Last Tango in Buenos Aires

Another Starbucks

Blackbookmag.com posted an amusing article about the prevalence of Starbucks in Argentina - can it possibly survive?

Judging by the consistent line-up at my local, it can - although the wait may be more related to the Jamaican-styley tardiness of the baristas than the scrum of people desperate to enter. In Buenos Aires women drink coffee in order to get out of the house and cackle for a few hours.

Cac-kle : the high-pitched complaint of women indignant at the behaviour of others (generally husbands and itinerant neighbours) that continues unabated and uninterrupted without the need to draw breath.

Couples may be seen taking a leisurely coffee together, also to get out of the house but generally without feeling the necessity to utter a single word to each other unless to make some derogatory comment on passers-by (preferably of a foreign persuasion).

The point being - Drinking a coffee is expected to take a long time in this city. Starbucks is like some new-century version of getting a milkshake at a 1950s diner - they even offer new-century milkshakes, known as frappucinos. The entire customer base at both Starbucks close to me in Palermo consists of groups of teenagers snapping gum and smoking cigarettes and drinking expensive plastic cups of syrup and whipped cream.

Yesterday when I ordered a mocha to take next door to the peluqueria, the barista couldn't quite wrap his brain around the fact that I wanted it hot, I couldn't quite get mine around the streams of girls walking through the door wearing the exact same goggle-eyed sunglasses, the exact same strapless mini pouff dress and the exact same bandanaed tease hair-do.

Cafayate Corso - Carneval

It was full on party week last week in Cafayate, Salta. Not only was there a corso along calle Rioja three nights running but there was the Serenata - a week long folk music festival - the most important in the North.

 

The street was packed with people and parillas and kids running around spraying espuma into your face. They have an unpleasant habit of blasting it straight in the eye.

 

It was amazingly well-organised for such a small city and some of the costumes and dancing displayed a huge amount of work.

 

After seeing corsos inside big buildings like the sambadromo, in Rio, designed for the purpose, it was fun to be part of the community on the street in Cafayate.

Emotionally Unavailable Men AND WOMEN

There is something terribly sad about the clunking cycle of looking for love men and women are now stuck in. The World today makes it much more difficult to establish emotional boundaries than it was in, say, the Macho-style 1950s. Now we have 'The Rules' and 'Mystery' and any number of other 'programmes' designed to effectively procure love from a member of the opposite sex who is resistant to giving it up. Surely all this game-playing goes against the freedom our Sixties ancestors initiated - aren't we supposed to be free to love and learn from each other with no demands, simply for the experience and the pleasure of giving.

Ah Giving. Now it seems we Women are not supposed to Give (apart from great blow jobs) anything for fear of scaring a man off. At first this seemed ridiculous. Now the number of Relationship Gurus advising restraint coupled with my experience of the DB informing me that I was trying to 'Buy' him by giving him a birthday cake, informs me that men fear giving.

Ah Fear. Keep your heart open - an ex-lover has told me on Facebook. Don't build a wall to hide behind in fear. Through projection, women have now been conditioned to be afraid of men's fear. As soon as the man you have been pressured into loving pulls away, you feel fear of rejection, of not being loved, of loss. The pressure he applies in the beginning, otherwise known as 'The Chase' or 'Seduction' is simply an expression of his fear of liking you, of you making him feel. How many men have told me they don't want to feel something. The loss of control when they fall into deep attraction makes them too vulnerable. Once they can even the score by making you feel it too, they are safe to back off.

It's a mutual collusion - the fear and a woman who can resist it will not only find herself irresistible, she will stop being manipulated by the projection of men's fears and insecurities. I am not going to start second guessing myself every time I date a man. If he thinks that a Birthday cake is somehow a metaphor for being trapped forever, that is going to be his problem, not mine.

This week, an ex-lover in Canada advised me that 'While men may be all about the chase, some women like to be chased'. For all the women complaining and blaming their heinous lovers for their inability to commit, ask yourself how much the force of the initial chase period is reinforcing your own fears. We are seduced because we want to be loved and because we are conditioned to compete with each other for a man.  All the ideals he applies that we are superior to the others appeal to our need for approval. Just think how many men say; 'I just haven't found the right one yet'.  Why do they trawl out this line? Because they know that your interior switch will be flipped to think; 'I am that one. I am better than all the rest'.

If there is reciprocity of fear - a yin-yang balancing act of it in a commitmentphobic relationship - then there is the same mutuality in Emotional Unavailabliity. It's a strange little dance we do - He chases us (out of fear) and we feel loved and special and we start to love back. He feels afraid of being smothered (more fear) and pulls back. Now we start to feel unloved (fear) and start chasing, persuading, begging, manipulating to get the love back again. We also get to cover our tracks of female emotional unavailability as we focus on his inability to commit. A man gives every sign that he's not there, even while swearing to God and Pachamama that he is - we just refuse to see it.

