We are over due for another update…(sorry padres) Jill has been mighty busy working hard and learning Spanish over at her internship every day of the week from 10 30 to 7ish and sometimes later! (more to follow about Spanglish)
This past week, Elana finally started working at a private language institute owned by a nice man who sounds like a little British man who drinks tea all day, but he’s just from Buenos Aires. She has two different classes, every day of the week from 8:30 am- 9:30 am at a company that has something to do with supplying medical products and lets her have as many café con leches o cappuccinos as she wants Her students are funny and very nice and interested in learning English and she is realizing how little sense English pronunciation really makes, schedule and prologue for example. BUT, it is only for one hour a day, before Jill even leaves for work, SO she needs something more to do with herself and more money to make. And she is actively looking for this thing. So far, aside from looking at Craigslist and twiddling her thumbs, she has been watching TV in Spanish, mostly the Disney channel because it is the slowest and most likely to be absorbed into her brain like osmosis(?) writing a little, reading a little, planning lessons, talking to the boys and pretending they are personal private spanish tutors aaaaand panicking about where she wants to live whenever she returns to the states. And I don’t know why this paragraph turned into the 3rd person.
The theme of this update it: These are a few of our favorite thiiiingsss… ( non specific order)
Meraviglia- The slogan on their window says “Podes confiar en lo organico” You can trust organic.” This has been our favorite restaurant since our first week here, and it still is by a mile. It’s only 5 blocks away, vegetarian, organic, bright, friendly, green and really affordable. The staff already knows us and they are one of the only places we have yet to find chai tea (besides Starbucks) and marinated tofu in many dishes. They have a new “plato del dia” every day and each one has been phenomenal (like gasp worthy between bites), the head chef is a woman named Juliana Lopez May (http://www.julianalopezmay.com/) If you like pictures of food ( our moms) then you should go there. In addition to being an adorable consistently amazing restaurant, it ALSO has a wall of organic veggies, eggs, jams, rice, whole grains, Mates, teas, fresh breads, etc you can buy for prices you would NEVER see in Whole Foods. http://meraviglia.com.ar/
Eterna Cadencia- This is a bookstore/ café we happened upon our very first afternoon wandering around Honduras street (connecting Palermo Hollywood to Palermo Soho, lined with cafes, cute little kitschy shops and restaurants) The bookstore is flooded with books (obviously) shelved right up to the ceiling,and the only way to reach some are with the wooden ladders (Beauty and the Beast style). Windows from the bookstore look right into the café ; there are plush couches at one end and little wooden tables on the other. The best part is upstairs on their terrace- it gets perfect morning, afternoon AND evening sun and is shaded with big leafy trees ,has outdoor comfy couches and the most deliciously caramel coffee vanilla frap frozen drinks.
http://www.eternacadencia.com/home.asp
Spring- Ok. Imagine a dream world bursting with every vegetable, tofu, soy sauce, carne de soya, potatos, sushi, veggie empanadas, asian inspired soups, fruits, cakes. Everything is laid out in front of you, warming under a soft light and all you need is a fork. And a plate. And it is a buffet. For 30 pesos. It’s a dangerous dangerous dream, and I realize that many of you are rolling your carnivorous eyes at this fantasy world turned reality, BUT in a country where there are legs of meat hanging from a large majority of the restaurants and markets, and YOU are a vegetarian and you’ve miraculously found yourself in a restaurant where you actually don’t have to struggle when you ask if this really doesn’t have any meat in it, not just cow (because here no carne means no cow) but that it also has no chicken, pig OR fish, then THIS is heaven. Enough said.
Arabe- Our belly dancing class. We’ve been going and shaking our bellies, pointing our feet and gracefully flailing our arms about once a week ( after we start making some money, we can hopefully afford to go a few times a week) Everyone kisses each other before AND after class and most of the older woman in the class begin grunting and audibly sighing to the teacher about half way through when we have to “sigue sigue sigue” (continue) with our hips smacking the air around us, back and forth back and forth.
Pepas: We discovered Pepas about a month ago- as we were wandering through the cookie aisle, searching for something not terribly guilty, we saw the world “membrillo” and our eyes lit up. They are grandma inspired shortbread cookies, for sure, but a bit darker in color and have a gooey glob of membrillo( quince jam) right in the middle of the cookie…mmm. They are no alfajors, BUT they are delicious.
