Cafe Montecarlo

When I enter the wood paneled cafe, my first thought is that it smells like breakfast. Perhaps I notice it so strongly because it is cold outside, and the warm air feels heavier, thicker with the smells of coffee, bread, and butter. The chairs around me are green and red leather, tacked with brass buttons into the wooden chair frames. The springs in my seat are shot, and I settle with a thump. I order a cafe con leche and two medialunas. The personality of the head waiter, mozo, sets the tone; he is friendly and teases me, and brings my breakfast quickly, slapping the items down briskly. The medialunas here are thin and compact. They are not like the airy medialunas, so fat that their croissant arms tuck like penguin wings into their sides. Instead they are arched and the dough is so thick that it takes several dunks for the coffee to really get inside. I sit, dunking and reading, for a while, watching as the breakfast crowd thins. The mozo surveys the room like a captain surveying calm seas, satisfied as we are supposed to be after a job well done. My stomach clutches warmly around bread and coffee and I put away this notebook. It is time to go to work.

Expatriates of a Different Flavor

Bruce Chatwin, author of In Patagonia, wrote in a letter to his wife that in Patagonia, “The Almighty has been playing at making Neapolitan ice cream. Imagine climbing (as I did) a cliff face 2000 feet high alternatively stripped vanilla, strawberry, and pistachio.” Each geologic layer of rock distinctly different in color, they are flavors—eras—that border but do not infiltrate each other.

The American expatriate community here sometimes looks like these rocks, or might, could a viewer really get far enough away. I live here, so to me, these other layers are usually invisible. These invisible Americans work for our embassy, our military, General Electric, themselves—some don’t work at all. Some have been sent by their companies to work for a two year shift, others own real estate and plan to stay forever. But I don’t seem them. We are divided by age and by money. Mostly, I think, by money. They don’t go to Gibraltar to drink on Friday night, they don’t work at my teaching institute, and if they go to a tango, it is probably a sparkling tango show on Av. de Mayo, not cluttered La Catedral.

This Friday, as part of my new internship duties, I ended up passing out magazines to one of the other layers of expatriates, a group of people who welcome newcomers and promote community among expatriates. They had invited a UCLA professor studying butterflies in Buenos Aires to give a lecture. The room reminded me of college, each blue plastic chair attached to its own little desk, as did the cookies and coffee in the back. But the people were older, most in their 50s or above, most women, most American, although I heard French and noticed the Spanish of a woman from Colombia. There was only one girl near my age and she was writing an article for the Smithsonian on American expatriates in Buenos Aires; I hope she gets a good look at the full Neapolitan ice cream.

The lecture was titled “Butterfly Dreams,” and clearly, the professor’s enthusiasm for butterflies had infiltrated every aspect of his life—waking or sleeping. While an Argentine tried to make the slide projector work, he stood in front of the audience telling stories the way musicians do while they tune their strings, which is to say usually badly, invoking laughter that forgives them for being musicians, not stand-up comics. Even after the lecture began, people seemed no more than politely interested in butterflies, but it was clear by the way the organizer watched the clock that everyone was interesting in the socializing that came afterward.

Over some food in a little French restaurant after the lecture, I sit and chat with a group of three women. Three of us, including myself, have just had our rents raised. One woman tells me how she is lonely with her husband gone working all the time. Another woman talks about how hard it can be to wait for inspiration between her writing projects. She has money and can simply wait; Virginia Woolf’s woman writer, with a steady income and a room with a lock. I relate to these women, and I am reminded that Chatwin’s ice cream rocks lie by omission; they don’t reveal the eras that accumulated and were washed away. Now those stark divisions make it seem like a cataclysmic flood or earthquake leveled one era to make way for the next, but that is rarely true. These women who are in the 50s and 60s and seem to lives so utterly separate from mine, were 22 once as well. It was days passing that wore them down and built them up.

When I go to the bar with friends later that night, I am guilty of revealing, to the shock of all, how much one of the woman’s hair dye job cost. It’s petty of me, and we all express amazement and feel smug. What we are proud of having is hard to put our fingers on: of being so young, so unable to afford what we are so uninterested in having? Whatever it is, it is already rubbing away under the force of our anxieties about jobs, love, sex, and stability. In our futures, perhaps it will be as hard to connect to our stable incomes and families to the instability of our lives right now, as hard as it is to remember that we share this city with whole other flavors of expatriates, who used to taste like us.

Recipe: Purée de Calabaza

I love purée de calabaza. In English, puréed squash, but because I ate it here first, it will always be calabaza to me, just like chard will always be acelga. Calabaza is a subtle, healthy side to a rich chorizo but can also be buttery and light as the top half of a squash and chard tarta (essentially a vegetable pie).

