In Buenos Aires
March
February April (Patagonia)
May June
A lot of Peruvians and Bolivians live in this part of town. It's less slick, less European, more visibly Latin American than downtown. * * *
My mood is still volatile. Sometimes, I'm really happy to be in this place that I've been dreaming about for so long. I love the cafés, the different pace of life, the people, the language, the food. One of my latest discoveries is chipa - bread rolls made of manioc meal and cheese, delicious. They're sold by street vendors around the coach and train stations of Buenos Aires. Occasionally, the chipa comes in the shape of a lizard or crocodile. I love those, and whenever I see one of them, I will buy it. * * * The weather has been funny recently. After the heat wave and the subsequent thunderstorms, it has started warming up again, but slowly. We have had more than a week of weather that the forecast calls inestable -- unstable. The weather seemed decidedly undecided. It has felt almost autumnal, cool in mornings and evenings, suddenly warm again during the day. In Colegiales. Apparently it is the case not only in Britain that one's home is one's castle. The sky was grey and it had been raining earlier that morning, but now, although it was cool and windy and I was wearing my fleece hoodie for the first time since arriving in Buenos Aires, it was dry again. I decided to walk the mile or so from the Subte station to the venue. Then it rained harder. I put my hood up. By the time I got to the venue, I was wet through. And the sun had come back out again. And I was told that it was not necessary after all to collect tickets beforehand. Just show up tonight, a friendly guard told me, and there will be space for all. So I went back home to change. I still managed to catch a cold, even though over the weekend temperatures went back up to summery again. But I got to see Patricia Noval.
She has a beautiful, husky contralto voice, and I like her interpretations of classic tangos, and the more modern, jazzy adaptations she sings. It's exciting to see her live. This is one of the reasons why I have come here - so I can take part more in the cultural life of the city, see and hear some of my favourite singers or writers in the flesh. * * *
July
August (Patagonia)
A couple of days ago, I moved to my new flat. More packing and unpacking, more change. I will stay in this flat for the rest of my stay in Buenos Aires, so I can really settle in there and feel a bit more permanent.
I now live in the district of Once ('Eleven'), short for 11 de Septiembre -- some memorable date in Argentinean history, no doubt. Many places here are named for notable dates, there's Avenida 9 de Julio, or the inner-city motorway Autopista 25 de Mayo. I know a small town in Patagonia that's called 28 de Julio.
I like Once - it's a busy, noisy, bustling place. The train station 11 de Septiembre is just round the corner from where I live.
There are lots of clothes manufacturers and clothes shops here, as in Whitechapel in London, but the atmosphere overall reminds me more of Brixton or Dalston. It's noisy and untidy and a bit chaotic. I like it.
My flat is on the fifth floor of a large apartment building. From my balcony, I have a great view of air and sky and a swathe of Buenos Aires. I love the urbanity of this place. After eight years in London, I have grown a little tired of toytown terraces with identical little red-brick houses. I really like the fact that away from the high streets, many streets in London look as though they were in some small town in the country. But I have been ready for a change.
Here, I can see the lights of the city blink and flicker at night, lit squares that are other people's windows, bits of other people's lives; the bright red glow of the warning light on the large aerial nearby. And, further away, the unknown stars that are visible from the southern hemisphere. I have decided to go to the planetarium soon to find out a bit more about them. I would like to be able to recognise some of the local constellations.
In my flat at all hours I hear the roar of the traffic, the honking of car horns, the high-pitched whine of motorcycles, the shrill warning bell from the car park next to my building, the voices of people. I have read somewhere that Buenos Aires is the fourth noisiest city in the world. So far, I have encountered nothing to make me doubt that.
My other discovery is tomato jam. Not chutney, jam. I saw it in the shop one day and just had to try it. It reminds me a little bit of rosehip jelly and quite a lot of fresh tomatoes, and it tastes great on fresh white bread.
