Thursday, June 23, 2011

How to Live in Buenos Aires, Part Whatever




    • Another technical account of getting started up in Buenos Aires. Per my training in anthropology, I would like to whine defensively that this is based purely off of my experience living in Buenos Aires and is no way representative of what living in Buenos Aires is an standard/typical/objective sense, if such a thing could be established. A different friend informed me that he is planning to come down to live here had some questions after reading my previous posts. Therefore, I answered them and now, published them, grammatical worts and all.


    • Thank you.

      That did help me gauge where I'll be stepping off, I think. My goal is to be down there in September. Would that be shooting myself in the foot from the get-go?

      Also, who did you fly down with? I'm planning on buying a ticket this week.

      What's your story with health insurance?

      I don't have a TEFL certification. Is this necessary going in or could I take a class while there if necessary?

      What would a good cushion be going down in terms of cash? I was hoping to have about $5000. More, less?

      I'll send more questions as I think of them...

      Thanks again for your help,

      Benja

    • Good questions, some I know the answers too, otheres I will find out the answer.

  • As my friend Teo Valdes put it (he was teaching down here before me) somebody who was contracted for a year walks off the job on a friday in september because they felt like quitting and they can put whatever they want on their resume for the time they were down here. That institute promised to have a native teacher year round and suddenly they need someone to start monday. Its all about the money here, no one REALLY cares if the students develop a proper relationship with their teacher. In short, while the main hiring season will have officially finished, many American schools start up in september and I´m sure lots of people who were planning to have a short english teaching adventure before going to college have given their employer the bad news. Thats what I calculate anyway, I,ll try to consult some peeps.

    Plane, no idea, I could ask my mom if you want. It was a graduation gift.

    Tefl will definitely make you a more attractive candidate. Again, in my experience, no one really cares if you´re a good teacher or qualified for that matter, but many of them throw some acronyms on their advistement (TEFL/TOEFL/BBQOMG certified native teachers) and they want to be able to back that up. So, in my experience, no one asked to see my tefl before interviewing, although I did make sure to mention it in my resume (CV) and they did want at least a digital scan of the article after they hired me. But, no one followed up on it or otherwise verified it as far as I know, asi que, you could probably make a convincing enough facsimile and send digital images to people if it gets asked of you.

    of course, that route is rather ¨argento¨. I think taking a course is a fine, if less rogueish, method. I do believe they offer month long training courses here and I believe they advertise they fact that they{ll hook you up with a job afterward. No idea if thats true. I do also believe that they give you some kind of field training, where you actually get some students and you make lesson plans that you actually execute with real ESL students. this kind of TEFl certification is seen as the most desirable, if youre looking at this as a long term investment. Sadly, i found that out from the teaching of my TEFL certification which was in the basement of a local university and definitely involved no real esl kids. So I would say, come down and take a course, if you want to take a course as it offers the most advantages.

    Cushion? Brother I came down here with 2300 dollars. I live/lived pretty cheaply, but if you can find some rent outside of the usual fuck the foreigner gangbang, you could retire on that money.

    In precise terms, it depends on your estimated expenditure. Going out in this city is ungodly expensive, at least relative to what you{ll earn. Drinks in a bar, food in a restaurant can set you back 200 pesos pretty easily, and thats 20 hours of work for me. Two and a half days work (I work four hours a day, so sue me). Food remains quite cheap, although inflation is imperceptibly working its magic, a weeks worth of groceries couldn{t cost 100 pesos. Meat is quite expensive actually, because Argentines will pay any price for it. I have a student who works for Southern Beef who tipped me to that bit of info. Aguante chikin, loco.

    So 5000 seems like a lot of money to me. You could have quite a bit of fun between that and a job. I had a lot of costs starting up and before i got employed i think i spent almost a 1000 dollars. (Rent was 450 dollars of that) I ate out some (1 to 3 times a week) and bought wine with my girlfriend, so I wasn{t exactly bare bonsing it, but I scrimped during the week.

    I hope I}m not spelling out the obvious or talking too much, but the key is to think in both dollars and pesos. I used to think only in pesos and refused to spend anything out of my savings, but I was living like a poor man in buenos aires. If anything is worse than living like a poor man in the united states, its living like a poor man in the second-world. So ive opened up my bank account to some things important to me, like tango singing classes, and hopefull, capoeira classes. A bit pricey, but what on earth am i doing in this city as a musician if I{m not learning about tango. I{m also hopefully going to start investing some of my money in rehearsal room shit for a band I want to start, pay some musicians, etc. this is a great city to start something creative up.

