Not a Blog

The wedding episode

2007-02-14T21:31:00.000-03:00

As Beatriz threw the bouquet, everyone decided to take a picture and the resulting flash could be seen from space. Consequently, nobody has any idea who actually caught it.

The wedding, I am pleased to report, was a tremendous success. Much alcohol was consumed, the Mariachi band went down a storm, and even my parents joined in with the dancing, which went on until the small hours.

In lieu of a honeymoon, we went on a day tour up north where we got to see just about every type of landscape imaginable.

These are the Salinas Grandes (Big Salt Flats) in Jujuy. 30cm of salt floats on a lake. On top of the salt, craftsmen produce salt artifacts to sell, and half-blinded tourists stagger around taking photos and getting sunburnt.

This is the Hill (or hills) of Seven Colours, near the town of Pumarcarna.

We're currently relaxing in BA, where we're waiting for Beatriz's visa to be processed. In the meantime we're having a lot of siestas and generally taking it easy after the stress and sleeplessness of last week!

I bet I don't look good on the dancefloor

2007-02-07T11:38:00.000-03:00

The preparations continue...

The Waltz

Argentinean weddings don't have speeches. I guess they just kind of assume that everyone already knows the bride and groom and all the details of the relationship really well, so they don't need to bother.

Even though speeches are my favourite bit of wedding (if they're done well) I don't mind that we're not having any here. We're having a wedding party in Sheffield in April, so we'll do speeches aplenty then.

But what they do have is the waltz. I have to waltz with Beatriz, her mum and probably some other members of her family, and she has to do the same with mine. Only problem is, I haven't a clue how to waltz. And as it turns out, after she tried to teach me, Beatriz doesn't either.

Hopefully all will be saved by my mum and Auntie Gerry giving us a crash course tomorrow afternoon. Otherwise it will be a shambles and everyone will wish we'd done speeches instead.

El Mariachi

The wedding feast is to be partially accompanied by a mariachi band. One of them came to the house to arrange the details. I was disappointed that he had neither a moustache, nor a sombrero, nor even a comedy Mexican accent. He didn't look like Antonio Banderas either, but I wasn't so bothered about that. They'd better have all those things on the night though, or I'm calling the police.

The Greek Orthodox (?!)

Despite the Bible having much to say on the virtue of tolerance, as an atheist, the Catholic churches here won't touch me with a shitty stick. Not one to be deterred lightly however, Beatriz has been able to book us a ceremony at the Orthodox church. It's still Catholic enough for her, and tolerant enough for me. Beatriz's family aren't 100% behind us (wrong sort of God apparently) but never mind.

On Saturday we went to a pre-nuptial talk thingy where Beatriz warned me beforehand to be on my best behaviour and try not to say anything at all, for fear of getting us kicked out of the only church in town that will have us. She needn't have worried though - the Padre seems like a lovely chap and he explained that the ceremony basically involves us standing there and doing as we're told. We don't have to pretend to pray or anything. I asked some intelligent questions about icons and Russian crosses, and we got along just fine.

There is a part of the ceremony I'm a bit worried about, where they put crowns on our heads, and I might not be able to keep a straight face, but we'll just have to warn my parents beforehand not to laugh, and ban all photography so the folks back home can't laugh either.

The Blood Test

2007-02-06T11:14:00.000-03:00

Seven o'clock yesterday morning saw us wearily waiting in a queue in one of Salta's (crumbly) public hospitals.

"What do we have to have a blood test for anyway?"
"I don't know, but you can't get married here without one."
"What are they testing for, exactly?"
"I think it's to test whether we can have babies and stuff."
"I'm not a doctor, but I don't think they test blood for that. And they can get their filthy hands off my semen."
"Well they're probably testing for STIs then."
"So if someone's getting married, they wouldn't want them to pass an STI to just one other person."
"No."
"But they don't test single people, who would be more likely to pass STIs to lots of other people."
"Well this is supposedly a Catholic country, so in theory single people aren't having sex, so they don't need to test them."
"Well by that logic, as we're not married yet, we've never had sex, so they don't need to test us either."

It turned out the test was for syphilis and, happily, Beatriz and I are in the clear. It all seemed quite quaint to me, conjuring up an image of young mulleted Argentineans spending their youth frequenting the bordellos of Paris, drinking absinthe and reading a bit of Jean Paul Satre.

One of those dreams

2007-02-05T10:50:00.000-03:00

It seems to be a pretty common thing amongst people staying for a long time in another country to occasionally dream that they've popped back home just for a few days, to meet up with their friends or whatever. I got them sometimes and always woke up once I realized that I couldn't remember anything of the journey back, which gave the game away, as it got me thinking "hang on, this probably isn't real..."

Being back in Salta is somewhat like that, only in reverse, and I can recall the journey here perfectly, so I reckon I really am here. Everything's exactly as it was six months ago, except it appears slightly more crumbly and smellier than I remember, probably because last time I came here from Mendoza, but this time I came here from England.

Beatriz's family's house is the same too, except now it's full of additional family members (her older sister and her neice) with more expected on Friday. As is often the case with wedding arrangements, everyone in the family seems to have found something to criticise, but without actually doing anything, which is driving Beatriz a bit mental. I'm staying well out of such discussions, and confining my role to giving Beatriz moral support and helping out where needed. This is partly because I get a bit lost in group conversations in Spanish, partly because the family would be very unlikely to listen to my input, but mostly because, with five days to go, the time for changes of plan has long since passed, so the whole debate is pointless anyway.

The Shins and the sudden summer in Buenos Aires

2007-02-02T10:00:00.000-03:00

I was determined not to listen to my personal CD player on the way to Argentina, for fear that it would cause the plane to fall into the sea. But when the lady sitting next to me started listening to hers, and the aircraft resolutely failed to nosedive, I plucked up the courage and put the new Shins album on. And very soon I decided that there can be no better soundtrack to approach Buenos Aires by. It sounds great in England in winter, but by 'eck, in Buenos Aires in summer it's chuffin' marvellous.

