A Different Person

I am now a different person than when I first arrived in Argentina.  I have been here now seven months and I see the world differently.  The people of Argentina have transformed my world view dramatically in how to live life, respect life, and basically just have fun and not take things too seriously.

I have lived in the same house in the same barrio the whole time I have been in Buenos Aires.   The people of the barrio are kind, gentle and sweet people.  They know me now.  I am the foreigner guy who lives in their hood.

I have been accepted with open arms and kindness.

People who know me know that I love to ride the busses.  I have wandered and traveled all over Buenos Aires.  I know the city now almost like the back of my hand.  Funny, if you read my earlier posts you will see my struggling with my book of maps of the city, wondering where I was, because the city is not an easy one to meander as it has a pie shape that is kind of bizarre.

The key to knowing your way around Buenos Aires as you walk kilometers and kilometers are the trains.  The trains in BA are the waterways in Holland.  They guide you from point A to point B and if you know what side of the train line you are on, you know where you are in the city.  Clearly, I no longer need my map.

The language is beautiful, challenging and a life long process.  I am now able to write in Spanish, with the help of my calculator friend called Google translate.  It is my guide to writing, and a template for the words that go on the page.  I still can not write quickly in Spanish, but the words do now flow a bit better, and the spoken word tambien.

I am a changed person.  I like who I am better now.  I like seeing the world through different purple colored glasses, instead of rose colored glasses.  As I have continued to write in my blog, the one theme has been appreciation for the opportunity to come to South America and really live here.  To get to know the people.  But most importantly for me, it has been satisfying the burning desire I have had in my heart for many years to come down here.  It was a long time in coming, but once you finally do the thing in your life that you always wanted to do, a peace sets in like no other.

It does not matter what that thing is, for all people on the planet that thing is something different.  For me, it was coming to South America and living.  And I thank the universe for giving me the opportunity to do just that.

My Second Home

The perspective of time is very interesting in your life especially when you are living in a foreign country.  We were in Ecuador for three months and now I have been in Argentina now for almost seven months.  It takes many lifetimes to truly understand, but in this life I am beginning to understand how making a commitment for a certain amount of time to a particular thing really matters.  I have been here now long enough in Argentina to understand what life is about here and how I can officially in my mind now call this place my second home.

I have been taken care of by everyone who I have met.  From my friends at the place I hang out during the day, to the shop keepers in my little barrio, and especially my family in my home that I have been living in now since the day I arrived.

It is funny how life works out sometimes.  You get lucky a lot of tiimes in life, and surely you make your luck as well.  But those days back in New Mexico before coming down to Argentina who would have thought that the place I found to live initially would be the place I stayed the whole time I was in Argentina.

Seven months is a good amount of time.  There are thresholds in life about time, amounts of time where once you pass the mark, you can say it it was ten years or ten months.  Enough time to know.

One of the things that I have been extremely satisfied with in Buenos Aires is the climate.  It is a lovely climate.  I guess you can call it Mediterranean.  Having lived in California twice for over six years, four years in the Bay Area and two years in LA, I can honestly say that the climate in Buenos Aires is similar to California.  And it makes sense.  California is around 35 degrees north and Buenos Aires is around 35 degrees south.  This climate is very different from Ecuador.  In Ecuador during the months of January, February and March it rained almost every day.  Here in Buenos Aires during the spring, summer, and beginning of autumn the hot sticky days in December and January follow into February and March with more rain and cooler days.  This is of course a function of the moisture as well, as the autumn approaches the amount of rain falling from the sky slightly increases.

But during the hot summer months the occasional rains are a blessing in cooling off the big city.  Recenlty I have done some interesting things.  I am venturing out a bit more from BA into the country side and on to some smaller towns in the surrounding areas.  Last week I went to La Plata with some nice friends who showed me around the smaller city.  La Plata is about one and one half hours on the train from BA.  If you are eating ice cream on the ride, it seems a lot quicker, especially in the company of friends who make you laugh a lot.