    Health insurance, I got my fingers printed the other day, ha, so at best it would be another 1 or 2 months for me to get ¨pre pago¨which is like the nice company sponsored shit. I{m on the public plan at the moment, which involves long times, I{m told. I don{t know much more about it, except that. Part of the plan is not to get sick (bad plan, I know) but in a real emergency if it happened tomorrow, i would go to a nicer hospital and foot the bill. The heatl systems prices aren{t jacked up by malpractice insurance shit here asi que its much cheaper.

    Hit me with the next round, and I believe I will publish this correspondence to my blog.

    Nathan
    • Posted by at 2 comments

    Monday, April 18, 2011

    A Letter from the Informed

    This is a Facebook message I wrote to a friend who was thinking about moving to Buenos Aires himself. It's funny how I respond much better to prompts than to total freedom. I blame education.

    Sam old buddy, howdeedoo,

    Funny you should ask a question that is so eminently on my mind.

    Regarding your questions, BA is exactly how I remember it. Kind of a pain of the ass, kind of great. The moneda situation has been rememdied, the people are still short tempered, it's still over crowded and a pain to get around anywhere. The primary difference would be my economic standing now that I'm here under my own power and, more importantly, earning in pesos. But even from a dollar perspective, the city is a little rough.

    Inflation has struck the city pretty hard in our absence, and food prices have also risen pretty extremely. Whereas before, on the dollar, I always said that Buenos Aires was not cheap exactly, but a surprisingly good deal considering what you were getting, now it has moved firmly into the expensive side of things. I would say prices are more generally along the lines of what you would be willing to pay in the united states if you are accustomed to living cheaply there (like an unemployed liberal arts grad for example). Randomly, some food things will be exceptionally cheap (a kilo of mandarin oranges for 75 american cents or a bundle of onions for the same) whilst other things remains inexplicably (relatively) expensive (3 dollars for 400 grams of butter, garlic for 50 cents a head). Poor college student food remains quite cheap (noodles, eggs and the like) but meat and dairy (and any interesting fruit) is pretty much american prices.

    The problem is earning in pesos, and not earning very much. The English teaching market here, though perhaps the gentlest, is about as exploitative as any other based on the labor of unconnected immigrants. Jobs range in price from about 20 pesos an hour to 40+ hour (pesos). They don't seem to hard to get, although there is a large pool of applicants. Most applicants are here on some poorly founded concept of adventure and admit that to their potential employers, saying that they will only be here for 3-6 months. Humorously, are totally bewildered when they find themselves without work for the duration of their "working" vacation. Needless to say, making a serious commitment to Buenos Aires, or at least pretending to make such a commitment, is great help in getting a job. I said that I was funny in my cover letter and that appeared to be the sole basis for accepting me for an interview.

    But the exploitation. I have accepted a job on the bottom end of the pay range (20 p an hour) because I am compensated for almost all of the hours that I work. Also, if I ever get around to doing the paperwork, I can be here legally, but that's a detail. I was also working at another english institute which compensated me 35 pesos an hour, which is a pretty good pay at first glance. I recently quit the job, because after some calculation, it wasn't worth it.

    I received 35 pesos an hour for every hour I was in front of a class. That's fine, but I was not otherwise compensated for the time it took to prepare for these classes (which, as a novice, I can assure you is lots, especially considering how much time you end up wasting running around making copies). On top of that, the institute required a great deal more planning than what I am told is normal here. I was expected to come up with my own annual plan (based off of some textbook that were given to me) and the supplement it with certain items that, though requested specifcally, were completely left up to me to design. Two movies a school year, broken into small parts with prep and breakdown worksheets, class lessons related to cultural events from my own country (halloween, 4th of july, etc) exam design and grading, and participation in the end of school year concert and all of these things made entirely of your own hand. And they wanted us to attend two uncompensated meetings a month for which they don't even give some pesos for the subte (now 1.20 a ride) For veteran teachers, its not such a bad deal, as they might have accumulated some of their things in their experience and are probably efficient in designing such things. Also, if your passion is teaching, I'm sure you would become an expert pretty quickly. But I'm certainly not in this country to help some parents force English onto their kids and certainly not for that price.

