back in Buenos Aires
Rachel Back in Buenos Aires
Well I realised today that it is a year exactly since I was sitting in Milan airport typing in my last post on the blog, so I spent a long time typing up some stuff about being back here and saved it onto my flash drive, but I cannot open it on this crappy computer! So tough, I will try other means another day and meanwhile just say all is well here and it really is where I want to be right now.
Hasta la vista babies,
R xx
This is the entry I had planned to post:
Back in Buenos Aires
So, this time last year, I was sitting in Milan airport killing time. I never did go back and edit the results of the dodgy keyboard because when I read it back, I quite liked the rough and ready effect.
It took me almost a year of working on my flat to make it presentable for sale, then pulling out of the sale at the last minute despite getting a reasonable price for it, then doing it up again for rental which was another thing entirely - new boiler, new kitchen, the unbearable business of finding workmen willing to take money off me, the inevitable business of getting on my knees and up ladders and getting on with it. Finally, finding tenants and moving out what remained of my stuff. Oh, what stuff I possess! No matter how much you throw out and take to the charity shops, there is still a mountain of trinkets and clothes and books and just amazing accumulated stuff. It is all boxed up and stacked under the stairs at my father’s house. Well, if he will have five children, he has to bear the consequences!
Today it is three weeks since I touched down at Ezeiza airport. One of the scariest landings ever. The airport had been closed all morning due to fog and there was talk of us diverting to Montevideo to refuel and wait for the runway to clear. We were in a holding pattern for some time, in glorious sunshine, then started a descent into the cloud. But it wasn’t cloud, it was fog, so there was literally no end to it and before I could see the runway out of the window, we were on it. I could barely even see the wing it was so dense, so heaven knows how the pilot managed to take us down so smoothly on instruments alone. I had been sitting next to a very young man on his gap year who has probably been eaten alive by now. His naivety was stunning at times. It is such an interesting age - when you know so little but you have to get to grips with the world and everything seems possible one minute and hopeless the next. The point at which I realised that he was talking to me as someone of his parents’ generation was a little alarming but his mother sounds quite young and funky, so that took the edge off! I gave him a lift into town in my taxi, which seemed a nice motherly thing to do, and let him loose on Buenos Aires. I wonder how he got on.
The first ten days or so, I rented my friend Linda’s spare room and we spent a lot of time together eating big old lunches and going to milongas. Then I moved to a little flat in town which I really like and am on my own agenda, which I also really like. Time is just slipping through my fingers already and I have not danced at all as much as last year. I suppose there is less urgency as I have at least six months here but there is something odd about my attitude at the moment that I can’t quite pin a tail on. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter because I don’t have to account for it to anyone but myself!
It has been good to see some of the faces I remember from last year, especially Belen, and now I am settled I will have to make a bit of an effort socially. Buenos Aires is still the busy, busy, noisy, dirty place it was last year and I love its energy and its gorgeousness. Some things have clearly changed already. The economy seems to be on the up, quite a few things are more expensive. Entrance to milongas for example, while still generally less than two quid was generally around one quid last year. Internet cafes tend to have doubled to 40p an hour, though it is still possible to find them at 20p if you don’t mind all the letters having been rubbed off the grubby keyboards. My lovely tango teachers have doubled their prices too. A quick look in estate agents’ office windows shows that property prices have been increasing apace, so I had better get a move on if my little stash is going to buy me anything reasonable. If anyone fancies a good medium-term investment opportunity ….
Wary of time slipping through my fingers, I drew up a list of things to do this week and have already made a bit of progress.
I have started looking into that whole property-buying business and talked to a couple of helpful Brits who have already done it. My first step is to get the local police to visit me at home and give me a certificate to confirm my existence. This I take with my passport to a tax office where I can queue for a few days to get some sort of ID card. Once I have that, all I have to do is get the cash - yes, cash - into the country. Either I go across to a bank in Montevideo in Uruguay, to which my bank can wire the money, and come back here with tens of thousands of dollars stuffed in my knickers or I take the more civilised but still bizarre route of using a service that brings in cash via the US and gives it to me in a suitcase. Either way, apparently I will have to sit in a room with several people while they count and check every note. Hey ho! Of course, somewhere between the bureaucratic thingy and the cash thingy I have to find a property and that process will probably involve getting out of bed in the morning. Life can be tough!
