The Week (or so) in Review

Hello friends, this is Nathan speaking to you from deep within Buenos Aires.

First, let me further qualify my recent non-postage with an explanation. I was sick and went to the doctor. From my experience, that works like this: you talk to a guy at a desk that asks you insurance type questions and gives you a form and then you sit and wait for a long period of time until a doctor calls you back and talks to you for about 5 minutes before giving you a slip of paper with the name of a medicine on it. It's all arguably irrelevant as getting medicine does not require a prescription. Then you go to the guy out front who charges you 3o bucks. Not a bad deal.

Speaking of good deals, yesterday I have two sirloin steaks for six dollars apiece. They were exquisite. Today I had nine and a half empanadas for lunch. That was unwise. Go with steak.

What else have I been up to as of late? I got down to some touristing with some friends in the city center. I took along Silia of blue-haired fame to go downtown and poke around some sites that Lonely Planet insists are worth seeing. I went to the Confitería Ideal, which is a historic cafe/tango place thats been in operation since forever.

Silia and her friend Ryan whined enormously about going in. They felt that it looked cheto (cheh'toe), they couldn´t afford it, they´d be thrown out, they´d be a minimum fee etc etc. None of those things came to pass. Medialunas were of mediocre price and quality.

There are some important words in the above paragraph. Cheto is a key word of this city. It means stuck up, fancy, expensive etc. I get a sense of illegitimate luxury about it, i.e. someone is rich but in a tasteless starbucks and costco sort of way. Three for one plasma screen´s in the back of your Forerunner sort of thing. The university of Belgrano and indeed the district of Belgrano itself is held to be the epitome of cheto. They are correct.

The opposite of cheto is grasa, which literally means fat and it is perhaps this lexical ambiguity which causes it to be used less. Presumably, grasa has a negative connotation also, but I´ve never heard it as such. In fact, I´ve never heard it outside of the conversation where I ask what the opposite of cheto is.

The other important word from that paragraph was medialuna, which is a croissant. They are everywhere, and usually cost around 50 cents. They are my friends. That I eat.

Trucha, another word that they use, means carp. But it can also mean worthless. The guy scrambling around behind me trying to fix the computers is of the opinion that computers are becoming more and more trucha. This is a funny mental image and one that makes me want to wash my hands after this blog post.

This is the famous Obelisco. It´s situated on the widest avenue in the world, the 9 de Julio. I went down there with Michi the other day, just lookin´for trouble, I suppose.

We go to a variety of places. For the sake of contrast, look at this photo of scenic Chacarita, a lovely neighborhood we got lost in:

Recently Michi and I had this conversation:

M: Remember that time we got lost in Chacarita?

N: Yeah...

M: I asked around, we shouldn´t ever do that again.

Retrospectively, that should of been obvious.

Friday was international party night, where all the internationals get together in the basement of the school and party up. It´s been interesting to see how these international gatherings have evolved over time. In elementary school the imitations of local decortations were overwrought with glue and glitter. In middle school, our evolving pallettes brought greater focus on procuring foods from different parts of the world. And now in college, our desire to test the limits of the human liver have caused us to conspire to bring the local drink and drinking custom to each booth. For America, this meant Budweiser and a beer bong.

Don´t worry, we also had peanut butter.

After the party, I opted to join a cavalcade of europeos, as they had been invited to a party in some Italian guy´s apartment. Italians look exactly like Argentines except with nicer shoes and more piercings.

However, the Italian was a little too enterprising because, after accompanying the europeans to buy the requisite cheap beer and liqour, we arrived to find thirty people lounging in the street outside our destination. No landlord was about to let a party of this size take place in a district this cheto.

Untroubled, my group of French and assorted northern european Germanics decided that the only way to recoup the loss was to drink the beer warm on the stoop of the apartment and head out to Crowbar, a bar/club of some notoriety. Cognizant of the european ability to stomach immense quantities of rancid booze and techno, I skipped out to go pursue an attractive group of Ecuadorianas who had designs on attending a party held by the son of Angolan diplomat.

Sadly, this didn´t pan out either as they decided it was too far. Instead, I went with them (about 90% strangers) to someone elses party (100% strangers) in an apartment that juxtaposed the high cost of space with a total dearth of furnishment other than upturned bottles of alcohol. The apartment, which had countless rooms and a patio, also had a desiginated room for flirtation and upwards living neighbors that dropped waterballoons on people to quell the racket.

It also had a drunk chick that stumbled around the room like a warped character from the Great Gatsby with a bowl of what I will not call jello shots because they were too impatient to put them into shot glasses. After being banged in the teeth with a spoon a few times, I decided that they had probably drank all the alcohol before they put it into the mix and accepted my hostess generous offer. I don´t like alcohol, I don´t like jello, the combination might have been livable had the jello not-shots lived up to their lethal reputation and introduced me to a another level of being. However, I was correct in my prediction and mostly it tasted like dirty jello.

That is all folks.