I got up early at 8 o'clock, to get to a class that began at 9:40. I failed to spring out of bed and I had to choose breakfast instead of showering today. I got to school around 9:45 to discover that actually that mental note I had made yesterday [You have an early class tomorrow] meant 8 instead of 9:40. Whoops. Attendance is not yet being kept, so not a huge problem, I still had a class at 10:20.
I sat greasily in the computer lab burning time, and went to my 10:20 class. Again, as there was the last time I attempted this, it was not in the aula that my horario said it should be in. Chewing on my tongue and trying to make the best of the situation, I decided to see my aconsejora in order to find some new classes to try out before Monday. However, she would not be in till 12. Thwarted yet, again.
So, I'd already checked my mail and it was beginning to look like a low-activity day, so I pooled my willpower and walked away from the computer lab and out of the school to look around the immediate neighborhood.
This walk turned out to be extremely satisfying. It led downhill into a little depression of relatively calm streets and relatively leafy parks. Well, more like a wide median with trees on it. But naytheless, I added a Greek restaurant to my list of foreign restaurants I will eat in at some point there and so I enjoyed.
I began, on this walk, to understand my neighborhood a little a better. Belgrano is constantly described as an upper-middle class barrio. Walking around leafy Olleros Avenue, I felt what that means. There are little shops that meet the needs of the somewhat wealthy. Leather stores, electronics stores, attended by well-groomed, deep-voiced salesmen that somehow add a sense of dignity to the sale of earbud headphones.
This peace and order is artificial. How could I forget nutty Avenida Cabildo that rages away just uphill? But I felt like they deserve it. They have something to escape from, Buenos Aires is unrelenting.
It did help me place my surroundings on my personal cultural landscape. If this same neighborhood were in suburban Kansas, I suppose it would be a bit like the Village, which is a pleasant outdoor mall/quasi plaza in my home-region.
It is from this sentiment that I am drawing the conclusion that my barrio here is largely the same as that at home. A sense of familiarity, yes, but not totally positive. My neighborhood, though as far as I'm concerned a beautiful place to live, is home to a sizable yuppie population that derives great satisfaction from the purchase of earbuds and not really a cultural center.
I did return to the school only for my adviser to give grudgingly (I assert that she begrudges helping me) some information for classes that had happened already earlier in the week.
So I headed for another walk, trying to derive some meaning from day.
And I realized that I live very close to what is referred to as a "shopping street".
I might be re-describing the wheel for anyone that has lived in a real city before, but this concept is quite foreign to me. Take some interior stretch of mall. You know, with the plants, benches and kiosks in the center and the pseudo-organized lanes of people walking, window shopping, etc. Now move the walls of that mall about 10 meters in both directions and bulldoze the benches and plants and throw a major thoroughfare in there instead.
It is exactly like a mall, exactly, except for that extremely busy road full of honking, exhaust-spewing traffic in the middle. It is, by outward appearances at an uncrowded time of day, like any other part of the city. Shops with big glass windows, kioscos selling candies and phone cards, the occasional cafe and confiteria.
But throw a ululating mob of people in there (and Argentines have been known to ululate) and I recognize it for what it is. Something about the mass of humanity draws all the elements together. You notice that some of the kiosks are open-air and playing music. Formerly charming bakeries are then revealed to be the local variant of the diabetes-dealing cookie/fried batter shops that placate screaming babies on the merry-go-round at your local center of commerce.
One fundamental difference between the consuming landscape of Argentina and the US is that, in the US we usually have one store of a certain type and reasonable size that is pretty much the only one of its type for a 15-minute drive in any direction. Example, there is a music shop in the Village and if you don't want to go there, you have to go drive the other direction of that road for a few miles until you wind up at another music store that is largely the same but staffed by kids from a different high school.
Buenos Aires could be said to follow the same model, but on a physical scale about 1/100th the size and you will rarely find shops that sell something besides the genre of item you are looking for. That is, instead of a large store and 15-minute drive, you have a small, dorm room-sized shop that sells only fruits and vegetables that has a cousins one block away in every direction.
This concept gets funny when applied to galerías, which are what Argentines probably consider to be malls. You walk down the street and eventually spy a wide opening in the glass/stone wall to your right. Seeking respite, you step into it, thinking that it is the entryway to a very large store, such as a Sears of T.J. Maxx. It is not, it is a galería.
The size of a modest grocery store, a galería must be the conscious porteño effort to imitate an American mall. It is all, all wrong. In my opinion, one of the key characteristics of a mall is its total uneconomy of space. Huge ceilings, excessively wide internal track, with pointless kiosks selling sunglasses in the center. The shops themselves should have an enormous quantity of space available but should strike to use all of it but having racks of clothing full of every style/size combinations.
A galería does not do this. First of all, in contrast to the streets that they are on, they seem to be uniformly devoid of people. They do have the high ceilings and wide internal space, but it is less a track and more a amorphous, unplanned blob. Then, the shops themselves are tiny hole-in-the-walls and seem to carry about one variety of clothing in every size. Furthermore, reapplying their belief concerning city sidewalks, it seems that each business gets to control the tiling in front of the store, essentially transforming the floor into a seizure-inducing tiling sample catalog. They are uniform only in their state of disrepair and genericness.
At any rate, all of this has somehow made me feel more at ease. I have attempted to despise my immediate surroundings since middle school doing so now is probably a sign of increasing comfort.
Ah and PS this journey was begun by the need to find a place to buy a new coat to replace my irish one which is now lost. I've never had to make these horrifyingly heavy style decisions before. Can someone give me some kind of advice on how to shop and figure out what is in-style and if I'm paying a good price for it? Is there some sort of lifeskill I missed out on while my mother and sister did all my shopping for me?
