Second, third weeks

Days are starting to blur dangerously, and I’m counting on this writing to help pin them down. The challenge is to catch you up on the last two weeks without going on forever. I don’t want this to be confused for the new papal encyclical.

A few recollections, roughly ordered by chronology: I walked with Paige, a girl from Wisconsin, to Capuchinos Cathedral (its full name is longer and less alliterative), to whose upstairs chapel I would later return alone to read. That morning, Paige and I had found a vegetarian restaurant — a thrilling discovery after a first week during which, no matter what I ordered, I was served dry beef with ham on top. Later that week: a few volunteers spent a weekday morning at Museo de la Memoria, a small building where 30 or so young people were tortured and killed under military rule… I had a three-hour conversation over dinner with Victoria Marks, a freshman in Davenport at Yale whom I did not know before, and who is also working here, but with a different organization… I accompanied 10 hostel-mates to Alta Gracia, a nearby town with a Che Guevara museum, a Jesuit compound, and weirdly invigorating air — Che’s family moved there to help him recover from respiratory problems.  I’ve begun to spend more time on my own since growing somewhat exhausted with Spanish-speaking and with the Spanish-speakers with whom I live.

First week

I am sitting in a very dirty cafe. Ten seconds ago, I found a used floss pick under my leg. Today is Sunday, June 6. I arrived in Argentina on Sunday, May 31. It has been, as we say back in America, a week.

My pre-departure leafing-through of a guidebook lead me to believe that (1) Córdoba was “the spiritual home of the empanada” and that (2) its inhabitants were “renowned for their distinctive accents and sophisticated (sometimes surreal) sense of humor.” Within an hour of landing I was apportioning scoops of meat in a college student’s apartment, having been conscripted into the empanada-production service. So, the empanada thing checks out. I’m assuming the second claim is true, too – though I wouldn’t know, since some combination of the two factors (accent and sophisticated surrealism) conspire to ensure that I understand virtually nothing that is said to me. I spent the flight from Santiago to Córdoba desperately listening to a podcast called “Learn Argentinian Spanish,” but half an hour of half-listening did not induce fluency.