To all of you (to my knowledge, just one person) who check this blog "less than facebook but more than hotornot.com," I suppose an apology is in order. It´s been awhile.

Argentina.

Since I last wrote I´ve received a number of requests: for more descriptions of food, for "less flowery language and overwrought description," and for "pictures of the naked Chilean chick." I´m happy to oblige one of the three.

(Naeha and Amit: stop reading.)

Steak! Argentina is a lot like India in that there are cows everywhere. Unlike India, however, they´re mostly on the plates. This is the best beef in the world, barbequed to perfection with nothing more than a dusting of salt, and with a distinct flavor that comes from the pampas the cows eat. A choice cut in a restaurant will set you back all of about $5. On first taste it´s hard to imagine why Argentinians would eat anything else-- and indeed, it seems many don´t. By this point in my stay, though, I have to say that

(welcome back, gentle Hindus)

I´ll be happy if I don´t eat steak again for at least a decade.

Today marks the end of nearly a month in Argentina-- or, better said, a month in Buenos Aires. I wish I could scan, if only for comic effect, the margins of my guidebook, which I filled, long ago, with meticulously-charted plans for traveling all over the country (north to Salta, south to Patagonia, a weekend in Córdoba, and so on).

Buenos Aires changed all that. With the grit and chaos of New York, the architecture, cafes and wide avenues of Paris, Buenos Aires also has something all its own-- gregarious and immensely likeable people; modest peñas where on Sunday afternoon couples dance to a man singing over cassette recordings of ballads; every several blocks, another scattered pocket of improbable green.

Needless to say I´ve had a hell of a time leaving to go anywhere else. I did manage a few short trips-- to the tranquility of Uruguay for a day, to the packed beach town of Mar del Plata for a weekend, and to the beautiful wine country of Mendoza for another. And each time I was happy to have gone, but happier still to be coming back to Buenos Aires.

Thanks to Kuelli, who put me in touch with a friend of hers here, I´ve been renting a room in the apartment of a wonderful porteño family. The food is great, there are other foreign students who keep me more than entertained, and best of all, the couple´s mischievous four-year-old granddaughter Catalina is a frequent visitor. Within five minutes of meeting her, Cata not only invited me to watch "The Lady and the Tramp," but had also taken a seat in my lap and told me that I was "the best in the world." From that point on she had me wrapped around her finger (and she certainly knew it). Every time I´m just about to drift off into a siesta, I hear her knock on my door wanting to play. I can´t say I´ve ever minded.

It´s been a privelege to live in a home for awhile, to feel settled, to have home-cooked meals and people to remind you of siblings and friends, surrogate parents to look at you bemusedly from the breakfast table when you come back from a Buenos Aires night out at 8:30AM. (And yes, Renee, people here do indeed drink on Sabbath. It´s not unusual for porteños to go out every night of the week. Happy hours end at midnight, clubs open around 2:00AM-- you can dance until the sun comes up and head to work an hour later.)

Like New Orleans, Buenos Aires is a city that can only shorten your life expectancy-- while making you feel, simultaneously, that you´ve lived immeasurably more. Within a day I found myself lingering by the real estate listings posted on agency windows.

And then, of course, there´s the fútbol, some cross of national passion and national religion. Only in Argentina could a commentator have exclaimed in the seconds following a legendary Maradona goal: "¡Genio! ¡Genio! ¡Genio! Barrilete cósmico, ¿de qué planeta viniste? ¡Gracias Dios! ... por el fútbol ... por Maradona ... por estas lágrimas." I couldn´t possibly do these lines poetic justice, so I won´t even try to translate.

Argentina is host to one of the great soccer rivalries in the world: River Plate versus Boca Juniors. On an overnight bus ride I took the chauffeur, a River supporter, announced that Boca fans would be served nothing more than bitter tea. This was a pretty tame threat as the rivalry goes-- just ask the teenager who went into a tattoo parlor and asked the artist for a Boca tattoo. The artist happened to be a River fan, and the kid ended up with a penis etched indelibly on his back.

I wasn´t able to see a Boca game, but I did make a visit to the Museo de la Pasión Boquense, located directly under the stadium. In a country that sees the wonders of the cosmos incarnate in their fútbolistas, it should´ve come as no surprise that Argentineans would identify some rather surprising parallels (to our untrained, gringo eyes, anyway) between the outcome of the twice-annual national club championship and major world events. Some favorites:

- "1934: To Argentina, arrives a Cardinal who will one day be Pope and pass into history: Pius XII. To soccer, arrives a team that will be national champions and pass into history: BOCA."

