Finding My Feet (and other lost causes)

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My time in B.A. had it´s ups and downs. An up, perhaps, was talking to a German guy and Dutch girl about whether it was ethical to be attracted to Disney characters. We concluded that when it comes to the little mermaid, anything goes. You all know about my down of course, and my new friend Fernando the locksmith.
It´s now time to say goodbye to the other volunteers, and make my own perilously solo journey across Argentina to a little province named San Luis. My co-ordinator Kika finds that I´m the most prone to incident, and so accompanies me herself to the coach that will take me half way over this vast country. The others, obviously, are capable of doing it by themselves. She asks the coach staff to make sure I get off in San Luis, gives me a hug, kiss and a ´chow´ and sends me on my way. I justify her worrying by immediately sitting in the wrong seat, despite my ticket boldly offering me ´SEAT 3´. Coaching in Argentina is reminscient of a long-haul flight. You get dinner and breakfast, mostly revolting, and a man waving a cup at you when you´re desperate for the toilet. Our journey across the fertile flats of The Pampas was greeted with the most ominous of signs: the thunderstorm. Little flashes and claps wake me up during my already tenuous slumber. I am sitting next to a nice old lady, again speaking at me in spanish. I smile and nod, and say ´si´ at everything. In return she starts moving my pillow. This, I reckon, must be an Argentinian thing. Either that, or I need to learn to start saying ´no´.
I arrive at 8.00am local time at the bus station in San Luis, after a trek of eleven hours. I take the ticket I was given for the luggage and make my way to the luggage compartment, where a twelve-year-old kid is acting as ticket inspector. He gives me a long hard look, and says something complicated. I shrug and do a gesture denoting ´backpack´and he goes "Ohhh!" Once I get my other stuff together, I look for Nahuel. I´ve been in email contact with this guy for about a month, and knew exactly what he looked like, but instead I caused a scene by going up to everyone in a red cap (his identification sign) and going ´Nahuel?´ There were around eight men in red caps in an area of twenty metres. I circled the bus station about five times, eventually giving up and sitting on a bench. One thing I was told about the San Luis province by Marcello, is that the women are probably the most beautiful. He liked to talk about women alot, and so I thought, he´s probably got a good idea. I did notice that San Luis girls are astonishing beautiful- just in the bus station. As Argentina is largely populated by Italian and Spanish women, this is hardly surprising. But I mean, damn, y´know? After a while I start walking around again. I see another man in a red cap. We stare at each other for a while. “Nahuel?"
After the hellos and how are yous, he led me to a 1994 three-door green ´Gol´volkswagon, with three working tyres. The car, typically in the Argentine provinces, runs off natural gas, which sits in a pressurized cylinder in the boot of the car. Petrol is actually relatively cheap here, averaging $1 a litre, but gas is even more economical, and of course, far more likely to explode. To shut the car door, I need to push a lever upwards and do something with a mechanism, something that I have learned to enjoy doing. Tiao, Nahuel´s son, usually beats me to it though the little rascal. Next, it was time for me to meet the family. Silvana is a happy and I think she´ll agree passionate person- much with the exclamation and hand waving, and Tiao keeps saying ´hello´to me, and possibly knows more English than I do Spanish. He is five. The first couple of days were a little overwhelming; the first day I was invited to a children´s birthday party. In Spanish. With everyone looking at me. To be honest they were the most inviting they could have been, but I´d just got off an eleven hour coach ride and was feeling a little ´bleh´. Enchampadas (sp?), pizza, sweets, hot dogs and some other weird Argentinian food I hadn´t heard of. All of these not offered; more fed, to me. For the following week my bowels had to hit the refresh button. And believe me, teaching a lesson in front of twenty strangers who don´t understand what you´re saying is really tricky when you have to go to the toilet ´right just now´. And even trickier when there´s no toilet paper. (I rectified this situation by using my own lesson notes later on). I guess it would be more entertaining for you guys to read about how I massively failed during my first lesson at Celeste´s Instituto de Ingles. Well, this is a truthful blog, so I´m happy to report that the first lesson went really well, besides my efforts at teaching the phonetic alphabet, in which I did an impression of The Fonz for “A”. They just sat there staring blankly at me. I thought, ´what god-forsaken place am I in where the people don´t know of the greatness of Fonzie?´. No, the epic fail would come later.
The buses here, though regular, are awful. Thus I surmise that they are awful on a regular basis. They often do not follow the same route, and the drivers like to leave me in a dusty residential development on the edge of town, and then make me pay again to leave it. My epic fail, however, was my own fault. Nahuel had taken me on the buses early on so I could know my route. On the way back I should have got off next to a magazine kiosk deep into the estate. Instead, I panicked and got off with a large contingent of my fellow passengers in some strange area of the city. So I walked. San Luis has a major dog problem. Some might call it a problem, others, a quaint feature. For me, gangs of large, barking, feral dogs however, will never be seen as a quaint feature. So I got chased a little, I hid a little, and finally I tried to find a landmark or something and call Nahuel. Nahuel, Silvana and their friend Marrisio came to my rescue, after Silvana proclaimed she vaguely knew where I was. But I´m pretty awful at getting found, never mind lost. Stupidly I kept walking around looking for a better landmark than the ´Farmacia San Jose´. There are like five pharmacies to a street here. They´re everywhere. Eventually they found me, and once again, I looked like a fool.
I have to mention Nahuel and Silvana´s family here- they´re like those Dolmio Day adverts, seriously. Just like them. And they´re always offering me beer. It´s great. Yesterday I was invited over for Asado, which is essentially any meat that´s available stuck on a big fire and eaten. It was really good. I have no idea what is was, but, yeah, good.
I´m going to try and get some pictures up, but internet is touch and go, and I have to hope that the antennae that serves the compound doesn´t fail in the next storm. I´ll include some other stuff from my first week in next week´s blog. Till then, chow!

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Comments

[Chris]

Good to hear you've settled in a bit - and that you have already managed to get lost at least once. Nice work. Get some photos up too, especially of the hot chicas. ;-)