My list of things to do this week included signing up for Spanish classes so I’ve spent some time researching schools and prices online and looking at what is on offer, I think I will wait a little until I have really done justice to Michel Thomas, whose method is working wonders and who has the immense benefit of being free. Then I’ll start paying for classes when I am more advanced and have some serious questions to ask. The Michel Thomas course is very intuitive and it has been sinking in in patches, though there are still huge gaps. What I really need is to talk to more people. Taxi drivers are great for that and I have had some good conversations with people in shops & bars too. And of course at milongas, but there is a limit to how useful vocabulary is going to be about how beautiful my eyes are or how smoothly I dance! I had a long taxi ride on Sunday out to the Feria de Mataderos with a very chatty driver. He said he preferred the Brits to the Americans, even though that was not the common view (yikes!). When I asked him why, he explained that the UK had gone to war with Argentina because we were provoked, not because we thought we were in charge of the world like the States does. He also talked about people he knew who had fought in the Falklands and when I suggested that that war had been good for Argentina as it had brought down the military junta, he agreed and said that Galtieri would be like Castro now if they had won. I had to admit, I was wondering whether Galtieri was still alive but apparently he is. We talked about the education system and how he had disappointed his father and he tried to draw me into a conversation about Charles and Diana but I resisted rather forcefully and he shut up! It is quite a boost having conversations like that and in fact a taxi is a nice quiet (usually!) and contained environment for a chat. Milongas are always noisy and busy and you always have an eye on the next dance.
I’ve spoken to the British Embassy about registering with them while I am here and it seems to be the thing to do. They are only open in the mornings though…. I may try to drop in there tomorrow on my way to meet Debbie’s friend Heloise who is here for a very quick holiday and staying in a hotel in Recoleta, the fancy part of town where most of the embassies are. We are going to get a bit of culture and do a bit of boutique-hopping. I may see if I can lure her to a milonga but she said on the phone that she is no dancer. I may leave the embassy to another day as it seems likely there will be queues and forms and conversations to contend with.
Also on the list is tango lessons, so I am going on Friday morning to Romina and Carlos who were so great last year. I think my dancing has improved a lot in a year and the sort of compliments I am getting seem to confirm that. I am still not one for decorations and kicks but every now and then it annoys me that I don’t come up with the goods when I have the sort of lead whose style that would go well with. So that is probably something to work on, though I do not ever want to be a flashy dancer as my own taste doesn‘t really stretch to women whose ankles and heels are constantly twitching and whose knees fly about the whole time.
I have not bought any new shoes yet and I haven‘t put that on the list as something tells me that will happen in its own good time. I only brought two pairs with me, my comfiest black suede ones and the foxy foxy killer red ones. The latter have only seen one outing thus far but I’ll take them out for a spin later.
So what else to say? We did a couple of very touristy things, with mixed success. In my first week, Linda’s landlady suggested we go to this show called Opera Pampa which is not something either of us would have considered otherwise. At its best, there was some truly amazing horse-riding and at its worst there was some horribly twee choreographed dancing to a rather biased take on Argentine history - happy native peasants frolicking in the fields, that sort of thing. On balance, I’d rather have cut the crap and gone to a rodeo but it was largely a good-will exercise anyway. Then we offered to take said landlady out for lunch and somehow that turned into a whole day out in Tigre, which is a rather beautiful place in the river delta. I’d like to go again and see it properly. The other touristy thing was a trip to an estancia (ranch) about an hour’s drive from BsAs to have a big old barbecue and ogle at some gauchos. That was great fun, we went with Alfredo & Marisol, some really lovely London friends who have also been in Bs As the past few weeks but sadly have now gone back. There will I hope be quite a bit of coming and going of people while I am here and that will probably lead to a few more touristy outings - so I won’t need to initiate any of that. Linda and I are off to the opera next week to see another Verdi I have never heard of. Something about Vespas! Watch this space.
All is well; this is where I want to be right now and I am deeply happy, excited, content and proud of myself for making it happen.
That will do for my first post of 2006.
