An international exchange

It happened one evening in Tigre (photo) and again on a Saturday afternoon in Salta. I happened across a pair of guys juggling in a park. They weren't passing the hat, just passing equipment, practicing their juggling.

I watched them for awhile, and tried to wait until they were between patterns. Then I did something that women tourists probably don't do too often. I asked if I could juggle, too. They were a little surprised, I suppose, but they gladly offered me the use of their equipment to see what I could do.

I'm not the greatest juggler in the world, and I was pretty out of practice, but I can keep three balls and (usually) three clubs in the air, and do a couple of extra things with them, and in both places, I ended up teaching a couple of tricks. My Spanish isn't really equipped to teach juggling, so we all fumbled along in some mixture of Spanish and English and gesture. Words like "inside" and "outside" and "here" and "sooner" all served well. However we managed it, I'm glad we did. It was an opportunity

They all had clubs. One had very dirty professionally-made balls; the other three had tired tennis balls filled with rice or sand and taped over. (Tennis balls alone are too light and bouncy to juggle comfortably.) The fellow in the photo above had torches, of course, and he let me try them, too. It had been a very long time since I had last juggled torches, but I managed it a little bit.

Lost in the Subte

During the first week or so of my trip, there were people hanging around from the conference, and I mostly got from here to there by finding somebody who was going somewhere interesting and following along. Scott was the sort of person who could get off a train somewhere in Italy and turn the right direction. I'm not.

The first day I ventured out by myself, I decided to make my way across town to the MALBA, a modern art museum well to the northwest of where I was staying. Following my trusty, little street map (purchased at a bookstore in California), I hopped on a train, and headed for a dotted line. The line was labeled 'H', and there is a subway line named that, so I thought that was where I was going.

I got off at the station to transfer to H, and wandered around reading signs for a good, long time. It's possible to get from any one Subte station to any other on a single $1.10 ticket, so I was taking care not to exit any turnstiles, but some of the tunnels between stations run for a block or two underground.

There was a subway official standing there, monitoring the turnstiles I was not exiting, and he must have seen me looking exceedingly lost. He asked me where I was going. This was one of the times when my Spanish wasn't quite working at full speed, but I explained which station I thought I was going to, and he assured me I could not go that way. I showed him my street map. It turns out the planned H line only runs south from A, not north. My street map had the entire planned route as a dotted line.

In the process of explaining all this to me, the subway official decided he did not like my map. It is, he explained, a street map, and what I needed was a subway map. He fished around for awhile in the little pouch he was carrying and pulled out a pocket-sized copy of the official Subte* map. I had seen this map advertised in several of the Subte stations, but others from the conference who had asked about getting one were told that they were unavailable. Apparently, the trick is to find the right official at the wrong station and be hopelessly lost.

He explained where I should go, which was most of the way back to where I had begun and then onto another train, and I wandered off down the ramp. It turned out to be the wrong ramp, leading to some other train. He actually followed me down the ramp, turned me around, and walked me to the correct ramp. I'm pleased to report that I made it to the museum successfully (if later than planned) on my own, and didn't get lost on the Subte again at all after that. The new map served me well for several more trips out.

Now, for some reason, when I was out on my own, people came up to me to ask directions. It happened at least half a dozen times. I'm sure that if the words to explain that I wasn't from there didn't get the point across, the accent surely did. But the very last time I took the Subte in Buenos Aires, somebody getting on the train asked as I was getting off where the train went. I showed them my street map (not the one the official had given me; it was quite usable once I knew how to read it), and I in fact pointed them to the right train. They asked where I had gotten the map, and all I could tell them was, "from a bookstore in California."

There's one more postscript to this story. The wiki community includes various train aficionados, several of whom expressed jealousy (or at least interest) regarding my copy of the unavailable Subte map they had seen advertised. So I attempted to scan it. It is a little too large for the bed of my scanner, so I fiddled around scanning it in sections. I had only started to fiddle with the possibility of sticking the sections back together when I discovered the inscription about the Subte website. If you'd like to see a very nice, complete copy of the official map, you need only look here.

*Subte is short for "subterráneo".

A few awkward restaurant visits

The first time I ate a meal alone in Argentina, it was stranger than the other times I had dined there. I wandered into a restaurant at lunchtime and...nothing happened. The waiters did not come greet me, or ask me how many were dining. They just sort of stared. It seemed to happen whenever I dined alone. I found my own table and sat down there, and they proceeded to bring me a menu.