La Plata is on the river as well.  It is just further south from BA.  The train ride starts in BA and ends in La Plata, so you literally take the whole line in, and go from beginning to end.  La Plata is home to one of the largest catolica cathedrals in South America.  Its consruction began in 1884 and over one hundred years later it was finally coming to completion.  Building big churches today is no easy feat, and one hundred years, mas o menos is a good amount of time for working on a project.  We had the opportunity to go up in the towers of the cathedral and take in the magnificent views of the surrounding area.  We were high above the pampa, or flat land that surrounds Buenos Aires.  La Plata is the capital of the province of Buenos Aires and Capital Federal which is the heart of the city of Buenos Aires is the capital of Argentina.

La Plata is known as the city of diagonals.  There are diagonal streets all over the town and the names of the streets are numbers and now real names.  So La Plata is unique in several different ways.

I also took a train ride out of town another day to a smaller village of Pilar.   It is also on another train line and the line begins at Retiro, the main train station in BA and ends in the small town of Pilar.  I was fortunate enough to ride the train all the way in both directions.  I was surprised however to learn after arriving in Pilar and spending the afternoon there that upon returning to the train station that the train had broken down.  So in my mind there was no way to return to Buenos Aires, and I did not know the other busses and where they went.  Depending on one means of transportation to get you somewhere is not always a great idea, especially when you decided to hardly take any money with you.  So, if I did decide to spend the night there it would have been possibly kind of chilly.  Luckily eventually the return train showed up, and whisked me back home to Buenos Aires.  We passed by plenty of stations on the way home without stopping as I suppose the driver wanted to get back home, so he could keep the trains running on time.  As far as the people that had to get off at all of the stops we passed by, I guess they get back on the train and go in the other direction, or decide to take a bus back home.
 

The Magical Six Month Mark

People have told me for years that after you live for six months in a foreign country where you are not a native speaker that your language skills in the particular language you are learning in the particular country you are living in start to kick in and you notice an improvement.  I am happy to report that this is happening to me as well.  It is not like now I am a native speaker, that will take me several more years at least to get to a point where I feel really comfortable, but in the past couple of weeks I have noticed a marked change in my ability to understand people better, and also have more of a cadence once I start talking a bit.  It is still pretty basic Spanish, and I am not able to carry on a really deep conversation and express myself the way I would like to, but it is basic enough to get to know some one who you have never met before and have a nice talk.



There is one important ingredient though that has to be there, and this is something that is not obvious to a lot of people. The person you are speaking with must understand where you are coming from and understand what it takes for you to understand them.  If they do not get that point then I still am not able to be successful in conversation.  The person has to really understand to slow down their speech dramatically in order for you to understand.  When that happens, then the conversation is able to blossom into a nice flower.

As the time goes on here, I am liking living here more and more.  It is a beautiful country with beautiful people.  I can pretty much say that of all the places I have visited in Latin America and all of the people I meet here.  I am starting to get to know people from all over South America.  

I am starting to understand better the different peoples from different lands and know their idiosyncracies of their culture and who they are.  This is why I came down here, to get to know better, what this place is all about.  With that said, as we all know in life, the more we get to learn and understand something, the more we get to know how much we do not know.

That is truly the case in understanding the country of Argentina.  As I spend more time here, I am starting to learn more about what it is like to live here, and what the problemas are as well.  And there are many problems both in Argentina, and Latin America as a whole.  BUT this piece is not about that, it is just worth noting that this information is out there for my consumption and processing.

Yesterday, I got to go to a families home once again who lives here in Argentina and witness first hand what it is like to be with a family down here.  This is my second chance at doing this, and what I get to see is truly fascinating.  The thing I continue to witness down here in Latin America is the close knitness of the family.  The family UNIT is very important, it is essential to life in Latin America and probably in most parts of the world.  Clearly this is both good and bad, and the ramifications of this cultural effect has many social and political dissertations at its feet, but suffice it to say that this component of a society is very interesting in how it ties the social fabric of a nation together and what it means to be part of a bigger picture.

Clearly, in Estados Unidos, this is not the case.  There are pockets where this is true, and many families in the United States maintain this bond that I witness down here, but clearly it is not as normal as it is down here.  For me personally, I am lucky to still be relatively close with my parents and immediate siblings, but the distance I have traveled in my life, and not living close to home my whole entire life, I have not experienced the close knittedness overall that you see not only with your immediate family members but also the extended family members as well.  Yet, another component of life in Latin America.

