Tango, Inc.

If you come to Buenos Aires as a tourist, you'll see plenty of tango. Tango shows -- "espectaculos" -- are hawked everywhere, and eager young dancers perform in major tourist areas.

But you can't appreciate the reach of the tango industry unless you come to dance. Then you'll seek out brochures and magazines filled with listings for every aspect of tango. On any given day there will be as many as 30 "milongas" -- tango social dances -- held all over the city. (And that doesn't include a number of more informal neighborhood milongas.) Often these start at 10PM and go until 3, 4 and even 5 in the morning, with the hours trending later as the week progresses. They are sweet affairs, held in big places and small, and mostly quite unpretentious.

There are also dozens of tango shoe vendors, clothing purveyors and guest houses. There is zen tango, gay tango and tango therapy. (The latter is redundant for all but the self-unaware.) From a small number of tango "maestros," the ranks of teachers has ballooned in the last decade, making for much discussion as to "authentic" versus arriviste.


And, as of this week, there is an official Tango Monument, unveiled in Puerto Madero, a new development on the river side of downtown BA, rather like Portland's Pearl District, but on a much grander scale. The product of collaboration between the city and numerous tango and neighborhood organizations, the monument was unveiled with much fanfare, music and dance this week. It takes its shape from a stretched bandoneon, the signature instrument of tango. The fact that, from many angles, it looks also like a giant metal Slinky, shall be but quietly noted.

So Tango, Inc. is building momentum. There are are now tango "competitions," a grotesque idea, since the soul of tango is a communion, or connection, between partners, and with the music and the floor, resulting in an improvised dance. I have no idea how one might fairly score that.

Still, there is an element in the tango world which seems to favor athleticism over connection. (Tango, well-danced, actually is more athletic than it sometimes looks; what I refer to here are very vigorous, acrobatic movements which upstage musicality.) There even has been talk of lobbying to make tango an Olympic event. Puhleeze. Tango as the new ice dancing? it's an abhorrent thought, but one with much more profit potential than the milongas we have now. Full-time dancers no more crave to be starving artists than the rest of us.

Everyone who dances Argentine tango probably has experienced the moment when, having just confessed his obsession, she hears this response: "Oh, yeah, I saw that on 'Dancing With The Stars!.'" Well, no. That would be ballroom tango. A different animal. But the differences, at least in some sectors, may be narrowing.

It's the weekend. The weather has recovered from its record-breaking spring chill and I celebrated by going native.

That is, I went to a mall.

Malls have become the new town square for many of the world's cities, and Baires is no exception. I wanted to finger the goods and check out the vibe. I chose the solidly middle-class Abasto mall, an enormous converted train station. with 4 or 5 levels of shops, a playground, numerous fast-food places, and -- most remarkable -- a ferris wheel and other carnival rides. Disney had a space for little kids to sing karaoke tunes from "High School Musical." Stores rocked with "wanna-buy, wanna-buy" music.

Shopping in Baires pits my relatively conservative taste (probably news to some of you) against the Argentine love for things that are dramatic, revealing and precariously engineered. Grab an inviting garment off the rack and you will likely find that, instead of the simple black top you had thought, it plunges to the waist front and back and all of its parts are held together by tiny chains. Or perhaps it has a large cut-out exposing areas of your body you prefer to leave to the imagination. Or maybe it has a cat's cradle of straps which you must decipher before you even start to put it over your head. As a matter of principle, a piece of clothing that requires me to figure out how to get it on doesn't make the cut.

I lasted about 2 hours before bolting from the glossy surfaces of the mall into the decaying streets of the neighborhood, celebrated as the barrio where the great tango troubadour Carlos Gardel grew up. I came away with a pair of leggings and a tee shirt -- not one of those boxy things we wear in North America, but a tight, black off-the-shoulder affair. It's front is adorned with faintly shiny black stars.

As I say, I went native.