Well I realised today that it is a year exactly since I was sitting in Milan airport typing in my last post on the blog, so I spent a long time typing up some stuff about being back here and saved it onto my flash drive, but I cannot open it on this crappy computer! So tough, I will try other means another day and meanwhile just say all is well here and it really is where I want to be right now.
Hasta la vista babies,
R xx
This is the entry I had planned to post:
Back in Buenos Aires
So, this time last year, I was sitting in Milan airport killing time. I never did go back and edit the results of the dodgy keyboard because when I read it back, I quite liked the rough and ready effect.
It took me almost a year of working on my flat to make it presentable for sale, then pulling out of the sale at the last minute despite getting a reasonable price for it, then doing it up again for rental which was another thing entirely - new boiler, new kitchen, the unbearable business of finding workmen willing to take money off me, the inevitable business of getting on my knees and up ladders and getting on with it. Finally, finding tenants and moving out what remained of my stuff. Oh, what stuff I possess! No matter how much you throw out and take to the charity shops, there is still a mountain of trinkets and clothes and books and just amazing accumulated stuff. It is all boxed up and stacked under the stairs at my father’s house. Well, if he will have five children, he has to bear the consequences!
Today it is three weeks since I touched down at Ezeiza airport. One of the scariest landings ever. The airport had been closed all morning due to fog and there was talk of us diverting to Montevideo to refuel and wait for the runway to clear. We were in a holding pattern for some time, in glorious sunshine, then started a descent into the cloud. But it wasn’t cloud, it was fog, so there was literally no end to it and before I could see the runway out of the window, we were on it. I could barely even see the wing it was so dense, so heaven knows how the pilot managed to take us down so smoothly on instruments alone. I had been sitting next to a very young man on his gap year who has probably been eaten alive by now. His naivety was stunning at times. It is such an interesting age - when you know so little but you have to get to grips with the world and everything seems possible one minute and hopeless the next. The point at which I realised that he was talking to me as someone of his parents’ generation was a little alarming but his mother sounds quite young and funky, so that took the edge off! I gave him a lift into town in my taxi, which seemed a nice motherly thing to do, and let him loose on Buenos Aires. I wonder how he got on.
The first ten days or so, I rented my friend Linda’s spare room and we spent a lot of time together eating big old lunches and going to milongas. Then I moved to a little flat in town which I really like and am on my own agenda, which I also really like. Time is just slipping through my fingers already and I have not danced at all as much as last year. I suppose there is less urgency as I have at least six months here but there is something odd about my attitude at the moment that I can’t quite pin a tail on. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter because I don’t have to account for it to anyone but myself!
It has been good to see some of the faces I remember from last year, especially Belen, and now I am settled I will have to make a bit of an effort socially. Buenos Aires is still the busy, busy, noisy, dirty place it was last year and I love its energy and its gorgeousness. Some things have clearly changed already. The economy seems to be on the up, quite a few things are more expensive. Entrance to milongas for example, while still generally less than two quid was generally around one quid last year. Internet cafes tend to have doubled to 40p an hour, though it is still possible to find them at 20p if you don’t mind all the letters having been rubbed off the grubby keyboards. My lovely tango teachers have doubled their prices too. A quick look in estate agents’ office windows shows that property prices have been increasing apace, so I had better get a move on if my little stash is going to buy me anything reasonable. If anyone fancies a good medium-term investment opportunity ….
Wary of time slipping through my fingers, I drew up a list of things to do this week and have already made a bit of progress.
I have started looking into that whole property-buying business and talked to a couple of helpful Brits who have already done it. My first step is to get the local police to visit me at home and give me a certificate to confirm my existence. This I take with my passport to a tax office where I can queue for a few days to get some sort of ID card. Once I have that, all I have to do is get the cash - yes, cash - into the country. Either I go across to a bank in Montevideo in Uruguay, to which my bank can wire the money, and come back here with tens of thousands of dollars stuffed in my knickers or I take the more civilised but still bizarre route of using a service that brings in cash via the US and gives it to me in a suitcase. Either way, apparently I will have to sit in a room with several people while they count and check every note. Hey ho! Of course, somewhere between the bureaucratic thingy and the cash thingy I have to find a property and that process will probably involve getting out of bed in the morning. Life can be tough!