    When I told other argentines that this is what I was doing for 35 pesos an hour, their eyes bugged out and there was a moment of stunned silence, surpassing, even, the portenio ability to have a comic line for everything. Teaching is a profession notorious for the hours of work outside the paid hours of work, but for comparison, my working in the white, employed by the government teacher friends made 85 pesos an hour for their work.

    And furthermore, conscious or not, English teaching jobs like these are taking advantage of Americans and other gringos who come to Buenos Aires to work. People like me are muscled into the pay range you see here by Americans who pop down here for a months, rely on their savings to pay rent and use their income for booze money. Also, the expectation that I should show up early for work, give two weeks notice or not take unexpected vacations or sick days, while normal in the anglo-world, was considered to be a enormous courtesy--or even luxury--to my employers by the Argentines to whom I described my working relationship. If they are employing me in black, then they have to understand I'm not actually obligated to do anything that they won't fire me for,
    These things however, were outlined in my contract and were vocally impressed upon me by my employer. Furthermore, they rely (begrudingly, I'll say perhaps unconsciously) on the fact that teachers are unlikely to walk off the job because of emotional attachment to their students.
    So I'm very happily at Wall Street where they pay me 20 pesos an hour, but I don't do anything more than wear slacks and show up and gab. And I'll get better health insurance if I file that fucking paperwork.

    So, if you want to make any semi-real quantity of money here, you have to either work like a dog or work like a smart dog and get private students. Which typically pay 40+ for classes and are much easier to prepare for. The only catch is that you have to find them. I've just begun on this myself, so I can't relate how difficult it is, but like many things in Buenos Aires, I think it requires a good network of contacts.

    The real game here in Buenos Aires, in turns of creating a financially stable existence, is getting your costs down. This is really hard to do in a city with such a well-developed tourist infrastructure, AKA, oiled system of separating unsuspecting yankees from their money.

    Step 1 and trap 1 one is rent. Glancing at the Buenos Aires craiglist would lead you to believe that the low end of prices for rentable properties in BsAs is around 300-400 dollars a month, which will get you an apartment in a nice part of town with really nice furnishings. Further analysis of craiglist will lead you to believe that there are no unfurnished apartments available for rent in Buenos Aires and that it is customary to describe rent in a ratio of dollars to the week or day.

    If you're lucky, one day you describe this to a guy from the city and he says "No!" emphatically and tells you for that kind of money you could have a 1 bedroom apartment all to yourself, if you were just willing to live outside of all these fancy districts you had just mentioned to him. What your friend doesn't know and what you just realized is that no one advertises these sorts of properties to foreigners. So the lesson there is that any international or english language resources are going to break your piggy bank, to speak politely.

    The most conventional way to rent property is to look in a the newspaper on saturday and see the properties listing, which can be dizzying in terms of contractions and argot. Sadly, most properties require something called a garantia, which means someone with property in the city vouches for the fact that you can pay, and if you don't pay, the will. Foreigners (and many Argentines) don't typically have a garantia.

    So the search is limited somewhat to "alquila due~no" which means that the owner is renting the property and doesn't have an agency (inmobilaria) representing him. There you cut out a very expensive middleman, and may eliminate the garantia. May. It does cut down your options quite a bit and requires a lot of cold-calling and trial and error.

    Being that there are a ton of argentines and foreigners milling about the city with garantia, there are some services on the internet that have surfaced to help them. comparto depto, solo duenos and a number of internet resources attempt to organize the barbaric latino horde. But its a decidedly web 1.0 affair, there is no central website and information is often out of date or false and posted by a scheming inmobilario that hopes to interest you in another, probably less perfect property. It's pretty gruesome and requires ALOT! of legwork, but this is probably the best option for an unconnected foreigner arriving in the city. But it takes a lot of time. A few conversations I've had with other strapped-for-cash argentines revealed that they spend several months searching for an apartment before finding something that suits their needs. The difference is that they can rely on social capital and live with their parents or friends where as people like you and me Sam, have far less social capital to spend.

    Other options include subletting a single room from a family apartment or something like that. But that was a relationship I was definitely not comfortable with, although it might have been wiser in a purely economic mindset. Those arrangements are somewhat easy to find and can be a rock bottom price (500 pesos a month, ideally) but are usually somewhat expensive and its usually done by people used to working with foreigners (1000 pesos a month).