Regular readers of this blog (if there still are any, given my erratic updates of the past few months) will have noticed that I have a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards Argentina in general. As much as anything else, for the last 6 months or so of my stay I didn't even really want to be here. I was pretty much just waiting for Beatriz to finish her project at work so we could head off to Blighty ASAP. Consequently, tinged as it is with negative associations, I'm not even looking forward to going back to Salta all that much - although of course I'm looking forward to seeing Beatriz and her family, and getting married next Saturday!

My parents and my aunt and uncle, exploring the rather wonderful indoor market in San Telmo

Buenos Aires, on the other hand, is a different kettle of fish. In my mind it's associated entirely with sitting in San Telmo cafes, drinking G&Ts with friends, and trying to discreetly ogle beautiful girls while avoiding getting run over and/or treading in dog mess. After spending a month here in December 2004, I'm pretty good at living the lifestyle. Plus, as I long ago saw pretty much all of the city, I don't feel any pressure to do touristy things. And that's why I'm in an internet cafe now. (Well, that and the fact it's got air-conditioning.)

More to follow soon...

Argentineans Don't Know What Cows Look Like

2007-01-19T15:33:00.000-03:00

The above may seem an outrageous claim, yet it recently occured to me that during my entire year and nine months in Argentina, not once did I clap eyes on one of these delicious bovine quadropeds.

Now around half of all Argentineans live in Buenos Aires, with most of the rest of them living in Mendoza, Cordoba or Salta. But the cows all live in the vast fields of the Pampas, somewhere several hours south of Buenos Aires where nobody goes.

So despite the fact that the average Argentinean eats his/her own bodyweight in steak every couple of days (fact!) very few of them have actually met a cow at any point in their lives. I reckon if they had, they wouldn't eat so many of them.

And in case any Argentineans want to tell me "we bloody well do know what cows look like!" I shall say "of course you do now - there's a picture of one here."

"You will become like us."

2007-01-15T19:36:00.000-03:00

At work this week we've got the cyber-inspectors in.

As my group of pathetic humans aren't being inspected, my job therefore is to keep them away from the cyber-inspectors at all costs, even if it means destroying them.

The last thing my colleagues need when delivering a reconditioning session under inspection, would be for two of my humans to press their faces up against the glass of the reconditioning chamber and/or pretend to rape each other. This has happened in the past. However it's not really the image of our organisation that we want to put across.

I'm honoured to be entrusted with such an important duty. I've been doing well at work, and the cyber-team-leader is pleased with my efforts.

Some kind of update

2007-01-13T09:47:00.000-03:00

So, with Beatriz away I've been doing a lot more of an activity that I haven't done that much since I was single.

I'm talking of course about reading.

Currently I'm hugely enjoying Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell - not the guy from Peep Show, another David Mitchell. Part 19th Century seafaring yarn, part 70s detective story, part post-apocalyptic sci-fi, and doing all those parts rather well, it's much more fun than boring old sex.

Meanwhile in Salta, Beatriz has the wedding arrangements pretty much sorted out now. So with not much left to do, she's been stuck indoors while the torrential summer rain pounds down, and hundreds of frogs hop between puddles in the unmettled road outside her house.

Did you know the Pope really likes cats? Oh yes, he can't get enough of them - in fact he's a cat-holic!

2006-12-20T14:07:00.000-03:00

Got this through the post from The Holiest Most Catholic Church of Argentina. So the test does exist!

Are You a Catholic?
Please answer the following multiple choice question.

Sex equals…
(a) Pleasure for all concerned when done properly
(b) Duty
(c) Shame
(d) Guilt
(e) Shame and guilt

Understanding your answer
If your answer was (e) then you are definitely a Catholic. Give yourself a pat on the back - you're going to Heaven my boy (or girl)!

(c) or (d) = Probably a Catholic, but best seek out your baptism certificate just to be sure.

(b) = You may be a stereotypical English person.

(a) = You are an dirty sinner and can look forward to spending all eternity in one of the worst hells when you die. Unless we can convert you first, in which case you'll be alright.

Edit: I've just noticed that this is my 100th post. Hurrah!

Not a Blog: Not a Catholic either

2006-12-16T11:51:00.000-03:00

Over on the other side of the world, Beatriz has been running round like a mad thing trying to get our wedding organised. The churches over there, it seems, are not keen on marrying a Catholic to an atheist, no matter how much the Catholic may want to.

Argentineans for the most part are strong Catholics. They may not go to church, or confession, or do anything the Pope says, but nevertheless the vast majority of them are firm in their belief in God. So much so that the concept of atheism is altogether alien. They can't even get their heads round what it means, and tend to come out with things like "maybe he doesn't believe in God, but he does believe in the Virgin Mary, doesn't he?"

Consequently, when Beatriz went to one church, they told her that in order to marry her, I would have to go to a church in England (not a Catholic one, an Anglican one presumably) and obtain a certificate there to prove that I am not a Catholic.

This raised a number of questions...

Could they not just take my word for it?
Seeing as I'm not C of E either, how would a vicar/priest/minister who wouldn't know me from Adam (if you'll pardon the expression) possibly be able to attest to my religious beliefs, or lack thereof?
Aren't certificates normally for things that you are, rather than things that you aren't?
Does the Anglican church, or any other church, have a stack of "This is to Certify that ___________ is Not a Catholic" certificates ready to be filled in, or would they have to make one up for me specially?

Eventually Beatriz conceded that it was a wee bit silly.

And then what happened?

2006-12-11T16:14:00.000-03:00

What with one thing and another (details to follow!) this blog entry is somewhat overdue, so I’ll start off with the big news as there’s not a moment more to waste: On the 10th of February Beatriz and I are getting married!

We’ll be tying the knot in Salta, on about the only day in the year when my parents andBeatriz’s widely-distributed family members can all be in the same place at the same time. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so soon.

One of the reasons that I’ve got time to blog a little now is that last week Beatriz went back to Argentina to buy a wedding dress, finalise the catering, send out the invitations, and all the other tasks that I understand are normally completed rather earlier than two months before the date of the wedding. She’s also got to find a church that’samenable to atheism. So she’s pretty busy.