Colombians: We live with gorgeous Colombian boys who we love and sometimes we try to turn into our personal Spanish tutors. Apparently, Colombian Spanish is one of the clearest and easiest forms of Spanish to understand for a new Spanish speaker, both our boys have told us this along with many other Argentines, so we know they aren’t just being cocky. We got really lucky finding them. They’re hilarious, generous, artistic and they are definitely going to be lifelong friends of ours. The only downside to having them is that when Jill comes home and tries to use something she learned in class they make her re-learn it without the Argentine accent (which can be a little tricky).
In addition to Sam y Nahuel who we see all the time, Alex, also from Colombia lives upstairs. He works a lot at Narciso, a famous men’s underwear company and often comes home late and leaves early. BUT , we do see him occasionally in the kitchen and he loves to practice his English with us and is very patient and helpful with Jill’s Spanish. Elana even helped him translate a business presentation he did on a trip to Panama a few weeks ago and he was very grateful. He’s super sweet, wears cute little pants and we love him too.
Venezuelans: Particularly 2. We first met Gaby the same night we met our boys at the B and B New Year’s dinner party. She lives downtown and recently started working at Starbucks (which just came to BA about 2 years ago and is ALWAYS crowded and people only order frapucinos)even though she is actually an accountant in real life. She will be starting marketing classes soon. She has a cute little jumpy hyper puppy named Simba and recently her cousin, Adrian came to Buenos Aires as well to go to school. So now we have two Venezuelan friends and they are wonderful people, always make us laugh, and always take us to cool places. As much as we love all of these latino boys, its very nice to have a girl in the mix as well.
On Friday, we went with them to a rich little town called San Isidro 45 minutos just outside of Buenos Aires. It reminded Jill of Shady Side, in Pittsburgh, but was a bit bigger and has a lot of trees and fresh air and is a LOT cleaner in every sense, which was refreshing. We also found a natural market there where they have seeds and beans and oats galore! And we are going to be making our own granola( cause it is pricey here, and we’ve become crafty like that) and we will be sure to document the experience, for better or for worse.
La terraza- Well, now that the hot hot sticky humid city summer is coming to an end, slowly, but still coming, we can spend even MORE time on our lovely roof deck without frying. Carlos has quite the green thumb and a habit of buying furniture online on the cheap and refurbishing it. This means that our terraza always has new beautiful flowers and plants and new tables painted cool colors that magically appear.
Freddo fro yo: Of course we just so happen to live in the only neighborhood in all of Buenos Aires that is home to the one and only fro yo shop. It is connected to Freddo, a very popular ice cream chain in BA, which has delicious ice cream, but is sometimes, just a bit too ridiculously thick, creamy and guilty. (It also unfortunately makes Jill think she has dysentery) We saw the fro yo sign one day (it literally just opened within the last month) and now everything is light and fruity. It’s a lot like BerryLine or PinkyBerry. It’s also half the price of the ice cream which makes anything taste better. Well maybe not anything.
Tartas: The lovechild of a quiche and a savory pie. Pretty much every restaurant and bakery here has them and always in multiple veggie friendly flavors. The crusts are also usually light; flakey and not too thick (like ones in the states). At our organic markets here they also have integral(whole wheat) tartas which gets our goat every time. At our favorite restaurant they have tartas de calabaza and tartas de zapatillo – kind of like zucchini but a little different.
Calabaza: Is Pumpkin and it is everywhere here all the time not just in the fall. Almost every restaurant has mashed pumpkin , pure de calabaza, tarta de calabaza y mozzarella, whole calabaza, pumpkin soup, pumpkin ravioli etc etc etc. It’s not too sweet, not too bland, is always cooked just right and has an amazingly happy orange color and is delicious. Claro. If only they had pumpkin chai like in our favorite cafes in Cambridge/Somerville. Le sigh.
Milanesas de Soja Caseras: Milanesas are huge here. Everywhere offers them and people eat them all the time. Milanesa completa is very common to eat and it’s a sandwich with the works – chicken milanesa (usually) with lettuce, tomato, ham, cheese, sauces, etc. Obviously we don’t go for that. Since we don’t have our Trader Joe’s Meatballs or Morning Star crumbles to get us through, we discovered milanesas de soya aka vegetable/soy milanesas. Every brand makes them, they come in different flavors (our first favorite was onion) and they actually just came out with a pumpkin one a couple weeks ago. Perfecto.
