Back to top.

"Hello new shoes, bye-bye blues."

Anyone who is a fan of music has one song that speaks to them, that can define their existence like no other.  For me, since I've been in Buenos Aires, that song is Paolo Nutini's "New Shoes".  Yes, it's British pop music, and no, it has nothing to do with living abroad, Latin America, or anything deep and profound.  And yet, it pretty much sums up my entire experience so far.

"Hey, I put some new shoes on, and suddenly everything is right. I said, hey, I put some new shoes on and everybody's smiling, it's so inviting.  Oh, short on money, but long on time, slowly strolling in the sweet sunshine. And I'm running late, and I don't need an excuse, 'cause I'm wearing my brand new shoes."

How on earth does this have anything to do with me and Buenos Aires?  Let me explain:  Despite my best efforts to speak Spanish and not wear NU sweatshirts around town, it was pretty obvious to everyone that I wasn't from these parts.  The way I look, the way I talk, the way I carry myself, what I wear, all of these mark me not only as a foreigner, but as an American.  And, frustratingly enough, most of these aspects are either out of my control or very hard to change in the short time I've been here.

So after a few weeks of being patronized in English by the general population of Argentina, I decided I wanted to do something so I wouldn't stick out so much.  There must be some symbol of porteño-ism (Porteño is the word used to describe someone from Buenos Aires.  Generally, people here are very proud of being porteño.) that I could adopt as my first step towards cultural assimilation.  And as I looked around, trying to identify something that I could imitate, I started noticing their shoes.

Chuck Taylors, Converse, All Stars.  Whatever you prefer to call them, they are everywhere.  If you look down as you walk down the street (and everyone generally does to avoid all the dog, er, residue, on the sidewalks) you can notice Converse of every shape and color on all sorts of people.  This, I decided, was my "in" into porteño life.

So I went out and bought a pair of cream colored Chuck Taylor Hi-Tops.  Ihate to sound like a stereotype, but as a girl with a fair amount of shoes, I am familiar with the joy that a new pair of shoes can give.  But the sense of happiness and confidence that accompanied me as I strutted down the street in my new shoes was unlike any other new-shoe feeling I have ever had.  As hard as it is to believe, when I wore my new shoes, I finally felt like I belonged, or at the very least, didn't not belong quite so much.

I probably stuck out of the crowd just as much as ever, but I felt like I was taking my first well-healed steps towards fitting in.  When people stopped me on the street to ask for directions, or when the cashier didn't automatically speak to me in English, I gave the credit to my shoes.  Obviously these people had seen my Converse and assumed I was from here.  (Okay, I know that's a bit of a stretch.  What most likely happened is that I became more confident and people responded to that, but Paolo Nutini doesn't have a song about that.)  The point is that identifying that one Argentine detail was a gateway of sorts.  Wearing the shoes, I felt like I looked more porteño, and in feeling that way, I started acting more porteño.  I stopped walking around the city like a lost little American, apologizing to everyone I bumped into, and started walking around like I knew what I was doing, like I had a right to be here too.             

So how did Paolo know how absolutely transformative a new pair of shoes could be?  He probably wears Converse too.

Back to top.

 

Colectivos:  An Anthropological Study

One of the most daunting aspects of life here (at least for me) is the public transportation system.  It's not that I'm not used to buses and trains, I've been taking the CTA for half of my life, it's just the sheer quantity of buses here that's a bit overwhelming.

According to my "Pocket Guía T", a conveniently tiny guide to the city that describe bus and train routes (also known as my bible), there are over 500 colectivos (also known as buses).  Never mind the fact that I have the sense of direction of a blind man in the desert, 500 different buses is a bit much for anyone to handle.

But after getting myself lost several times and therefore getting over my fear of getting lost, I finally conquered my fear of the colectivo.  This was not only good for my sense of self-sufficiency and self-worth, but was completely necessary in order to get around the city.  And even more than that, getting on a colectivo is completely fascinating.

You see, the buses here are truly a cross-section of porteño life.  People of all ages, races, sexes, and backgrounds get on the bus.  A pristinely dressed business man sits next to a filthy construction worker, who gives his seat up to a pregnant housewife, who passes by the cop who is wearily watching the gaggle of teenagers in the back of the bus.  And that's before the college students, the old women, and the men trying to sell you stain-remover get on at the next stop.

