I Officially Pass for Argentine

I claim this because I was walking by an English school yesterday, and the girl out front was trying to recruit people and asked "do you have problems with your English?" I just smiled and said no. Of course, I only really pass as Argentine until I open my mouth, or until someone looks at my shoes. Seriously, I have seen several people look at my shoes since arriving in Buenos Aires, and right now have my Backpacker Hiking Boots on, which are a pretty dead giveaway (my non-BHBs are in my bag, since they pack much easier than big boots).



Yes, I have arrived in Buenos Aires, or Paris-in-South America. The people are pale-skinned and smartly dressed, and portenos (people from Buenos) will often tell you about their Italian or Spanish family background before they cop to being South American. The city itself, too, feels very Parisian (or at least what I understand from pictures, having never been there): narrow, one-way streets punctuated with wide boulevards and avenues; roundabouts decorated with fountains and statues; buildings with ornate entrance ways, stone balconies, and marble staircases. It makes for nice walking around. I haven't really been very many places yet, since my sister is coming tomorrow and I have a lot of logistical stuff to figure out for her visit, plus I need to get my travel to Brazil figured out.

The Spanish here is a little easier to understand than Chilean Spanish, I think; the main difference being that they talk a Hell of a lot slower (the good side), and they change the pronunciation of ll and y to a "sh" sound (the bad side). But I think I can get used to "sh" a lot faster than I can get used to people who talk a mile a minute with words only used in their neighborhoods. Still though, virtually the first thing I did off the plane was ask where the Callao metro station was, which took a few tries because the girl I asked didn't understand "ca-ya-o," but when she came back with "ca-sha-o?" I realized my mistake. It's funny, the change permeates so many common words (yo, or "I/me", becomes "show;" como se llama or "what do they call you" becomes "shamma" instead of "yamma," for example), that Argentines almost sounds like they're lisping or something when you first listen to them.

Not only is it warmer here than in Vina, but they heat more buildings here. And it's hard, because I'd become so used to a 50 degree ambient temperature that my body has forgotten how to deal with a 68-degree room - starting with the UN building, but continuing with the airport and my hostel in Argentina, I've been sweating pretty hard lately. Man, what's going to happen when I get to the beach in Brazil? Also, you will always need a key to get in or out of any private building in this country. In fact, even most businesses open to the public have to buzz you in, even in the middle of the day. It's like they all sell porn or drug or something. Not that I would know anything about that.

The first thing I need to do before my sister gets here is arrange all the stuff to go to Brazil. That means getting a visa. But before I can apply for my visa, I have to get extra visa pages in my passport, because they will turn down your application if they think you don't have enough pages (I had two left). So I had to go to the US embassy first. At least there I got to use the fast-track line for US citizens and bypass the line around the block of what appeared to be mostly students applying for permission to visit the US. The consulate room was a bit of a scene, with maybe a hundred Argentines waiting to be serviced by 3 windows, where the teller would occasionally get on their speaker behind their bullet-proof glass and announce the next group of names to be helped. Everyone would go "shhh! shhh!" as they strained to listen, and then most of them would then groan as three or four people would form a cue behind the given window. Myself, I was entertained for a while watching everything: scores of excited young people, a woman at the US Citizen window getting upset and waving her arms wildly - "...because of the delay... but they told me..." (I wasn't sure what was going on, but was glad I wasn't her); the 60-some year old American ex-pat making a fool of himself by singing what sounded like old 50's Sinatra-style Spanish songs to a group of embarrassed 15 and 16 year old girls. In fact, that last bit unfolded right next to me, and I was so close to the guy, who came back twice to try and strut his stuff as the girls turned red and stifled giggles (while others in the room giggled outright), that I was embarrassed just to be next to him. I shrunk down in my chair, trying to mentally project the idea that "I am not with him; in fact I'm not actually American. I just have the passport, and am in fact a wealthy cigar importer living in Miami. Don't look at my shoes." It's not that the guy was a bad singer (in fact, he was pretty good), but the fact that he was so blatantly singing to this group of young girls, a group in an age category that nobody in their right mind would expect to react positively to such excruciatingly public attention; at least no one who knew or remembered anything about 16 year old girls. And that was the most painful thing: this guy wasn't creepy, he was clueless.

Eventually though, I grew bored with the endless bureaucracy: go to this window, turn in application; go to a second window to receive a proof of payment (ironically, extra visa pages are free, so I had to go to the cashier to get the receipt showing I hadn't paid anything); be called back to the first window just so they can tell you they're still working on the pages, etc. But now my passport has pages 1-24 PLUS pages A-Z, and a visa-sized sticker proclaiming that this passport was modified on such and such a date for such and such a reason, which is kind of cool I guess. American passports have the least number of visa pages of any country, probably since we don't travel much even when we have passports (only about 10% of US citizens have one). I guess when the bean-counters at the Congressional Budget Office figured out this move would save X dollars a year, some civic-minded senator had the foresight to insert a clause into the change that would allow the travel-happy to at least get a normal number of visa pages at no charge.

So yeah, it wasn't the most fun way to spend my first day in Buenos, but at least I'm back in a country where I can get orange juice without sugar in it (hey, I liked Chile, but the juice was awful).