    For my part, I have worked what little contacts I have made here in the city and came up with the place I am now in. It's 900 pesos a month for a small (perhaps 3 by 5 or 6 meters) concrete box on the roof of a very large house that is shared by a number of other argentines, one chileno and one peruvian. The room itself is pretty shitty and definitely doesn't deserve the 900 pesos I pay for it. It has no insulation, doesn't block the sound of the nearby highway and I have to go down a flight of stairs to use the bathroom that I share with 3 other people. But, it's cheap as I could find
    that gave me any level of autonomy, and I like the neighborhood, which is safe and cheap (Boedo) and its been fun living with all the people in the house. Plus, I can practice trombone and I don't bother anyone. And the roof, (kind of like my patio, is enormous and cool)

    After rent, its just learning how to live in the city and limit expenses, but I haven't found that to be too challenging. Use public transportation, save taxis for emergencies, don't eat out often, buy alcohol at liquor stores, not in bars, etc etc.

    And I think that's as complete an answer as I can give. Ah, yes, one more important piece of advice. Take all advice with a grain of salt! Too many times I've gotten advice from foreigners who've spent what seemed like a long enough time in the city to be hip, only to find out that these idiots are still paying 400 dollars in rent, or have split a 2 bedroom apartment between 5 people to make ends meet. Other gringos can be more helpful than argentines in many ways, but only gringos who themselves are not morons. Although I only have some 9-10 months of experience of buenos aires all added together, I appear to be a lot smarter than the average gringo bear. People who know as much as me about the city usually have been here at least 2 years.

    Yeah, so that's a complete answer. Hope you actually read it!
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    Thursday, March 24, 2011

    Right, Right Now

    Hey.

    Been awhile, Drugstore-fans, hasn't it?

    Right now, I'm sitting at the table in the kitchen of the same house that I was staying in when we last met. It was somewhat freezing when I woke up this morning in the concrete box of mine on the roof, so I went to where I am now to seal up the kitchen and use the oven, thereby creating my own personal summer.

    I'm making banana bread, that wonderful method by which my mother prevented the waste of bananas. Of course, here, they don't recognize this as bread, so much as they recognize is as "budin," which I take to be somehow related to pudding. The nice thing about that is that it does give lie to the idea that banana bread might somehow be healthy, being that it is not, containing more sugar than all of the export of the Dominican Republic.

    I have successfully completed what I imagined to be the 0th and 1st stages of my plan here in Buenos Aires. In stage 0, I came to Buenos Aires, resumed with most of my old contacts and make temporary arrangements to live. Now completing stage 1, I have found means for what I believe to be sustainable living. I am paying 900 pesos a month in rent, which I tell myself is not a bad price for how nice the house I am living in is. I have also found work at two english institutes which gives me a fixed income of about 3000 pesos a month. This will be month which comes with a full "paycheck" (cash in an envelope) so I expect to be able to pay a month's rent without using my savings and have enough left over to eat and even spend on meals at restaurants.

    There are a few problems. The job I like pays only 20 pesos an hour, is located in the most-loathed downtown of Buenos Aires, and it forces me to wear nice pants and shirt. Irritation aside, this will make a significant increase in my expenses for dry cleaning, and in a country where text messages are a quarter a pop (1 peso), you can never really tell what's going to be expensive and what's not.

    In my other job, I make 35 pesos an hour, I can wear T-shirt and jeans, and is only a 30 minute walk from my home. Sadly, it puts me into daily contact with the most hated thing in Christendom. Small, energetic children and requires me to work much time outside of the hours that they actually pay me. And worse, despite the fact that she is a thin and tall dark-skinned woman who appears to be about 25 years old, my boss is more interested in making sure I do the things they pay me for than flirting with me. As only taxi-drivers in Buenos Aires seem to grasp, there is nothing more terrible than having a beautiful lady-boss who is actually expects you to show up to work on time. Nay! Early, even.

    The other problem as I am transitioning out of stage 1 is that stage makes it somewhat impossible to get to the point where I'm spending most of my time involved with music and saving some money. The job that pays me better (and is some 2000 of my 3000 pesos) is from 5:30-8:30 or 9:30 M-TR. My other job is daily (except sunday) from 10-2 or 10-4. As you may notice this leaves me precious little time to do those important things like find people to hire me as a trombonist, find trombone students or english students, or do any of the things that I wanted to do while I was here, like compose, or start a webcomic. Oh, or eat or sleep.