American Idol- Luckily, thanks to illegal TV show viewing websites, we have been able to keep up with the most important current events going on in the USA while we are out of the country. Sometimes it’s blurry, sometimes it says we’ve watched too much in one night and have to wait 54 minutes to continue, but it’s worth it and the girls are way better than the guys this year.
Online movie sites: Thanks to other illegal things on the internet we’ve also been able to keep up with the movies coming out in the states. There are a lot of movie channels on TV here that play movies in English with Spanish subtitles but they frequently play the same movies over and over again. We can only watch The 40 Year Old Virgin or Miss Congeniality 2 so many times. This is when these sites come in handy. Much like with idol they have their problems but we eventually get through them. It’s also made us realize we don’t really need to be able to see the color of a characters eyes or even that they have eyes to know what’s going on. We’ve also mastered the art of patience thanks to Megavideo as well as multi-tasking. Example: When it times out of "Precious" halfway through we can switch to the "Hurt Locker" on another site… their storylines don’t quite match up so there’s no risk of confusion.
El Parque Armenia en Palermo Soho: A cute, lush park in the middle of Palermo Soho near our house. It’s full of families, people drinking Mate, preteens playing tonsil hockey, pigeons, sun, palm trees and unlike other parks not too many creepy men. On sunny blue skied days we go here with our boys, a blanket, music, cards, books and our journals. Sometimes a bottle of wine that we pour into an empty Fanta bottle (thank you college education).
Jewelry de semillas: Baires is a great place. But it’s a city. And every city has its drawbacks. This particular city has quite a bit of theft. And they’re good at it. Pickpocketing, cell phone snatchery, a recent fad in old school bank robbery (seems like a lot of work and very pre-the year 2000 if you ask us), purse stealing, children who crawl under your seat in the subte and reach their tiny little hands into your bag. You get it. Jewelry is especially desirable. And they’ll take it right off neck as your walking in broad daylight with police and lots of people around (eek bad memories). After ‘the incident’ that won’t be brought up again, we noticed that no one wears real jewelry. Not even costume jewelry. Lots of people wear beads and braided string bracelets. Lucky for us we happen to love that kind of jewelry so we’ve been collecting necklaces and bracelets made of semillas or seeds. Acai seeds are the most popular it seems but there are all different kinds and different pretty colors and no one has any desire to steal it. We hope.
Mariposa: honey liquor we buy because it is sweet, cheap and has a big ole butterfly on the bottle. Sometimes we drink a bottle of this on a Friday night when we don’t feel like going out. Don’t worry we drink it with our boys not just us.
Alfajoritos: tiny little bite size alfajores ( read back a few posts for a lengthy mouth watering description of the full size.) These are perfect for us because they aren’t horrible for you and they’re equally delicious. We’ve also recently found a wide variety of healthier alfajors – integral style, rice cakes instead of cakecake, fruta alfajores instead of dulce de leche.
Fidel y Bamboo ( the dogs, not our wireless internet connection which is also called Bamboo): Quite possibly the sweetest most cuddly, lovey dogs ever. They are attached to Carlos at the hip so they frequently lose interest in us if they hear Carlos walking, talking or breathing within a 10 foot radius.
The ’93: There are about a million different buses in this city. It is very confusing. Luckily, we are able to take the ’93 to almost everywhere we ever want to go and it picks up and drops us off 100 steps from our door. We do have to take other buses sometimes, but we live on a main street which usually means they’re pretty easy to find.
The fruit and vegetable stand on Ravignani- Up until this past week, this WAS the cheapest place we could buy veggies and fruit and eggs galore. However, inflation in the city is ridiculous- literally everything just noticeably jumped up a few pesos this past week alone, markets, atms, everything. But because we will most likely be around for a few more jumps, we have no choice but to get used to it. Even though it sucks. Anyways, this veggie stand is super fresh, right around the corner from us (on the way to the subte), the man says “Buen dia” to Jill every morning, they still have the cheapest eggs ( 3.50 pesos for 6!) and the plumpest looking fruit.
