So I have recently become vaguely obsessed with this Argentine group called Alvy, Nacho, y Rubin Interpretan a Los Campos Magnéticos. Above is one of my favorite songs of theirs.

As you may note, this is a cover of a Magnetic Fields song, which after all is what they do—re-interpret, in Spanish, Magnetic Fields songs.

Which is awesome.

I was going to say more, but that might be enough. Another day.

Pues, reciente empecé a estar un poco obsesionado con un grupo argentino que se llama Alvy, Nacho, y Rubin Interpretan a Los Campos Magnéticos. Arriba está una de las pistas de ellos que más me gusta.

Como quizás puedes darse cuenta, esto es una versión de una canción de The Magnetic Fields, el grupo americano. Eso, después de todo, es lo que hacen—re-interpretan, en castellano, las canciones de The Magnetic Fields.

Que está alucinante.

Intenté decir más, pero eso puede ser bastante. Otro día.

1. I spent a while complaining about the falls and how many people there were here. While perhaps a valid complaint, today I had two pretty fantastic experiences. First, we walked down the Sendero Macuco, where sendero = path, and a macuco is a kind of bird, which google tells me is a Solitary Tinamou. The path doesn’t bring you to the main falls, so it’s much less-used. It’s a dirt path, mud in places, and after three kilometers of nothing but flat jungle, you come to a rather intense decline, and come out onto a fork. If you go right, which we did second, you can climb down a difficult path to find yourself at the riverside, with these beautiful sedimentary-I-think rocks, and lizards, and under the hot sun. You can’t even see the waterfall from this far down the river, so we saw all of this without seeing anyone else but one boyscout-redhead who I named William.

If instead you go left at the fork, you come to the bottom of a smaller waterfall which falls into a small pool, crosses a small stream, and falls down below into the river. The path ends at the pool-side, but you can clamber over the rocks, crossing all the way around to stand under the waterfall, literally underneath it, or behind it. The water was cold and amazing, and underneath you could hear nothing, you could see the water spraying into the air, you could feel the slippery, mossy rocks under your feet. If you walked along the stream, you could stand unencumbered at the shelf of the lower falls, trying to get close enough to peer over the edge. As we left, some kids went the easy route, and just jumped into the cold water and swam across. 

Before we took off, we walked the lower path below the falls again, the main falls, and walked as close as we could, and I realized as I stood there, staring up into the water pouring over the cliff, the spray wetting my face and hair, that I could hear nothing except the roar of the falls, and when I stared up into it, I could pretend I was alone. Although I might wish I could be closer, or climb across the river and stand below the most beautiful falls, or go to the island (which was closed because of “high water”), I was still amazed with what there was. How’s that for a message?

2. I think I need to add that when I say I don’t think I could work with kids, I mean in part that I think some people are able to form attachments with all of the kids that they work with, and really get something out of each day — it’s just difficult for me to do so

3. Last, I need to add that although I’m regretful of not having tried to meet people, I really did end up enjoying my time in Buenos Aires, no? I am sad that I did not, and set in the idea that I’ll try harder in the future, but I’m pleased with how things went, on the whole. 

In any case, a happy Fourth to the all of you, and I find myself leaving for Tucúman this evening. It’s a 20-hour-or-so bus ride, so I’ll have a nice chance to get to know the north. Or something.

Which are really fantastic — by which I mean, I’ll put pictures on the internet when I finally get home and have a connector cable, but these falls are glorious to look at. On the one hand, we’re able to get really close — the metal pathways built by the Argentine Park Service bring you perilously close to the edges, and you can feel the spray against your face — but on the other, it’s really lame how many people there are, how crowded the largest portion (La Garganta del Diablo, The Devil’s Throat) is, how it feels a bit like a tourist trap. I’m so glad I got to go here, and I like my photographs, and there were some moments where all I could really hear was the roar of the falls, but there’s no sense of adventure. The paths are all man-made, the jungle is cut back, the bannisters keep you away. My father went here in the 1970s, when he hitch-hiked around South America (crazy old man), and he doesn’t remember these crowds. Really, though, I just have this idea of nature as something personal & spiritual, not something to be shared with strangers. Just the idea exploring is taken away, no?

In any case, clearly I’ve made it through the part of the summer wherein I work at FLENI. I’m not home yet, of course, but I finished my internship. There was nothing that changed over the course of it, not really, but I do feel like the length was educational and useful; I think I managed to figure out two main things through the time I spent here. One, of course, was how floor time works. I don’t actually feel as though I have a complete understanding of it, but spending days watching it, I felt as though I was managing to get a much better idea of the complexities involved, and an understanding of what ends it heads towards. Maria, my boss, was really good at floortime, and watching her coach other people in ways of challenging and supporting kids was really cool. The second thing I think I came to understand was that while I like developmental psychology, and am interested in working with both children and autism, I don’t think I have the strength of heart to do autism therapy as a life-time occupation. I don’t have the fascination with the disorder, or the attachment to the children that you really need in order to be happy doing it. 

Tomorrow my sister, parents and I head off to the northwest of Argentina, to Tucúman, and thence to Salta and Jujuy, and I’m looking forward to exploring these regions. My father’s friend will be showing us around, and it should be a strange, but hopefully novel and enjoyable, experience — my dad hasn’t seen this guy for fifteen years, perhaps, and the rest of us don’t know him. 

I saw Michael (Neddy) twice before I headed up here, and got to meet some of his friends. The experience made me wish I had expended more effort in meeting people in Buenos Aires, in finding people to spend time with. I liked my time there, I really enjoyed the city and sort of enjoyed all my free time, but it would have been cool to make new friends, to explore alongside others. I can make all sorts of excuses as to why I didn’t try harder (I was here so short a time, I don’t speak the language, I’m shy, I didn’t know how, I had to get up really early every weekday morning), but I think the long and short of it is that I wish I had tried harder — tried to get together with some of the people from work, or tried to meet some folks on the internet (how terrifying!), or even gone to some American-frequented bars and hung around. Because of course, you meet people not by chance, but by meeting the friends of people you already know, by hanging out and around until you find someone you like. And you can’t do that if you don’t know anyone. 

This isn’t to say that I was bored, or that I didn’t go out while I was in Buenos Aires — I hung out with my sister a lot while she was there, and with her friends after she left, and with people I met through them. There was only really a week where I didn’t see people, only a day or two where I really passed the entire day without exchanging more than ten words with anyone. I saw some awesome things, I really enjoyed my job, I got to know the city. I guess in essence I am thinking of this as “how to do it next time.” Which is rather nice. 

I like thinking that there will be a next time, no?

It was pretty cool to watch. I’ll admit that ten minutes after it ended, everything repeated in my head was in English. It’s weird to see this show in Buenos Aires, though, where the theatre was just a theatre, and not, you know, Broadway. The acting was good (I really liked the guy who played Collins, and Mimi was pretty good, and I pretty much will always love Maureen), and the singing as well. But I mean — I guess it just felt like going to any theater production, aye? Not like going to see a Musical. And I kind of liked that.

Following Krista’s suggestion (was it hers?), I looked at the website, and followed the directions there about getting a discount: I went to the ticket office at 17:00 (actually, I got there at 17:20; I had to take a taxi to make it on-time because I showered first and lost track of the time), and wrote down my name and email and DNI, and then at 17:30 they had a “drawing” to give out the 16 free tickets they give out each night. Only, I mean, it was a drawing in name only, since there were five of us there, the other four in a party together. I got drawn first.

Which meant that, come 21:00, I sat in the middle of the front row with a $20 peso ticket (I’m not sure how much other tickets are), and the other folks sat on either side of me. This was mildly awkward, since it was a young woman, her (boy?)friend, and her parents, but it actually turned out to be fine; the woman sat next to me, and talked to me a bit. She’s a theater student here in Buenos Aire, but from Entre Rios (the city; how’s that spelled?), and she’s apparently going to Orlando in a few months to work at Disney (not sure what she’s doing). And she knew some of the folks in the performance, which was fun. We talked exclusively in Spanish, which was cool to be able to do, but slighly limiting.