Money, and all that garbage

I have just finished tearing my credit card receipts into hundreds of tiny pieces. I put the pieces in a paper bag and stirred them a bit, like raffle tickets. Then I drew out a handful and put it in the garbage. Each night, as I put out the trash, I will throw another handful in.

I observe this ritual because I know my garbage will be picked through. Not by thieves. Not by government agents, in any but the broadest sense. But by the poor, who are Buenos Aires' quasi-official recycling program.

Few sights are as unsettling to visitors to this city as the "cartoneros," who appear at dusk pulling huge cartloads loaded with plastic, metal, paper ("carton") and glass. Some are adolescent boys; others are mothers trailing young children. (Photo courtesy of Gonzaaaa on Flickr.) Their job is to sort through the city's trash and extract recyclables, which they sell for cash. The scavenging is very orderly. There are assigned routes and "stations" on each block for the picking through process.

Two years ago, according to a story that ran in La Nacion (whose statistics were translated by long-time expat blogger Ian Mount at (http://www.goodairs.com/), there were an estimated 20,000 cartoneros netting 70 million pesos annually. Approximately half of the cartoneros were registered officially with the government, which provides a bare-bones train ("El Tren Blanco") to bring them in from the exurban slums. Rubber gloves appear to be optional. But the public health issues are not.

A few days ago, I read in one of the local dailies that the city is rolling out a regulation requiring residents to separate recyclables from wet garbage. So far, this requirement applies only to hotels, certain businesses, apartment buildings taller than 19 stories, and one or two neighborhoods.

How this recycling program came to be is the kind of absurdist invention that might feather the imagination of a novelist like Gabriel Garcia Marquez. What follows is an approximate narrative, cobbled together from a number of sources. Its particulars are rough, by journalism standards, but, as Chicago journalists have been heard to say, "Never let the facts stand in the way of a good story."

Before 2001, the city had entrusted recycling to private enterprise, which could offer a market, but apparently couldn't put together a work force to serve it. In late 2001-early 2002, Argentina's jerry-rigged economy collapsed. This period featured a revolving door of 5 presidents, each new leader emerging to present a new rabbit from a new hat, maneuvers that made 3-card monte look transparent by comparison. (For a more complete account, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_economic_crisis_(1999-2002).} When all the sleights of hand had been exhausted, the Argentine peso, which had been pegged one-to-one with the dollar, was allowed to float. At one point, it lost 75% of its value. It is now trading at approximately 3 pesos to 1 dollar.

Many of the poor lost jobs no longer supported by a suddenly strapped middle class. They turned to garbage-picking. There were leaders in the slums who organized the scavengers. Middle-men emerged to process the haul. By mid-2002, the government had provided, free-of-charge, El Tren Blanco. Some people say this was in response to demands by slum leaders. Others say it was in response to outraged cries by regular commuters who protested the huge bags of trash being dragged onto their commuter trains.

Now the cartoneros have volunteer-staffed day-care for infants and toddlers, and public health care. And Buenos Aires has a recycling program.

La lingua no es franca

My brain is ajostle with languages. Spanish has to fight hard to be noticed, let alone used. And Buenos Aires Spanish does not exactly elbow for position. With a big city's indifference to accommodation, it speaks a Spanish just far enough from the norm to keep strangers at a remove.

To the casual ear, the Buenos Aires dialect, with its swoop and lilt, sounds more Italian than Spanish, as befits the population here. It's pleasing to the ear in a way that some pocketa-pocketa Spanish is not.

But it can be confounding. For Americans, Spanish has always been billed as "the accessible foreign language." It's the one where all the letters are supposed to sound out, and, if you can master the trilling "r," you're set.

Not so fast.

Porteno Spanish drops the "s" at the ends of many words, thus eliding them with the next word. And in place of the "y" sound associated with "y" and "ll" in much of the Spanish-speaking world, it uses "szh," kind of a cross between an "sh" and a "j." "Ayuda" becomes "aszhuda." "Calle" becomes "caszhay." "Me llamo Johanna" becomes "me szhamo Johanna."