When I leave Argentina, I want to be able to make at least a few of the foods I love eating here, so with that in mind, I want to start doing a little bit more Argentine cooking in my rather small kitchen. Today, I made an impulse buy on the walk home. A small, saran wrapped package of cubed calabaza. I asked the vendor how you cook it and he looked at me like I was insane. “You boil it,” he told me.

“And?” I asked.

“You boil it. Then crush it into a pulp.”

With that sage advice in mind, I went home and cooked!

Step 1: Buy calabaza. You can get them at any vegetable vender in a few different forms. I bought the calabaza already chopped into easily boiled cubes for a peso and a half. They also sell them in flat, round disks, or, if you are truly ambitious, you can buy an entire calabaza. The pre-cut calabaza is the color of cantaloupe. The whole one has a slightly whiter, very hard shell that you will need a good knife to cut off. If you buy the whole calabaza, you will need to de-seed it.

Step 2: Boil it. Simple. Drop the pieces of calabaza into boiling, already well salted water and let it sit. Using calabaza cubes, I let mine boil for fifteen minutes, and could have left it a bit longer. When you think your calabaza is done, scoop one piece out with a spoon and trying crushing it. If it breaks apart easily, you are ready for step three.

Step 3: Strain it. Using whatever you use to strain pasta (since admit it, if you need to read how to make calabaza purée, you, like me, probably eat a lot of pasta), separate the water and the calabaza. Then, crush it in the strainer, letting the excess water go down the drain.

Step 4: Add salt, butter, oil, spices—whatever you like! Now you can eat it alone, as a side to a main dish, inside an empanada, or as one layer of a vegetable tarta.

As you can see, my calabaza is a side to a rice empanada and some grilled peppers. Delicious!

I am easily excited by my culinary successes.

A New Vocabularly Word

I learned a new vocabulary word today from a student of mine. Tregua. It means truce. Say it like agua, she explained, telling me that the government and the farmers have called a thirty day truce to allow negotiations and goods to flow.

This kind of thing is always happening, she told me. It just changes topics.

Export Tax Protests

Despite the fact that I live in Buenos Aires, I still find myself scanning the New York Times in hopes of finding an article to explain what is going here. I could read El Clarín or La Nación to get the details—in fact I have—but what I need isn’t the details, it’s the background story. Right now, the country is in a gridlock. Angry farmers from the provinces are blocking the roads into Buenos Aires to prevent food from entering the city. They hope to persuade the government to get rid of the increased export taxes instated several weeks ago. President Kirchner refuses, arguing that the tax only affects wealthy farmers. However, if that is the case, what are thousands of angry small farmers doing on the highways? And why are so many residents of Buenos Aires standing in the streets or on their balconies banging pots and pans in support of the campo.

Today, the Times had a short blurb on a large rally held yesterday in the Plaza de Mayo, showing support for President Kirchner’s government. It is only one paragraph, which says that a huge rally held yesterday was “a show of strength for Mrs. Kirchner.” That is one way to interpret the rally, but it isn’t an interpretation I have heard from the people I talk to in the streets. Several of my students told me that most of the people at the rally for the government were paid 50 pesos to be there. Don’t go to the plaza, they told me, you don’t know what will happen. I asked my roommate what she thought, and she agreed with my students. She was only a block away from rally when it started yesterday afternoon and she said she could hear them yelling in her office building. She said they were from the “lower classes,” people who probably supported the provinces but were happy to shout and cheer for good money. She didn’t feel safe there, she said.

The export taxes on grain products are not new. They were put in place to try to prevent dairy farmers and cattle ranchers from changing their land into soybean plantations, a far more lucrative industry. Argentina is the third largest exporter of soybeans in the world and the largest exporter of soybean oil. Obviously, exporting soy beans for dollars and euros produces more profits than selling milk for pesos. Already high, export taxes on soy beans were raised from 35 to 44 percent and other taxes went up as well. According to one article, these raises affect small farmers (who account for 85 percent of all farmers) most drastically. The big farms can afford the tax.

April second is the anniversary of the war for the Malvinas and no one has to go to work. The city is calm and quite, shops are closed; it is almost like Christmas or Easter. On the news, I see women in the provinces screaming at the cameras that they cannot feed their children and listen to union leaders who say that while the government isn’t changing its position yet, they will once the supermarkets get emptier and the people get angry. People are already angry. And today feels like a quiet before a storm, even if it is a storm that may not come or that I, as an outsider, may never really feel or understand.