In any case, “Rent” was a good time. It was essentially exactly the same as when I saw it in New York for probably 10 times as much, except the words were in Spanish. If I sung along in my head, which I [quasi-ashamedly] could do, the English words were still there, and the intonations were generally quite similar. But there were definitely points lost and words lost. I’m not complaining too much — there have got to be lost words in a translation of a musical, Jesus (speaking of whom, I got talked at by this woman at a bus stop on the way there, for like fifteen minutes, about the Bible, and she just babbled on in Spanish) — but I guess I’d say that it turned it from a musical with clever rhymes and clever syntax into a musical with just good music. That’s not entirely true, perhaps, but I think in general the meaning was retained without the simplicity, and sometimes it didn’t sound as good. (“Glory” drawn out sounds a lot better than “Gloria,” I promise you, and Mimi’s “And she looked good” in the final scene was gone, and a lot more like that.) And while perhaps we’re all limited by knowing the English version better, this woman and her parents agreed with me on this, and they spoke fluent Spanish. (We discussed it during the intermission; they had the movie & the CD of the English version at home, and apparently the father really likes it.)

I am convinced of these things:
(1) The guy who played Angel was good, but his dance scene was kind of lame, compared to past ones I’ve seen.
(2) Maureen’s monologue was good even in Spanish (although they repeated “saltar de fe” [leap of faith] more than “over the moon,” as in the English version), but I still think the best version I ever saw was Miriam’s, at TiP.
(3) “Without you” sounds a lot better than “Si no estas”.
(4) The “Contact” scene, when Angel dies, was holy shit way more scandalous here, with guys just in briefs humping women at the front of the stage. Maybe I’m wrong and was just closer to the stage.

Anyway, a fun time was had by all, and I am glad I went and saw that, and glad I got to sit in the front row. Even if I then had to eat leftovers at home because all the restaurants were closed by the time I got out at 00:30. (Leftovers weren’t bad. I took the rice from yesterday that I didn’t eat earlier today, and fried it with two eggs and some of the tofu. Which was, technically, silken tofu. I was silly and confused “pasta de soja” with tofu, and it does look the same from above, but, errr, maybe “pasta” means paste, but paste is not tofu. This is sort of like when I ordered “pan de pizza” thinking, hey, a pan pizza, and got just the baked pizza dough, with salt and oregano and nothing else. Which was actually delicious. Anyway.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about gerunds, in any case: I feel as though we use them a lot more in English than they do in other languages. I rarely hear someone saying “Yo estoy [haciendo algo]“, but in English “I’m [doing something]” is common parlance. And, when I think about it, a common mistake in people learning English is to say, “I go to this place,” when we would say, “I am going there.” I’m unsure about this — I don’t know if I’m wrong when I say, “Estoy trabajando en FLENI,” if I should be saying, “Trabajo en FLENI” (and is it “en,” or “a”), or if either is fine. In English, I could say, “I’m working at FLENI” or “I work at FLENI,” but sometimes I feel as though Spanish uses gerunds less, and would be more likely to interpret gerund-use as expressing immediacy.

And then I wonder whether maybe the case is just that I use gerunds more than the average bear in English as well, and that my confusion is based on being more self-aware of my language use. Anyway, weigh in, folks.

Rice Pilaf à la +justin
Ingredients:

• 1 cup rice (I used brown; white is fine; use the appropriate amount of water + a bit more, and the cook time is a little longer than expected)
• 1/2 white onion, chopped small
• 2 cloves garlic, pressed, chopped finely, or mashed (I used a fork)
• 1 1/4 chicken bouillon cubes (broth or stock would be better, but I can’t find canned broth here)
• Curry Powder, approximately 2 tsp
• Salt to taste (NOTE: you don’t need salt if you’re using bouillon cubes! they’re more than half salt, usually!)
• A little bit of butter (and a few teaspoons of olive oil)
• Frozen (or canned, I suppose) green peas, maybe 1/4 cup
• Dried apricots, quartered (any kind, really: I prefer the tart, sun-dried, wrinklier orange kind, sometimes referred to as California; there are also “turkish” apricots, which are brown because they don’t have sulfur added, and Mediterranean apricots, which are orange but artificially dried and sweet), maybe 8
• Raw almonds, maybe 1/8 cup

Okay, right. Cook the onion in a little bit of olive oil, for maybe 4 minutes, and then add the spices. After a minute, add a little more oil and then the rice, stir to coat. Add the water and bouillon cube, and stir occasionally until it dissolves. Add the garlic and the sun-dried tomato. Cover, and don’t open or stir until close to the end. Turn the heat to very-low but not lowest, or almost-lowest if you’re using an electric range.

When the time is almost up, add the peas, apricots, almonds, and a small pat of butter. Re-cover immediately without stirring, and wait until the water is fully absorbed. Stir everything up, turn off the heat, and leave for a few more minutes. Then serve.

With, optionally,
Chicken-eggplant stir fry
Ingredients:

• 1 breast chicken, cubed
• 1 small eggplant, cubed
• 1/2 onion (see: above!), chopped into small pieces
• a few mushrooms, preferrably portabello or white button, but any will do, sliced or chopped
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1/2 tbsp butter
• Olive oil as needed (note: the eggplant necessitates more than you might normally use, or such has been my experience!)
• Crushed red peppers, approximately 1 tsp, but to taste
• Curry powder, approximately 1 tbsp
• Salt and pepper, to taste

Melt the butter in the pan, and cook the onions at a low heat while chopping up everything else. After the onions are soft, add a bit of olive oil, and add the eggplant and garlic. Stir to coat. Stir occasionally for the next five minutes or so, and then add the chicken. Add olive oil as needed (see: when things start to stick; the eggplant absorbs a lot of olive oil) — but don’t overdo it. A little at a time.

When the chicken has begun to turn white, add the spices, and stir them in. When the chicken seems close to cooked, add the mushrooms. When the mushrooms are coated in spices and cooked, and the chicken is cooked through, it’s done. The mushrooms will provide some juice, but if you want a sauce, add some soy sauce near the end, I guess. It’s spicy enough on its own.

Serve everything together, I suppose. Drink a white wine with it, to offset the spicy. I drank a Familia Zuccardi Santa Julia Tardío 2007, which was really refreshingly fruity and delicious. I would totally recommend it. (It’s a bit pricey for Argentine wines; I was feeling adventurous, and not spending much on food [I just bought the onion and eggplant] since I was using things I already had.)

Aye, aye! This entry is silly.

2. I tried to make a cheese-sauce, Alfredo-like, today. I think I just used a cheese that isn’t supposed to be used for melting, but regardless I ended up with a lumpy butter-sauce, which was delicious but had like eight chunks of cheese that were relatively inedible. I need to figure out which cheeses melt well, I guess? I think this is the problem. I don’t know what else it would’ve been?

3. Tomorrow I go to the public hospital again, for one final time. I am interested, a wee bit excited, and a wee bit nervous. Again. For some reason.

Shrug.

1. I finished “Kavalier & Clay,” which was indeed a devestating moment of separation, but which was also entirely worth it. A really, really good book. It got me interested anew in stage magic (The Illusionist [film] did this as well, but I was always a Harry Houdini kid) and in the World Fair. These are good things.

2. My camera ran out of batteries. I knew this would happen soon. I have a very few photographs from FLENI. I wasn’t going to be allowed to take photos of anything I was actually doing (the kids are, you know, patients, and they have rules) but I still would’ve liked to have gotten a few more photographs. We’ll see what I have when my parents comme and bring the charger.

