Two Months to the Day

This past week was our first week with nothing to do...besides looking for jobs and being tourists. The looking for jobs thing has been a bit more difficult than we thought, most likely because it's summer, and Argentines are slow at responding to anything, but we are hopeful and still sending out resumes to anything we can find.

ALTHOUGH -- Jill got an internship (that will turn into a paying job) at a really cool start up company called Spanglish. It's kind of like speed dating, except with language exchange and they've done so well that they were able to start a language school, where Jill will get free classes in exchange for labor!

Touristy things we've done this week

MALBA- the (museum of Latin American art Buenos Aires) We tried to go last Saturday, but the line was at least an hour and a half wait, so we decided to come early the next morning and figured Argentines wouldn't wake up until 3. That wasn't exactly true, but the line was only 30ish minutes (it was the last day before the exhibit ended) The exhibit everyone was coming to see was MR. AMERICA- ANDY WARHOL -- and guess where every single picture was imported from? Yep, that's right, Mr. Warhol's birthplace and Elana's - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania! What a small world. Anyways, it was a cool exhibit and we hadn't seen EVERYTHING before, certain pieces must have been traveling for a while. THEN we saw Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window" ( in English) for the first time and loved it!

Recoleta Cemetery - A famous and huge cemetery, where lots of well known Argentines, whose names are now streets or subway stops are kept. ALSO Ms. Eva Peron's tomb is there, although apparently, she was actually moved from the spot in the 80's when all that disappeared stuff was going on and now it's just a big empty mausoleum with flowers and engraving with messages of love, that nobody realizes is empty and waits in lines to take pictures of. Obviously we waited in line with them. The cemetery has no grass and no one is actually buried underneath the ground, there are just all these personal mausoleums with beautiful statues and intricately designed doorways with the casket resting right there behind the doors. It's like a little city with lots of "houses" and narrow stone streets and loads of tourists walking around taking pictures.

Palermo Soho-- is actually the neighborhood we live right next to and walk through all the time, but we've never just taken the time to stroll around and window shop, so we did. Palermo Soho is a super ritzy, super hip, super pretty neighborhood that we would love to live in, but could never afford to. Every restaurant is cute and perfectly decorated and has beautifully lit terraces and every time we walk by them we say "MAN, I wish our friends and family were here so we could take them!"

The same day, we went to a Spanglish event at a bar in Palermo Soho. As we were signing up and paying for the event, the woman who started Spanglish, who Jill met at her interview said, “So you’ll be joining us next week?” Jill looked confused. Then the woman smiled and said, “ You didn’t check your email, did you?”
And this is how Jill found out she got the job! She didn’t have to pay or anything.
So, we met some cool Argentines, exchanged languages , some email addresses, had some drinks and a good night! ( There isn’t a work in Spanish for cheesy, if there was, we would say it here.)

Also in Palermo Soho, at a super hip hair salon/ oxygen bar called “Blow” a very scared Jill got her hair chopped off. We had to be careful to specify that she didn’t want a mullet nor a Florence Henderson flip do…both of which are common styles here. She realized that she’s always been curious to see what short hair would look like and that life is short and hair is hair is hair.

So for those of you who don’t know, we cook everything in small saucepans, yes everything (eggs, onions, vegetables, soja patties, stirfrys, etc) because we don’t have a frying pan. Also, we open cans by stabbing them with dull knives and letting the juices drain from the poked holes. Then we stab a few more holes into the cans and CAREFULLY push back the tin and shake out the contents of the can into the tiny saucepan ( no can opener either)

Well, for some reason, (good karma) a blender has appeared in our kitchen in the past few weeks. We immediately brainstormed all the possible things we could do and make and eat with this blender before it inevitably disappeared or broke. We made fruit smoothies a few times and then we got the idea to make hummus! There is no hummus in any of the markets here and we miss it. A lot. Probably more than some people…just kidding...maybe.

We bought a giant bag of dried chickpeas ( the economical option) soaked them for 10 hours and cooked ‘em for 40 minutos. We bought lemons and spices and garlic oh my. Everything we would need to make delicious hummus. Once we started spooning the chick peas into the blender and watched them spin around, without being blended, we realized that maybe this blender just didn’t have it in it. At first we thought the chickpeas were just very hot and that it was just steam coming out from the blender, but when we taste tested the clumpy concoction, we realized it was smoke. Oops.