    I have recently asked that half my hours with the little latino bastards from hell be stricken from my schedule, which will hopefully give me some time to prepare the next stage while maintaining a baseline income.

    Regarding housing: I appear to be doing better than most foreigners to whom I speak. And everyone's rent in the house got hiked, so I'm now paying the least rent! Schaudenfreude, methinks. But it does make me look like a spaz, though, I may still be paying much above what the thing is actually worth.

    Ja ne, friends.
    Posted by at 1 comments

    Friday, February 18, 2011

    As of late

    There's so much to say. Where have I been, what have I been doing? I know you'd like to know, or you wouldn't be reading.
    .
    How I wish I could Twitter every little inane thought that comes into my head and every strange happening that happens to me.

    For instance, the other day, I read about the saying here, its free to dream or dreaming is free, or whatever. And then I halfway managed to execute the phrase with one of my housemates and he taught me to use it more better. Then yesterday, I bought a scratchpad to write on and I remarked to myself that to dream is free, but to write it down costs 5 and 1/2 pesos.

    The last month or so has been so totally dedicated to finding a job and getting an apartment/place to stay. I like to think that I did good job exerting myself towards the goals, a commendable effort when its so difficult to chart progress. I often thought or writing a blog post solely about doing these things in Buenos Aires. I guess you're looking at the paragraph that that has become. Anyway, lonely wanderer of the internet, here is how to find a cheap place to stay in Argentina.

    Forget Craigslist. Americans use Craiglist, and Argentines know it. The only things you'll find on Craigslist are those some hopeful Argentine has put up thinking that some rich Yankee will overpay for. Use American resources and you'll get booted onto the merry-go-round of Argentine for export. And let me tell you that Argentines don't pay those prices.

    Don't expect Couchsurfing or anything the like to be a whole lot better. Yeah, that website is supposed to be about people helping each other out, but the fact is Argentines in tight financial situations often rent out a room in their house to get some breathing room. Having little idea how to do this, the ask their friends and someone says, hey why not this website couch surfing, and they open a profile pretty much for the purpose of getting someone to help pay their rent (probably more than 50%, I'm betting).

    This is how it works in Buenos Aires, and this is why you're screwed: people ask their friends to help them find a place to stay. That's how everything works in Buenos Aires. This town is more italian than spaghetti. You need the friend of a friend of somebody's uncle's mechanic who knows a guy who knows a guy that's renting out an apartment. And even, that doesn't guarantee you a good deal, it just admits the possibility of a good deal, which Craigslist can not do.

    But here's an example of just how necessary it is to know somebody. One day I go to the real estate office and ring the bell. A lady comes to the barred door and asks me what I want. I tell her that I'm looking for a temporary rentals (that's less than than two years, the standard Argentine contract) she says that don't have any and I get the sense that the conversation is supposed to be done. I ask if she knows anyone that might have such a rental and she says that she wouldn't know in this neighborhood. I then took my leave.

    Then after some beer-assisted schmoozing in my friendly neighborhood machine shop, I'm directed to the wife of a retired guy that sometimes comes around to drink beer. I see her and there occurs one of those magical spanish conversations where I seem to understand all of the words but really come away with nothing from the conversation. Except, better than nothing, she tells me of a real estate agency where she knows someone and where the might have temporary rentals. She writes down the name Alba, her name, on a scrap of paper along with the address of someplace she thinks they might rent me.

    I follow her vague directions and wind up at, guess what, the same real estate agency I had been at but a few days ago. I ring, the some women answers in the same way, behind the barred door and I read off my scrap "Uh... I was sent by a women named Alba. She s-"

    "OH! Alba! Yes! Come in! Come in!" And this lady proceeds to actually do what a real estate agenct is supposed to do. Show me real estate. I managed to communicate to her in her flurry of helpfulness that actually I'm looking for a temporary rental and that maybe this place that Alba had suggested to me might be available. The real estate agent says unfortunately they just rented that place and that I should check out some of the two year rentals cause "Hey, things can be arranged". A few days go by and she calls my on my cell phone and lets me know of a "couple" looking for someone to live with them. I check it out and its an actual house (almost, duplex) with beautiful furnishing and all. My own, somewhat large private room with my own bathroom and carte blanche from the owners to have my girlfriend over and generally have my run of the house. (Incidentally, the couple is a gay one as he quickly informed me at the beginning of the house checking out process). And all that for a mere 1000 pesos. 250 murkan dollars. For how nice that house was, its a very good price.