Spanglish: 5 rounds of 5 minutes in English 5 minutes in Spanish. Like speed dating- but not. Spanglish is a language exchange event twice a week on Wednesday and Thursday nights here in BA. Elana loves going because she gets to drink wine and talk to people in Spanish and make new friends. This also happens to be where Jill is interning and also taking classes (Spanglishcool, yes cool). Jill loves working for them. It’s a start up company that’s doing really well and is promoting a really cool idea.
www.spanglishexchange.com check it out
Weather.com- For obvious reasons. This lets us know what the weather will be like, in Fahrenheit because even though the conversion is fairly easy, we hate math and because our language side of the brain is being over stimulated, we can’t begin to activate the math side…and we can never remember it. ALSO, weather.com keeps us updated on the weather in the US and makes us very glad that we just happened to pick this specific horrible winter to leave the country, sorry guys.
Skype: Duh. We miss everyone. And video skype makes it extra easy to feel like we’re just a computer screen away. (Except Elana’s parents are computer challenged and have failed to fix their video camera , maybe this public announcement will encourage them to ACTUALLY fix it)
Llaves: this means keys. Jill added this one to this list. She “really likes the way they look. They are old fashioned (or just not American) and really cute.” And they remind her of "Indian in the Cupboard"
exerciseTV.com: You can’t go running in Buenos Aires because there are piles of fresh dog poop everywhere and because men say horrible things to you, especially if you're a woman running in shorts. We're pretty sure that the men would say something even if you were wearing a Barney costume if they thought a woman was inside of it. There is a park where literally all the runners in the entire city go and run in a circle, but it is kind of far and running can get boring. And gyms are expensive, well not that expensive but there no 10 dollar Planet Fitness deal, AND we don’t got no extra money. SO , to keep up our physiques, we use exercisetv.com! There are over a hundred videos of kick boxing, bikini body workouts, yoga, stretching, dancing, squatting etc. They have pretty much all the same videos they have ON DEMAND at home, so you can do it too!
Carlos y Miguel: Our cute little gay parents. Mas o menos. Carlos owns the B &B where we first stayed and also the apartment we are living in now. He is a cute skinny man of about 50 some years, originally from Chile but moved here over 30 years ago. He always wears old vintage tees in English, like the kind we would buy at goodwill that say “I lost my turtle” or some random town’s little league. On Jill’s birthday, he brought her a big bouquet of pinkish orange gerber daisies with a note from him and his puppies. He’s super easy going and doesn’t care if we give him our rent 2 weeks late
Miguel is Carlos’ best friend and business partner for the past 30 years. He is a jolly little bald man who is very fashionable and wears an apron in the mornings when he makes the breakfast for the guests at the B &B. He is from Argentina and never speaks any English, neither does Carlos. Miguel frequently goes on rants about one thing or another if we ask him a simple question relating to Argentina or politics, weather etc. We sometimes catch him running down the hall with a towel around his plump little waist and we giggle. Also, we think that he might be a big deal in the gay Argentine scene because sometimes he makes a phone call and all of a sudden we can jump the line and pay half the price of admission at a club.
Claudia: Is a very tiny woman who comes everyday and cleans; the floor, the dishes, the bathroom, the windows, everything. We are very spoiled. We don’t like to be around when she is cleaning because we feel guilty. But we just found out she is actually our neighbor and a friend of Carlos’ and we think she cleans as a side job so she can make some extra dinero from Carlos. She is cute and smokes while she cleans and in spite of her size we are pretty sure she could take a person 3 times her size. She has that look in her eyes.
Full House Season 2 con subtitles: It’s comforting, it’s Elana’s favorite and it’s good practice. And who doesn’t love Uncle Jesse?
So those a few of our favoriteeee things.
We are going to Uruguay this week, from Thursday to Sunday to get away from the city AND more importantly to renew our tourist visas, so we will certainly have more to say after that! We will be going with our friends, Jill and Sara; we met Jill during our TEFL class and funny enough she is from a town right next to Jill’s! What a small world. We also just found out that we have mutual friends, what an even smaller world! Sara is her girlfriend and equally cool, and she always knows the goings ons in the city and is very news savy and sends us links to things we should know. And she’s a master juggler. They live super close to us, which is very convenient and we are getting together with them tonight to have dinner, which we also did last Sunday and will probably do next Sunday! (actually we won’t because well be on ferry coming back from Uruguay BUT the Sunday after that, for sure!)
It’s raining now and the last day of summer was yesterday, but hopefully that will just make the sticky humidity go away. This was an extra long update because we are bad at doing it regularly, but we're sure you ate up every word cause you miss us.