I feel a little bit guilty, though, since one of the few things the CPGC asks for is photographs. I also don’t know if I’ve really mentioned that the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship at Haverford College is funding my “internship” here, but I guess I might as well say that yes, they are, and they’re pretty awesome. I was reading through the web journals some of the other “interns” (I put all of this in quotes; I feel like that word is wrong) are keeping on Haverford’s website, and it’s cool to see what we’re all doing. Emily H. is off in Rwanda working with non-violent conflict resolution workshops; Chris H. is in Tibet teaching English to kids. (Their writing is the best of the bunch thus far, I think. Also I’m friends with them and they’re actually bothering to update with details.)

Also fantastic is the song “Kilkelly, Ireland,” which you can listen to via youtube (which tells me this version is song by Robbie O’Connell and the Clancy Brothers), and which is amazingly sad. Brendan Dutch played it (via youtube or a CD) to my folklore class, and I was writing a poem today that was sort of chanelling it, so I went and found the song. I almost remembered the name, but was thinking Kilkenny, rather than Kilkelly, and so I had to look it up in my old journal.

2. Movies. At MALBA.

Saturday night I went to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which you should check up on via wikipedia if you’ve never heard of. (Woah, syntactical incongruity!) For my first time ever seeing it in theatres, I was alone, the majority of the audience had never seen it, and there was neither a floor show nor call back lines. It was a pretty strange experience to hear people actually laughing at the movie. It was subtitled in Spanish, of course, which was similarly strange — not because the translations were bad (although they were certainly funny on occasion; they were off the internet, and I think they were good, but not great), but because the subtitles made me realize that there were actually pointed where in the past I had never had any clue what was being said, but had just sort of brushed over it. I was tempted to call out callbacks on occasion, but I figured that the kids in the theatre wouldn’t understand either the English or the reason behind it, and would just be mad. Anyway, it was fun.

Sunday I structured my day around Vincent Gallo’s visit to MALBA. I got to the museum by noon, waiting on line for maybe ten minutes, and then received a ticket to his talk that evening. Then I wandered around Recoleta (went to the cemetary, had lunch and coffee, and so on), before returning to MALBA by 16:00 for “Buffalo ’66,” Gallo’s critically-aclaimed first film. I wasn’t really expecting it to be either good or interesting, but it was both. I loved the colors of the film (apparently that has to do with the film it was shot on), and the characters were intriguing and reasonably deep. Gallo plays a man who made a losing bet he had to default on, and ended up spending years in jail as payback to the bookie. On getting out of jail at the film’s beginning, he kidnaps a young dancer (Christina Ricci, who plays the part at 17), and takes her to his parents’ home to pretend to be his wife. In the process, we meet his lunatic parents (Anjelica Huston plays his mother), learn about why he was in jail, and learn that he wants to kill the guy who technically lost him the bet — the football field goal kicker from the Buffalo Bills.

In any case, “Buffalo ’66″ ends up being well-done, and while you don’t like Gallo at the end of it (I didn’t, gah he was annoying), I found him at least somewhat intriguing, and I guess I wanted things to work out. I felt like I’d heard the story before (not in the sense that it was unoriginal, but literally I think I’ve heard it before in another form), so maybe that had something to do with my enjoyment of it.

Afterwards, I went and had a coffee. They screened “The Brown Bunny,” Gallo’s second film (he’s acted a lot, but he’s only directed two), but I didn’t have a ticket, and they gave the last ones away while I was talking to my father, and they didn’t let me sneak in.

At around 8:30, I got let back in, and I sat down on the floor in the front of the theatre. It was packed full of people. Gallo is in his late-forties, now, but he still looks reasonably imposing. He’s tall and thin, dark-haired in a way that makes him seem half like a magician and half like an evangelist preacher and an imaginary half like a salesman or a carny. You really oughtta read a bit about him, so you know why it’s easy to assume he’d be a tool. He wasn’t. He was funny, he was normal. He wasn’t the best speaker — sort of funny, sort of conceited, sort of boring. It was nice, and enjoyable, and a cool experience. I got a photo or two of ‘im.

There was a translator provided to translate his English for the non-speakers, but he quickly got frustrated with pausing and would just speak uninterrupted for as much as fifteen minutes before giving the translator a quick minute to sum it all up. (See: arrogance!) He talked primarily about the controversy over “Brown Bunny” (in brief, there’s a sex scene at the end wherein Chloe Sevigny gives Gallo a blow job; the film is overwhelmingly motonous and Roger Ebert, the film critic, and Gallo got into a nasty fight over it; Ebert claimed it was self-indulgent and so on, and said it was the worst movie ever made, and the insults escalated; my personal favorite was when Ebert said that his colonoscopy was more enjoyable than “Brown Bunny”). He said, err, “To get a blowjob… it’s really easy. I didn’t spend three years working on a movie just to get a blowjob.” And, after talking about being shy, he said, “I wasn’t waiting my whole life to show my pecker in a movie.” Which all seems like fair points — he claims the movie isn’t about being narcissistic or self-indulgent, but about showing the pain in loneliness and love, and so on. Shrug; I haven’t actually seen it yet. (Hah!)

He showed us a few short films, then, after the two Roger Ebert reviews. (In one, it’s “possibly the worst film ever made”; in the next, it gets a thumbs up.) The first is “Hunny Bunny” (or, possibly, “Honey Bunny”), a four-minute short he made before “Brown Bunny,” which is a film that primarily consists of objectified shots of women turning in a circle, which at the end changes into a twirling toy bunny, and then into Gallo’s blurry, bearded face. I have no clue. He said, “I still kind of like it,” this version, and that it’s about obsession and fetishization, in a more direct way than “Brown Bunny,” but similarly nonetheless.

He also showed us what he claimed were his two earliest films — “Vincent Gallo as Jesus Christ,” a repetitive stop-motion film that looped maybe five times, of him jumping in the air and holding a Jesus pose; and “Rocky X,” a testament to his hatred for the idea of “Rocky II,” which was a montage of images, including a shot of Gallo being hit by a car. These were both from 1979.

Lastly, he showed us a short film he made while filming “Buffalo ’66,” which he said was of him reacting to his new power (he directed, wrote, starred, did music, edited), but was really just a day-in-the-life. It ends with Ricci on the phone, lying to her parents about where she was. It was called “Looking for Enemies finding friends,” with just that capitalization & punctualization.

I don’t know. It doesn’t blend, but it was interesting. And a good enough time.

3. Dancing.

On Saturday night, after Rocky Horror, I went to Amerika, a club a short distance from where I live. Going to clubs by yourself is strange — especially since I was too cheap to drink anything, and so I was completely sober by the time I got in there. The music was techno, the dancing was fine, but I was reasonably unimpressed — not all too many attractive folks, not all too many good dancers, a poor showing in general. I am not giving up on clubs in general — I think they can be fun when you’re with friends, and I think they can be fun alone if you’re into the music or getting hit on, but I’m just saying I don’t think it would have been all too much more fun even if I’d spoken the language and been able to talk to folks. Still, I was pleased to find that while I still think of myself as a bad dancer, even without anything to drink I was fine with dancing alone. Surrounded by people, of course.

On Monday night, at around 7:30, I walked to the same general area, past Abasto Mall, and to Konex, which on Monday nights hosts La Bomba de Tiempo. I’ve mentioned it before — it’s this really great drumming circle, with thousands of people crowded in to watch and dance. This time, after checking my bag, I bought a beer and drank it (and buy “a beer,” I mean a plastic cup filled with Quilmes, and beer here comes in 950 cc bottles), quickly, watching the people around me. (I wanted to dance, honest.) Mostly the crowd is twenty-somethings, maybe one-third foreigners, but there were a few mothers there with little daughters. I watched this one woman with her two-or-so-year-old on her shoulders, dancing slightly. In front of her, holding the little girl’s gaze, another woman danced with her hands in the air. With perfect facility, the little girl mimicked the older woman’s movements, her face pulled into a huge grin. It was this great moment of THIS is what we’re trying to achieve at work.

