A Bit More Like Life

This week, my life in Buenos Aires finally became a life, not an extension of a vacation or an experience outside of mundane time. I no longer felt like I was watching myself live in a foreign city, awkwardly awed, taking notes, and being noted as a tourist by everyone I passed. Tourists give themselves away by looking from side to side when they walk, mesmerized by the sweet smell of bread from a panaderia and the site of sausages hanging from the ceiling of the carniceria. They look up from the sidewalk to the streets ahead and quickly trip on a broken square of concrete or step in dog shit. Buenos Aires is known for being a city in which no one picks up after their dog—and everyone has a dog.

I am always tripping over broken sidewalk here, catching the lip of my flip flop in a hole and lurching forward. This week, though, when I tripped it was because I was walking too quickly, not because I was looking around. I worked hard, getting up early to travel back and forth across the city for the rest of the day. On Tuesday, my first class began at 7:30am in an outlying suburb and my last class finished at 7:30pm in the microcentro. In between, I traveled to Belgrano to teach a class at Johnson & Johnson. On the walk there, following Calle Mendoza after getting off subway D at Juramento, I discovered the four blocks of Buenos Aires that make up Chinatown. Tucked between wealthy apartments and houses, Chinatown is only a few restaurants, two or three grocery stores, and a few novelty shops that reminded me of San Francisco. The grocery store I explored, in addition to having Sushi for nine pesos a log and a fast food noodle bar, is the only place I have found peanut butter. Skippy brand, with Chinese writing wrapped around the sides.

My discovery of Chinatown on Tuesday is the type of digression that teaching forces me to make, again and again. With my GuiaT in hand (the GuiaT is a small book of the city, the Bible of maps) I figure out how to get to new classes in new parts of the city and, while I do get tired of using the subway four times a day, I love being continually surprised and, in my surprise, made a tourist once again.

So perhaps what changed this week was not that I had so much work—after all, I’ve been working since my fifth day in the city—but that after work my days kept going. On Monday night I had class with my independent student; we talked long after class was over, switching into Spanish to get to know each other. On Tuesday night I packed my apartment up, on Wednesday night I moved and then went to cook dinner with friends; we made milanesa de pollo with cheese and ham baked on top. On Thursday night I went to the first meeting of my writing group. Three people replied to my Craig’s List add and came to a café I had chosen called Boutique de Libro en Palermo. We met at seven and talked for so long that I was late to my Thanksgiving dinner at Anna’s apartment. I didn’t even go out Friday night; I took a much needed night to myself with Middlesex and a mug of tea.

All of these activities certainly don’t make me more Argentine or show how living here has drastically opened my mind to new ways of living. But in subtle ways, I feel my life and myself changing. I was not worried about being late to Thanksgiving dinner. No Argentine would worry about it, and so I sat and talked with fellow writers in a café until we were ready to leave. Then, and only then, did I look at what time it was. Of course, just as I feel freer to take my time, I now have less time and I face the danger that everyone faces when life becomes full and busy. There is always the danger of becoming too wrapped up in your own life, of not looking up from the sidewalk and taking the time to write down what you see. This week my life here became a real life. Now I just have to make sure that that “life” doesn’t interfere with really living.