Good Airs

We spent our first full day in Buenos Aires today, and everything that I heard about the Argentine capital is true. The city is vaguely reminiscent of both New York and Paris, but with that distinctive South American feel. We´ve settled in temporary residency at Hostel Carlos Gardel, a charming old buiding with red painted walls in the heart of San Telmo. Our compañeros are a thoroughly international bunch, including a friendly Spanish character and a long haired Italian.
Today we through caution to the wind and throughly acted the part of the touristas, snapping photos of the monuments and the European architecture, chatting in English and sampling shoes at the many stores in the Microcenter. It was hot and the sunshine was a welcome respite from the last two days of pure rainy misery in Viña, so we peeled off the layers and reveled in this sense of vacation.
We wandered the streets of Buenos Aires today, getting lost and finding our way again, through San Telmo and the bustling Centro, up into Recoleta (which is just as ritzy as the guidebook promised, in an Upper East Side sort of way). We´re awaiting the arrival of our fourth blonde-haired travel mate, the always interesting Lilia, in which time the drunken splendor of this party capital will come into full effect.
Uruguay is on the horizon, and it´s likely that next week we´ll cross the water and find ourselves in the little country sandwiched between Brazil and Argentina. I think this will be one of the things I miss the most about this whole experience, the ease with which we travel and move around the continent. "Pinche gringas!" the mexicanos always say, "Siempre estan viajando a todos partes!" And its true, that we´re blessed with the ability to pack our bags and go, disfrutarlo y tener grandes experiencias. Our classroom, quite literally, is the South American continent, and the infinite variety of the land here.
Que suerte, si?

Old(er)

I found this on my computer last night, and it rekindled some old memories of places I´ve been. I thought I´d post it for a little DC love.

At night, Baltimore effuses an incandescent glow, rising up out of spires that oddly sprout out from the low brownstones and industrial machinery. In the daylight, the city appears dirty and somehow incomplete: a block of brightly colored doorways offset by the boarded-up wreck on the corner. The slope of Charles Street, born in the bright glare of the Inner Harbor, past knots of black youths on the street corners, rises upward towards the sedate, tree-lined promenades that surround John Hopkins University. This is a city marked by its differences, black and white, poor and rich, somehow stitched together to form this patchwork city that alternates between seemingly-safe and frightening, eliciting a nasty reputation that makes visitors from Bethesda lock their doors as they drive down these streets.
Today, I bought a ticket at Penn Station, boarded a train bound for DC, and watched as the Baltimore brownstones gave way to the lush green of early Maryland summer. I find it funny how these trees and vines all look the same as they did two years ago, still sedated despite their natural disorder. This is not the explosion of chaotic fauna that somehow harmonizes in the Hawaiian tropics; this is the oppressive air of disciplined order. This is Maryland.
It’s no better in DC. What once I took to be completely natural now seems stifled, as if a giant hand is slowly pushing down on the entire city. Everyone looks pressed, pressured into his or her respective compartments: DC professional, DC-East Coast college student, DC poor, DC anti-establishment rocker/bike messenger. Even though they are different, they are each carbon copies of their peers.
Perhaps it’s like this everywhere, simply replaced by paradigms that seem more natural and acceptable to me. But walking around Dupont Circle, despite the racket of the DC Guerilla Poets in the Circle, the chatter of the metro/homo/fashionista men in sunglasses on cell phones, the general flow of traffic from work-to restaurants-to home-to Metro-to wherever, I couldn’t help but feel that this is a place completely devoid of diversity.
Which is silly, I know. Walk the half-mile to Adams Morgan and you see the colorful neighborhood dynamics reflected in the restaurants: Ethiopian, Mexican, Middle Eastern, Chinese, McDonalds Team America. We settle for the Diner, tip extravagantly as our own personal thanks for the simple human friendliness of our tag-team waiter and waitress. I eat French toast for dinner because, dammit, I can. My own rebellion in the heart of American conformity? In some weak way, perhaps.
I’m exhausted beyond reason, but my mind is chewing and mulling over the whole day. I love talking with Mark, who bubbles over with anecdotes and ideas and a pure, unadulterated excitement for life and his work. I can’t help but be enchanted by his contagious enthusiasm, and passion for politics. We go by Poets and Busboys after a marathon walk around DC, I buy James a present and lovingly open the pages of these radical, revolutionary, fervent books. This is the most segregated city I’ve ever seen, a weirdly repressive and stagnant one, but you can’t stop flowers from growing through the cracks. The cacophony of the streets nourishes this quiet, somewhat stunted revolution. But it’s what I’m here to bear witness to, what I’m here to do. And I’m thankful for every minute of that.

Back

We're back in Chile, bid our farewells to Peru and are back to the rolling cerros of Valparaiso. But not for long...I think the reality of the fact that our trip is already halfway over has set in, so we're frenentically traveling the continent, experiencing and drinking (literally) it all in, trying to make the most of this Southern springtime.
Last weekend, we crossed the Cordillera and ended up in Mendoza, Argentina. I had been told (by reliale sources) that all Argentinians are beautiful, but I was utterly unprepared for the jaw-dropping beauty of the people there. Imagine Gael Garcia Bernal, Gisele...then drop them down into more relateable models, and you have the image of Argentinians (at least in my experience). As well as being gorgeous, Argentinians are friendly and more boisterous than their Chilean neighbors, lounging and chatting animatedly in outdoor cafes under the umbrella of Mendoza's tree-lined calles. The food is amazing and ridiculously cheap, the shopping better than good and the entire atmosphere dripping with life and sensual beauty. I love Argentina. Already plans are in the making for a trip to Buenos Aires, the Argentina capital hugging the Atlantic, and possibly to Uruguay.
I'm in my friend Ti's house off Calle Valparaiso now, eating popcorn and half-watching Amores Perros. We're trying to pick out all the Mexican slang, and it reminds the girls of the way I talk, with my faux-Mexican accent. Better than a Chilean one, I figure, since words just sound better and fuller, somehow, in mexicano.
There are so many little idiosyncratic things about this place that I'm going to miss when I go back...the stray dogs, the agua con gas (carbonated mineral water that is the norm here), the jotes en las calles, the pisco, the sunset over Valpo, the crazy dude with bandaids on his face on the corner. All of the things, some ugly and some beautiful, that compose the urban landscape of Vina, and of my Chile. Sometimes, as much as I hate it, I remember how much I'll miss the omniscient "Siii po," the quintessential Chilean saying. How lucky we are to be part of our families, part of the cultura, part of life here. I'm going to miss it, even if I do find myself holed up in Mexico, like I've always dreamed I could be.
But the movie is calling me back, the sound of the streets and the eventual walk back home by the ocean, up Balmaceda. I'll pass Cafe Journal and the stray dogs, the lights and the smells. And it will be my Chile, if only for a little longer.