Tango, ovens and the beginning of Sewjo´s travels

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Greetings, salutations and mosquito filled well wishes from iguazu falls! Dan and I arrived here this afternoon after the Plane Of Terror from BA, and am know currently chilling out in the most laid back hostel ever with a glass of wine. At any point I feel I am so relaxed I might pass out on the keyboard so appologies if the end of this blog turns into incomprehensible dribble.

Just over 2 weeks have passed since the last entry, the fact that I have managed to see a blog through to not just one but 2 posts is achievement even by my low standards. I feel like I´ve barely stopped since I landed in BA, which is bizarre given that I have gone from having 10 to 12 hour days to just 3 hours of classes a day. My spanish has progressed quite a bit from my starting point 3 weeks ago where I could barely string a sentence together, and I´ve even managed to learn some of the 400 past tenses they appear to have. This gives me the unenviable ability to confuse people even more, as I start a story confidently in the past tense, only for it to meander inexplicably into the present tense when I run out of past particples. My foolproof strategy when I don´t know a word of a) saying it in english and adding common endings such as 'ido' or 'mente', or if that fails b) say it in french with an apologetic look on my face gets me by in about 75%!o(MISSING)f cases. I've also been pretty lucky as the 2 other guys in my class are so pathologically laid back that they generally only show up to lessons about 3 days out of 5, so I've had the occasional private lesson which is ace! I've also started to see england from an outsiders point of view: Everyone here thinks London is the most glamorous destination in the world, but that it rains pretty much all the time (yes but we don't have mosquitos do we, HA!). When asked to describe a famous public holiday in my spanish class (following thanksgiving from the american, and sinti claus day or whatever its called from the dutch bloke), I decided to plump for guy fawkes night. Not only did this stretch my spanish way beyond its capability (hung drawn and quartered reduced me to a bizarre sequence of mimes and gestures that would frighten small children), it was also met with stunned silence from my audience, who now believe we are a bunch of blood thirsting bonfire dancing loons. Woops.

My spanish teacher, yanina, is originally from Peru, and is ridiculously nice. We bonded over our mutual love of german history and film (I knew there had to be another person in the world SOMEWHERE), and after I'd wittered on for a bit the conversation wandered into the argentinian dictatorship and 'the process' or dirty war of the late 70s (as all good conversations do). She then invited me over to her house to watch the first film made after the dictatorship fell, Garage Olimpio, which follows the story of one of the 30,000 people who disappeared. Being a person of the world (or at least someone who spent a substantial part of my university life reading joyful holocaust novels), I thought I was prepared for this. I was not. That pretty much sums it up. I spent most of the film with my hand over my mouth, and when it finished I found it hard to contemplate ever being happy again. Not a film for the faint hearted! My teacher then introduced me to her flatmate, and artist, whose father was one of the people who disappeared. Jeez. It´s quite hard in a city as beautiful and friendly as Buenos Aries now to imagine a time so recently where even politically inactive people lived in fear of either the military government, or the machine gun weilding rebels (no wonder my mum was so terrified of me coming to argentina!). The father of my host family, Juan Carlos, being a socioloy professor, reeled off countless moments when he came terrifyingly close to being hauled in for questioning. It also made me slightly embarassed just how littled we learn about the history of this continent in Europe (another term on the industrial revolution, anyone¿).

Veering from one extreme of Argentinian culture to another, I decided to have a few tango lessons whilst I was in BA. Starting off with a group lesson, I quickly developped the bug and decided to take the plunge with a couple of private classes with a friend of my host family´s daughter. Arriving in San Telmo, I took the lift up to the 17th floor of an apartment block, knocked on the door and was confronted with the most unbelievable panoramic view of BA. My teacher offered me a mate, and after a quick obligatory conversation about the Falkland Islands (I´m starting to enjoy them now), we had an hour´s lesson while the sun set on BA (yes it was as pretentious as it sounds). It was awesome. I'm pretty sure it is nigh on impossible to be crap when you´re dancing with one of BA's tango circuit, so I'm pretty sure it was nothing to do with any ounce of talent on my part, but it was so much fun! A bit like strictly come dancing without the grating voice of Bruce Forsyth, but with the added complication of my delays in following instructions whilst I translated them in my head!

At tango class I befriended a girl from geneva, who invited me out for dinner with some french and american friends that weekend for st patricks day. after an hour of speaking in french my brain was completely frazzled and I could barely stammer a sentence in spanish - my brain seems to be adopting a one in one out policy against my will!! We ended up in one of BA's newest bars - bar jobs, which has an upstairs part where you can play archery!¿!¿¿!!¿ This prompted a good 20 minute conversation about what the verb for ´to arch'was, before I decided I didn't care anyway because I was shockingly bad at archery (i'm blaming it on the wine).

