Buenos Aires - Safety

Since I presented a pro last time, I will talk about one of the biggest cons of my experience here.

Con: Unwanted Attention and Danger of Getting Robbed

• As a woman, especially as a foreigner, you will receive a lot of unwanted attention from men whenever you're in public. Unfortunately, machismo is still very much a part of the culture here, and many men (including married ones, as long as their wives aren't around) feel that it is perfectly ok to harass and hit on women in the streets and in the clubs. If you plan to visit Argentina and you're female, expect to get hit on an average of at least three or four times a day (but this also depends on how often you are out in public). These can range from innocent "Que linda sos" to annoying kissy noises to really lewd comments to even outright inappropriate touching. Fortunately, most of the time it's on the milder end of the spectrum. When this happens, the best thing to do is to ignore them and keep walking. If you show any signs that you've noticed their attention on you, even if it's a negative reaction, this will often invite them to continue hitting on you. One thing I dislike about living here is that when I'm by myself in public, I've learned to avert my eyes and walk faster whenever I pass by a group of male strangers. Even when they just simply say hi, I ignore them, because I eventually learned that if you're only trying to be friendly and return a simple greeting, this is sometimes enough of an invitation for the guy to start behaving inappropriately with you. Not all guys here are like this, but enough of them are so that I have to take this precaution and behave in a such a way that in the US if I walked around like that I would probably seem like some anti-social freak with no self-confidence. In the clubs, many guys will even try to kiss you without asking you first, and trust me, telling them you have a boyfriend is not a deterrent in the least. They'll just say, "So? He's not here right now. It's just a kiss." The best way to get away from a creepy guy at the club is to tell him you think he's ugly. Then you'll hurt his pride and he'll finally leave you alone. When riding in a taxi alone, for the most part I've had no problems chatting with the driver and being friendly, but this did one time result in a pretty scary situation. Avoid taking independent taxis that don't work for a company. The ones that do work for a company will have the words "Radio Taxi" on it.
• So far no one has tried to rob me, but I have enough friends who have been robbed that I am always super cautious and keep my hand securely over my purse at all times. There are pickpockets here that are really tricky and often you'll not even know you got robbed until later when you can't find something or you discover there's a slit in the bottom of your purse or that your pants pocket is gone (not just the contents, but the actual pocket itself!) However, as annoying as it may be to discover later that you were robbed without noticing, you should be thankful that it wasn't a confrontational robbery, which also happens here. People can come up to you with a weapon and tell you directly, "You are being robbed. Give me everything you have." I don't know what I would do if I were to get into this situation, although I've been advised to never fight back or refuse or call out for help, and that I should just hand them everything and get away unharmed. Even if there are a lot of people around, the people usually will just mind their own business and not help out if you are being robbed or even beat up. So the safest thing to do is to not fight back and just do what the robber tells you. Though the ISA staff told us that there was one year when a group of students were out drinking at a park, and someone came up to them with a gun and told them to give him everything. So they handed the man everything. Then one of the guys in the group told the man if they could at least have their bottle of vodka back and he can keep all of their other stuff. So the man agreed and gave them the bottle back, which the guy immediately smashed on the man's head. The man fell to the ground with his head bleeding, and the group took back all of their stuff and his gun. Once they found out it was actually a fake gun, they all ganged up on the man and started kicking him and hitting him. The story was really funny, but I almost felt sorry for the man. He thought it would be so easy to rob some group of stupid drunk Americans, and then he received the surprise of his life. That's probably the last time he ever tried to rob any tourists.
• Anti-Americanism: It's no secret that Argentines hate Americans. The first book I saw at the university bookstore was about why Argentines hate Americans and why many of the things they believe about them are myths or overgeneralizations. I hope many Argentine students take the course that requires that textbook, because it would probably help alleviate some of the anti-American sentiments. Now that being said, most of my friends and I have never run into problems with anti-American Argentines. It seems that they like American individuals (simply because they like tourists in general), but hate Americans as a nation, if that makes sense. They're friendly and helpful to you as an individual, but they have extremely negative feelings towards the American people. They think Americans are obnoxious, egoistic, rude, and ignorant. Many of the impressions they have of us are true to some extent, but many of them are also because they don't see the full picture. For example, they think Americans are always getting drunk and yelling around in the streets at night (I don't do this, btw). What they don't realize is that the Americans are behaving this way because they're on vacation with their friends, but they don't act like this normally at home. The Argentines don't see how Americans normally act in the US, so they can only judge us based on how we act in their country. Or another example is that they think all Americans are rolling in money. Even though it's true that the average American is wealthier than the average Argentine, the reality is still different from how they perceive it. They don't realize that they are only seeing a select group of Americans: those who can afford to travel abroad. They also don't realize that we tend to spend more money abroad then we do at home. Like at home, I would not be going out at night all the time or going shopping for clothes and souvenirs once a week or eating at restaurants that often. We're also not as conscious about comparing prices since we are not familiar with the country. Argentines know what's considered a good price for something, they know where to get the cheapest stuff, and they know their way around enough so that they can compare the prices at various different places. Americans are not as familiar with this information, so they will buy things at prices that Argentines would consider too high. This adds to the impression that Americans have too much money and spend it carelessly. Anyways, so you can see why people here can have distorted views of Americans. Despite their hatred for us, for the most part they are friendly, or at least they don't usually try to harm you. But be cautious. There was one instance that happened recently where a group of friends were just hanging out in public and speaking English, and some Argentines came out of nowhere and started beating up the two guys in the group (they left the girls alone), and the guys got seriously injured and had to go to the hospital. Sometimes just to be safe, some of my friends lie and say they're from Canada when asked where they're from.
  