Tafi del Valle - Nada Que Ver

I had been told - mostly by Tucumanos - that Tafi del Valle in the Tucuman Province was every bit as lovely as Salta and that it was a shame that it wasn't on the circuito turistico in the way that the two provinces oop North are.

After a number of glorious days in Cafayate, where the BD drove around the Plaza watching me drinking coffee but not having sufficient pelotas to stop and speak to me nor offer an explanation for his tonteria, I went on to Tucuman alone. Or rather in a remise with a sweet driver and a couple from Capital. It worked out perfectly as the buses from Cafayate to Tafi leave at a deeply inconvenient horario - taking the excursion meant I saw Quilmes and Pachamama and Tafi AND my luggage was removed door to door.

Quilmes - much hyped ruins along the ancient Inca trail - taken over last year by indigents and only recently recovered. Interesting in principal, but as everybody told me when I asked 'Why isn't Tucuman popular with tourists?' - Nada Que Ver. Quilmes is a rather dull series of garden walls climbing a steep dry hill. You seriously need some imagination to get excited about the place. Nothing like the Pucara in Tilcara, Jujuy, which is a real village with an Inca church at the top and a stupendous view down the Quebrada forever.

Next - the Pachamama Museum at Amaicha. A really ingeniously decorated space, using Inca motifs, just as you would expect from the artist who owns it. Inside there is some interesting geographical information about how the gorges were formed and some dioramas of Inca tribal life. And then a number of rooms dedicated to the owner's painting and weaving. Very clever businessmen some artists are.

The drive of another 100km to Tafi is pretty enough if you like Wales in Autumn - not something I would come to the end of the World to see. And then you drop down into Tafi from a height of 3042m above sea level through a rolling green environment of sheep huts that soon turns into summer homes for rich Tucumanos escaping the 40 degree heat of the city. For S.M. de Tucuman is an infierno of a capital and Tafi is, well, cold. The temperature dropped so much when the afternoon drizzles set in that I had to put on every cover-up I had brought and then go shopping for a wool wrap.

I hated Tafi personally. It's in a basin surrounded by green mountains which makes it cooler but also means every breath you take is full of pollution. The cars are as pervasive as the wild dogs and lunatics. In a city of 8000 inhabitants, two-thirds as many as Cafayate, there is about a tenth of the charm. There is no pretty central plaza with iglesia. The wild dogs outnumber the cars and I was forced to observe chocques between the two. Then, finally attempting to relax at a sidewalk cafe, the local loony grabbed my half eaten empanada from the plate and rammed it into his mouth, not before returning to grab the limon slice from the plate and squeeze it all over the pastry. Apparently it's a regular occurrence here and the locals simply shrugged their shoulders.

It was delightful to get on the bus to Tucuman, that is until it stopped at every pueblo and parada in the valley and pandemonium broke out - just without the chickens. There is a great section of road on the way to the capital as you climb out of the pozo of Tafi over the mountain and down to Tucuman. The hills are cloched in trees and ferns tighter than a skinhead's beanie as the road snakes along clinging to the precipice. The photos were taken through a grubby window as people hurled themselves back and forth at every bend on the cornisa, screaming at the driver for a non-existent seat or their money back. Never has a bus station looked so calm.

 

 

Argentina is Not South America

Only geographically speaking of course it is - plonked here at the end of the world but with an outlook so unlike the rest of the continent it is hard to believe it's real. People always go on about Buenos Aires being so European, with its Fin-de-siecle architecture and theatres and cafe society but I find myself really missing the culture of England, especially the music.

I have been out in Salta for the last ten days and I am extremely tired of the culture of tourism. the landscape is so stunning but it is besieged.The overpriced excursion buses stopping en masse throughout the valleys and pueblos. The tourists snapping photos of every single quotidian action of the locals, often causing them to crack up as soon as the turista has passed on. In Cafayate, every restaurant is besieged by gaucho children performing their folkloric Riverdance for two minutes before harassing diners, hat in hand.

The food is the furthest thing gastronomically from Latin America. At least in Salta, you can request some salsa picante to accompany your empanadas - but only if you ask. Otherwise,the whole of Argentina is a food facsimile of asado, bife and pizza. You don't even need to look at the menu except to check the constantly rocketing prices.

And there is a major lack of joie de vivre in Argentina. Think of the joyous dancing in Brazil and Colombia and then think of tango - a dance that expresses the neuroses of the Argentine character. Ormaybe the Porteno character. In Salta,everyone asks  mewhat I think of Buenos Aires and especially the Portenos. They are despised as the arrogant,unreliable and somewhat myopic people they are.