I ordered the hamburguesa. As I waited for the order to come, I saw that I was the only woman in a rather crowded restaurant (I still haven't figured out why, but other women did come in later). What came was a pair of patties with nothing on them, and a pile of fries. No buns, no lettuce, and so on. To order a hamburger as we know it, it's necessary to order the hamburguesa completa.

The napkins are different in restaurants in Argentina. If they bring you a fabric napkin, it's just the same as here, but the paper napkins used at sandwicherías and parillas (grills) are small, tissue paper affairs. They're not very absorbent, except when it comes to grease. They do work very well on grease, but it may take two or three to get the job done.

In fancier restaurants, the kind with cloth napkins, I often received bread with no bread plate. I guess I was just supposed to scatter crumbs all over the tablecloth, or at least that's what I ended up doing. After the meal, I always had to ask for the check. The waiters assume folks want to hang around and talk, otherwise.

The part I missed until I got back is that I was expected to seat myself, which is not the norm in a sit-down restaurant here at home. I felt like a bit of an intruder plunking down in any old seat, but that was exactly what they expected me to do. I only figured it out by asking somebody who lives there, after I got home. Next time I'll know.

A tale of two taxistas

I don't think the blogs for this trip are going to be in order. It's not like anything else here is, anyway. (The photos in the flickr set are approximately in order, and yes, they are still coming as I have time.)

Gustavo is the taxista, or cab driver, who collected and then adopted us at the Iguazú airport. I visited Iguazú with a German couple from the conference who speak excellent English, German (of course), and a tiny bit of rudimentary restaurant Spanish. Since Gustavo speaks only rudimentary English, I got the front seat so I could translate.

We spent two days there, flying in one morning and flying out the following evening, spending one night at the Esturion hotel in the town of Iguazú, by far the nicest place I stayed during the entire trip. We asked Gustavo to take us to the hotel, so that we could drop off our bags, but he suggested that we go straight to the park. Now, there are places in the world (and parts of Argentina) where it is not terribly wise to let a taxi driver take you anywhere that you did not ask to go, but Gustavo knew how much time we should plan on spending on each side of the park, and it was late morning when we arrived. He continued driving down the road as he pulled out a tourist map of the park and started pointing at and marking things we should see that day. (The park, the falls, and the wildlife there are spectacular, but they are best described in photos; please see the flickr link to the right.)

We followed his advice about seeing the Brazil side, taking a boat tour there (I think he gets a kickback from bringing visitors, because he was intent on taking us all the way to the ticket office) and then taking the park bus up the road to the pathways close to the falls. He picked us up only fashionably late at the gate where he promised to meet us in the evening. We declined his suggestion about a rather costly dinner show to attend, but we did take a walk around the town of Iguazú on his advice, and he showed us the viewpoint that looks out over the rivers that separate Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay.

He picked us up at the hotel promptly at 9am the following day, as we had agreed, and again scribbled on a tourist map where we should go in the park and how much time to allow. He suggested meeting at the park gate at 5pm for a 6pm flight. He was right again on that count; the Iguazú airport is 10 minutes from the park and it's tiny. Domestic flights in Argentina also tend to include security checks that are far quicker and more straightforward than in the U.S. On the way to the airport, he had one more idea that wasn't in our plan, and he was exactly right again. He made a rather inelegant U-turn across a mostly empty road to show us some toucans he spotted in a tree, since we hadn't yet seen any in the park. We paid him kind of a lot (at least by Argentinian standards), but he saw us through two full days, and I doubt our visit would have been as complete without his guidance.

I'll mention one other taxista I met in Argentina. I spent less time with him, only about 20 minutes as he drove me from the hostel to the airport in Salta, and I didn't get his name. That conversation was also in Spanish, which I speak with an accent that usually prompts the question, "Where are you from?" I explained that I am from California, and he started asking me about California. California is not something I can explain in 20 minutes, but I explained that the culture was different, that the driving was certainly different, and so on. (Perhaps it was because of this conversation; this driver was the most cautious of any I rode with. Argentinian drivers, especially taxistas, are a very competitive lot.)

He also mentioned that he had never traveled much. He earned perhaps twenty pesos taking me to the airport, which is about US$5, and the cost of some things (including computers and long-distance travel) does not come down just because of weak currency; they are simply beyond the means of most people. The part that surprised me was that when we entered through the airport gates, he said that he had never been inside the airport grounds before, at all. In any case, I hope he also enjoyed his trip.