And then I finished my beer and danced for an hour, and didn’t make any friends but had a good time, smiling at all the flushed faces, and watching that guy who thinks he’s an eagle again.

I suppose that’s more than enough, neh?

Yesterday I complained some about work. Today I feel obligated to talk about good things.

This morning I found my way to work, and ended up following Belén around for much of the morning, because Maria was busy. Belén, as I think I’ve mentioned, is one of the instructors in charge of FLENI’s school, which means she supervises the other teacher-therapists with their charges. She has more experience with floortime, so she does some supervising of their work with their students, and gives suggestions of how they can improve their interactions — like, ways of prolonging communication and moments of engagement. It’s cool to watch, although her floortime sessions are so short that they make the day feel much longer — divide an hour into 20-30 minute blocks, and it feels twice as long.

In any case, today we spent the morning working with some kids who were great, even just in terms of affect. (This is what I was talking about the other day in terms of counter-transference: it’s so obvious to me how much I prefer working with the kids who seem to want to work with me, and I feel much fonder towards them. It’s undeniably easier.) In any case, we started the morning with Trini, a little girl wearing a sweatshirt that said “Girls,” drooling slightly but smiling constantly. She seemed to really like me (she kept pointing to me and then pointing next to her, which is apparently Trini-sign for “sit there”), and she literally was constantly smiling; we played with a bunch of colored balls, tossing them in-between each other and her. (I suppose this was Maria, Trini’s therapist Jose[fina, I assume], and I.) This sounds simplistic, and it is, but we were getting Trini to decide who had balls, getting her to ask for things, to tell us to do things, to react to emotions. It was really cool, and fun to see her responding.

When I went back into the floortime room, after walking Trini back to her classroom with Jose, Paola was playing with Ernesto while Belén watched and gave suggestions. Ernesto is rather more advanced than a lot of the kids in the school; he has language when he wants to, and he can do imaginative play; he and Pao were chasing each other with monsters, and it was just absolutely adorable to watch. I really like Paola; she’s been really friendly to me, and when Maria says that Ernesto is her favorite student in the school, I don’t think she’s really exaggerating. Afterwards, there was a failed attempt at playing with Cielo, but because there were complications (she had wet herself), Belén and I chatted for a while, which was actually quite nice. I really like Belén, although she’s quite a bit older, and while my Spanish isn’t enough for us to chat perfectly, we can still have conversations, especially since she’s patient. It’s always funny which phrases just can’t be translated, though.

Anyway, afterwards Maria and I got to play with Justo, who stow (sorry, that’s a lame joke), who was really interesting to work with. His mother was there as well, and she and Maria told me to speak to Justo in English, since he understands and doesn’t like it when they speak it; he told me to speak in Spanish as well, in the end. They seemed to think he’d pay more attention in English; I don’t know. But the play was actually really complex, although not initiated by Justo, he was able to understand it, and they spent almost half an hour involved in a game that involved a rain storm, and a cave, and this kids’ song that I fucking know because they taught it to us in second grade. (Que llueva, que llueva, / la Virgen de la Cueva, / los pajarillos cantan, / las nubes se levantan, / que sí, que no, / que caiga un chaparrón, / con azucar y jamon.¹) Anyway, it was pretty fantastic.

I felt at the end of the afternoon as though this was a much better day — I’d spent all morning doing floortime, I had observed some sessions that felt like actual progress, I had really enjoyed the kids, I felt like I had learned some things about these kids. I’m only here for two more weeks (which is absurd — but also, in some sense, quite reasonable; I feel like I’ve already gotten out of this most of what I want to?), but I’m pleased to realize that a lot of what I wanted to figure out while I was here, I have. I’ve been here a month, now, essentially, in terms of working at FLENI, and I can’t imagine what more I would do with another month beyond what I have left. In deciding to come here, I chose a very specific aspect — floortime — which really interests me, and I feel like I’m getting to experience it very closely. But there’s only so much of that that is worthwhile, I suppose? And after some point it moves from being interested and novel and me feeling as though I’m learning a lot, to me just feeling like I’m not getting that much out of it, and that my presence, while not a burden during floortime sessions (at the very least, I can take part quite often, and Maria likes using other people in play), is certainly not necessary. It’s a complicated sort of feeling that I can’t quite enunciate here as well as I’d like. I don’t feel unwanted, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong, and I feel as though my internship has been useful and interesting and fun at times, but I guess what I’m saying is that leaving in two weeks is better than leaving in two months. I will miss FLENI, but in order to take more advantage of it I’d need to actually have training I don’t have, and be working there in full and not just interning.

Yes?

§ II

The Starbucks that opened in Alto Palermo, a few blocks from me, the first in Argentina, still consistently has a line that extends out the door. This is awful.

§ III

I left work today at a little past noon, which while admittedly early, was just as well, since it took me until 13:20, more than an hour, to get to Pilar, which is really about a fifteen/twenty minute’s drive away. Male (that’s a name) drove me and Gaby and someone else into Escobar (which is the town where the part of FLENI I work at is, technically), and dropped Gaby and I off. We waited fifteen minutes or so to catch a collectivo², which we took into Pilar; we talked the entire way in Spanish, without too many interruptions, and I felt really proud of myself; I felt as though we had actual conversations, about graffiti and schooling and stuff, and not just pleasantries. I got off and caught another one for like five minutes along the highway, to Village Pilar, which is where Elisa’s university (Austral) is.

Elisa met me at 13:30, or so, and we went to this place called, I believe, (yup), Siga la Vaca.³ It’s an all-you-can-eat parrilla, or grill, and so essentially for $35, we got a liter of beer, some water, unlimited slices of beef and sausage, some bread, a mostly-scorned salad bar, and dessert. It was fantastic and kind of awful; we left feeling like we needed an afternoon nap, or two. And like we didn’t need to eat dinner (and, honestly, I barely did so). I had small bits of: vacio (flank) and matambre (only a bit; it wasn’t so good — it’s lower body meat), bife de chorizo (rump) and chorizo (spicy sausage), tira de asado (grilled ribs) and chinchulín (sadly: intestine; gross and salty). Elisa and I shared; she made me try things. Some of it was very delicious (the vacio & chorizo, leastways), and some of it not so much, but so it goes. It was just a fun time.

§ IV

I’ve been reading Isabel Allende’s La Casa de los Espíritus (The House of the Spirits) in Spanish, which is difficult but rather enjoyable. I’m making pretty good sense of what’s going on, although I’m sure I miss a lot. What’s interesting to me, and I wonder whether this would be true if I understood more, is just how useless the first-person narrative segments seem to me — they seem frustrating and meaningless, and I don’t like the voice at all, although I find the character of Esteban Trueba intriguing in third-person. I don’t know if it’s Allende’s problems with male voice, or my own awkwardness with the language, or whether it’s just a boring character, but I find myself disliking those sections, and much preferring the jerky moments of narration.

I see indeed why so many people refer to this book as a follow-up to García Márquez’s Cien Años de Soledad, in terms of the sweeping narration and the grandosity of characterization and landscape; I have yet to see feminism explicitly, but that’s okay. I’m curious to see where this novel goes; I’m only 80 pages into it, which leaves me with about 450 to go.

I’m also reading Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, as I mentioned yesterday. I can’t read in Spanish when I’m tired, so I often read my English books in the morning and then have trouble putting them down in the afternoon, which is great. I’m loving this story, and following Sam and Joe as they try to make a comic book work; I just finished Part II, and am excited to see where things go. I like reading books — both of these, actually, fall into this category — about which I know nothing more than that they’re well-recommended; I have no clue of the plot of either of these. And that’s a lot of fun.

Tomorrow, yoga & exploring. Tonight, now, sleep.

1. It’s raining, it’s raining, the Virgin of the Cave, the birds sing, the clouds clear, yes! no!, a downpour falls, with sugar and ham.^a I never said it makes sense. I’m pretty sure that I learned it with “la bruja esta en la cueva,” the witch is in the cave. I’m sure it’s a regional thing. I don’t even remember who my Spanish teacher was in second grade.

