Arrival

It is incredibly overwhelming to board a taxi when you’re going to somewhere you’ve never been, to meet up with someone you’ve never seen, in a foreign country, where your eight years of education in the language is exposed as horribly inadequate.

The taxi ride into Buenos Aires, as the sun was rising stands as a giddy, fearful, but somehow settling experience. As my cab driver wheezed away, hopefully not swine flu, I stared out the windows at a completely alien terrain. Even the way the highway was built seemed completely different then home. As opposed to the sprawling mega structure of the Eisenhower interstate, this was simply a highway.

Billboards in Spanish assaulted my vision on each side of the road as people on the radio babbled away far beyond my comprehension.

Slowly the shanty slums on the edge of the city gave way to towering apartments, back down to a condensed urban hodgepodge, and then finally into the city limits proper.

Everything seemed so familiar yet completely alien. Street cleaners were at work, but the streets seemed designed to more make car travel an option, rather than the only way to move.

The cab driver dropped me off and I thanked him and wished that he would feel better in a rudimentary Spanish phrase that I spent the entirety of the ride composing.

I rang the bell for my host mothers apartment, didn’t hear a reply.
I tried again, and got through, but the door wasn’t unlocked.
Was she coming down?

I stood outside of the apartment building, hating to appear like some rude foreigner, just wishing to boss her around with no patience. I’ve come thousands of miles in twenty-four hours and stopped by a locked door.

Fuck it. I tried again and went up.

My “host mother” is a 67 year old with a sufficiently grandmotherly air. Probably due to her being an Italian mother (similar in many habits to the familiar to me Jewish mother). One interesting thing was she mentioned several times one of her sons who died in a climbing accident.

When I enter, she assaults me with a barrage of Spanish, but I feign fluster from the flight and we start off in English. It doesn’t last long, and even though I hate to strain myself with Spanish, I know it’s for the better.

When forced to conduct your entire life in a language other than your own for the first time, it feels almost like surrendering part of oneself while simultaneously being thrown completely off balance. Simple communication needs forethought. No longer can I just instinctively say what comes to mind without feeling like a ritard who simply spouts one word answers, malo, bueno, caliente, frio, si, etc., etc.

All that needs to be said about Spanish keyboards is that they hurt. Making room for the “n-yay” and other signature Spanish letters completely changes the layout of the keyboard and I felt myself straining my fingers in unaccustomed ways to type, nothing to be said of many inadvertent typos.

Googles also automatically searching Argentine results. Not only are they in Spanish, I just can’t find the results I want.

Going on my own, down several blocks on the same street, to change my cash feels like a real beginning of a grand adventure. Here I am setting off through a foreign country, on the other side of the world, something I’ve always dreamed of doing, somewhere where everything is unfamiliar and captivating and new and worth attention, even on this simple errand of going to the bank.

Banks are the same everywhere, except all the tellers here are young and the girl tellers were hot.

I didn’t have my passport, couldn’t exchange money there, so I continued to a major shopping street a block down to change cash.

Out of curiosity I dropped into an electronics shop to just scout out cell phones, and again simple tasks and phrases became a struggle. It’s so much easier to tell off pushy floor employees politely in your own language.

I leave and pass by someone who stops me and asks if I go to UMass. She remembers me from a political theory class first semester freshman year that she transferred out of. Ironically, four weeks prior in Boston someone else who I didn’t know at all recognized me from that same class. The less said about that class and its bizarrely persisting impact, the better.

I asked the basic details that anyone would want from someone vaguely familiar about a city that isn’t familiar at all. She arrived yesterday. Exchange names, to be found on facebook later.
I return to the bank, now with my passport, but five minutes after the time they stop cash changes. No exceptions. Banks are the same everywhere.

I continued to kill time and go to a high end mall back on the shopping street and through rough, and incredibly inaccurate math, determine that all of the designer clothes being sold there is ridiculously affordable. The UMass girl did say we’re loaded here. Meanwhile, mall crowds are the same here, but seemingly more stylish and hotter. This whole hot preconception is defiantly influenced by a hype that people have given me about Argentinean girls before coming.

Return to the apartment. Find internet to squat off of, and guess what? No matter what country I’m in, I know how to make a complete waste of myself by checking the same seven webpages over and over. I tell myself that further exploring will be better done with actual currency.

Dinners late and I continue the awkward efforts at smalltalk in another language. I squeeze it out. It definitely makes it difficult when there’s no one else eating at the table to carry the conversation. All the pressure is on you. It’s difficult enough to carry on a conversation when you have absolutely nothing to say. Imagine it when constantly worry whether your conjugating your subjunctive whatevers.

It’s funny though. I find myself typing here and at times, Spanish is creeping into my thoughts of what to type and words that I write. The conflict of languages feels like my mind is split in two and each side is racing to my mouth or hands, trying to be the first one out while fighting and pulling the other one back.

I’ve come to Argentina to throw myself completely off balance, because only then will I know what I am made of, what I am capable of, and what parts of me deserve to shine through the most. This shit’s not gonna be easy, but I can attest to one thing. It’s definitely going to lead me somewhere. Where? Somewhere great.