Back in Sheffield, I’m busy buying a house. For the last four months we’ve been living with friends on a temporary basis, but it’s clearly time to get my own place. I’ve had an offer accepted on a very nice two-bedroom terraced house in Hillsborough, right near the tram-lines, so it’s got good access to the city centre. Now I’m busy trying to get solicitors and mortgage organised.

And the third stressful thing in my life at the moment is my new job. I've spent the past two months trying to coax (supposed) job-seekers into the world of work - with partial success. Despite having to spend a lot of time with people who have a fondness for sportswear and baseball caps, and who sometimes have an overly relaxed attitude towards personal hygiene, it’s a pretty good job. It’s stressful, but it’s good-stressful, and at least I’m never bored, which is the main thing.

I'm B, L, O, double G, I N G, I´m blogging! Again.

2006-11-30T15:00:00.000-03:00

A proper update on the last couple of months to follow soon, but for now just a thought...

Most days my job goes fine, but recently I've had to deal with a group of the most pain-in-the-arse clients you could ever hope to meet. I'm handing out warnings left right and centre, and some of them are perilously close to getting kicked out and having their benefits stopped (and a good thing too). But still it can be very stressful.

So this morning I hit on a solution.

I shall apply to become a Cyberman.

That way, instead of saying things like "I'm afraid I've got to give you a warning because you've repeatedly refused to get on with your work," I shall merely shout "DESTROY THEM! DESTROY THEM AT ONCE!" and then do so.

And they'll never come back.

In which Gainful Employment finally beckons, to the relief of some.

2006-10-11T11:01:00.000-03:00

So what do travelling (unqualified) English teachers do once they get back to the real world? Well, they teach English, if yesterday's informal-chat-followed-by-job-offer is anything to go by! Yep, from Monday I will be back in the world of The Employed - which in my case will be the world of The Unemployed, helping other people to become Employed, by teaching them basic English and Maths.

Consequently I will also be back in the world of Having Money (hurrah!) albeit not much of it, as I've still got Beatriz to support:-) She's doing well, generally enjoying the Sheffield life (curry, rock climbing, pub quiz on Tuesdays) although she's feeling frustrated that she hasn't found work for herself yet. If anybody out there wants to give a Work Permit to a highly skilled, experienced Computer Systems Engineer from Argentina, please let me know!

Coming soon: 99% Alien Monsters

Another guide (really definitely the last) to finding teaching work in Mendoza

2006-10-09T07:32:00.000-03:00

Hi Alex I read a post on the forums and you said that you were happy to give info on Mendoza, so I thought I'd give it a go! Do you have any idea of the demand for English teachers at the moment? And also, more generally for Chile, is there really no work between December and March, because that could convince me to go to Madrid. Thanks a lot for any info, much appreciated, Dominic

I’ve cobbled this post together out of the many, many emails I’ve sent to people asking about Mendoza over the past few months. Hope it helps!

There are plenty of institutes in Mendoza, so it’s always possible to find work if you go there with your CV. They don’t seem to mind whether you’ve got a TEFL (or indeed a work visa), they just want you to be a native speaker. How much work you’ll actually get though depends on luck, persistence and also on how long you’re planning on staying for.

Although there are fewer institutes in Mendoza than in BA, there's much less competition too, so I think you'd be a lot more likely to find something. Plus, Mendoza is much smaller, so you'll be able to walk to all your classes, rather than always having to get the bus, train or Subte, like in BA. That way you'll save both time and money.

Mendoza's pretty similar to BA in that you'll have to piece various gigs together in order to get by. I've never heard of anyone employed by just one institute. The pay tends to be between 10 and 12 pesos an hour. If you want more, you should put up adverts in shop windows for private classes. I found this to be pretty successful, although I did get a large number of time-wasters who said they’d call back, then didn’t. I was charging 13 pesos an hour for private classes, though some teachers go as high as 15.

The institutes are closed between December and March – probably in Chile as well – so for your income during those months you’ll have to rely on your private classes.

As for accommodation, you could try the notice boards in the universities. Also there’s the institute Intercultural. Beware – the owner is, er, not the most pleasant lady you could meet, and they have a terrible record for paying you on time. However, people sometimes advertise accommodation with them, and if you’re a teacher there they won’t make you pay a hefty commission, so it’s probably worth getting a job with them if you can. That’s what I did and I ended up sharing a flat with a Mendocina teacher – great for practising Spanish! Rent tends to be 250-400 pesos a month. Some of my friends rented their own places.

Mendoza’s very nice and everyone I’ve met who’s been to Santiago says it’s much much better! You would get paid more in Santiago though:-)

Interviews don't scare me.

2006-09-30T16:50:00.000-03:00

At my job interview I was engaging, enthusiastic, knowledgeable and interesting. And what's more, they didn't make me do any psychometric profiling. Consequently they were impressed with me, yet uncertain how I would cope with a room full of unemployed 18-24 year olds. It's a justified concern, but the thought of it doesn't bother me after teaching English to a room full of Argentinean teenagers. :-) So hopefully next week they'll give me a second interview, which will be my chance to prove myself.

In the meantime, I've got some temporary office admin work for the next three weeks. It's not much, but my income will be almost quadruple the amount I currently get from Jobseekers' Allowance, so I'm all for it.

The Alex's Diary

2006-09-25T12:08:00.000-03:00

Weight: 10st (holding steady for several weeks despite eating like a pig. Think it's a symptom of Reiter's Syndrome) Units of alcohol: 0 (can't afford it. Unemployed.) Cigarettes: 0 (although maybe a sneaky rolly later on once Beatriz has gone to bed.)

Have been reading Beatriz's copy of Bridget Jones's Diary. Worrying that this may make me a Gay, even though I am really a Manly Man (albeit a Manly Man currently wearing sky-blue t-shirt with butterflies and flowers on it).

Job interview tomorrow. Hurrah! With company that aims to get long-term unemployed back into work. Sounds v inspiring, but then remembered the character of Pauline from League of Gentlemen, and began to worry that I may turn into her. Still, pay's not bad, and is ideal match for my skills, so quite confident.