    For the record, there do exist actual independent housings for that price. I saw one studio apartment for 800 pesos plus some expenses that would make it nearly 1000 pesos. It was a small square with a bathroom and one window which pointed to inside the building, a "courtyard" view. That is to say the column of air that was built into the design so that the residents wouldn't suffocate. It also came with a fridge and oven. I would have taken it, had it not required a two year contract and a "garantia". (Some property owner vouches for you. If you don't pay, they do.)

    Anyway, nowadays I'm paying 900 pesos for a little concrete box on a roof of what used to be a mansion for the living of an extended family. What I do like about my situation is that I can practice trombone and not bother anyone, that the facilities of the house are good (kitchen, etc) and that its populated exclusively by other bohemians, not the owners. I dislike sharing a house with someone who is renting a space out to me. (What's with that vibe? "I will rent you this room and let you use my kitchen." C'mon, really?) Oh, and finally, that its 225 murka dollars a month.

    What I do not like about my living situation is that the concrete box turns into a solar oven around 2 pm, the highway is nicely audible 24/7 and that one of the residents of the house is guitar banging rock and roller with stamina matched only by an out-of-tune Apollo with highly accented English.

    I am tired now. I go to bed. Maybe next time I talk about employment.
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    Monday, January 24, 2011

    Beer, Community

    Posted by at 1 comments

    Tuesday, January 18, 2011

    Regarding My Sobriquet, Yanki and Associated Questions of Geography

    "To a foreigner, a Yankee is an American.
    To an American, a Yankee is a Northerner.
    To a Northerner, a Yankee is a New Englander.
    To a New Englander, a Yankee is a Vermonter.
    To a Vermonter, a Yankee is someone who still has an outhouse."

    Everyone in a spanish speaking country has a nickname. Un apodo. So it seems, anyway.

    Mine is yankee. Except written yanki and pronounced shan-kee, due to the eccentricities of pronunciation here around the Rio Plata.

    Many people believe that this word is "despectiva" which I take to mean disrespectful. I tell them that it´s not and that the only time I´ve ever heard the word was mainly in the song Yankee Doodle, which does not cause me a feeling of disrespectedness, to say the least.

    Then I realized I´ve never really been to the South and I found this quote, which I assume to be something in general usage. Teo? As a guy from the midwest, I said to myself self, huh, well I guess the word can refer to me. Now I realize that maybe a southerner might resent the word. And NOW I realize that perhaps my attitude towards the word is a typical midwestern reaction towards anything and the southern reaction is similarly stereotypical.

    Also, I prefer the term yanki because its a pretty complicated to get into politics surrounding the use of the word American to describe citizens of the United States of America. In case you don´t know, anyone else (except maybe Canadians, I haven´t spoken to one, you tell me) living in the Americas feels like the word American should refer to anyone living on the continent. Ha, yes, thats right. THE continent. From my experience, most people believe that the terms North and South America refer to two extremities of the same object. Terms of direction rather than distinction. Nicholas?

    Did you ever think that might disagree on something such as the number of continents in the world? I mean, yeah it occurred to me, I studied anthropology, I´ll accept anything as possible. But usually its something like the number of colors or vowels, things that we ourselves make. Cultures with two colors? Conceivable (the WASP male for example recognizes two colors Statistically Speaking, Probably Will Match (tan, cream, black, white grey and khaki) and Statistically Speaking, Probably Will Not Match (everything else).

    But my aside aside, people I´ve asked have reported there to be five continents or six, depending on if they´re anticipating my yankee belief in America as two continents in order to fight with me on the topic. So, even in the most continent-generous interactions I´ve had on the subject, we are still short of the typically taught seven continents. Turns out that don´t include
    Antartica. Meg? Can we get a statement on all this?

