Buenos Aires, “La Tigra”, and Mannequins, Oh my!

9-16-09
So I spent all of last week in Buenos Aires with my sister, her best friend Liza, and two of my closest Peace Corps friends celebrating my quarter century birthday. It was superb! BA is maybe now my favorite international city, and I spent a great deal of the week fantasizing about what type of work I could do there for a year after my Peace Corps service is done. We basically ate a lot of delicious food (particularly meat) and drank a bunch of wonderful wine. The wine variety was a nice change from the boxed wine and Coke/pineapple soda that is such a Paraguayan staple. One place that really knocked our socks off was in La Boca, in southern BA, where all the houses were painted bright colors. Right by the soccer stadium is a place called Don Carlos, where Don Carlos doesn’t give you options about what you’re having. I believe the only requests were that vegetarian options be provided for my sister and that he brings out chorizo. It was amazing. Francis Ford Coppola randomly recommends it in a New York Times article, claiming it is his favorite restaurant in BA. (Don Carlos brought out the article and the guest book at the very beginning of the meal.) We all walked out wishing we were in elastic-banded pants as I wondered if Don Carlos had a nice son I could marry. Another highlight was Recoleta Cemetery, where a number of rich and famous Argentines are buried, including Eva “Evita” Peron, who is apparently buried 27 feet underground to prevent her body from being stolen again (yes, again). There is also a woman who was buried alive, apparently in a coma. She woke and began screaming but cemetery workers did not get to her in time. Because of this, another man designed a coffin for her that opened from the inside, but when he tested it for the 25th time or so he could not get out and was then himself buried alive. How crazy is that??
My favorite day perhaps was spent going on a train about an hour north of the city to a town called El Tigre. My sister continued to call it La Tigra, which sounds wonderfully cougar like. Porteños (people from BA) ran to El Tigre to escape the yellow fever via the newly constructed railroad in the 1870s. It is an understandable refuge, with 5 rivers converging to create a maze of canals and water ways, framed by beautiful low hanging trees and marshes. We took a two hour tour of some of the islands by boat, but it quickly became evident that most of the people on our boat were locals using it as public transportation. Grocery bags were heaved off at numerous docks, empty water jugs and gas tanks thrown on the top to be filled and returned later. The water ways have everything you would need to live in El Tigre delta, including a school, a health center, and municipality. I expected to see a pretentious BA vacation spot but there was a real mix. I wouldn’t mind going back and perhaps writing a book there…it’s that kind of place.
Anyway, BA was phenomenal to say the very least. The week before Mimi, my sister, came to Paraguay for about 5 days. After some visa issues (read: you need a visa to get into Paraguay), Mimi got in late on Tuesday. I wanted to show her a “typical” day in my life on Wednesday so we went on a walk through my community, went to the comedor (where the kids were absolutely psyched to meet her), then heard some drama/gossip from some of the comedor ladies who just split from the group (that wasn’t planned), then to the internet café to see about free copies for the community census I’m doing with the youth group. We had then planned on going to Abrazo, an organization for kids who would otherwise be working in the streets, to play games and do activities but ran into some kids who said that the organization had a last minute meeting, so it got cancelled. (It is actually appropriate that while trying to show a “typical” day something got cancelled very last minute.) The evening consisted of a youth group meeting during which a 20 year old kid told my 27 year old sister, “If only you weren’t so old and married…” After I translated this, Mimi laughed, pointing out that it was interesting that he didn’t mention the language barrier or the fact that she lives in New York. We then went into Limpio itself and had pizza by candlelight. There was a storm that had apparently knocked out all power in Limpio. The next day found us heading to Villarrica to see (and feed) the carpinchos (capybaras) that I think I’ll have to take every US visitor to go see. (I’m obsessed but so is my entire family.) We had some nice meals with other PCVs, and then headed into the capital for the evening before leaving for BA.
And so, here I am, back in site, diving back into my work. It is getting super hot here. In a charla yesterday the middle school aged kids were worse than ever. I have to really focus on finding my own place to live, hopefully so I can move in on October 1, but we’ll see how that goes. I thought it’d be tough to get back to work but I feel like the projects are still coming at me as fast as ever. I also have tentative plans to start doing sex-ed charlas in October in one local high school. The professor said he had no problem with me teaching kids how to put condoms on mandioca, so I’m psyched for that!