Positively my last ever guide to finding teaching work in Argentina!

2006-09-23T10:24:00.000-03:00

After my last post I received a comment from Russ in BA, asking if I could give him any help finding work in Salta. So here it is:

Although there were a few native speakers in Salta while I was there, all of the others had full-time jobs, which meant I was the only one available to take on extra classes. Hurrah!

The best thing to do is get a copy of the phone book, find the English institutes and visit all of them in turn, with a copy of your CV, between the hours of 5pm and 8pm. Some of them are open in the mornings, but all of them are open in the evenings. I got work very easily with Good News (Rivadavia 350) and IEI (Pasaje Zorrilla 239) and they were both very professional and enjoyable to work for.

Of course you can also advertise for private students by putting up adverts around town. Just remember that people in Salta expect to pay rather less for their classes than people in BA do! I only charged $12 pesos an hour, and even then most people were put off. (Or at least, they said they'd get back to me, then didn't.) However, if they want classes with a native, and you're the only one in town who's available, you get to set the price!

Finally, check out the English conversation group I started on Wednesdays at 9.30pm in Funes Bar (Dean Funes, between Caseros and Espana). As far as I know it's still going, and you may well meet potential students there.

Good luck!

Sheffield: Sex City

2006-09-11T12:50:00.000-03:00

As you may have gathered from the dearth of posts over the past few weeks, I've "gone dark" (as Jack Bauer would say).

I'm actually using the internet quite a lot, but at the moment it's for USEFUL stuff like job-hunting, so there's no time for blogging, much as I would like to!

But to fill you in before I disappear again, Beatriz and I are currently living with my mate Jim and his girlfriend up north in Sheffield, the home of Arctic Monkeys and Pulp. I'm averagely busy, applying for jobs in the public sector, hopefully in some kind of advising-members-of-the-public-of-helpful-things role. Beatriz meanwhile is settling into life in England with reasonable success.

From this morning's conversation on the subject of cultural differences:

"They're selling Christmas decorations?! But there's still four months to go."
"Don't worry. Although it's not uncommon around this time of year, it still seems as unfathomable to us as it does to you."

And that's all I've got time for this evening I'm afraid. Oh yes, and my elbow's a lot better, thanks for asking.

night on the tiles

2006-08-24T18:36:00.000-03:00

Not for us the trendy wine bars and chart music of Leicester city centre. Oh no, this evening my girlfriend and I caught the bus to the neighbouring village of Rothley, where I introduced her to fish and chips, on a bench in the village square, by the war memorial. Then we walked through quiet country lanes, past the green where they were playing cricket, to the railway station to look at the steam trains. And back home on the bus to arrive just before 8.30.

It was exactly the sort of date they used to go on in the 1920s, I imagine.

I cut quite a dash in my new pullover and woollen slacks,* while Beatriz looked as stunning as ever in her favourite shapeless coat/dress garment.

* That's right, I'm sexy again.

How sexy am I?

2006-08-22T18:05:00.000-03:00

Having arthritis, conjunctivitis, a wounded elbow and something that isn't herpes all at the same time, doesn't make me feel as good about my self-image as you might imagine. To give you some example of how bad the problem is, I can tell you that I'm a long way from feeling even as sexy as a single Nochero* - let alone all four of them.

I'd even say that I don't even feel as sexy as Argentinean telly's Susana Gimenez.

No. Today I feel about this sexy:

Only with slightly better clothes.

* According to my dictionary, "Nochero" translates as "bedside table". Bet you didn't expect that.

elbow woe

2006-08-20T15:56:00.000-03:00

Over the few days we spent travelling between Salta and Leicester, my left elbow enjoyed steadily less and less freedom of movement, until on Monday I could barely move it at all, and decided to take it to hospital to find out what was up.

After a couple of x-rays the answer came: “You’ve broken it.” Which was odd, as you’d think I’d at least remember doing something like that – even in the hectic last few days of preparing to leave. Nevertheless, there it was. The kindly nurse put my arm in a sling, gave me some painkillers and told me to bugger off.

The next morning I got a call from the hospital, asking me to come in for some more tests. This time I was seen by a doctor, who asked a lot of questions regarding my immediate medical history. I explained about the dodgy yoghurt, and also mentioned that a few days before I left, I’d been to see a doctor who had diagnosed me with what he said was herpes. Again, I thought this diagnosis highly improbable, as my girlfriend and I have been together, and with no-one else, for over a year.
“Why didn’t you mention that last night?”
“My mum was there, with my girlfriend! I’d rather not raise the spectre of STDs in front of her while they’re still getting to know each other. The finger of suspicion is going to point, if you know what I mean! Anyway it’s not herpes.”

So then, under x-ray, the doctor used a big fat syringe to suck a fair quantity of what looked like Mountain Dew out of my elbow. “Don’t worry,” he reassured me. “It’s supposed to be yellow, not green, and there’s not supposed to be that much of it, but it seems to be free of infection. And gout.”
“Well at least I won’t be going the same way Henry VIII did.”
“However, just to be on the safe side, we want to admit you. We may want to cut your elbow open and wash it out later.”
“So it’s not broken then?”
“No.”

And on Wednesday morning they washed out my elbow. It was brilliant! I had my first ever surgical procedure and my first ever general anaesthetic. Everyone was happy to answer all my many questions, and I was so curious about everything that it didn’t even occur to me to be nervous. All in all it was a thoroughly interesting day.

In the afternoon another doctor came to see me. Although I was infection-free, I did have arthritis, which is an odd thing for a 28-year-old to have. And an elbow that wasn’t broken. And herpes that couldn’t be herpes. But this doctor could see the connection between all of these! I had, he informed me, a virtually textbook case of Reiter’s Syndrome. Reiter’s occurs when the body over-reacts to intestinal problems by giving itself the problems outlined above. The only thing I lacked was conjunctivitis, apparently.