I then skipped (read staggered) off to the birthday house party of a friend of a friend who works on reception at my spanish school. The birthday girl was colombian - officially the only nationality on earth to be more friendly than the argentinians. Having arrived at the party just as it was getting started around 2am, pushing all thoughts of being too old to stay up that late out my head, I proceded to get trolleyed on 'love juice' (don't ask). Almost every person at the party came up to me and asked me what I was doing in BA, where I was from, etc (relatively speaking us english are cold horrible gits!). It being st patricks day, there was a bin bag of green paraphanaelia - I'm pretty sure the visual of 20 drunk tanned colombians wearing green glittery st paddy´s day hats is one I will take to the grave. Having resisted the proffering of various glasses of ´fernett'(disgusting cough medicine argentinians drink with coke because it is made with 'supposed'herbs which 'supposedly'mean you don't get a hangover in the morning. i'll take the hangover thanks), I ended up in the kitchen with 4 very hammered argentinians talking about football at 5am. Once I revealed my Liverpool affiliation, they all started clammering loudly and gesticulating towards the stove shouting 'OVEN!!! OVEN!!!!'. Worried this was a sign that my choice of team was so bad they were asking me to climb inside the oven which, frankly, I was not very happy about doing, I was mid inching away nervously when one of them elaborated with 'MICHAEL OVEN!!!!!'. Bloody brilliant.

Continuing in the vein of watching films only roughly 60%!o(MISSING)f which I can understand, I went to watch an independant argentinian film about a man driving a bus from paraguay to BA (if you think there's a hidden intellectual subtext to this film, you'd be wrong, that was the entire film. minimal speaking though which is good for lack of spanish!). Unfortunately this also highlighted one of the other quite shocking things about Argentina, its widespread poverty. Around 30%!o(MISSING)f the population living below the poverty line, you're relatively shielded from it in the centre, but its quite an eye opener in some of the other barrios in BA, and in iguazu where we saw 3 familys living on the pavement just on the taxi ride in to the centre. So many times I´ve thought I was in a european city, and then had to remind myself I'm not.

That sort of brings me back to our arrival in Iguazu. Having loaded myself with my various oversize bags, including shoes and sleeping bag tied randomly to straps and swinging around me madly, I staggered from the hostel to a taxi to the airport. What followed was one of the worst flying experiences I've ever had. In. My. Life. It was a pretty windy day when we left BA, and I was already wary when we performed one of the most bizarre take offs I've ever seen . We rose a bit, juddered, lurched to one side, climbed perpendicularly and then meandered around in a sort of circle until we were properly airborne. About 20 minutes into the 1hr20 min journey, the turbulance set in. Being knocked from side to side and unexplained lurches down, up, forwards (and at one point i'm convinced backwards), the only comparable experience I've had was the 'tower of terror'ride at Disney land. Turning to Dan in the hope he might be the voice of calm, he was busy turning his ipod up to full volume, closing his eyes and rocking backwards and forwards, before flinging it to the side and starting to breath loudly and uncontrollably. The woman on the other side of the isle had her legs crossed and her hands together praying (i am honesly not lying). I managed to stutter to Dan 'get your airsickness bag now', and he dutifully obliged and proceeded to hyperventilate into it for about 20 minutes. The whole experience lasted about 40 minutes (during which I though of you a lot soph, and wished I´d opted for the 21 hour bus ride instead). I even contemplated looking into taking a boat home from Mexico. Once it was over, without a word from the cabin crew, they merilly proceeded with the trolley service, and we somehow landed in Iguazu. I'm one glass of wine down and am probably going to sob myself to sleep. Type 2 fun at its finest.

I've managed to beat my own record with rambling, and as I'm off to Brazil tomorrow (save me a caiprinha jonny!!!), I thought I'd round off with a couple of other random observations about Argentina:

- At a conservative estimate, Argentina is about 3 times more expensive than when I came here 3 years ago. With inflation at over 20%!a(MISSING)nnually, the cost of living is ridiculously high. I have blown about half my 3 month budget, and as a result Dan and I have had ham and cheese sandwiches for about 3 days in a row - eek!

- Starbucks has decended on BA. In my disgust I went in, used the loo, and left without buying anything. Take THAT globalisation!

- Argies are a nosy, superstitous bunch. Upon meeting any argentinian, you are confronted with 3 stock questions 'where are you from¿ mumble mumble FALKLANDS', 'are you married' (often followed with a 'why not'😉, and 'what is your star sign'. The latter is my favourite, because they will then proceed to tell you that whatever personality trait you have just displayed just so happens to be characteristic for your sign. Apparently there are 3 varieties of each star sign, the first (and im not making this up), being the antithesis of everything characteristic to that sign¿¿¿ Rob, Em, this is much more complicated than look magazine!!!

- I am involved in an unrequited love affair. With mosquitos. They love me. I do not love them. Yesterday Dan declared he was going to tear off his own skin rather than be bitten again. Extreme.

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