Anyways, I've been working on this post for too long, so I'm going to end it now. Besides, I just got back from the Iguazu Falls, so I want to write about that.

Buenos Aires - Food (Original title: Buenos Aires - pros and cons)

When I first arrived in Buenos Aires, I thought, "Wow, this looks exactly like Taipei!" And I have heard many other foreigners here compare it to other big cities they know. So first and foremost, Buenos Aires looks like a big city. I was having a discussion with some people, and we seemed to agree that when you go to a small city or town or village, you get much more of a distinct characteristic feel that belongs to the culture. However, when you get to big cities like NY or Paris or Buenos Aires or Taipei, most of them on the surface seem to belong to one culture: big city culture. Big buildings, crowded streets, tons of traffic and pollution, lots of public transportation, bright lights at night, billboards everywhere, etc. However, when you stay in the city for a period of time, you do start seeing the differences. I've outlined some of the pros and cons and added important cultural notes and vocab about them.

Empanadas

Pro: Food!!!

• Argentina is a carnivore's heaven. This country is well known for having some of the best meat in the world. According to Wikipedia (therefore it must be true), Argentina has the highest consumption of red meat in the world.
  
  Some of the most popular types of food here include:
  - Empanadas, which are like large dumplings with a tough pizza-crust type skin around it. There are also variations of it. I think a "canasta" (which literally means basket) is an open empanada. It has the contents and has the same pizza-crust skin around it, but it's made so that the top is open so that you can see the contents inside.
  - Milanesas, which are thin steaks of chicken. If you say "milanesa a la napolitana", they add cheese and tomato sauce on the steak, and it is soooo good.
  - Pizza, pronounced "pixa" so many Americans including myself have trouble identifying what it is until they see it, then they realize that they're talking about pizzas. The pizzas here are not at all like American pizzas. There's no tomato sauce, and it has an extremely thick layer of cheese. Personally, I prefer it with the tomato sauce, but that's probably because that's what I'm used to.
  - Chorizo, which is a really delicious sausage. Although it is not at all spicy to me, it's probably considered one of the spicier foods in Argentina.
  - Tartas are not tarts! They are like quiches, like a pie of cheese with vegetables and other ingredients in it.
  