I sat greasily in the computer lab burning time, and went to my 10:20 class. Again, as there was the last time I attempted this, it was not in the aula that my horario said it should be in. Chewing on my tongue and trying to make the best of the situation, I decided to see my aconsejora in order to find some new classes to try out before Monday. However, she would not be in till 12. Thwarted yet, again.
So, I'd already checked my mail and it was beginning to look like a low-activity day, so I pooled my willpower and walked away from the computer lab and out of the school to look around the immediate neighborhood.
This walk turned out to be extremely satisfying. It led downhill into a little depression of relatively calm streets and relatively leafy parks. Well, more like a wide median with trees on it. But naytheless, I added a Greek restaurant to my list of foreign restaurants I will eat in at some point there and so I enjoyed.
I began, on this walk, to understand my neighborhood a little a better. Belgrano is constantly described as an upper-middle class barrio. Walking around leafy Olleros Avenue, I felt what that means. There are little shops that meet the needs of the somewhat wealthy. Leather stores, electronics stores, attended by well-groomed, deep-voiced salesmen that somehow add a sense of dignity to the sale of earbud headphones.
This peace and order is artificial. How could I forget nutty Avenida Cabildo that rages away just uphill? But I felt like they deserve it. They have something to escape from, Buenos Aires is unrelenting.
It did help me place my surroundings on my personal cultural landscape. If this same neighborhood were in suburban Kansas, I suppose it would be a bit like the Village, which is a pleasant outdoor mall/quasi plaza in my home-region.
It is from this sentiment that I am drawing the conclusion that my barrio here is largely the same as that at home. A sense of familiarity, yes, but not totally positive. My neighborhood, though as far as I'm concerned a beautiful place to live, is home to a sizable yuppie population that derives great satisfaction from the purchase of earbuds and not really a cultural center.
I did return to the school only for my adviser to give grudgingly (I assert that she begrudges helping me) some information for classes that had happened already earlier in the week.
So I headed for another walk, trying to derive some meaning from day.
And I realized that I live very close to what is referred to as a "shopping street".
I might be re-describing the wheel for anyone that has lived in a real city before, but this concept is quite foreign to me. Take some interior stretch of mall. You know, with the plants, benches and kiosks in the center and the pseudo-organized lanes of people walking, window shopping, etc. Now move the walls of that mall about 10 meters in both directions and bulldoze the benches and plants and throw a major thoroughfare in there instead.
It is exactly like a mall, exactly, except for that extremely busy road full of honking, exhaust-spewing traffic in the middle. It is, by outward appearances at an uncrowded time of day, like any other part of the city. Shops with big glass windows, kioscos selling candies and phone cards, the occasional cafe and confiteria.
But throw a ululating mob of people in there (and Argentines have been known to ululate) and I recognize it for what it is. Something about the mass of humanity draws all the elements together. You notice that some of the kiosks are open-air and playing music. Formerly charming bakeries are then revealed to be the local variant of the diabetes-dealing cookie/fried batter shops that placate screaming babies on the merry-go-round at your local center of commerce.
One fundamental difference between the consuming landscape of Argentina and the US is that, in the US we usually have one store of a certain type and reasonable size that is pretty much the only one of its type for a 15-minute drive in any direction. Example, there is a music shop in the Village and if you don't want to go there, you have to go drive the other direction of that road for a few miles until you wind up at another music store that is largely the same but staffed by kids from a different high school.
Buenos Aires could be said to follow the same model, but on a physical scale about 1/100th the size and you will rarely find shops that sell something besides the genre of item you are looking for. That is, instead of a large store and 15-minute drive, you have a small, dorm room-sized shop that sells only fruits and vegetables that has a cousins one block away in every direction.
This concept gets funny when applied to galerías, which are what Argentines probably consider to be malls. You walk down the street and eventually spy a wide opening in the glass/stone wall to your right. Seeking respite, you step into it, thinking that it is the entryway to a very large store, such as a Sears of T.J. Maxx. It is not, it is a galería.
The size of a modest grocery store, a galería must be the conscious porteño effort to imitate an American mall. It is all, all wrong. In my opinion, one of the key characteristics of a mall is its total uneconomy of space. Huge ceilings, excessively wide internal track, with pointless kiosks selling sunglasses in the center. The shops themselves should have an enormous quantity of space available but should strike to use all of it but having racks of clothing full of every style/size combinations.
A galería does not do this. First of all, in contrast to the streets that they are on, they seem to be uniformly devoid of people. They do have the high ceilings and wide internal space, but it is less a track and more a amorphous, unplanned blob. Then, the shops themselves are tiny hole-in-the-walls and seem to carry about one variety of clothing in every size. Furthermore, reapplying their belief concerning city sidewalks, it seems that each business gets to control the tiling in front of the store, essentially transforming the floor into a seizure-inducing tiling sample catalog. They are uniform only in their state of disrepair and genericness.
At any rate, all of this has somehow made me feel more at ease. I have attempted to despise my immediate surroundings since middle school doing so now is probably a sign of increasing comfort.
Ah and PS this journey was begun by the need to find a place to buy a new coat to replace my irish one which is now lost. I've never had to make these horrifyingly heavy style decisions before. Can someone give me some kind of advice on how to shop and figure out what is in-style and if I'm paying a good price for it? Is there some sort of lifeskill I missed out on while my mother and sister did all my shopping for me?
Comments
Those are the places you looked in london/dublin and at one you bought your coat.
you are asking for shopping advice:)
UM, bring me back a crocodile please!
~Jess
your advisors are always incompetent. What's up with that?
Get the most gawdawful thing you can possibly find.
Conversation starter at the least.
It's a bilingual musical, with Spanish and English lyrics and dialogue. It was amazing! The entire time I was sitting there thinking of you and our mutual obsession with Hispanic culture.
~Jessica