2. Collectivo is the word they use here for public bus; I’m not entirely sure why, since Spanish for bus is “bus,” or I guess “omnibus.” The bus system here is really good, but traffic is unbearably slow; as I’ve mentioned before, I take the subte whenever I can. The subte is only in Buenos Aires, however. Some bus lines, as this one, have both local and non-local (express) routes; Gaby and I waited for a non-local, since otherwise we would take over an hour to travel into Pilar. The express buses are more expensive, but undeniably worth it — it cost $1.80 for the twenty-minute ride, as opposed to $1 for a local.

3. Siga la Vaca = Follow the cow.

a. Speaking of ham — I mentioned it the other day as being on a pizza with olives (and being gross), but I made things grosser still my translating the word but not the spelling, and writing “jam,” which rather than being a cross between jamon and ham is a sweet fruit preserve. There was no jam on that pizza. I am so amused by this mistake, however, that I refuse to fix it. (For the record, in case you’re confused, the j in Spanish is pronounced like an h in English; my mistake was essentially that I wrote the English word phonetically in Spanish.)

At work today I was sort of frustrated. When I first got here, I was sort of frustrated to realize that I wasn’t going to be doing as much as I had wanted to. It’s not so much that I’m not allowed to do more as that there isn’t more I can do — the nature of my project is such that a lot of my time here is just observing and asking questions. It’s great, on the one hand, and I feel very lucky to be getting this opportunity to really get to see what therapy looks like from this standpoint. Really, the amount I’m getting to see, and the number of different kids I’m getting to observe things with, is really awesome. On the other hand, while I don’t know that I was really expecting to do a lot of actual work, I feel frustrated by the fact that I’m completely unnecessary here. They’re doing me a favor, and helping me out; I’m serving a very small part in a hospital with a lot of people. FLENI is a not-for-profit organization, but it has a lot of money and a lot of staff, and that’s awesome. It just leaves me without much I could do to help.

What I really enjoy about what I’m doing here is the stuff I wanted to come here and work with: floortime, the therapy I’ve talked about before. This takes up around half of my time at FLENI, and when we’re doing floortime, I get to be actually engaged. Maria, who I work for, does a lot of teaching and organizing, and all of that is fine, but just a stream of fast Spanish of which I understand only some. When we’re doing floortime, whether it’s with Maria or Belén, I can actually engage with them and with the kids directly — most of these kids have very few language skills, and so my Spanish is generally sufficient to at least attempt to link with them. Sometimes it’s fantastic, and other times floortime is a really frustrating experience, wherein I realize that even Belén or Maria are having trouble engaging the kid, and there’s no way I’m going to. Today was one of those days — I followed Belén’s working with four different kids, and it went from not-so-good to completely-impossible: F., who lay down and didn’t speak, forcing Belén to play with him tactilely. G., who chirps like a bird and who moved from game to game, unwilling to focus, before finally signing that he wanted to leave. And then L., who spent the entire twenty to thirty minutes trying to get up on the trampoline, before finally getting up, becoming scared, and sitting down, not speaking at all. And lastly G., who’s deaf, and responds poorly to anything at all.

One of the DIR concepts is that of vínculo, which I know is a word that just sort of means “link” (it’s the word internet browsers use for “links,” leastways), but which I take in DIR theory to mean more explicitly the moment of engagement between two individuals, wherein communication occurs. And a lot of floortime is about creating these vínculos, and sustainig them. Sustained engagement, circles of communication. And it’s frustrating when I can’t be part of them, but more frustrating still when no one is. When you’re just watching someone else be frustrated.

Anyway, tomorrow will probably be better.

So I bought a kilogram of chicken over the weekend, and I had a giant chicken breast left to figure out something to do with. I complained to Rachel that I didn’t know how to cook chicken, and she told me, well, why don’t you grill it?

At first I was going to laugh at her, but then I realized that hey, Elena has a stove-top grill, which I can totally use. And then I thought, oh-my-god, I can make chicken satay. Then I remembered that I don’t know how to, but I do know how to make a basic marinade with yoghurt and curry. And so I put on some Andrew Bird this evening, after buying two potatoes and some string beans and an avocado, and marinated the chicken in curry powder, plain yoghurt, red pepper flakes, and a bit of lemon juice. I grilled the garlic first, while boiling the potatoes, and then tossed the garlic into the water to soften it up, and grilled the chicken and some of a leftover green pepper. It stuck to the pan like all hell (I guess I should’ve greased it? I’m not sure), but it cooked through well enough, and the garlic & potatoes mashed perfectly with a bit of butter, and the green beans got steamed over potato water with lemon & soy sauce. (The avocado got chopped and set next to the chicken.) The only failure was my attempt at a sauce; I tried to make use of the leftover yoghurt mixture, but I really needed some chicken broth, I suppose, because it wasn’t enough, and using soy sauce to thin it out just didn’t work (it tasted way too salty and soy-y).

But aye: really good garlic mashed potatoes, even without milk; I alternated bites of mashed-potatoes-and-chicken with bites of avocado-and-chicken, and grilled green pepper and steamed green beans. And then I was pleased with myself and decided to write it all down.

I totally don’t know to cook for just one, though.

Speaking of food, I was at a grocery store the other day, walking through the jam section, and I got an intense craving for nutella. So, of course, I looked for it. They didn’t sell nutella, but they did have two chocolate-based spreads: one with hazelnuts that looked like a nutella rip-off to me, and one with peanuts that was cheaper and looked like Argentine industry’s finest. So I bought that one. And it’s absolutely bloody delicious.

My sister Rachel left yesterday afternoon for Chile and thence Bolivia, but that’s okay.

For one, I went yesterday evening with Kateland (Rachel’s friend from her program), her family, Natanya (another friend from her program), and her family, to this place called CAFF (Club Atletico Fernandez Fierro), which has modern tango music on Wednesday nights; it was really good music, and the place was rather cool. They do one Saturday a month as well; I’d like to take my parents there if it works out. The musicians were just, really fucking into the music; there were four awesome accordionists, two bassists, a pianist, three violinists, and a singer, all male, and all dancing to themselves and concentrated. Intense.

And then this afternoon after work, I joined the same group again for a tour of MALBA (Museo de Arte Latinoamericana de Buenos Aires), which I’ve already been to, but a tour (in English) arranged by Kateland’s parents was fun and somewhat interesting. It made me lazy, though, in that I ended up not going to yoga, and instead just talking on the internet and reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (by Michael Chabon), which is pretty damn amazing thus far.

And Monday is a holiday.

In any case, when I got here I had no spices, and so I bought pepper; we’ve got salt. Technically I suppose I could use some of Elena’s spices, but they’re all unlabeled, and I’d feel bad, regardless. In any case, I ended up buying curry powder and red pepper flakes, and honestly it was the best decision ever, because if I want something to be spicey, I get a delicious curry flavor. Which is really to say that I made a really simple chicken curry last night and will make something vaguely similar tonight. (They sold me three chicken breasts for $20 pesos, and I wasn’t sure if I could ask them for just one, so I am using them one-at-a-time. They’re fucking huge — literally a kilogram of meat. And pretty good, I’d say. If I knew how to shop for it, I’d probably try and cook some red meat, but I don’t really know how, which is weird. I’m very limited in terms of buying and cooking. Some things are easy to figure out, but meat is not one of them, or rather not if you want to be safe.

Okay, right, babbling ’bout cooking.