On one of my first days here, I was told that what I was seeking was on the corner of such-and-such street and "Szhatay," I consulted my map and gradually realized that the letters I was seeking would have to be re-imagined based on Porteno phonetic rules. Eventually, I found the street: Yatay. Of course. How silly of me. I realized then that all the "y" and "ll" words in my small Spanish vocabulary needed to be relearned if I were to hope to understand anything said to me.

In any case, I'm barely scraping the linguistic surface. Here's an interesting overview from infoplease.com:

"A fourth type of Spanish has developed in and around Buenos Aires and in parts of Uruguay. It is characterized by some out-of-date grammar, and a vocabulary and pronunciation heavily influenced by Italians who settled the area in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Generally in the Spanish world "tú" is the singular way of saying "you." In Buenos Aires, however, "vos" is used instead. It is accompanied by a modified old Spanish verb form. It is as if part of the English-speaking world still used "thee" and "thou" in everyday speech. .... The Buenos Aires accent is instantly recognizable throughout the Spanish world. Gaucho poetry and twentieth-century Buenos Aires novelists have preserved this speech as a literary style.

The influence of Italian has even led to the development of a separate language, Lunfardo, which blends Spanish and Italian. Argentine intellectuals have produced Lunfardo dictionaries and books in an effort to keep the language alive."

Lunfardo, as it happens, is the slang most often found in tango lyrics. It's associated with the slums. It draws heavily, sometimes literally, on Neapolitan Italian. A few examples:

To eat in Spanish: comer; in Italian: mangiare; in Lunfardo: manyar.
To speak in Spanish: hablar; in Italian: parlare; in Lunfardo: parlar.

I guess this explains why, when I've slipped a few times, drawing on years of French, and said "parlo" instead of "hablo," people here have looked rather startled. Ah, let them imagine the worst.

The gaucho is the Argentinean -- and Uruguayan -- cowboy. (For that matter, his counterpart is found in Chile and Brazil as well.) Today, he's a ranch manager or ranch hand, but in the early 19th century he was a guy imported from Spain's underclass to keep unfenced herds of cattle together. He was colorful, lived by his own code of honor, and often kept company with the country's indigenous Guarani, before the Guarani were wiped out in the 1870's. Here's a link with a brief overview: http://iq.lycos.co.uk/qa/show/118/Who+were+the+gauchos%3F/

San Antonio de Areco's gaucho flavor includes a gaucho museum, chiefly filled with artifacts derived from and about Ricardo Guiraldes (1886-1927), who wrote the definitive gaucho novel, Don Segundo Sombra. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Güiraldes) The museum recalls an old estancia, with the main house fortified with a moat, though not a particularly deep one. Still, I suppose it afforded one the chance to lock and load. The veranda is pictured above. There are estancias all over the region, many of them catering to guests. They are Argentina's dude ranches.

Besides the museum, and gorgeously tooled spurs and whips and stirrups for sale everywhere, San Antonio has several old-time "pulperias," which were combination bar/general stores. The one in the photo, on the town square and named Esquina de Merti, or "Merti's Corner," has decor which any restauranteur would kill for: high beamed ceilings, exposed brick, floor to ceiling shelves with dusty staples. And. when I walked in, sitting in the corner were a quartet of leathery gents in riding boots and berets sharing a beer. Some Mozart suddenly ruffled the silence, and one of them answered his cellphone. The modern gaucho.

Descanso en San Antonio de Areco

Fatigue from 2 weeks of dancing has set in. It is time to get out of Dodge. And all the savvy guidebooks imply that you really haven't seen Argentina until you've travelled as the Argentinians do -- on a double-decked, TV-outfitted, drinks-serving coche, complete with leather seats that recline fully, for those 36-hour jaunts to Mendoza.