  There are of course a lot of different types of food here, and I don't know the names to a lot of them. And of course they have food that is found everywhere in the world, like sandwiches and salads and soups.
  
• A funny thing that I noticed as a general pattern is that it seems like almost all of the breadstuff that have ingredients in them, such as empanadas, sandwiches, pizzas, canastas, etc., have their ingredients in pairs. Some common combinations are jamón y queso (ham and cheese), queso y cebolla [pronounced say-bo-sha] (cheese and onion), jamón y tomate (ham and tomato), queso y choclo (cheese and corn), cebolla y espinaca (onion and spinach), but there are also a lot of other pairings found (although with pizza, queso is always one of the ingredients). I haven't yet found any that have more than two ingredients, though. And if you order, let's say, a "sandwich con jamón y queso", be prepared to get a sandwich with nothing but ham and cheese between the bread. In the US, you would probably expect some lettuce or tomato, maybe a little mayonnaise or something. Here, don't expect it unless it specifically says "lechuga" or "tomate" or "mayonesa" [ma-sho-nay-sa]. And you'd probably be sacrificing either the ham or the cheese in order to have one of these, since ingredients are offered in pairs. Although usually, you can ask for mayonnaise or olive oil or ketchup, and they'll hand you a small packet of it.
• Argentines do not like spicy food. There are places where you can find spicy cuisines, but for the most part, there is nothing spicy that is native to Argentina. I love the food here, but I miss spicy food. My friend offered to make her host family tacos to give them a taste of the Mexican cuisine, and they asked her to put very little spice in it. So she put much less spice than she normally would and afterwards said she couldn't taste it at all, but the family wasn't able to finish their tacos because they thought it was way too spicy. My host family, too, cannot stand anything with the least bit of spice in it.
• At a cafe, if you ask for hot chocolate (the weather here is super hot because it's summer right now, but the air conditioning in my classroom makes it super cold), they give you two bars of solid dark chocolate and a cup of hot milk. I was dumbfounded when the cashier handed me two bars of chocolate. I looked confused, so he told me I had to go get in another line to get a cup of hot milk. You put the chocolate in the milk and stir it to melt it. It's called a "submarino", a submarine. It was delicious, but this was the first time I ever made hot chocolate in this manner, and I was really intrigued. But these kinds of surprises are what make different cultures worth experiencing!
• Many things in Argentina are much cheaper than in the US, like clothes or alcohol or transportation (taxi fares here are so cheap!). Unfortunately, food is not one of them. My roommate here and I were talking about how this makes it very difficult for people living here. They make much less money than they would doing the same job in the US, yet such a basic everyday necessity has such a relatively high cost. Argentina, especially Buenos Aires, has a pretty high cost of living relative to how much they make. In the US, most people are retired when they hit their early or mid sixties. It's very common for people here in their 70's or 80's to still be working and not planning on retiring soon, and many of them lead very difficult lives, with long working hours (much longer than the typical work day in the US), commute for hours every day if they live outside the city (because the living cost in the city is prohibitively high for them), and sleep very little. Sorry, that's off the topic of food, though.
  

  

  Milanesa a la Napolitana

So my original plan was for this one post to be all about the pros and cons of Buenos Aires, and now I realized how long just one of them is, and it's getting really late now. So I think I'm just going to present one or two each time I post, alternating back and forth between pros and cons.

Intro

My excursion to El Tigre and the beach today got cancelled due to the rain, so now I have some free time and decided to start a blog. I won't bore anyone by writing about my daily activities here (unless something special or unusual happens). Instead, I'll share my observations and thoughts about Buenos Aires and Argentine culture (and then about Brazil and Peru later). Of course with any experience, there are ups and downs, so I'll share both of them. First, an intro with a summary about my semester here (skip to the next post if you just want to read about the culture here).