I guess I can about-face and talk briefly about my second experience at Carolina Tobar García, the public mental hospital. I arrive this morning at 7:40 AM, after getting out of my apartment by 7 and taking the subte — it’s astonishing how many people there were at Constitución, the stop I got off at (and the end of the C-line), at like 7:30 AM. This is presumably because Constitución is also the end-point of a lot of train lines, which bring people into the city from the North — that is to say, people who work elsewhere in the city, but live from outside, come through here on their commute. When I got off the train, there (and very few people come in this way), I literally waded through people to get out. (It’s also amazing that while I had to switch lines and take the subte the length of a line-and-a-half, I still managed to make it to the hospital in half the time it took to make it by bus last Friday, even though the bus is much more direct. The buses are great if you’ve got time or are going somewhere the subte doesn’t go, but even if it’s a farther walk, it’s totally worth it to take the subte where you can.)

Anyway, I actually got there slightly early, so I wandered around outside in the cloudy dawn, and took pictures of the outsides of Borda and Tobar García, the two mental hospitals on this block (on the other block is Moyano, which is a women’s mental hospital; Borda is men, Tobar García is kids). Unfortunately, I can’t upload my pictures until I get my camera charger; I’m really hoping I can get some pictures at FLENI before it dies (else the CPGC will be sad). Still, these photos would be worth it; these places looked fantastic in morning half-light.

I went in closer to 8, and Marco introduced me again to Stella, who’s the chief of Admissions. I was ushered into a small room, peeling paint, along with three of the residents and an older woman who introduced herself as, I think, Iliana. We sat along the side of the table & she sat behind it — there was a one-way mirror along the wall, but apparently they don’t go for subtle, here. (That’s unfair — from my understanding, they can’t use the one-way mirrors anymore because all of the audio equipment has been stolen. This used to be a really well-equipped hospital, according to Sebastián.) We watched an interview of a grandmother and her grandson; the players switched, and I watched an interview of a pregnant mother, with her two hyperactive sons. I won’t write about the interviews here, but they were seriously unreal. These people were smiling and crying; the kids were oblivious. They went for maybe an hour or so each, and then the psychologist or doctor gave a treatment plan, as if everything was solvable, all of us knowing it wasn’t quite. No diagnosis really necessary — no insurance to bill, I guess.

At around 11, the interviews were over, and so I left. It was drizzling lightly, but I walked into Borda and walked around a little bit. No one bothered me, but it was bizarre to see an older man busking in the hospital hallway. I wanted to take some photographs, but was mighty uncomfortable.

I walked to Boca in the drizzle, a really tourist-y barrio not all that far away, just closer to the river, and walked down el Caminito, a corner of streets that was bright-colored & tourist trap nightmare. I ate my lunch sitting under a tree, looking over the dark, empty port (most shipping happens up-river, now), the tree blocking most of the rain. After lunch, I walked back down the road, and got pulled into a bar by a woman whose job, I suppose, was to lure tourists. (Lure makes this sound evil; she asked me if I wanted to come see a tango show, and I figured why not.) Today was a day for staying inside; I was the only one there, and all I wanted was a coffee. I watched the tango dancers, who were dressed well and not half bad (although not great; they were dancing in a bar mid-day on a Monday), and watched tourists take photographs with them (I was tempted, but held back, not sure why except that I hate feeling too much like a tourist). And then I finished my coffee, took out my Guia, and figured out a bus route home, which I took, and which dropped me off two blocks from my house after probably an hour of winding through the city.

I want to go make dinner. I want “Dexter” to be on TV again (I watched it last night for the first time! it was really quite good!).

I still intend to go to the Recoleta Cemetery sometime soon, but perhaps I should save that for when my parents are here; I definitely want to go to the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. Perhaps this weekend.

No, I’m not really sure why this is a separate entry from the previous. Other than that it wasn’t conneced thematically (but when has that ever stopped me).

The hospital isn’t awful. It’s just pretty damn bad — there’s in article in The Daily Profile, here, that details (in Spanish) just how much is wrong with this place. In essence, though, the building is really fucking old, and the new building still isn’t finished, and they don’t have great equipment — so although there are some talented doctors, and they have good training, they can’t do all that much.

Anyway, let’s start up top. I was supposed to get there at like 9:30, so I figured I’d take a 9 AM bus, get there maybe fifteen minutes late, and all would be well. I got out a little late, waited for the bus for a while, and it took longer than expected; I got off a little before 10:30. Okay, you know, it’s not like they’re waiting for me. I was mildly upset, but not really. I walked down Brandsen, crossed under the autopista and uner the train tracks, and got onto Carrillo, which is where the hospital is. And then I madea huge mistake: I turned left. Let me tell you: left was not a hospital. Left was wall, all the way down, wall covered with graffiti. It was a beautiful morning; it was bright; I wasn’t unsafe. I just wasn’t where I needed to be. At the end is a giant area where they load trains and trucks, with who-knows-what; Barracas is still a factory district. I turned right onto Suarez, and essentially walked up a street filled entirely with trucks. Huge, hulking monstrousities, hauling what-the-ever, lorry-loads of Things. The paths were covered with leaves (it’s still technically autumn here, remember), blowing in the wind, crunching under my feet. Then I turned and I walked up Perdriel. Essentially, I circled the entire block — and this is not a small block, this is at least a kilometer of walking. And then I called Sebastián, who I was supposed to meet.

And Sebastián told me that I essentially had circled the WRONG block — there were indeed hospitals there, right where I had started, but they weren’t even the ones I wanted. No matter — I found my way to Borda, the adult neuropsychiatric hospital, and he found me there, and showed me around. The first thing I noticed was that there were people asking for change outside of the front entrance. The second thing I noticed was that the entire thing looked as much like a prison as like a hospital. My view of prison is tempered by my restorative justice class taught at the Detention Center in Philadelphia, but the lights were the same — not the bright, clean white light I associate with hospitals, not the white light and sunlight of FLENI, but flickering and yellow. Old lights. Sebastian showed me the different parts of the hospital (and, amusingly, I can’t think of the right words in English to describe them), the consulting rooms, the chapel, the fields, the cafeteria, the research and laboratory, the rooms for the… shit, internados, the kids who stay there. Apparently, there are around 70 of them — he said that they’re only supposed to stay for a few weeks, but sometimes parents just don’t come back. A lot of the kids who are inpatients are violent, apparently, or have violent outbursts — schizophrenia, or sometimes autism, but dangerous to themselves or others. Which makes sense, of course.

Essentially, Sebastián showed me around to the different parts of the hospital, showed me the outpatient services, which is where he work, and then introduced me to some of the psychologists who work there. One of them, a big, bearded man eating in the break room, stood up to greet me. I’m still unsure about why he was happy to see me, other than that he spoke some English — I also don’t really know who he was; he just looked like a Freudian. But he shook my hand, crumbs in his beard, asked me how I was and where I was from, and then we turned to go. As I walked out, he called, “Eh, ¡Che!” (Che, here, is sort of like “man,” only more gender-neutral and age-neutral; I’ve heard parents use it with their children, girls use it with their female friends, and so on. This is not what was funny.) He asked me, then, “Eh, who do you prefer, Obama, or…” I shrugged my shoulders, and said, “Obama, naturalmente.” Anyway, the point was that this giant bearded psychologist who I met for twenty seconds immediately asked me about my political affiliations. Rachel tells me this has been overwhelmingly her experience here, but this was my first brush with it.

And then, maybe only two hours after I got there, maybe less, Sebastián left me with the head of the residents, Marco, who is another friend of Maria’s, and who was very helpful and friendly, and spoke English with a British tinge, and had a black sweater and a soul patch and seemed, like everyone here, younger than he probably is. And in the space of 10 minutes, Marco had arranged for me to return Monday morning at 8 AM (actually on-time, this time, ugh) and watch the admissions procedures for inpatients. I think. That part was in Spanish. 8 AM, definitely. Monday, definitely. What I’ll be doing, not so clear — and honestly, I don’t think it was my Spanish so much as that they didn’t really tell me. But hey, I’m interested, and it should be a good time, no?

Maybe “good time” isn’t quite right. Regardless.

I really want to go back there and take photographs, but I don’t know how much that’d be possible; I also don’t want to run out of battery without getting pictures at FLENI. I’ll consider it.