And so when I woke up yesterday with the Eye of Sauron, I was thereby assured that the diagnosis had been the correct one.

Now all I need to know is what they’re going to do about it.

Next: Some thoughts on doctors and the NHS.

It's going to take a bit of getting used to.

2006-08-18T16:27:00.000-03:00

This week we have mostly been experiencing culture shock (Beatriz), reverse culture shock (me), and spending three days in hospital where it was learned that in certain circumstances, eating a dodgy yoghurt can lead to fluid being drained out of the elbow (also me). So that explains why I haven’t been blogging a lot lately then.

The hospital story, which I think is worthy of an episode of Doctor House, will have to wait though. Until then, let’s get back to this blog’s primary stock in trade: cultural differences between England and Argentina.

To put it mildly, Beatriz and I were both completely blown away by England. Here are some of the things we’ve experienced this week.

Weather

With the (possibly mythical) 35 degree heatwave now well in the past, we were greeted with humid yet overcast conditions, which I found quite pleasant, and which Beatriz described as “crap” - a comment that she promptly followed up with: “Poor England. It doesn’t have a summer.” She has been forced to admit though, that all the rain does make the countryside a lovely shade of green. And also that hot, cold, rainy, sunny and cloudy all in the same day, and even all at the same time, is kind of exciting.

People

One of the more tiresome things that the Argentines couldn’t get enough of telling me, was “the English are much colder than we are.”An assertion that seems to rest entirely on the observation that Argentines kiss each other upon meeting, while English people don’t. And in truth, I did find myself wondering if I would return home to find that the English were in fact reserved and uptight, but that I just hadn’t noticed it before.

However, after taking careful note of how the people here have interacted with us over the past few days, ranging from my family, to shop staff, to people in the street, to the doctors and nurses in the hospital, Beatriz and I are in full agreement that the view that English people are cold is a fucking myth. Unless by “cold” you mean “very friendly and polite.”

Food and drink

“There are too many different sauces here! Why do you need so many?!” In Argentina there are three sauces: ketchup, mayonnaise and mustard. Not real mustard, mind. Only American hot-dog style mustard. So the sheer variety of sauces, dressings and pickles on offer here came as something as a surprise.

Without even making any particular effort I’ve managed to introduce Beatriz to cranberry juice, crystalised ginger, oyster sauce, pickled beetroot, plain unsweetened yoghurt, stilton cheese, cottage cheese, carrot cake, brie, brown bread, coleslaw, Danish pastries, baked beans, basmati rice, coffee and walnut cake, sparkling grape juice and many other fine delicacies that she’s never seen before. She’s also willingly embraced the concept of drinking about ten cups of tea a day. In short, we’ve been living the good life and it’s a good thing I lost all that weight after my dodgy yoghurt-drinking experience, because it means I can indulge with a clear conscience.

Next: The National Health Service Experience

The End

2006-08-11T12:17:00.000-03:00

Oh alright, it's not The End. Which means I don't have to bore everyone by writing some kind of emotional summary of the past year and nine months spent in Argentina. Anyway, hopefully you'll already have a bit of an idea of what it's like here from reading my previous posts.

Although I quite like the idea of a blog with a definite End, hopefully I'll be able to continue blogging on the subject of cultural differences between England and Argentina once Beatriz and I are back in England. However I expect I'll have less time on my hands, so it'll probably be written on a less than daily basis.

Here is what the next few days contain:

This afternoon
Fly to Buenos Aires, where we'll meet Beatriz's other brother, and her sister.

Tomorrow
Fly to Heathrow, via Sao Paulo and Frankfurt. There may be quite some time spent in airports with book and CD player. If the airport authorities try to part me from either of those, I'm not going to be in a good mood, as neither of them are liquid.
I, however, am over two-thirds liquid, so hopefully they'll let me on the flight.

Sunday
Arrive in Heathrow (possibly). Meet parents. Beatriz met them when they came to Salta in March, so at least that's one thing she doesn't have to be stressed about. Drive to Leicester. Beatriz will be amazed at the careful and courteous nature of the British driver. Meet uncle and aunt at home. Eat. Sleep.
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Yesterday's foiled terrorist plot made me think of the second part of this quote from everyone's favourite humourless ranting scientist, Richard Dawkins:

"Out of all of the religious sects in the world, we notice an uncanny coincidence: the overwhelming majority just happen to choose the one that their parents belong to. Not the sect that has the best evidence in its favour, the best miracles, the best moral code, the best cathedral, the best stained glass, the best music: when it comes to choosing from the smorgasbord of available religions, their potential virtues seem to count for nothing, compared to the matter of heredity.

This is an unmistakable fact; nobody could seriously deny it. Yet people with full knowledge of the arbitrary nature of this heredity, somehow manage to go on believing in their religion, often with such fanaticism that they are prepared to murder people who follow a different one."

I've travelled to lots of countries and met Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Atheists and people who thanked the Earth Mother before every meal. And (unsurprisingly) I discovered that people everywhere are all pretty much the same, and their religiosity, or lack of it, has nothing to do with how good a person they are.

But what if you needed to justify blowing up aeroplanes with the sole intention of killing your own countrymen? Nothing but religion could possibly be used to justify that one. And bearing in mind the purely arbitrary nature of religiosity, that's very weird indeed.

Worst-kept city

2006-08-09T15:07:00.000-03:00

Pride's an odd thing.
Although "Best-Kept Village" competitions may be won mainly through the bullying tactics of psychopathic old biddies, I'm beginning to think they're not such a bad idea after all.

The other day I saw a poster from the government of Salta, which said "El orgullo de haber nacido en esta tierra!", or "The pride to have been born in this land!" These posters are fairly common. I used to see them in Mendoza as well.

Salteños are proud to call their city "Salta la Linda" ("Salta the Beautiful") and with good reason. The city boasts some fine colonial architecture, and nestles in the heart of some gorgeous countryside full of mountains and sub-tropical forests. However, correct me if I'm wrong, but normally if you're proud of something, don't you tend to want to keep it nice? So why do so many people here drop litter, fill the streets with traffic fumes and let the paint flake off their once-beautiful houses*?