I was going only to San Antonio de Areco, a bare 2 hours out of town, $15 round-trip, so we dispensed with the TV and the drinks. But the seats were sumptuous, and I felt, riding in the second story of this amazing conveyance, like a Maharani on her elephant. Drape me in silk and bejewel me. (Please.)

It took quite a while to get out of Buenos Aires. But at last we hit open road -- the fabled pampa. To my surprise, it looked a lot like Illinois -- verdant agricultural flatland punctuated by great stands of trees. Scratch one more exotic fantasy.

San Antonio de Areco, population 20,000, is the center of gaucho culture in Argentina. Its festival celebrating same happens next week and the town will be thronged by those wanting to see gaucho sports, dancing and parades. (Two of these involve horses.) But, for now, it is a tranquil place, filled with artisanal workshops making gaucho-related crafts -- silver, leather and weaving. And, for some reason, chocolate.

By American standards, this is a very low-key tourist attraction. It is quite in contrast to El Tigre. Signage is discreet and tasteful, Children go to school, sports are played, lives are led. It's the sort of place where dogs run free, and thus don't despoil the sidewalks, although any patch of grass is fair game. The odd sheep is let out to graze on the parkways. Tourism seems almost incidental. Yet there are more, and better, restaurants and shops than another town its size might boast.

My hotel, Paradores Draghi, is wonderful, a tiny inn attached to a silver workshop. Overnight is $43. (This is one reason tourists are flocking to Argentina.) I'm luxuriating in silky sheets and adequate toweling, the latter not a feature of my apartment. There is a small pool and fountain in the courtyard. Breakfast of croissants and jam is delivered to my door in the morning at 8:30. Sigh.

San Antonians ride bikes everywhere, and the hotel makes them available. So this morning I decided to take a spin myself. Many of you know that my relationship with bikes is tentative at best, since I didn't learn to ride as a child. Gary bought me my first bike shortly before I became pregnant with Pearson. But after hotel personnel reset the seat to a low and ridiculously inefficient height, I set out. The bikes are sturdy single-speeds with hand-brakes. Some of the roads are paved, some not, and there are no hills. I didn't really see anything I hadn't seen on foot. But somehow the interaction with the community felt different this way.

I've decided to stay a second night.

Eating in Baires

Eating in another country is, in some ways, about finding new comfort food. What can you ingest day after day that leaves you feeling sated and happy?

Generic food in Buenos Aires is bland, much to my surprise. The ingredients are wonderfully fresh, but salt is an option and pepper rarely supplied. Garlic is a mystery. Did all the Italian and Spanish immigrants drop it overboard crossing the Atlantic? If there is something on the menu labeled "piquante," I always order it, knowing that their "spicy" will be my "flavorful." Argentina must have the lowest rate of heartburn in the world.

The national dish is "parrilla," translated loosely as barbecue. The country is known for its livestock and, though it has over 3000 miles of coastline, seafood takes second billing. Great slabs of grilled meat are consumed ritualistically in every neighborhood. The other night, I got to go to an upscale parilla in the Palermo neighborhood, which had been mentioned that very week in the New York Times travel mag. Foodies were descending from everywhere, but, thanks to Karen and Mike, enterprising fellow tango students, we got there first. The good news is that the sauces served with these morsels of seared flesh were memorable.

There are lots of pizzerias, serving up a variety of styles, from flat to doughy. A spinach tortilla is very filling. "Tortillas" are grilled rounds of vegetables and cheese, like a quiche filling without a crust. And I can always find good, plainly dressed, salads.

Argentinians seem to make up for the lack of savory with an abundance of sweet. It is impossible to buy unsweetened yogurt or soy milk, for example. Confiterias are everywhere. But the best of Baires' Italian gastronomic heritage, I think, is in its abundance of heladerias, or gelatorias. The one around the corner from me serves up a divine concoction of figs and nuts.

Although mate drinking is an Argentine habit, the coffee is excellent. Perhaps that is my comfort food.