Buenos Aires in the New York Times

Article from March 16, 2008
http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/travel/16buenos.html?ref=travel

Eleven o’clock and eating dinner on Maryann’s terrace, we made fun of the recent New York Times article on Buenos Aires. Quoting phrases that described the city as “a throbbing hothouse of cool,” we joked about what life was like in the edgy city to which the article was directing its slightly worn out, stylized travel-writing.

In travel articles, the graffiti that makes you nervous walking home at night transforms into an artistic “graffiti-splattered space” and turning another neighborhood into Palermo-hyphenation-mark is a sign of bohemia expanding, not a marketing tool to up the price of apartments. Too often, it makes the unfamiliar exotic and the familiar unrecognizable.

“Bohemians-in-exile.” That’s us! We smiled and the toasts all around washed down chipotle sauce with some cheap Malbec. The chipotle sauce was part of a special Mexican meal that Maryann’s friend, visiting from the states, had made for us with peppers she had smuggled in her suitcase. We watched her put whole tomatoes, half an onion, garlic cloves, and chipotle peppers into the pot to boil until they were ready to be blended. “You own a blender?” I asked Maryann with just a touch of envy, thinking of my own sparse kitchen.

Phrases like “You own a blender?” and “My friend is bringing me peanut butter!” prevent us from being the sirens of cool that the Times praises, or at least they prevent us from letting our bohemian status go to our heads. We miss bagels the way we love our newfound medialunas, lovers of two places, not allowed to be “from” Buenos Aires but equally unwilling to call any one place in the United States our home. And we are a potentially dangerous duality for Buenos Aires. As Americans and Europeans open more and more businesses here, I wonder how long it will take before peanut butter and bagels are easy to find and the long awaited, much maligned Starbucks arrives in Recoleta.

No one here who has a little life savings and a true desire to work on their craft—whether that be painting, writing, design, ect.—can deny the Time’s claim that we are a part of something exciting, an opportunity to work without the financial constraints that we would face in the States. But when I read about the young bohemian writers enjoying the city’s “hedonistic night life” I can’t help but think, who are these people? Then I remember that they are me, fictionalized. And when I go to a party here, I am that girl in the worn jeans or retro dress with her blogspot and her flat on the edge of Recoleta. And when I go home, I am just a girl with some Word documents that need to be edited, some blank pages that need to be filled, and a class to teach in the morning.

The Mexican Wrestler Dances a Jig

The day before St. Patrick’s day, I asked an Argentine friend of mine when I should plan on getting to Kilkenny’s, one of the city’s most well known Irish pubs. “Probably seven,” he told me, and I simply didn’t believe him. Nothing in Buenos Aires starts at seven. When I told my American friends that we should be there by seven, they blew me off. Eight at least. But someone had dance class until 9:30 and someone else was going out to dinner, which couldn’t even start earlier than eight.

I ended up meeting my friends outside of Kilkenny’s at nine and found myself alone in a line that stretched down the sidewalk and half way around the bar. The whole of Reconquista was closed off, made into a pedestrian-only zone that was brimming with drunk partiers. As I waited for my friends, I fought off the question I have learned to hate, “Where you from?” by insisting that they speak to me in Spanish and accept my answer, “I live here.” The line didn’t move and by the time my friends got there I had learned that entrance alone was forty pesos, which none of were willing to pay. We found some beer being vended from a pizza stand and decided to enjoy the party in the humid Argentine evening.

The party in the street, however, lacked direction, even towards the beer. “Where is it?” people would ask us when they noticed the plastic beer cups in our hands. “Down the street two blocks. It’s a thirty minute wait,” we would reply and they would swear a little in Spanish. An enterprising Argentine with a cooler full of liters of Quilmes could have made a fortune that night. Every once in a while, yelling would start up, at first making us worried that a fight had started. It always turned out to be a camera crew though, around which knots of people formed, screaming “San Patricio,” jumping up and down, and spilling their hard won beer. The patches of television-illuminated partying looking nothing like the scene surrounding them.

St. Patrick’s Day in Buenos Aires was the least Irish Irish festival I have ever seen. You could spot a foreigner a million miles away because that person was actually wearing green. Three men playing Aeolian pipes were the highlight of my evening and created a crowd around them. After the first song or two a large man wearing a Mexican wrestling mask began break dancing in front of them. As he kicked out his legs and did a flip, the crowd clapped and we couldn’t help but smile at what we supposed was an imitation of Irish folk dancing. We took a few turns ourselves, linking elbows and skipping our own awkward homage to the holiday.