Live update

Contepomi, Argentina's golden boy fly-half, just dropped a goal to win the game against Ireland and the whole place has gone mad.

They're making roughly the same amount of horn-tooting, leaning-out-of-windows, running-screaming-out-of-cafes noise as they do when Boca wins a corner.

Updating your phrase book

10 phrases you will not hear (no existe en Argentina):
1. “Hey buddy, you’re driving too fast.” Literally, you would say, I think: 'Estas manejando mas rapido' but it really doesn’t translate. You communicate something more like: 'Dude! You’re winning! Go, you good thing!'
2. “I’m not really into football.”
3. “Oh, I don’t really have an opinion on that.”
4. “Oo, is that the time. I’d better go to bed.” (Although you might hear: “Oo, is that the time, I’d better go to work.”
5. “Please stop looking at me. I am shy.”
6. “My round. Right you losers, let’s get some shots in.”
7. Although equally unlikely: “My round.”
8. “Look, that chubby tango dancer just missed a step.”
9. “Nah, I’m sure the traffic will clear in a minute. I’ll toot my horn then.”
10. “Two salads and an iced water please.”

And 5 you might hear:
1. “Oh, I see you own a camera. Would you like a picture of me?”
2. “I am amazing at things.”
3. “Did I mention I had silicone breasts? Oh good, I thought I’d forgotten. Wanna feel?”
4. “I’m telling you, these lights do not change unless you toot your horn. (Pause. Toots.) There you go. See?”
5. “I would like a kilo of ice cream please. No, no. One fork is fine.”

Skills shortage

In Australia and New Zealand they have a Job List. If there is a shortage of a particular skill, it is put on The List and people trying to stay or get into the country have preferance. A very sensible system. Because of the last two words in that sentence, I don't think it'll be around here for a while.

Shame. If they did, I'd like to think it would read as follows. My Top 5 for the Job List Skills:

5. Door fitters.
A little thing but a daily irritant. Not one of the four interior doors in our flat can be fully closed. You can close the spare room door if you force it, but when you do the door handle falls off, trapping you inside. Which is rubbish. Friends and visitors report similar irritations across the country (and indeed continent).

4. Car Alarm Manufacturers.
At least, people who can get them to work as alarms: that is, as a deterrant to potential thieves. Every night, and I mean every night, a chorus of car alarms slices through your sleep. Clearly these cars are not being stolen, as the sound remains. Furthermore, this particular type of car alarm, with its distinctive alarm that goes off ‘at random’, appears to have the ability to set off other cars fitted with the same, equally cheap, alarm. An electronic beacon system, if you like. I don’t.

3. Ugly women.
Technically neither a job nor a skill, but there does not appear to be any and, as the Chinese say, life is all about balance.

2. Driving Instructors.
An obvious gag, but there is a reason that the main cause of death in 18-30 year olds in Buenos Aires is through traffic accidents.

1. Telling the time.
There is no other explanation as to why they have coffee and cake at dinner time, dinner a a midnight feast, breakfast anytime between 8am and 4pm, and no concept of nor word for ‘bedtime’.

If you can do any of the above, please migrate here, You will be made most welcome.

Language Barrier, Part 3

Katie and her Spanish teacher, for some reason, were talking about my maturing age. On mentioning that I had turned 30, her teacher reacted rather strongly: "Oo, a difficult age. In Argentina we say that is the age when they start to go a little crazy... "

Ignoring the obvious reply ("How would you tell?"), Katie replied that in the UK we talk about the mid-life crisis as starting in the forties.

"Si", Katie dijo, "En los cuarentas los hombres a veces quieren sentir mas joven... (In their forties men like to feel a little younger) Y entonces ellos hacen relaciones con sus secretarias (So they have relations with their sectaries), o ellos compran una Porsche. (Or they buy a Porsche)"
"Por que, una pollo", dijo la profesora confuso.

Amazing, the word 'pollo' ('ll' pronounced 'sch') and 'Por-sche' (pronounced correctly) sound similar enough to be confused. Cue hilarity.