Right right, enough enough. I think I shall nap, now, or maybe go to yoga… And besides, it’s a Friday, and I should figure out something to do this evening. Oh, how frustrating this life! (Hah.) In any case, to explorations and new places, and a fond farewell.

1. I found a place that has yoga classes that I like, and I’ve gone to them. I’ve missed two that I meant to go to since the first one, but I’m sure I’ll go again, and they have both Iyengar and Ashtanga yoga, hurray.
2. I found a copy of Isabel Allende’s La Casa de los Espíritus, and started reading it. I’ve finished Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal; this is considerably more difficult. (It starts off with a lot of words about mourning, religion, and piety, and damn me if I knew any of them.) I’ll try it without a dictionary eventually, but for now I’m looking up words right and left.
3. I started reading Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase, which is apparently his first well-known book; it’s really good thus far. (I read about 150 pages in two days, but then I started the Allende.) I think I can sort of see the ways that his confounding explanations have improved since this one, but as always I like reading the way he writes. Sometimes these books feel so foreign (well, they are indeed written originally in Japanese), and sometimes so very American. It’s cool to feel.
4. I bought delicious dates filled with… well, I’m not quite sure. Some kind of nut.
5. I got my clothes washed, my dress shirts pressed, and everything folded, for $15 pesos.
6. I found cocoa butter (I mean, this was quite a task! I’m not sure if pharmacies didn’t have it, or if I just hadn’t been looking closely enough, but nowhere had any signs of lip balm; of course, I should’ve probably just asked for manteca de cacao, which is what this is called anyway), which is a blessing since my lips had been quite painful.
7. I figured out where the post office is! So as soon as I go somewhere and find more postcards, I can begin sending them. I should probably send my cousins and grandmother ones… I guess I need addresses.
8. I decided to actually start doing things on the afternoons I get back before five — like, going to museums, or exploring places in the city I haven’t been yet. I even made myself a list.
9. The list of films that they’re showing at MALBA this month actually came out. I lied about French New Wave, although an occasional film falls into that category, but they’re showing a few films I want to see: Polanski’s Cul-de-sac this weekend, Teshigahara’s Woman of the Dunes. And then they’re also showing some movies that would be fun to see, especially in Buenos Aires: Yellow Submarine, Rocky Horror Picture Show. I guess I mentioned all of this already.
10. I guess that’s about it. Still, better to buoyed up than weighed down, says I.

I think it’s clear from the way these entries are going why I didn’t want to have this be officially a blog for the CPGC. Besides the fact that those never work out so well, I also am talking only occasionally about my project. Which, honestly, is as it should be.

2. I have been trying to write a lot. I am sort of succeeding. I mean write fiction and stories and sketches, and it’s good to do. On the other hand, I’m certainly succeeding in writing about my trip on here. I’m sort of sad that I’m not writing so much in my journal, but it’s a lot easier to write on here, and a lot faster, and easier to go back and edit… still, I’ll definitely have my journal ten years from now. But where will this be?

Tonight, my sister Rachel and I were going to go to this Vegeterian restaurant, but she called me when we went to meet up, and said, no, come to the Bulnes subte stop, my friends are going to be there and they are going to this peña and we should join them. So I said, sure, definitely, why not, I haven’t really been to a traditional parrilla yet, and it’s not like I can’t eat vegeterian food any time, and anyway Rachel had been feeling sort of sick so she can’t eat much wherever we go. So we went.

The place was indeed one of those recommended by Nora; it’s called the Peña del Colorado (website), and it was a small, homey-is-the-only-word place, with a big grill in the back and a small stage in the front. Rachel and I hadn’t made reservations, but they were able to seat us all together, and we sat and ordered food and wine and watched the show when it started at 22:00 or so. (I love that they use a 24-hour-clock here; it’s so nice, especially since I always try to use one at home and no one is ever willing to deal with it.) The singer was this woman named Gabriela Torres, and we collectively decided that she was nice to listen to but that we wouldn’t ever really put her on at home; I really liked some of her accompaniment, like the harmonica and the flute.

The food was really very good; I got my first steak since I was maybe 10 (I’m making that up; I’ve no memory of when I last actually ordered steak, rather than chicken or fish), and it was really delicious so long as I didn’t think about it. The wine, for $12 a bottle, was perfectly fine (remember, that’s fucking $4 US), and in general it was a pretty cool experience, although they ran out of flan before I’d ordered it (I never get to have flan here when I want it! and the one time I did, it was sort of bad and I could’ve sworn that my flan is better). I had café con crema instead, which was nice. (I’ve been into drinking coffee here, even though I so rarely drink it in the states; it’s something reasonably inexpensive to buy, and it gives you something to do.)

Earlier today, I went to the Feria de Mataderos, in Mataderos, which is a barrio in the south-west of the city. It was an hour-long bus-ride, and I’m actually sort of proud of myself for figuring it out and going on my own. Todd F had recommended it, and it was a pretty cool time; it’s less tourist-y than, say, San Telmo, in the least because it’s not on a subway line, and there was a lot more music and dancing, and good food, including tamales (oh man, so delicious), and lots of sweets. I talked myself out of buying cotton candy, twice. I want to go back with more than $30; there was some cool stuff there — all I ended up buying was a bombilla for my mate gourd, since the wooden one Rachel bought me, as nice as it is, got clogged immediately when I tried to actually use it.

Ferias are, well fairs, street fairs, clogged with vendors, and foodsellers, and people. I don’t know how better to explain them.

Tomorrow morning I am going to a yoga class, if I can get up in time to make myself. If I like it, I imagine I will buy a pass and go once a week, although not necessarily on Monday mornings. The place I’m thinking of going is surprisingly not-cheap; it ends up being more than yoga is at the place I go to near Haverford (although certainly cheaper than anywhere I’ve been to other than that; Daniel, who owns the Haverford place, gives fantastic discounts to students).

Saturday I finally went to MALBA, the museum Joe had told me about; it was pretty good, but in general I wasn’t horribly impressed; they had a floor devoted to Tarsila do Amaral, a Brasilian artist who was, errr, okay. I mean, fine, I loved some of her dream paintings, but in general I wasn’t so impressed. I just like dreamscapes.

MALBA also has a film series, and regular daily screenings in their auditorium (you can only look at the schedue if you’re on the Spanish version of their website). From the looks of it, they’re going to be doing a French New Wave cycle this month, which is exciting — I can see French movies with Spanish subtitles! I imagine I’ll go at least to a few films; I’ve been wanting to educate myself a bit more about French film. And they’re showing Rocky Horror Picture Show, twice, and especially since Joe said it was fun, I shall have to go and see it in Spanish. Or, I guess, subtitled in Spanish. Jesus, it’s been a long time since I actually saw Rocky Horror.

Saturday night I didn’t leave my apartment, I don’t think.

Which brings us up to now, temporally oddly, but nonetheless. I have lost some English syntactical ability, and my keyboard makes it so that every time I try to type some, literally every time, I type smoe instead. Fucking A. This is what I get for pretending that a toy computer is a real one.

I wish I was taking more pictures. I’m not allowed to photograph at FLENI, so I won’t get pictures of the kids I’m working with, which does make sense I suppose; still, I should take some pictures more than I am. I should’ve purchased a small camera for this; I always feel so awkward with my gigantocam. Regardless, when I get the chance I will indeed upload some photos onto Rachel’s computer, thence resized, and thence to the web.

Until then, folks.

Today I slept a lot, by which I mean I woke up feeling sick, didn’t end up going to observe at the public hospital (I’ll go next week), and slept until… well, really late. I hate doing that, both because I’m not here for that long and because I feel disoriented for sleeping so long, but it was perhaps in general a good thing, since I feel better now.