My list of things to do this week included signing up for Spanish classes so I’ve spent some time researching schools and prices online and looking at what is on offer, I think I will wait a little until I have really done justice to Michel Thomas, whose method is working wonders and who has the immense benefit of being free. Then I’ll start paying for classes when I am more advanced and have some serious questions to ask. The Michel Thomas course is very intuitive and it has been sinking in in patches, though there are still huge gaps. What I really need is to talk to more people. Taxi drivers are great for that and I have had some good conversations with people in shops & bars too. And of course at milongas, but there is a limit to how useful vocabulary is going to be about how beautiful my eyes are or how smoothly I dance! I had a long taxi ride on Sunday out to the Feria de Mataderos with a very chatty driver. He said he preferred the Brits to the Americans, even though that was not the common view (yikes!). When I asked him why, he explained that the UK had gone to war with Argentina because we were provoked, not because we thought we were in charge of the world like the States does. He also talked about people he knew who had fought in the Falklands and when I suggested that that war had been good for Argentina as it had brought down the military junta, he agreed and said that Galtieri would be like Castro now if they had won. I had to admit, I was wondering whether Galtieri was still alive but apparently he is. We talked about the education system and how he had disappointed his father and he tried to draw me into a conversation about Charles and Diana but I resisted rather forcefully and he shut up! It is quite a boost having conversations like that and in fact a taxi is a nice quiet (usually!) and contained environment for a chat. Milongas are always noisy and busy and you always have an eye on the next dance.
I’ve spoken to the British Embassy about registering with them while I am here and it seems to be the thing to do. They are only open in the mornings though…. I may try to drop in there tomorrow on my way to meet Debbie’s friend Heloise who is here for a very quick holiday and staying in a hotel in Recoleta, the fancy part of town where most of the embassies are. We are going to get a bit of culture and do a bit of boutique-hopping. I may see if I can lure her to a milonga but she said on the phone that she is no dancer. I may leave the embassy to another day as it seems likely there will be queues and forms and conversations to contend with.
Also on the list is tango lessons, so I am going on Friday morning to Romina and Carlos who were so great last year. I think my dancing has improved a lot in a year and the sort of compliments I am getting seem to confirm that. I am still not one for decorations and kicks but every now and then it annoys me that I don’t come up with the goods when I have the sort of lead whose style that would go well with. So that is probably something to work on, though I do not ever want to be a flashy dancer as my own taste doesn‘t really stretch to women whose ankles and heels are constantly twitching and whose knees fly about the whole time.
I have not bought any new shoes yet and I haven‘t put that on the list as something tells me that will happen in its own good time. I only brought two pairs with me, my comfiest black suede ones and the foxy foxy killer red ones. The latter have only seen one outing thus far but I’ll take them out for a spin later.
So what else to say? We did a couple of very touristy things, with mixed success. In my first week, Linda’s landlady suggested we go to this show called Opera Pampa which is not something either of us would have considered otherwise. At its best, there was some truly amazing horse-riding and at its worst there was some horribly twee choreographed dancing to a rather biased take on Argentine history - happy native peasants frolicking in the fields, that sort of thing. On balance, I’d rather have cut the crap and gone to a rodeo but it was largely a good-will exercise anyway. Then we offered to take said landlady out for lunch and somehow that turned into a whole day out in Tigre, which is a rather beautiful place in the river delta. I’d like to go again and see it properly. The other touristy thing was a trip to an estancia (ranch) about an hour’s drive from BsAs to have a big old barbecue and ogle at some gauchos. That was great fun, we went with Alfredo & Marisol, some really lovely London friends who have also been in Bs As the past few weeks but sadly have now gone back. There will I hope be quite a bit of coming and going of people while I am here and that will probably lead to a few more touristy outings - so I won’t need to initiate any of that. Linda and I are off to the opera next week to see another Verdi I have never heard of. Something about Vespas! Watch this space.
All is well; this is where I want to be right now and I am deeply happy, excited, content and proud of myself for making it happen.
That will do for my first post of 2006.
posted by Rachel in Buenos Aires at 6:22 pm
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