I will close for now on this topic and this post, but I look forward to exploring other areas of life in Latin America and what it means for a country and a society as a whole as the experience expands even further and wider and deeper.

Happy New Year 2011

Estoy empezando a explorar la idea de hacer blogs multilingüe blog, pero no estoy seguro de la mejor manera de hacerlo. Me gusta este formato porque permite a la gente que está aprendiendo español para que sus cerca de contexto Inglés y español el uno al otro. La otra forma que pudiera hacer el post es para hacer todos los españoles y, a continuación Inglés todos. Como mi español mejora con el tiempo, probablemente se trasladará a ese formato. Pero por ahora, todo lo que hablantes nativos de español tendrá que soportar en movimiento más allá de la apartados Inglés. Pido disculpas de antemano por la inconveniene.

I am starting to explore the idea of doing multilingual blog posts but I am not sure the best way to do it.  I like this format because it enables the people who are learning Spanish to have their English and Spanish context close to each other.  The other way I could do the post is to do all Spanish and then all English.  As my Spanish improves over time I will probably move to that format.  But for now, all you native Spanish speakers will have to endure moving past the English paragraphs.  I apologize in advance for the inconveniene.

El año comenzó en Pasadena, California, se mudó a Nuevo México y terminé el año en Buenos Aires. El viaje a la Argentina se ha llenado de emoción y la volatilidad.  Yo nunca podría haber imaginado lo mucho que mi vida iba a cambiar en un corto de cinco meses, pero mi punto de vista sobre el mundo actual es muy diferente de lo que era hace poco en el verano caliente en Nuevo México.

The year started in Pasadena, California moved to New Mexico and I ended the year in Buenos Aires. The journey to Argentina has been filled with emotion and volatility.  I never could have imagined how much my life would change in a short five months, but my perspective on the world now is very different than it was a short while ago back in the hot summer in New Mexico.

El pueblo de la Argentina son hermosas. Ellos han tomado el cuidado de mí en cada uno y cada vuelta. De mis amigos en el trabajo para la gente que he estado viviendo con mis vecinos para locales y tenderos.   Nunca me hubiera imaginado en mis sueños más salvajes que me iba a pasar Navidad y Año Nuevo en América del Sur. Este lugar es ahora mi segundo hogar. Me encanta la lengua y la cultura y el modo de vida, aunque a veces puede muy difícil.

The people of Argentina are beautiful.  They have taken care of me at each and every turn.  From my friends at work to the people I have been living with to my local neighbors and shop keepers.  I would never have imagined in my wildest dreams that I would be spending Christmas and New Years in South America.  This place is now my second home.  I love the language and the culture and the way of life, although at times it can very difficult.

Mi pasión por la vida en América del Sur comenzó antes de que yo tenía 30 años. Uno de mis compañeros de casa en Santa Fe fue pasando el tiempo en el Perú. Durante el próximo par de años en Santa Fe seguí para conocer gente que se va a Perú. No estoy seguro de qué se trataba el Perú, pero yo estaba con gente que iba allí. Empecé a querer ir a América del Sur también.

My passion for living in South America began before I was 30 years old.  One of my housemates in Santa Fe was spending time in Peru.  Over the next couple of years in Santa Fe I continued to meet people who were going to Peru.  I am not sure what it was about Peru, but I was meeting people who were going there.  I started to want to go to South America as well.

Michele y yo empezamos a viajar a México alrededor de 2005. Hemos hecho tres viajes a México en menos de tres años. Pasamos el tiempo siempre fuera de la ciudad de México alrededor de 4 o 5 horas. Nosotros siempre se mantuvo al norte de la Ciudad de México con el con el viaje a Guadalajara. Nuestros viajes a México llevó mi pasión aún más para explorar más al sur en el corazón del principio de los tiempos en las tierras nativas.

Michele and I started traveling to Mexico around 2005.  We made three trips to Mexico in less than three years.  We spent time always outside of Mexico City about 4 or 5 hours.  We always stayed to the north of Mexico City with with trip to Guadalajara.  Our trips to Mexico drove my passion even more to explore further south into the heart of the beginning of time in the native lands.