"Si", Katie goes on. "They think that by going around with a chicken/Porsche it makes them look younger."
"But... why?"
"Well, you know, they think it will makes girls like them..."
"Verdad? A chicken?"

You can tell from the above that Katie's Spanish is pretty good, give or take the pronounciation of chicken. My language, as yet, lacks such depth.

I though I might relate this hilarious tale with Mercedes, my teacher. It was not a very good rendition of the story as I lacked most of the nouns and almost all of the verbs, and consequently descended into a rather embarrassing series of non statements.

D: "Cuanto los hermanos es viaje... mas o menas cuarenta anos..." (When the brothers is old... more or less 40 years)
M: (Confuso) "Si?"
D: "El paga por un pollo." (He pays for a chicken)
M: "Por que?"
D: "Pollo. Es un palabras similar que Porshe, el coche." (Chicken! It's a word similar to Porsche, the car)
M: Si. Er... classe termina.

The Buenos Aires Herald

The Buenos Aires Herald is the staple newspaper of the English speaker in BsAs. It is also easily the funniest newspaper ever written, though regrettably I do not think this is deliberate.

I intend for this to be a regular blog entry, but this is my quote of the week from the BA Herald. Following heavy flooding in Rosario, about an hour North of Buenos Aires, the opening line of the report read as follows:

"Three people and a Bolivian were killed yesterday in what has been described as..."

I am now scanning the sports pages to see if 'Bolivians' are categorised in other areas of society. I'm hoping to find something like this:

"Boca played in front of a crowd of 46,327 people and 29 Bolvians yesterday..."

"Bolivia. For all you know this could be all there is..."

Quickie blog entry in confusing internet café.

Half term, flew on Saturday from BA to Salta (North Arg), hired a car and drove north through twisty New Zealandesque landscape in the lower Andes to the Bolivian border.

Remote world, that.

Or so it seemed at the time, but was Time Square in comparison to where we were going.

After spending 6 hours doing two things that would take 5 minutes in the familiar world (changing some money to dollars, buying a train ticket), we took the ghost train from the border to Uyuni, central-ish Bolivia (climb miles into the clouds as the temperature drops to well below zero).

From there we took a trek (six people, in a dusty old Toyota 4x4) across the salt plains. Surreal landscape, 12,000 sq km of salt plains, formed from a series of dried salt lakes. It was about 30 degrees during the day, and about -10 at night, where you slept in uber basic cabins (made from salt, obviously), no hot water, one banos between 18 people etc

Our driver-guide-chef was a 21 year old guy who in my opinion was also on a tour as he had clearly never been to the Salt flats before. One suspected that he was also experiencing the thrill of driving on his own for the first time, as rudimentary techniques such as changing gears and stearing were not yet a strength. Our 'coche' managed to 'break down' on several occasions, leading to our little driver, Iradio, appearing with a solemn face, saying 'El coche esta muy mal... morte', and asking us to come and see. It 'died' for a number of reasons: lack of petrol, going over a bump, getting dark, hills. He kept making us get out and walk over bumpier sections. No idea why.

And he managed to crash it on our first night while we were having dinner. Drove into the side of another jeep. How this happened is still a mystery. You drive in 12000 sq km of flat white land, where at night you could see any other car coming from the horizon, how do you crash?

Our group were two 18 year old girls who'd just finished their GAP year ditch digging in Peru, and two 30 something rockers from Norwich, who'd sold everything and were travelling the world. With a little furry bear. Called Jish. Who we had to take everywhere, and talk to, and set a place for at the table...

About two minutes into the trip Jude said to Glyn - 'Oh no! We've left Jish in the bag on the roof. He'll be really cold. Oh no, what are we going to do...' It's rare that you actually hope someone is an abusive parent, and that Jish is merely a strangely named child.

Obviously I got right into the spirit of things with 'Jish' and couldn't think of anything cooler than travelling with a pretend bear, posing for photographs, listening to 'his' adventures, writing in his book.