The colectivos can be incredibly intimate and incredibly impersonal all at the same time.  At peak hours, everyone stands so close that you can smell the perfume of the woman next to you, or see the spot near his sideburn where a young man forgot to shave.  You can overhear a little girl tell her father what she learned in school as you try to avoid, but can't help but watch, a young couple making out as if they were they only two on the bus.  But besides the cursory "permiso" used to make your way through the crowd, and despite the fact that you are more closely packed than a can of sardines, everyone is in their own little world.

And because everyone is so self-absorbed, it's the perfect place for an outsider like me to observe the porteño in his natural habitat.  On the colectivo to class in the morning, I've noticed that the men here wear a lot more sweaters than they do in the U.S, and the women wear their clothes a lot tighter.  I've noticed that the young people who you would think should be in college are all wearing suits and ties and are off to work.  I've seen that common decency is, in fact, common, as people stand up to give their seats to old women, children, pregnant women, and the handicapped.  And machismo is very much alive too, if only witnessed through a man letting all the women in line budge him as they get on the bus.

So, yes, sometimes the routes are inconvenient, and no, you never have enough coins so you always have to go buy something useless at the drugstore in order to get change, and it's crowded and noisy, and you often have to wait for what feels like forever for your bus just to see three come by at once, but it's ultimately worth it, if only for the learning experience.

Back to top.

 

Taking it to the Streets
           

The first time I went to my Sociology of Revolutionary Processes class at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), I thought I was seeing the beginnings of an actual revolution. 

Te explico (I'll explain):  about half way through the class a girl barged into the room to make some announcement, something I would learn was not unusual for classes in la UBA.  We all listened attentively, although I didn't really follow what this girl was saying as it was all in very rapid Argentine Spanish.  Then everyone began gathering their things and heading for the door. 

Unsure if it was the scheduled break or if class was being cancelled for some reason, I asked the girl nearest me what was going on.  All I understood from her response was calle, which means street.  I had no idea why she had told me "street", but I followed her, my forty some-odd peers, and the professor outside of the building.  I was figuring out what bus I would need to take to get home when I realized that no one was actually leaving but rather mulling around outside, as if something was about to happen.

And something was about to happen.  Some students had made signs and barricades and were blocking traffic on either end of the block, while others were scrambling around to find a bullhorn for the professor.  Everyone else was making themselves comfortable in the middle of the street and turning their attention back to the teacher's lecture on comparative sociological theories.

Then I understood.  We were having a sit-in.

I have no idea what we were protesting, but we were protesting it good.  We had stopped traffic on a fairly busy street (Calle Marcelo T. de Alvear, if any of you know Buenos Aires) and were definitely getting our point across, whatever that point might have been.

We even had an angry woman come and yell at us with her four year old son in tow.  What's the use of an education, she asked, if we were just going to act like rude, uneducated, inconsiderate punks?  Ok, maybe that's not a direct translation, but that was the gist of her rant.  And I sympathized with her, I really did.  I wouldn't want to walk an extra six blocks because my bus was re-directed by a student protest either.  But at the same time, we weren't just sitting in the street for fun.  We had a purpose.  Or at least I hoped we did.

I couldn't make myself focus on the professor's lecture that night, I was too distracted by the current circumstances of the class, but I learned a lot anyway.  I saw that the other foreign students were either uncomfortable or thought the situation was amusing, or like me, a little bit of both.  We don't do things like this at my university was the general sentiment amongst ourselves.  The Argentines, on the other hand, appeared as if this sort of thing were no big deal.  Probably because it wasn't.  Protests, I would soon learn, are a common occurrence here. 

All in all, I thought this experience boded well for the rest of the class.  I mean, if the students could lead a demonstration after an hour and a half of class, maybe the final project would be a full-fledged socialist revolution in the city of Buenos Aires.  Sadly, this wasn't the case.  The final was only a couple of essay questions based on the readings.  How American.  And disappointing.  But university classes will be university classes, even in Argentina.