Pasamos tres meses viviendo en las tierras altas de los Andes del Ecuador y un par de semanas viviendo en la selva alta, en la frontera de Ecuador y Perú. La selva fue impresionante, y puedes ver fotos de nuestro tiempo en Zamora si hojear más detenidamente estas páginas. El viaje a Ecuador fue muy interesante y cuestiona la muy y muy hermosa en un solo aliento. Viajar con un amigo sin duda hizo que mi largo viaje primero a América Latina más aceptable.

We spent three months living in the highlands of the Andes of Ecuador and a couple of weeks living in the high jungle on the border of Ecuador and Peru.  The jungle was awesome, and you can see pictures of our time in Zamora if you peruse further throught these pages.  The trip to Ecuador was very interesting and very challening and very beautiful all in one breath.  Traveling with a friend certainly made my first long voyage to Latin America more palatable.

Volvimos a casa en la primavera de 2008 y yo estaba listo en mi mente volver. Pero me tomé un descanso durante dos años hasta que se levantó el coraje de hacer un segundo viaje, esta vez por mí mismo. Si alguna vez ha viajado en solitario por largos períodos de tiempo, usted sabe lo que es y la sensación de vivir en una tierra lejana no conocer a nadie. Es una manera de conocerse a sí mismo de una manera que no te puedes imaginar lo que va a aprender.

We returned home in the spring of 2008 and I was ready in my mind to return.  But I took a break for about two years until I got up the courage to do a second voyage, this time by myself.  If you have ever traveled by yourself for long periods of time, you know what it is like and the feeling of living in a far away land not knowing a soul.  It is a way to get to know yourself in a way that you can not imagine what you will learn.

100 Days In Argentina

The twist and fate of life never ceases to amaze, is it coincidence or is it the stars aligned in the sky, we will never know; but one thing I know for sure, we create our journey here and it is for us.  It is with that I decided to journey to a far away land in a far away language with people who I relate to very well.  I do not know many things in life, and the older I get the less I know, in a certain respect it is a well known fact that we have small brains and the universe is very large, so trying to understand is always a challenge that we face from day to day.  Fate is not part of our understanding, but it is part of our observation.

Birthdays in life are a strange coincidence, they happen whether we want them to happen or not.  We were born on a day and so that day arrives once a year.  The celebration varies from time to time, some years we have a big party, some years we are solitude, some years we go for a walk, other years we are with family, but each one is different, and each one presents to us a reflection we may prefer not to look at, but in any case the day comes and goes.

I am living in South America for many reasons, most of those reasons are not known to my conscious mind, I am just here.  I do know one of the reasons I believe I am here and that is to celebrate a mark in my life.  The mark of turning fifty years.   For quite a while I have been using the 50th birthday as a mark in my mind, in a subtle way to get to it.  To arrive in that time in my life, not only alive but fulfilled with a feeling of knowing.  Of knowing that, what I am doing here on Planet Earth is learning, living, loving, and finally leaving.


100 days

my birthday fell on the 100th day

in argentina

a twist of luck, suerte

50 years and counting

to be in a place

in a time

when as per usual

the planet is fine

the people

always in disarray

more or less, mas o menos

it has always been this way

and always will be this way

it is part of being a human

and observing the state

of the world at a scale we see

not at a quantum scale

not at a grande scale

but our scale

each one to her own

to love the opportunity

to live life to its fullest

each and every day

as we know best

Shooting the Dead

Maria Eva Duarte Peron, Evita, in Spanish meaning little Eva, was born May 7, 1919 and died July 26, 1952.  She was the second wife of President Juan Perón and served as the first lady of Argentina from 1946 until her death.

If you are not from Latin America, and from the United States, Evita is probably the most famous person you have ever heard of who you know for sure is from Argentina.  It is my guess that there is probably no one else famous you know from Argentina.  But this may not be true, because after writing this statement I checked a list of famous Argentinians and the list is very long, so depending on the field you are in, or your areas of interest you may know other famous Argentinians.

The only ones who come to my mind for me besides Evita is Ernesto Che Guevara born June 14, 1928 in Rosario and died October 9, 1967 and Jorge Luis Borges born August 24, 1899 in Buenos Aires and died June 14 1986.  

The cemetary also holds the remains of many illustrious military Generals, presidents, scientists, poets and other affluent Argentinians. There is a saying in Argentina that it costs more to die than it does to live.