This evening I made myself a tofu-and-eggplant stir fry, served over rice (yeah, I know this is Argentina, I found tofu at a health food store, and dammit it’s still lots cheaper than good meat, and I like tofu a lot, so.. shrug). And then I went out to a bar I had been wanting to go to, called Kim y Novak, at 4900 Gūemes, and had a drink, solo. Being at a bar is reasonably awkward when you’re alone, which I’d never much thought about before, but I liked this bar a lot — it had a cool atmosphere, relatively good music, and a clientele that made me feel comfortable. Some plus-es: there were two house dogs running around; there was a kid there who looked a lot like Louis Garrel; while I sat at the bar, an old woman came in, wearing a fur coat, and sat on the couch with her tiny dog, and had a champagne. While young folks ran about. Supposedly, there’s good dancing downstairs later in the evening; I shall have to go back with friends, later than just 1:30.

When I got home I took a photo of myself on my laptop’s camera and managed to upload it (it’s not a good picture; think of it as proof that I’m alive, sort of like the way a kidnapper might take a photo with a newspaper). I may not have mentioned that I brought my OLPC with me, but I did, and it turns out to be quite useful, and really entirely functional for what I would want it to do. In any case, picture below, and goodnight folks; I’ll try and upload some photographs from my own camera at some point soon.

Saturday night I hung out with Fernando, who worked at the hostel I was staying at then, and his friends; I spent a long while listening to them chatter in Argentine youth Spanish without understanding a word (well, I got “boludo”), as they smoked atop the hostel roof, and ate pizza with jam and olives. After a while, I ended up with Fernando and two of his friends at this tiny club behind a restaurant; one of the girls’ friends was playing in a band there. It was drumming music, and it was really cool to hear; Rachel and her friends took me to (La Bomba de Tiempo) Konex on Monday night, which was very similar, but much more touristy. Konex had at least a thousand people; this had maybe 100 Argentine kids, and was very dark. Both were great; Fernando and I danced and tried to talk a little, but his English was about as bad as my Spanish. Monday I moved into my new place. Tuesday and Wednesday were calm.

Since, after all, work starts early.

So my day begins at 6:30 AM, since there’s no room on the 6:30 combi and thus I “have” to take the 8 AM one (thank God). I awaken, shower in the tiny bathroom of Elena’s apartment where I am staying, trying to be quiet so I don’t awaken Omar (he’s nice; I’d just feel bad). (Oh, right — I’m in an apartment on Paraguay, between Vidt & Salguero; it’s reasonably nice.) I make toast on the stove-top toaster, and spread some dulce de leche and some jam on bread and run out the door. I walk five blocks or so to the Bulnes stop on the D line, catch the D subte towards Congreso de Tucumán, and get off at Juramento.

It’s another 15 minutes walk to FLENI, where I get there early enough to read for five minutes while I await the combi. It’s quite prompt, considering that people rely on it to make it to work on-time (or maybe just because FLENI is FLENI), and I sleep on the van on the way there, because dammit it’s early.

Generally I drink a coffee from the machine in the kiosk once I get there — $.75 for a cup, and that’s in pesos. And then I walk back to CETNA, to the school, to Aula 5 which is also Maria’s office. I leave my bag in the back, and talk to Maria about what I’m going to do today.

This week Belén is not around because she’s been sick, and a lot of working with children with special needs involves placing your face very near theirs, so — no Belén. Thus I followed Paola and watched as she played basic language games with Ernesto, a smiling nine-year-old with a buzz-cut and a quick-turning head. He’s a little bit beyond some of the games he was playing, which is to say he knows the date and he knows the day and what it’s like outside, and when you have his attention he can say them. Watching is perhaps not the best word — I was vaguely involved, but peripheral; I was someone to involve when he wasn’t paying attention.

Floortime is different, and that’s what I’m here for, after all; at 10 and 1, I helped Maria with two floortime sessions. The first was diagnostic, and we played with Lucia on the mats, getting her to ask us to eat plastic-food. DIR diagnosis involves watching how children interact, looking at eye contact, noticing whether they initiate or not, observing the type of play, and placing them at levels in comparison to their age — for a gross simplification of something that, I’ll remind you, I’m observing in Spanish. Lucia comes back on Wednesday, and we play with her again — she tosses balls across the room, and we yell for them, “Amarillo! Donde estas, amarillo?” Lucia has troube initiating games, and her play is not symbolic as it should be at her age, but she’s delayed only, thinks Maria, not PDD. Next week, Maria and the fonoaudoloigio (I misspelled that I’m sure; speech therapist) and the OT and the Neurologist and whoever else will meet and discuss a diagnosis.Wednesday morning I had the privelege of watching musicoterapia, Music Therapy, which primarily involved a pretty young woman with a guitar singing to kids who are semi-engaged, but was beautiful to watch. They began with a little song, one for each of the kids: «Hola, Santi, hola y como estas? Con la mano arriba, nos vamos a saludar.» I’ll sing it to you if you ask nicely.

Today Maria sent me home early (well, I’d been there four-and-a-half hours only) because she had nothing left to do, but I spent the morning talking with her about Lucia, above, and about FLENI’s design; I got to watch some of the other kids, and spent some time reading aticles from Greenspan & Wieder she’d assigned me, and one on the changing paradigm of autism therapy. I’m really proud of how well I can get through these articles on autism; I’m also reading Harry Potter y la Piedra Filosofal, which is surprisingly easy going. (I think my written-Spanish is a little ahead of my spoken, eh). At the end of the day, I took part in a class Maria is giving to the young women who are doing a year of training (not quite, but similar to, a residency) at FLENI on Floortime; she talked to them about how development is supposed to go, and showed videos of infants engaging — it’s a really good thing that I know the basic terms here, or this  would’ve been impossible going, but once I’ve got «desarrollo» (development) and a few others like «enganchar» (engage, as they use it) or «vinculos» (connections, more or less), I’m understanding at least the generalities of the conversation.

The woman who drove me home this afternoon was one of the others in that session, and we spoke most of the drive, about psychology and languages and how therapy works here. In general, I think we understood each other which is sort of amazing when you think about it.

As has been pointed out, perhaps my internship leans more towards the Global Citizenship part of the CPGC’s mission at Haverford, but I’m learning so much about psychology, and I feel like the people at FLENI are happy to have me there, even if my position functions more as validation than as help. I don’t know if that makes sense; I’m going to take a nap. Tonight Rachel and I are hopefully going to a club for my first time since I’ve been here; tomorrow I am going to the public hospital to observe for a day. Life is interesting. More about social things next time, perhaps.

Today I got to do some floortime with Belen, and then watched some classrooms, and some really basic therapy that looked like discrete trials to me. I talked to Belen for a while; I really like her. She’s, I believe, about seven years older than me (she laughed and told me I was young when I said my age), and she’s quite patient about letting me speak in Spanish, which is nice. (She speaks English, but not too much better than I speak Spanish.) I wonder if a lot of these women are married, or if they’re putting career first; I wonder if they have other jobs, especially those that only work at FLENI for a few hours.

The kids here come every day, or a few days a week, or even just a few hours a week, for therapy. The plus side is that, for those who need it, there are all sorts of types of therapy: physical therapy, music therapy, kinesthetics, occupational therapy, speech therapy, floortime, basic behavioral autism therapies…so for the most part, the therapists who work with each kid are tailored to what that child needs. Thus someone with severe language difficulties will maybe be working a lot with a speech pathologist, and so on.

It’s weird, though, to realize that Belen, for example, is in a leadership position (of a sort) here at FLENI, while when I am her age I may still be in school. Like: how very strange that our educational systems are so different. I like that I have a lot of time to consider, and think, and decide; I don’t need to know where I want to end up, now. But still.

Last night Rachel and I bought pasta and sauce and made it with some veggies in the kitchen at my hostel; it was nice to eat something we had made ourselves. I am going to go and write some emails about apartments, now.

I have been trying to write stories, but I’m lazy and uncreative. I am terrified of not wanting to write at all while I am here.