Ah! But look more clearly at what it says on that poster. It doesn't say you're supposed to be proud of the city or the countryside, you're only supposed to proud to have been born there. Excellent! That way you get to feel proud of yourself without making any effort whatsoever. What a benevolent government Salta has.

So over the years, as the tourists come to see the increasingly traffic-clogged streets, and breathe the fumes while wading ankle-deep in rubbish, at least the people they meet will be proud to have been born there.

Wouldn't a poster that said "Let's take pride in keeping Salta beautiful! (Stop dropping litter, you bastards!)" have been a bit more constructive? Together with a few more litter bins and some traffic calming measures? But no, those things would require a small amount of effort.

*Perhaps it's because paint in Argentina is so expensive that even the President can't afford it. The Casa Rosada (Pink House) where he lives, is only pink on the front. Round the back and sides it's a grubby brown.

food

2006-08-08T12:27:00.000-03:00

Over the past few weeks I've become engrossed in the online journal of Miss Cupcake, who blogs daily on one of my favourite subjects: food and Argentine culture.

Two. Two favourite subjects.

After I wrote about the flavour-free disaster that is the Great Argentinean Sandwich a few weeks ago I've been meaning to write more about food, but Miss Cupcake has not only gone and covered just about every Argentine food-related subject I could ever think of, she's done so in an entertaining in and well-informed manner as well, so I'm left with not a lot to say. But, dammit, I'm going to be intimidated by her excellent blog no longer! So here's what I have to say about the food in this country.
______________________________________

First the good. Happily, there's a comparatively small range of pre-prepared, pre-packaged food available in the supermarkets of Argentina. As a result, food here tends to be home-made and free of artificial ingredients. Plus the meat and vegetables themselves are cheap and of high quality, and dried pulses, lentils and so forth are freely available. All you need for a healthy and reasonably varied diet is here. And that's got to be a Good Thing, however you look at it.

Now the bad... oh no... the bad...

Argentine cookery has to be some of the blandest in the world. While the Italians enjoy fresh basil, sun-dried tomatoes and olive oil, and the Thais enjoy coconut milk, chilli and ginger... the Argentines enjoy sugar and salt.

Herbs and seasonings have no place in the repertoir of the Argentinean cook - and why should they? For flavour, you simply add salt, and when you start getting used to it and the food starts to seem bland again, put in some more!

As an example, in Cafayate at the weekend I ordered slow-cooked goat served on a bed of mashed potatoes, with a Torrontés (local wine) sauce. Sounds good - and highly imaginative by the standards of this country - but the problem was that I could taste neither goat, nor potato, and especially not the Torrontés. Only salt.

Meanwhile sugar consumption starts young, when parents put it in their children's milk, then progresses via Coca Cola in the baby's bottle, copious consumption of tooth-achingly sweet cakes and desserts, and fizzy drinks with every meal. Eventually the point is reached where nothing is complete without sugar. Despite my health warnings, my girlfriend can't enjoy her tea unless it's got four sugars in it.* Her mum, who's had more years to get used to it, has to put in so much that the spoon stands up on its own. Then there's her (30-something) brother, who feels that his orange juice isn't palatable unless it has three sugars in it.

So, given all that information, how is it that the Argentines aren't a race of fat toothless diabetics with high blood pressure?

Firstly there's vanity, which keeps girls thin through eating very little, and also leads to eating disorders aplenty. But most importantly there's exercise. As most people don't have a car, they tend to walk or cycle everywhere, which means that despite the terrible diet, they're still thinner on average than English people are.

* Four sugars! I'm with George Orwell on this one - if you have to put any sugar in your tea, you clearly don't like tea, and should drink something else.

Three things you may not know about llamas

2006-08-07T13:38:00.000-03:00

1. Somebody in Cafayate clearly likes them rather a lot. Who wouldn't want to live in a house like this!

2. The incomparable Hilaire Belloc liked them enough to write a poem about them, which I'll take the opportunity to reproduce here, if I may.

The Llama

The Llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat,
With an indolent expression and an undulating throat
Like an unsuccessful literary man.

And I know the place he lives in (or at least I think I do)
It is Ecuador, Brazil or Chile - possibly Peru;
You must find it in the Atlas if you can.

The Llama of the Pampasses you never should confound
(In spite of a deceptive similarity of sound)
With the Lama who is Lord of Turkestan.

For the former is a beautiful and valuable beast,
But the latter is not lovable nor useful in the least;
And the Ruminant is preferable surely to the Priest
Who battens on the woeful superstitions of the East,
The Mongol of the Monastery of Shan.

3. The llama is the most religious of all animals, regularly attending mass in Catholic churches. Indeed, their religion is the chief means of distinguishing them from their cousins the Alpacas, who are new-age pagans, into crystals and so forth. They are also related to Guanacos, who are nihilists - that means they believe in NOTHING.

The Tour, part 3

2006-08-04T22:30:00.000-03:00

To round off your tour, let's visit one of the most popular tourist attractions.

On the hillside overlooking the city is the monument built to comemorate General Güemes, Salta's most famous kicker of Spanish ass.

If you continue up the hill behind the monument, you'll find thousands of steps leading upwards...

And after half an hour or so (or 5 minutes in the cable car) you'll find yourself atop Cerro San Bernardo, looking down on the city. Those are the Sub-Andean Sierras, dimly visible in the background!

Cerro San Bernado translates as Saint Bernard Hill. There are two theories as to where the name comes from. The most popular is that it's named after Saint Bernard, the patron saint of injured skiers. However, there aren't any skiers in these parts (not even very severely lost ones) so the theory doesn't really hold water.

The hill is actually named after the actor Bernard Hill, who was canonised in 2004 after his sterling work in the second and third Lord of the Rings films.

Well I hope you enjoyed the tour. I'm off on a tour of my own this weekend to the nearby town of Cafayate, where they grow grapes and llamas. I'll return to these pages on Monday.