    Another term they throw at me in their efforts to avoid something that my yanki brain will identify as offensive is "norteamericano." While broadly accurate, I can not accept this word on principle. I have no problem being grouped with our lovely, more internationally accepted neighbors to the north (though they probably do), but I´m troubled by the fact that Mexicans are excluded from this groupation*.

    So, then the the exclusion appears to be one primarily of linguistic or racial division. It´s nice to know (in a we´re both lacking sort of way) that the south of the border geographic attitude of Americans is in someway reciprocated.

    There does exist the word "estadounidense" which surely was invented to punish english-speaking hispanophones. The word is baroque piece of booby trap, practically leaking with common points of ensnarement for the unknowing yankee. It´s long, its got that fucking O in it, its got that fucking D in it and on top of that, because its literal translation sounds goofy as balls. I´m not convinced this is a passable way to refer to once self. Unitedstater? Unitedstatist? C´mon.

    So, that leaves me with Yanki, something I gladly accept. I like the idea of introducing myself in away that causes the person on the other end of the introduction to blink and hesitate a little. Hey, I´m speaking in another language that I didn´t study til I was way past my critical period. I´m always off-footed, they can stand to be off-footed for the first round. Furthermore, I think it helps them get to know me a little faster. I am the sort of guy that would gleefully refer to himself as a spic if that term at all referred to me. Though that term is a little strong, reletive to yanki. No one has ever shouted yanki at me while pointing a gun at me and crafting draconian legislation to ruin my life

    Anyway, drugstore yanki, signing off.

    *This blog will still occasionally include formations of words which should not occur in English but do in Spanish for the sake of whimsy and what I like to call "local color".
    Posted by at 4 comments

    Saturday, January 8, 2011

    The Compromise

    Hello and welcome back.

    This blog is ready to begin in seriousness, once again, as I am back in America of South in the country of Argentina.

    This means a return to form in many ways, there will be a grand detailing of my adventures and misadventures, boring report of my success, hilarious recounting of my failure. There will be many awkward sentences that are born of a Spanish thought straying into my author´s consciousness and gumming up the flow as I awkwardly latinize words into existence that ought not to exist or throw phrasal verbs into the path of oncoming formal sentence structures, terminating in a little self-reference that hopes to excuse what is otherwise an unforgivable run-on?

    But what is different? Will it be different? Or will it be just more of the same DrugstoreGaucho, that dark-hatted figure, silhouetted in the doorway of adventure? The same guy that threw himself to the rapacious lions (first writing, loins) of the gay argentine dance club? That stalwart fellow that walked countless kilometers, trombone in hand, to return and give legend of the night´s travails?

    The truth is that it may or may not be. I am still who I am but I´m not who I was. No doubt my battles with public transportation will still hilariously continue, but I am no longer the college junior who happily frittered away his time in Argentina, putting every experience under the language-learning column in his mental budget. I have bathed in the unchartable waters of introspection that lap against the shores of college-land and emerged wet. Very wet. Downright soggy. I know that if I don´t focus my efforts on something that instead I will do nothing. There´s not even a course catalog to help me fill out my schedule anymore. I am both the guy in the desk and at the chalkboard.

    Overblown imagery aside, I´m not here to learn Spanish anymore, I´m here to play music and live the dream. Obliterate dichotomy, I couldn´t decide if what I wanted to do was to skip through the world like a good Taoist or make something of myself like a good ambitious twenty two year old, so I´m doing both. I´m here in a foreign land, living a life unknown to some, with strange food and custom (well kind of, anyway) satisfying my itch to see the unfamiliar. But I´m not sitting in a grass hut counting the beetles on my laptop keyboard, I´m in Buenos Fucking Aires. I have one of the greatest city´s in the world at my disposal. If you can make it here, you can probably make it New York!

    Here there are the resources I need for any project I undertake. If I write a chart, I can find a studio and the musicians to record it, if I make a comic, there are people to read it. For whatever reason, I´ve fallen in with a wonderfully strange and strangely wonderful group of whackos and creatives who also seem to feel a need to make something worthwhile while living the life bizarre. I feel like this is a good place for me to be right now.

    Of course, this is somewhat of an explanation drawn from events that have already happened. I´m not sure if I offered this to the me from a few months ago, the guy twiddling his thumbs in dough, that he would be convinced enough to choose to go to Argentina. But this self is contented in the explanation.

    Now this self will find a job and a place to stay so that he can go about being un bicho raro.
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