Fortunately, we only used a small amount of chick peas to start so we only had one batch of delicious electrical fire tasting hummus to toss. BUT we weren’t about to give up. Our hummus addiction wouldn’t let us. So we had to think.

FIRST we tried to fork it. This worked for a small batch, but Jill’s arm grew tired and it took too long.
NEXT, Elana tried mashing with a wooden spoon, but the slippery little chick peas wouldn’t be mashed.
FINALLY, Elana and Nahuel found a good old fashioned mortar and pestle and got to smashing them old school. With a little oil and salt, we had something that resembled hummus and tastes like it too.

WEATHER
Floods. February is usually a rainy month here, which we were prepared for. What we were not prepared for, along with the rest of Buenos Aires, was that in one storm, it rained more than it usually does in the entire month of February combined. Two weeks later, there was another storm, just as bad as the first. There has been flooding, electrical problems, train delays and branches everywhere except on our street. Only a few blocks down from our house though, the flood waters got so high, people were wading home waist deep. Ick. The closest we came to having to deal with this was when the second storm started, we were eating lunch at our favorite restaurant and realized that the corner outside was underwater.

Summer is coming to an end and you can already feel it. Nights are getting a lot cooler and the days aren’t hitting temps in the high 80s like they were just last week. The days have been mid to high 70s with not as much humidity and very cool breezes. We've been able to wear pants lately, which is a nice change from the five skirts and tanktops we've been rotating through since we got here.

EARTHQUAKES
All of the earthquakes, first in Haiti, then Chile then Japan and now northern parts of Argentina are scaring us. But not because we are directly affected, just because we are paranoid. We’ve already looked up maps of all the fault lines in Argentina, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania and read instructions on how to prepare for an earthquake and what to do when you feel one. We’ve decided on our safe spot, just in case anyone was wondering…and you should too. Reports say that people felt some aftershocks and the quake from Chile and from Salta and Mendoza, Argentina in Buenos Aires, but we think that was only in the country. Buenos Aires is pretty big and we are on the far east coast, as far as you could possibly be from the epicenters.

Thanks to everyone who has been asking how are we are though.


On a much happier note, it is Purim! We looked up some different Jabad houses around our neighborhood and the rabbi from a Jabad in Palermo Soho emailed us back, so we decided to go. When we first arrived, we knew that we had the right place because there was a little boy standing outside in a suit and a kepah. Also, we’ve heard that the security at all things Jewish is really tight, so as soon as we started going up the steps, we were interrogated and needed to show IDs etc etc etc. But we still got in.

Well, we didn’t realize it was a Lubavitch( aka very religious) Jabad. We were walked to the woman’s side of the room and sat down in a small group of about 15 women, all who stared at us and we were instantly very grateful we had worn long skirts and sweaters. A woman named Rivkah walked over and introduced herself to us, in English and asked where we were from, what we were doing etc. Of course, she knows a family of Weinsteins in Pittsburgh, her son is at a yeshiva in New York and her husband studied in Morristown, New Jersey (where Elana’s brother currently is and we’re sure giddy at the fact we wound up at a Lubavitch Jabad)

We waited a while for the men to be done with the Shabbat services and Elana tried to explain what Purim services were like for her growing up to Jill. Hamantashen, Queen Esther costumes, noise makers, screaming at Haman’s name and lots of children running around. This was a little bit different, there were no cookies, much to our dismay, but we were given noisemakers (gregors) and saw one or two little Queen Esthers prancing around.

When the cantor began the reading of the Megillah (the Purim story), all in Hebrew ( we tried to read the translation in Spanish), everything got a bit more familiar feeling when everyone screamed and barked and meowed and shook their noise makers at Haman’s(the bad guy of Purim) name.

At the end of the reading, a nice girl sitting behind us told us, in English, that there was a party for young people at a different Jabad house that we should go to afterwards. We ended up not going (it was too far) but it was a very sweet invitation and reminded us how nice and welcoming Jewish communities are in any country.

One funny thing we noticed was that even though the Rabbi was speaking in Spanish, we could see an obvious universal quality in the way that he and probably all Rabbis speak.

On a side note, we don’t think Jill is as lactose intolerant as we thought. We think it might have been a few week long stomach bug of sorts. YAY!

There are lots of fun things coming up this week ( Jill’s birthday!) so hopefully we’ll have a lot more to write about next time!

Be safe! We love you all. Besossss