The Tour, part 2

2006-08-04T12:15:00.000-03:00

Apart from the obvious tourist attractions of the cathedral that makes bingly-bongly noises and some very nice, slightly crumbly colonial architecture, what does Salta city centre have to offer?

This is the central plaza. Argentine culture is outdoorsy and social, and all cities have plazas sprinkled around liberally, where people sit and pass the time of day.

Salta also boasts a couple of pedestrian streets. And it could really do with more!

Salta's main distinguishing feature, which the tourist guides often neglect to mention, is that the city centre is visited by over three trillion cars a day - something the 16th century town planners completely failed to anticipate. Things are OK on Belgrano, which is a 5-lane one-way street where the traffic moves along nicely...

...but the situation on most of the streets is bordering on lunacy, particularly around 1pm, when everyone rushes home for lunch. Note also the narrow pavements, which ensure that the situation for pedestrians is pretty much the same as for the cars, but with fewer exhaust fumes.

The Tour, part 1

2006-08-03T18:44:00.000-03:00

Before I leave next week, I really should show you around the place...

This is my street. Relax! All the houses here have running water, electricity and cable TV. The streets are safe to walk at night and it's only 10 minutes by bus from the city centre.

One of my students told me that 20% of Argentineans are rich, 40% are poor and 40% are very poor, to the extent that they get by on $3 a day. The people who live in our barrio are definitely in the middle 40%.

As I took this photo on Monday when the weather was abysmal, the dogs that usually wander the streets are all indoors.

This is my girlfriend's family's house. The bars and railings motif is phenomenally popular in Argentina, and can be seen decorating houses of all sorts, all over the country. The family have got a shop, so they do alright for themselves. On the outside it's humble, but on the inside it's very nice, with all mod cons.

Only two blocks from the house and we've got mettled roads! Between the two carriageways is a large drainage channel. During the dry winter the locals use it to store carrier bags and empty Coke bottles, but in the summer it provides an outlet for the torrential rain.

This is a perfectly ordinary street in a residential area in the city centre.

the rather good life

2006-08-02T13:09:00.000-03:00

As regular readers of this blog will know, there's plenty to bitch about in Argentina. Yet you'll also know that I generally try to balance the bad with the good - if only so my comments boxes don't fill up with anonymous hate-mail, saying things like "If you don't like it here, go home. You're a disgrace to the country. Bastardo!"

This isn't a tourist guide though, so I won't be mentioning the beef, the friendly people, the landscapes or the exchange rate. Instead, here are some things I think are rather good about life in Argentina. I'm sure there are more, but these are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

1. People are not reliant on alcohol in order to have a good time

On a summer's evening, many people will just go and sit in a plaza and chat with their mates, without any alcohol being consumed. How many English people would do that?! In England any evening activity with friends MUST include alcohol, by law. Of course English beer is in a different league from the gassy chemical swill that passes for beer here, but the fact that we can't seem to get by without it makes us seem worryingly like addicts.

Women in particular drink hardly anything in Argentina. Lacking the English weapon of choice in the arsenal of seduction, I had to rely on cooking, charm and a limited grasp of Spanish in order to appear attractive to my girlfriend.

2. Political graffiti

"Strength to Kirchner"
"Yesterday they provoked inequality, today they're worried about poverty"

It's everywhere in Salta. I've got mixed feelings about graffiti, but if people are going to do it, they should at least make either some great art or some kind of statement.

What's a bit strange is that the political graffiti-doers in Salta are so in favour of the current government. "Fuerza Kirchner" is ubiquitous, and my personal favourite is "la oposición está hasta las bolas" which translates as "the opposition is up to its balls". In what? I wonder. I also wonder if the majority of this graffiti were written before President Kirchner was elected, or after?

3. Quality vegetables!

Vegetables are all but ignored by the majority of Argentineans, normally lying hidden away in the back corner of the supermarket where nobody goes. However if you go to the central market, particularly here in the north, you'll find friendly greengrocers eager to show you various local vegies that you don't get at home, particularly some odd-looking varieties of potato. Plus they're grown locally, so they don't need to be shipped in from abroad, meaning that they're generally fresher and tastier.

4. Er... the way they pronounce "Blockbuster"

I get a lot of childish pleasure from this. Spanish doesn't have the "uh" sound, so they tend to pronounce it as a hard "a". For some reason in this word the "o" comes out as an "a" as well. The end result is that they tend to refer to the video store as "Blackbastard". And when I do too, nobody notices.

El Hombre de Acero

2006-08-01T15:23:00.000-03:00

I haven't seen any Argentinean films this week, but my students told me about a film from America that's been going down well at the cinema recently. "It is a beautiful film" ("es una película linda") they told me, so on that recommendation I went to see it.

Superman Regresa
(English translation: Superman Comes Back)

This film is the latest example of a graphic novel being brought to the big screen, probably riding on the back of recent successes such as A History of Violence, and V for Vendetta. I enjoyed both of those, yet I must admit that they left me with certain notions of what this, another comic book movie, would be like. Happy to report then, that Superman Regresa shatters such preconceptions utterly.

The story concerns an alien who has evidently visited Earth in the past, but who has recently spent a few years visiting his home planet. Unlike most aliens, Superman appears unconcerned with traditional extraterrestrial preocupations such as abducting people, probing women and making crop circles - although cinematic cliches can be hard to avoid entirely, and the film does reveal that he was once involved in at least one of these activities.

In a bold departure from the comic-book heroes seen in Road to Perdition and From Hell, Superman dresses in a gaudy costume and posesses strange powers, including the ability to lift very heavy objects, and to fly. In this way the film makes a clear nod towards the outlandish abilities of the characters in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Although you could be forgiven for thinking that lifting heavy objects and flying are what this film is all about, it also presents us with a discourse on the subject of multiple identities, as Superman attempts to conceal his true nature by in effect taking on the life and personality of another man.

To sum up, there's so much to enjoy in this movie that even hardened audiences who don't enjoy foreign films, and who have never heard of the Superman comics, should be won over.

The extended DVD version of the film will include the scene in which two doctors attempt to revive the unconscious Superman by "bump-starting" him.