- "1940: The Germans enter Paris and parade past the Arc de Triomphe, a symbol of France. BOCA inagurates its own symbol of triumph: la Bombanera [their stadium]. To celebrate, they win another national championship."

- "1954: The United States explodes three atomic bombs in the Pacific. Boca passion also explodes. Boca finally comes back to win another championship."

- "1990: One name resounds in all of Africa: Mandela is freed. In Asia, the Gulf War is taking place. Another name resounds through all of Latin America: BOCA, which reclaims the championship."

The picture above is from La Boca, the neighborhood where the club is based. And it looks alright here, but you´ll have to take it on faith that it smells like absolute shit (how´s that for flowery language and overwrought description?). It´s partly for the smell, and partly for their generally lower social class that Boca fans are derided as bosteros (scum). River fans, in contrast, call themselves millonarios-- and are called gallinas (chickens). To be fair, their stadium does smell a lot better.

I saw a game there last weekend, the opener of the season against Lanús. The Estadio Monumental was packed with people in red and white jerseys, and there were homemade banners everywhere, flags that spanned from upper to lower decks, coordinated chants that shook the stands to the foundation and, luckily, heavy police protection for the visiting fans. If you´ve never seen a grown man yell "¡HIJO DE PUTA!" at the top of his lungs around five times a minute, this is the place to go.

The quality of play was obviously way above anything you´d see in the States, though River looked uninspired for most of the game. In the 91st minute, however, they broke the scoreless tie with an incredible strike from the top of the penalty area.

There is an infectiousness to Argentinean pasión. When the ball hit the back of the net and, instinctively, I leapt from my seat with arms raised, then jumped up and down screaming "¡PUTA MADRE!" at the Lanús fans while flipping them off along with thousands of my fellow fans, I figured I had more or less caught it.

But in the end, the best days in Buenos Aires were days spent doing nothing:

Days when I rode in the rumbling, wood-panelled car of the ancient Línea A subway to the end of the line, took a seat at the very front of the car, at the open window that looks out into the surrounding tunnels. When I rode the train all the way back home, peering out at an underground reminiscent of old mine shafts, ducking water water drops that fell from overhead pipes onto the seats.

The best days here were days spent doing nothing:

When I spent a day on the river delta region of Tigre, an hour outside Buenos Aires, where I happened to start talking with a porteño guy and his mother on the ferry. When they invited me to share lunch with them at a quiet restaurant on the riverbank, and treated me with all the kindness in the world; when we finished lunch and sat around in the shade, laughing and sipped round after round of mate through a straw. When after several hours with them I spent the train ride back thinking about the chances of having found them at all-- the relative improbability that I should have studied Spanish, have been traveling in Argentina, have decided to go to Tigre that day and not the next, have caught that specific ferry, have sat in the one place on the ferry next to the mother-- that she should have felt an itch and have decided to move towards me just slightly, bumping my shoulder and warranting the "excuse me" that started hours of conversation.

(Less than wanting to declare a belief in anything as self-important as "destiny," days like these make me think that there are so many iterations of life that have the possibility of being good-- that instead of there being one way that is right, everything could have been different, and still might have been good. And yet, an infinite series of events happened one way and not another, for some reason or for none, and once they happened as they did, I wouldn´t have wanted them any other way.

Or maybe all I mean to say is that it is rare and wonderful when strangers talk to one another.)

The best days here were days spent doing nothing:

When I passed a full six hours at a table by a window looking onto Plaza Dorrego in cobblestoned Barrio San Telmo with a book, a journal and a café con leche-- where I learned that over the course of a Buenos Aires afternoon people will gather under shaded tables for lunch, a couple will dance a tango in the square for loose change, pigeons will flock around the tables, get kicked away, straggle back, scatter again, regroup. And it will start to rain, waiters will rush to put up umbrellas, the sun will break through again just as they´re finishing, and the pigeons will come back again, chased now by a barking dog and a little girl.

The best days here happened when I didn´t do anything, nothing at all (time best spent)-- when I sat quietly for six hours in order to learn that a girl who stalks pigeons for long enough eventually sprouts wings.

I´m devastated to be leaving Buenos Aires, and somewhat scared, quite honestly, to be heading to Brazil tomorrow.

I miss you guys terribly (no matter where I am) and it only gets harder the longer I´m away. To people who have been e-mailing me with updates: you´re only making it worse-- and please keep doing it.

Love,

Fitz

P.S. I hear big things are in the works for the combination TNC/Cuervo´s 21st birthday party tonight. Rest assured that I´ll be more than happy to post any and all incriminating photographs.