Writer’s block is just the cramp one suffers from not stretching their writing muscle. One need’s to seize on the inspiration to write when it comes to them or else they just sputter and can’t build up the strength to get working again. With that said…
August is “Tango Month”. A series of free events and exhibitions are being put on across the city by the Government Department of Culture and the City of Buenos Aires Government. A few friends and I went to a free lesson being put on in the vacant remains of the Old Harrods’s Department Store downtown. When we passed by a week ago, the storefront seemed spooky and abandoned, like somewhere the villain from a Scooby Doo short would hide in. However, today it was buzzing.
A crowd outside peered through the windows to window shop the lessons being conducted in the front of the floor space. The floor for the lessons was packed full of middle aged tango impresarios bedecked in typical masculine Argentine style along with numerous other people who would get swept up by these men and appear to positively fly across the dance floor. And oh yeah, people like me with no sense of rhythm trying for the fourth time to get the basics of Tango down.
Despite a few bumps into other dancing couples and being upstaged by and having several dancing partners taken by a septuagenarian in a cardigan, I held my own. I think.
Arraigned around the edge of the floor space were vendors selling tango shoes (dress shoes with the soles completely sanded down), tango dresses, tango hats, tango books, tango music. At the back a rock band was playing a cover of some old tango song. I watched for a bit from a friend’s table at an overpriced impromptu café.
From there, a few of us made our way to a concert being held a few blocks down. Several people stopped to get some prepared food at a sketchy market (I didn’t like the way that the heat lamps glistened on the empanadas). We came to where the concert was being held, El Museo de Arte Hisanoamericano (a Hispano-American art museum).
The building seemed like an old fort or mansion from the city’s earlier days. When the neighborhood around it was demolished to make way for high rises and corporate towers, through someone’s act of philanthropy, the building was saved to serve culture.
The courtyard was a peaceful grove lined with statuary and shrubbery that blended into the scene. Not trying to attract attention, but accentuating the overall ambience. Fading sun poked through between the towers that loomed over the edge of the walls.
The concert, a flute, piano, and clarinet recital was held in a vaulted room with an elaborate ceiling, set among a display of Christian iconography made out of silver by Andean natives.
The music was ok, a nice change of pace. But I’ve heard more enjoyable classical music back in Sharon. Plus some guy behind us couldn’t stop rhythmically muttering some gibberish. It was weird.
It seems like free cultural events everywhere, all over the world, attract pensioners and retirees.
We followed this up with Peruvian food. Shark Cebiche is incredible, is filling, sweet, has a great texture, is just overall a fantastic dish. It’s the closest time I’ve tasted fish with the texture of steak. On the other hand, a Pisco Sour, the national cocktail of Peru, is good, but nothing special. It’s a mixed drink with lime, and all lime mixed drinks taste the same.
Pisco Sour, mixed with egg whites, is a smooth lime drink. Caprihanas, or however you spell the Brazilian cocktail, is a really sugary lime drink. A Margarita is a frozen lime drink. Lime just really makes a lot of drinks taste way too similar in my opinion. Just slight variations in texture.
After a beer at the hookah bar in Palermo, Quiroz, I found myself traveling with a new group to something that was being described as an “authentic Argentine party.” It was nearing three. For the first month, this time was a signal to check out, but my tolerance for long nights has been steadily growing. Now, walking down a street normally part of my route home I saw it packed. Most times, crossing it, I find the sidewalks almost empty. Now, probably a half hour after I normally cross it, people were pouring down it from everywhere.
We came to a crowd in front of just a door of a nondescript building. We went through the crowd, down a narrow hallway with no roof and a semi-flooded floor, following music. The crowd got thicker in the hallway and it spilled out to a bank of corridors which worked their way through what seemed like a vacant lot that had a roof thrown over it.
People congregated in rooms off the hallway, the smell of marijuana drifted over everything. We reached the dance floor, a room full of lights with a bar in the corner that served all the usuals. The place was packed, hard to navigate with my friends, obviously not built to be a club, but people were coming in because it was said to be “cool”. Holy shit, I was a guest at a frat party.
We left, happy with the fact that we “experienced” the party. If this was where most Argentines went, it makes me wonder where I’ve been going.
Earlier in the night, at Quiroz, one of my friends who was there for the first time mentioned how the crowd seemed older. A wrinkled, plastic surgery doll, with blonde hair and glistening bling who was sitting at the booth near us seemed familiar from a billboard. Drinks ran around 20 pesos at places we went to, not expensive at all by American standards (about equal to 4 bucks). It was similar to this at all the other trendy bars.
Something clicked. I’ve been balling in Buenos on an American college budget. These bars have been high end places were the wealthy and trendy hung out. Kids my age poured into makeshift bars like the one we had left at the end of the night. But the money transfer? The relative inexpensiveness of the hip bars? That’s experiencing difference in economies first hand.
I haven’t taken an economics class, but I’m starting to understand how lifestyles across the world can be disproportionate. My budget, low by American standards, affords me a high class lifestyle here. Damn, we Americans don’t know how to appreciate good things.
On the way home, sometime around 4:30, I walked through my neighborhood and saw people lined up outside of storefronts and doorways that I never notice before. Places were just opening, and it was 4:30? Better yet, these places were right near my house?
I saw a whole new life in front of me on the streets. I passed the courtyards of apartment buildings, places that seem vacant around 11:00 and saw people sitting by fountains, talking, showing no signs of quitting.
How do they do it here? I don’t know. But when I do figure it out, I’ll have a new hatred for last call at 12:45 in Amherst.
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