I like those new discoveries. I like just walking through the city and discovering it, getting a feel for it, getting to know it. At the moment, it feels more like a still new acquaintance; a person I like but whose reactions I don't always understand, whose history I don't know. We speak different languages, come from different cultures. There are misunderstandings between us, sometimes culture shocks. It isn't always easy, and sometimes I feel frustrated. I get tired from coping with all the changes, all the new things. With speaking another language, organising my life all afresh. I get homesick for London, for the life I know, familiar surroundings, my friends.
Sometimes I wish I wasn't so far away from my own world. I wish there was a place half-way between South America and Europe, a half-way house, border country that would combine elements of both.
I remember feeling exactly the same way when I first moved to London from Berlin more than eight years ago. I felt homesick, surrounded by unfamiliar things, an alien environment. Even though I spoke fluent English, I wasn't conversant with everyday life in England. I didn't know which shops to go to for bargains, how to go about finding a doctor; I didn't understand the buses, didn't know the words for everyday things. I'd only been in London before as a tourist, I hadn't had to cope with food shopping and launderettes and how to sort out the phone bill. And I remember wishing for exactly for the same thing back then, a place half-way between London and Berlin, not quite so extremely British as London, not quite as German as Berlin.
So if I felt that way then I was only an hour away by plane, in a country in many ways very similar to my own, a country whose language I spoke fluently, where I'd been many times before -- then maybe it's not that surprising that I feel similar now that I'm on another continent, 13 flight hours away from home, in a place where it's summer in February and autumn in April; where I don't speak the language fluently, where the culture really is quite different.
Sometimes at night when I look up at the sky and the (as yet) unknown stars, I imagine where I will be in 20 years' time. The first Earth colony will just have been established on Mars. I've always wanted to go to Mars, more than to the Moon even. I might get a commission to write a programme or an article or a book about living on Mars, and I will jump at the chance to go there for six or twelve months. To see the Red Planet, go out into space and see a little bit of the vastness of the world for myself. There I will be on Mars, watching the Earthrise and feeling very small and very far away from home in an unfamiliar environment, and I will think that even twenty years ago in Buenos Aires at least I was still on the same planet, just a few hours by plane away from anywhere else on Earth, not several weeks away somewhere out in space.
This, now, Buenos Aires, is sometimes hard and I have had moments where I just want to go back home and do stuff I know, in surroundings I am familiar with -- but I don't think I will leave just yet.
And if someone offered me a trip to Mars, I probably would accept.
Then another day of rain, last week Friday. It was also the last-day-but-one of the Buenos Aires Tango festival, and one of my favourite tango singers, Patricia Noval was giving a concert.
The venue was quite a way away, in a barrio called Colegiales, a bit beyond the chic neighbourhood of Palermo. I got on the Subte (Subterraneo, the Underground) in the morning to go pick up a couple of free tickets for later. I had expected the area to look like Palermo: with beautiful, modern apartment buildings, well-coiffed, thin and elegant women, lots of chi-chi little boutiques and shops. (I have an irrational prejudice against Palermo.) But it wasn't like that at all. There were lots of little houses, all different; hardly any apartment blocks. It all looked a bit down at heel and shabby and friendly. There were loads of antiques and furniture shops, a lot of cafés, some empty plots of land, old warehouses.
The sky clouded over. The wind became sharper. It began to rain. Of course, I didn't have a brolly. After the heat of recent weeks, I'd found the concept of being cold hard to imagine.
First, it just rained. I walked faster and hoped it would stop soon.
And then the water just came bucketing down. Within minutes, my feet and legs and hair were dripping wet. Large puddles formed on the pavement. The gutters overflowed and now, there were large puddles on the road too.
I spend Saturday in bed and Sunday in the park, reading and relaxing.
By Tuesday, the cold is pretty much gone. And that's just as well, because this Thursday, I'm off south: I'll be going to Patagonia for a week.
