Buenos Aires: Day One

Written by Steph

Today we have part two of Alex Pollacks adventures studying Spanish in Argentina. Click here to learn about Alex and read part one of his story.

“I’ll be back after nine,” my host Alejandro said, smiling, a man on the go, tall and tan and fit with a want-to-play-futbol? twinkle to his eyes. We were standing by the cramped doorway of a bedroom that would be mine for the next four weeks: two shelves of closet space, bunk beds, white walls, wood table, and, behind a glass screen, an orange parquet balcony stretching like a palm over the majestically begrimed skyline of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Into my hands Alejandro dropped a long-stemmed dungeon-master key. Tired and hungry and a little bit overwhelmed, I said gracias and wondered what I’d do and where I’d go in my first eight hours alone in this big, foreign city. Eat, then sleep? Sleep, then eat? And where? Minutes earlier, my host had brought me to the balcony’s railing: “Five, six blocks,” he said, pointing, “there is mall. Starbucks. McDonald’s. Everything.” I didn’t say so in as many words, but I hinted that I didn’t come to Argentina for frigging Chicken McNuggets. “Empanadas over there,” he said. Twenty-five stories up, I had no clue where Alejandro was pointing. To me, “over there” meant everywhere and nowhere and everything in between.

“You are tired from flight, you can sleep, if you want,” he said, setting down a Lonely Planet: Argentina on my table. Past his shoulder, I saw his seven-year-old son scampering long-shirted and pants-less down the elbow-wide hallway, which opened up to a den where his other boy, Menudo-haired and thirteen, was typing away on a laptop, a tutor across the table intoning social studies and a breeze frittering through the balcony curtains. Alejandro was divorced; his boys stayed with him on the weekends. It was Sunday, and here I was, a sudden bystander (or eavesdropper) to this man’s life.

I closed the door and lay on the lower bunk. I am here. Not in a Miami airport terminal, sitting across from a cluster of older Argentineans who looked like Bond villains with their silver-fox hair and ascots and open-sesame button-down shirts. I am here. Not on an overnight plane, barricaded in a window seat next to a sleeping blonde-bobbed white-suited woman on her way to Montevideo. No. I am here.

The front door clicked shut. Alejandro was gone. I shifted in my small bed, hearing through the walls the gently prodding words of his son’s tutor. I couldn’t go to sleep. Food. I wanted food, and I would look for it in the yet-to-be-known world twenty-five stories below me.

The slender alleys I walked smelled of cafe con leche (coffee with milk), as if a drop of it had bloomed like a flower across the boulevards of Retiro and Recoleta. This sweetness mixed uneasily with the decay of garbage, Budweiser and Coca-Cola bottles blackened and broken on the side of the road. Amid the chug and squeal of buses and small cars, I strode by older men, tired eyes, gray slacks, and younger women, black hair, demure expressions, many not wearing make-up. Alejandro had undersold the barrio’s food options, for I found a string of cafes down Juncal St. I squinted at the menus with their offerings in Argentine pesos, figuring that the cost of 17 Argentine dollars for a ¼ pollo (a quarter of a full chicken) was not as bad it sounded: it was just a little more than four bucks. I mention the ¼ pollo because that’s exactly what I ended up eating at a cafe called Cipriano: cocina regional.

It would be premature to say Argentina doesn’t do vegetables; I didn’t read the menu carefully, and I might have passed up such a choice. Still, I did get a sense that the meat-Meat-MEAT murmurs I’d heard are steeped in real mountains of cows, and in this case, chickens.

To my right sat an Asian man in glasses, gesticulating at the menu and saying, “Si.” After the waitress jotted down his order, I asked him where he was from. His answer was China. “Oh,” I said, “I taught English in South Korea for a year.”

“Uh?” he said. The lines on his forehead creased hard. Either he didn’t understand English well, or he just didn’t buy my attempt at you-Asia-me-Asia! brotherhood. When I told him I visited Beijing, he began to nod and grin, until I told him I visited for Lunar New Year. This made his forehead crease again, his eyes threatening to cross over each other. “Olympic?” he said.

“No, no, it was before the Olympics.”

It was my first day in Buenos Aires, and I was struggling to communicate in English with a Chinese guy.

After returning “home,” napping, and showering, I crossed the streets with new vigor, finding a park next to the San Martin subway station called Paseo de los Granaderos, where a healthy assortment of locals walked dogs and pushed strollers.

Some made out on benches under the trees. Seasons flip-flop in the Southern Hemisphere, so Argentina was seeing the end of its spring. I claimed an empty bench and listened to the buses nearby, the groan-groan-groan of their speed-up, the chittering chime of their slow-down. Pigeons squawked a few benches over, as if to tell the traffic, “we’re here, too!” Even though I wasn’t sitting outside a cafe, I could still smell cafe con leche in the air.

Later, I fumbled with the dungeon-master key and failed to unlock the front door of Alejandro’s apartment. Five times, I failed. Maybe six. Turning, twisting, twisting, turning. Dammit. The narrow hallway had an automatic light which flicked off with the absence of movement, so I had to kick my legs and wave my sweatshirt to light the darkness, my other hand still clumsy with the long key. I probably looked like a crazy person, por favoring a senora stranger to help me out. “Gracias,” I told her as the door opened with a pop.

My first night in Buenos Aires came to a close at Alejandro’s dinner table, where I met a thirty-something American woman who was residing in his other room and flying to Washington, D.C. in two days; she was already aching to return to Argentina. “You’re going to have so much fun,” she told me, her voice tinged with nostalgia. I also met Alejandro’s girlfriend, who projected the warmth of a mother in the toned body of an aerobics instructor. She rubbed his arm as he told of how they knew each other in college, but that they weren’t friends back then. Alejandro handed me a fork and a vat of dulce de leche, Argentina’s caramel-sweet dessert. “It’s good,” I said. He nodded, proud, as if he’d manufactured it himself.

I am here.