Emotionally Unavailable Men - Part 3857

This has been a funny old day. In terms of Single Girl managing Emotionally Unavailable Man, it's been maybe 8 on the richter scale - not as bad as when your Child's Father snatches Him and accuses you of heiniousity so that he can get him across the U.S. (obviously) border, but really kind of crap as in Single GIrl Trying to be Less Commitmentphobic, learn about self and be zen-loving to all men (no matter how obviously f/cked up they may be).

Funny because on the very same day that I suffered this humiliating dating escapade with an Argentine man, the publisher of the fantastic new, all bells and whistles English Newspaper told me that her American editor in Buenos Aires said that my column 'Single Girl  in Argentina' was too harsh on men. Even although it's an English newspaper, they want Argentines to read it and the Argentines wouldn't care for its attitude to men. Could I re-write it to be less ABUSIVE to men - Argentine men. I capitalize (against Journalism 101 rules) because this very tardy piece of 'Editing' (quotation marks also not acceptable in 101 unless about to cite) feedback from the publisher plops into my English Journalism in-box on the very same day that I arrive in Salta and the man who last night sent me a msg saying 'My Love can you come up here next week. My brother is going to Brazil and has lent me his apartment in Tucuman - Translation being - Honey, I know I told you last week that I couldn't get time off but this week we have a kinky love nest so I'll make an effort'.

And when I msg him to say I am here, in Salta, ready for the kinky love-nest-iness to begin, he ignores me the entire day and I am sat here on a Friday night being sad (or even.in all honesty. humiliated) while he is trying to juggle the latest tourist he's hit on and thinking up the latest excuse for zen-thinking me except that the wonderful Salta couchsurfers are coming out tonight - at 24.00.

And on top of those two romantic net-faults, today was the day that one of my regular blog marketing mails plopped in from Christian Carter, talking about 'How To Get Him Addicted To You Again'. And normally I think Christian Carter is the only way to go in Dating Drama internet-guru coaching except that after today I think that 'F/ck it - How many books are there in the self-help section advising men how to create a great relationship? NONE'.

Any 'relationship' or 'dating' book directed at men is like the Mystery plan advising how to seduce a woman in two easy moves (Ha - the guy that sold it to me has nothing on the DB or the BD, neither of whom followed anything close to the 'rules', Hell the idea that there were any rules outside of their own solipsistic desires would have been front page news to them. Mystery guys take note - No decent woman will enjoy being touched on the arm or shoulder more than once unless she is already on the hook and she defo won't take to being insulted unless she is on the hook to you and flopping on deck- make SURE the woman is hanging securely through the eyeball (floating off down the path of her slightly narcissistic fantasies rather than seeing you for the twat you really are) before you start with the psychological abuse. Hmmm- Tricky. My next $500 How-to download will be 'How to Know When A woman is Securely Hooked and You can Start With EMotional Abuse'

At least I read my own posts and maintain a zen mind of 'Hurt or Anger or Disappointment is only the realisation of not getting what you want. I came here not wanting anything, just to discover- and so now I know - so although I am feeling what I am feeling - This Too Shall Pass.

If I had a bandoneon to accomapny that story, it would be a tango.

Drinking Expatriotically

Arrived at the airport to go to Salta to be told that the flight left at 7.05 - AM - not de la tarde. How ridiculous. Obviously I wouldn't have booked a flight at that time when I had hardly fallen into bed by then after yakking half the night with two of the Buenos Aires Chicas.

So what to do in the BA Smoke on a loose end Thursday night? The options are:

1. Meet up with the kids from the Drinking Liberally or Democrats for Drinking or Drinking Insouciantly or whatever subgroup of Expats Getting Plastered is meeting tonight at a bar in Recoleta.
2. Join the PubCrawl BA kids closer to home for a pub crawl around Palermo. Starts at 10 ends next weekend.
3. Join the VinoBA kids with 0800Vino for a wine tasting of roses at Nigel's cellar in Abasto.

Hmmmm I wonder why I'm losing so much short  term memory

Superbowl

Everything stinks!

Superbowl Sunday at Sugar last night. Huge screen with internet feed so we saw the U.S. commercials and didn't have to suffer Castellano commentary but with a picture quality that made me feel blinder than I'm already stressing about.

Woke up this morning to the rancid smell of my hair on the pillow. My jeans and tee-shirt stink too. I had forgotten just how disgusting cigarette smoke is. It would appear that the no-smoking laws are being more frequently ignored as is the Argentine custom. The DB told me that any new law is vigorously followed for the first six months and promptly abandoned. Maybe I will be headless on the moto one day.