My time here has been divided up into 3 parts:

  - For part 1, I spent the month of January in Buenos Aires doing volunteer work in the slums in Buenos Aires province 3 days a week in the afternoon, and spending the rest of the time in the city, living in a student residence. This was the time when I learned the most about the city and its culture. I didn't have classes, so I had time to explore the city, learn the transportation system, and go out almost every night, and also because I wasn't provided with food, so I had to go grocery shopping (in addition to buying other things I needed, like a camera, cell phone, toiletries, currency exchange, etc.) and I learned that transactions here are done very differently from what I'm used to in the US. This month was also the time that I was able to meet locals (they call themselves "porteños") as well as people from all over the world and of a range of ages. I've met people with some of the most interesting lives (definitely one of the pros of traveling), but I'll save that for a later post.

- For part 2, I'm still in Buenos Aires, but now I'm living in a different neighborhood, and this time with a host mom and another girl in my program. I'm with ISA now (during the first month I was with a program called Road2Argentina). After R2A had forced me to be much more independent (the program provides housing and a few activities, but everything else you pretty much figure out with your friends), I was unaccustomed at first at how much ISA shelters its students. Food is provided by the host family so you never have to cook or go grocery shopping (this does help me save money, though), your laundry is done for you, all of the excursions and tours are included, and most of your day is taken up by classes, so you only have time in the evenings or on the weekend to go out to the city and explore it, and having to wake up early for your classes limits how late you can stay out on weekdays. Also, almost everyone I've met in my program is an American student in their second or third year of college (I think there's one Canadian), so not as much variety as there was in R2A. I have classes 5 hours a day at the University of Belgrano (but my professor is engaging, so it often goes by really quickly). It's a different experience from the first month, but there are many things I like about it. I like that I have a host family to interact with and speak Spanish with. My class is also helping me improve my spanish a lot. I like the planned excursions that ISA provides. I'm totally excited about going to Iguazu Falls next weekend. And while going out almost every night during the first month was fun, it would have been really unhealthy to do that for long, so I'm glad the classes are making me go to bed early on most weekdays and saving my liver and my money. It's also really great to have my own room. And the times that I do go out at night with friends are fun.

- There's a week-long break from Part 2, during which I will go to São Paulo and then Rio de Janeiro for Carnival. Then I come back to BA and part 2 continues with a new class. There's also a four-day weekend two weeks after the first break, so I'm thinking of planning a trip to Mendoza to do wine tasting (oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I took a wine-tasting course during the first month with R2A). In total, Part 2 is 2 months long, from Feb through March.

-Part 3 starts in April and goes through May. ISA will fly us to Lima, Peru, where we will take another set of classes at the University of the Pacific. Argentina is great, but I'm glad I'm going to get a chance to experience yet another culture. Some of the planned excursions during that time will go to Cusco and Macchu Picchu and the Peruvian Amazon Jungle. The Amazon Jungle excursion sounds amazing (4 days of exploring and camping out, boat ride down the river, swimming with pink dolphins, spotting monkeys and tons of other wildlife), but I am concerned about the recent outbreak of a particularly dangerous strain of dengue in that region, especially in the jungle where there are tons of mosquitos. Hopefully by the end of April, there will be fewer mosquitos because it's winter, but I'm still scared. I looked at some pictures, and this is not a pretty disease. You start growing weird rashes all over your body and then hemorrhaging out of them (there was a picture of a kid hemorrhaging out of his face!). There have already been several deaths from the outbreak. Anyways, it's too early now to be able to tell what's going to happen and whether or not the trip will get canceled. Even if I don't end up going to the jungle, I'm sure I will have an amazing time in Peru.

So that's the outline of my semester. Now I'll write a post about my thoughts on the culture here in Buenos Aires.

Edit: Ok, I changed my mind. I'll write about it later today or something. I want to get out of the house right now.