Katie also thought it was hilarous to encourage this, knowing inability to faker my reaction, asking question after question about the thing. 'Er, Jude. Dougs wanted to know what Jish's favourite place was. But he was embarrassed to ask.' (It was New Zealand, by the way. Jish was dressed as Gandolf.)

Somehow we all got on fine and I hid my emotions with the aplomb of a trained actor, I must be growing up or something, and was had a brilliant 3 days, and travelled though some of the most incredible places, but best told in photos.

Then caught a bus through the Atacama desert into Chile, then back over the Andes and the border to here, Salta. Met some great people, some of whom coming to BsAs, and have an even larger to do list in South America.

Can I Have My Rack Back?

Can I have my rack back? A Unicenter tale.

My shirt is damp and crinkled this morning because my new drying rack collapsed in the night, folding it awkwardly on itself. My colleagues think I have neither shame nor self respect, on account of my rumpled appearance, and I, as a reflection of this, have shame and no self respect, which could only be achieved if I was to turn back time to the purchase of this problematic piece of plastic.

Alliteration aside, it was almost on entering the Unicenter at the weekend, the largest and busiest Shopping in the Latin American world, that I’d bought a drying rack. Yes, it’s all glam, this anecdote. This naturally means Katie, the better half, had bought a drying rack, which I was now carrying around the Unicenter for the remainder of the day, like a student who’d lost a drunken bet.

You can really only carry a drying rack one way. You carry it like (and yet so unlike) a surfboard: flat, under one’s arm. A surfboard, for geeks. However, this Ubergeek Drying Rack (UDR) was almost exactly one inch longer than the distance between my armpit and finger stretch, so had to walk around trapping the UDR betwixt inner arm and side, flattened palm.

Which was sore.

Especially so when I failed to avoid the ladies of Zona Norte approaching from the flank, who would bustle into the UDR, fueled by their rich cocktail of Botox, hunger and caffeine, sending me spinning like a character in a silent comedy into Falabella.

Much swearing later, and I was trying on a tie (a Christian Dior tie, no less), and as such I wanted the UDR to be safely hidden and therefore disassociated from my now restored sophisticated self.

After rejecting all manner of striped and loud colours (mostly on account of the fact that they failed to bring out my Godgiven Scottish complexion of offal) I turned to find said UDR rack missing. Que paso? one might well ask.

I headed off to find out que paso and, eventually (and, in truth, by chance ) tracked down the now loathed UDR, heavily guarded and sitting behind the front desk.

Several officious looking staff stood between me and something I now desperately didn’t want.

I tried to explain the situation as best I could, which wasn’t very well, as I didn’t feel I could just bypass the queue, release it from its Falabella counter prison, and walk off.

Unfortunately, my Spanish was not up to such complexities, so after asking each of them how they were and where they came from, I was rather stuck.

Included in this dialogue were the words corbata, rack de drying, and cambiar (and I didn’t know how to say, Can I have my rack back? like a Zona Norte lady discussing her surgery options).

In the midst of bastante pointing I had somehow managed to communicate that I wanted to exchange my despised UDR for a tie. Which, fearing the wrath of my good woman, I did not.

I DID - moment of triumph - manage to explain that I did not want to exchange rack de drying rack of a tie. “No quiero cambiar mi rack de drying por una corbata” (it wasn’t in my phrasebook). But that only led us back to the start of the conversation. So I fell back on Como estas? De donde sois?

At length, I resorted to plan A: picking up my rack de drying and scarpering, with a Sales Assistant in hot pursuit desperately checking I wasn’t angry. “Soy Gracila, puedo ayudarte?”

I remember her as a Sales Assistant, although in retrospect she was more probably a shrink. There was a queue of around 5 people, which according to most estimates would indicate that there were 8 shrinks watching.

So now my shirt is crumpled and I look a mess. All the stigma of a vagabond and I wasn’t even out late.

The lesson to learn, is, I think, an obvious one.

Drying racks are shit.