I went to see Evita yesterday at her final resting place in the Recoleta Cemetary located in the northern part of barrio Recoleta.  We were alone together.  The most famous Argentinian of all time and I had a moment of silence together and then more people arrived to visit with her.

A friend of mine is a professional photographer, and so we shot the dead for hours on a beautiful Saturday morning in Buenos Aires.  It was an absolutely gorgeous splendid spring day.  The weather this time of year is superb, and I was happy to be hanging out in a cemetary walking around looking for cool shots and noticing famous people who I now know who are from Argentina.  Most of the famous people I ran into include people who have streets named after them and towns and neighborhoods in the local area.

The Nobel Peace Prize in 1936

The one person who stood out in my mind that I ran into while crusing the tombs of the dead was Mr. Carlos Saavedra Lamas.

This tomb for some reason was one we stopped at and sat for awhile, we were shooting some other stuff around the tomb and upon closer evaluation and my reading the plaque in Spanish of course I started to notice that this was no ordinary person, general or rich guy from Buenos Aires, but this was a true worldly person.

He was in the company of Martin Luther King, Linus Pauling, Andrei Sakharov, Anwar Sadat, Mother Teresa, Desmond Tutu, Elie Wiesel, Gorbachev and last but not least the Dalai Lama just to name a few from the last one hundred years or so.

So you may be wondering what did Mr Lamas do in his life to have the honor of being in the company of the above people.  To find out more about his life and the time in 1936 read the link above to discover the state of Argentina in 1936.

Upon further research I also realized that a total of four Latin American men including Mr. Lamas have been granted the Nobel peace and one woman Rigoberta Menchú.

They include:

• Óscar Arias Sánchez (born 1940), statesman, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate (1987).

• Alfonso García Robles (1911–1991), diplomat and politician, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate (1982).                                                                                                                                                
•   Rigoberta Menchú (born 1959), activist, UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate (1992).

• Adolfo Pérez Esquivel (born 1931), activist, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate (1980).

If you are curious about any of these people feel free to learn more about them and their lives and how they participated in Latin American culture during their time.

I digress today for many reasons but mainly to note that the world is a very big place and if you include human history there is a lot of information to get to know.  The mind is small and the universe is vast.  I continue to appreciate the opportunity and grace for being able to spend part of my life in a land very far away from my home yet rich in culture and corazón.

Spring has Sprung

This weekend was simply beautiful and I wanted to post a blog Sunday evening but the day got away from me and here we are almost midway into the week.  The weekend was full of sun, it is officially spring time in the southern hemisphere and especially here in Argentina.  For a big city, it was a lovely weekend, with not a cloud in the sky and clear with blue sky.  Actually, Buenos Aires does actually have some really nice air some of the times and I think the past seven weeks have been especially nice.  Even though if you look at the charts BA gets quite a bit of rain, about four times more rain than Albuquerque mas or menos, it seems to come in buckets when it rains and I suppose it also happens at certain times of the year, I have not yet encountered that time of year.

I am into a groove down here now.  I am feeling good and feel just a bit more comfortable being here, especially knowing my way around a bit better.  I actually am starting to get a handle on where I am in the city and what direction I am headed.  If you look at a map of Buenos Aires its not a trivial city to navigate in your head.  The city is not layed out in any sort of direction.  In fact depending on where you are in the city the streets all tend to run in odd directions.  The city evolved over a long period of time, hundreds of years, and I think different parts of the city over the centuries were layed out differently and then it all sort of came together.  One marker in the city is the river, the Rio Plata to the east, or towards the Atlantic ocean.

Luckily, I can see the sun during the day and know which general direction I am headed off in.  My main map is the collectivo pocket guide, which divides the city up into these little planos or maps and they have like 25 pages of little maps of the city with all of the bus lines on them and subway lines and trains all mashed into a book that fits into your pocket.  So, I am constantly flipping through this teeny book trying to figure out what map I am on and how that fits into the bigger picture.  Not to mention the bus lines are listed in the book in squares and you have to literally follow the squares and figure out what direction the bus is going in.  All basically inside scoop for the porteños in the crowd.

Wikipedia article on Porteño

Its a pretty interesting story and the language is even more interesting.