So cold... so very, very cold...

2006-07-31T18:41:00.000-03:00

Today I came to the conclusion that the cold makes people stupid. On Saturday the temperature plummeted to somewhere around zero, and although I didn't go Beatriz's friend's kid's baptism, I was persuaded to go to the party afterwards. Which was outdoors. And bugger me it was cold. Yet when I commented on this, people would come out with things like "of course it's much colder than this in England, isn't it?"

To which I could only reply, "well yes it is at times - but unlike you guys, the English tend not to have late-night garden parties in the middle of fucking winter."

Another important factor to bear in mind is that English houses generally have heating, so at least when you're at home you'll be warm and comfortable, and when you go out into the cold it's not so bad. Whereas here people pass the winter sitting indoors, wrapped in blankets, wondering if they'll ever feel warm again, as every last shred of heat gets sucked out of the cracks under the doors, the badly-fitted windows and, in our case, the wide open front door of the shop attached to the house. And then when you go outside it's even worse.

OK, so the cold makes other people stupid, and me bad tempered. However I shouldn't grumble; in two weeks it'll be English summer for me - if I live that long.

Tomorrow: Something Extremely Silly

Baptism of Water

2006-07-30T14:51:00.000-03:00

"Ooh, we've been invited to my friend's child's baptism, how lovely!"

"Great. The thin end of the wedge of religious brainwashing, forcing a belief system on a child way too young to make an informed critical decision, and thus denying her the right to make up her own mind."

"There you go again, criticising religion."

"I'm not criticising religion as such. Religion's like cigarettes, McDonald's or the Daily Mail. If adults want to choose those things, that's fair enough. But I have a massive problem when they're foisted on unsuspecting children."

So in the end, Beatriz went to the baptism, while I stayed in and watched Good Night and Good Luck (which coincidentally is a movie about standing up to those who use their beliefs to control other people).

As a humanist/atheist, I never imagined the possibility of going out with a Catholic. I always figured she would be perpetually trying to convert me in order to save my soul. Or if not, I would end up offending her by calling her a stranger to reason. Happily, none of those things have happened.

What makes things work is that we're both of the opinion that how a person behaves is infinitely more important than what they believe. Beatriz has learned from her own experience that there's bugger-all connection between religiosity and good behaviour, as she knows various Catholics who behave in a terrible way. So I respect her right to believe whatever she wants, while she (grudgingly) respects my right to extract humour from the rich comedy goldmine that is religion. That is, she tried initially to forbid jokes about God, but quickly realised that prohibition only made such jokes impossible to resist, no matter how hard I tried.

And so ends this Sunday's humanist sermon on how to have a successful relationship with people who have other values, without either fighting or simply refusing outright to talk about it.

Get off the bandwagon, put down the handbook (yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah)

2006-07-28T16:11:00.000-03:00

So which is harder, English or Spanish?

My students always tell me that Spanish is harder - just look at all those verbs you have to conjugate. And it's true, there are a lot of them. While English has five conjugations for each verb (eat, eats, ate, eaten, eating), Spanish boasts around 42. See one of my previous posts for more details. So basically in your first few months of learning Spanish, you're going to be spending a lot of time staring at verb tables, trying to memorise como, comés, comen, comemos, comí, comiste... blah blah etc etc. It's bloody hard and there's no avoiding it.

And yet, once you've got those pesky verbs under your belt, you've pretty much broken the back of the language, as it no longer has a lot left to vex you with. Spanish is nice and regular in everything from its plurals to its spelling. Plus there are less options when it comes to structuring your sentences, which makes things straightforward. In English you can choose between "the day of my daughter's wedding" or "my daughter's wedding day," between "with whom did you go to the cinema?" and "who did you go to the cinema with?" between "I like to get up early" or "I like getting up early." All have slight changes in meaning and/or formality. But in Spanish there is generally only one way to structure your sentence, which makes it much easier to remember how.

Then you have the spelling. Spanish is phonetic, so you can read aloud from a magazine with complete confidence in your pronunciation, even if you haven't a clue what some of the words mean. With English, if you don't know the word, chances are you won't know how to pronounce it either.

But the part of English that students fear and loathe more than anything is the phrasal verbs. Turn up, get over, put down, run into, put up with, sort out, there are thousands of them and we natives use them all the time without even thinking about it. But for non-natives they are a right bastard to remember. Think about it: "turn" means one thing, "up" means another, but put them together and they mean "to arrive (unexpectedly)". Learning English phrasal verbs has got to be a million times worse than Spanish conjugations. Consequently it's not uncommon for students to do whatever possible to avoid learning them.

So how do you overcome the student's reluctance to learn phrasal verbs? Easy - fear! Last week I got Beatriz to learn loads of them after I said "look, you might not use them, but the people you meet in England certainly will. You'll be able to get them to speak slowly for you, but you won't be able to get them to stop using phrasal verbs, because it won't even occur to them that they're tricky for foreigners. So you're going to have to learn them!" That approach worked a treat.

So to simplify, it's a question of learning curves. English is easy at first - everyone's met someone who speaks it badly but can communicate perfectly well after no lessons at all. However, it gets very difficult indeed if you want to become good at it. On the other hand, Spanish is bloody hard at first, what with the verbs and all, but pretty straightforward after that, owing to regularity combined with inflexibility.

Therefore on the mountain that is the foreign language, English is skiing and Spanish is snowboarding. Except you're going up the mountain, not down it. While the English beginners are doing pizza and french fries, making their way carefully down (by which I mean "up") the mountain in a line, the Spanish students are spending a lot of time falling on their arses, before having to be taken back to their chalets on stretchers. But a few weeks later, the Spanish students are carving turns in the powder and zipping between trees, while the English students are still warily contemplating a blue run, with powder and trees still several years in the future.

Well, I hope you enjoyed this three-day language experience.
Tomorrow: Something else entirely.

keep climbing that ladder

2006-07-27T14:59:00.000-03:00

More stuff on learning another language

"Learning a language," I decided quite independently, before discovering that the world and its hamster have at some point made exactly the same analogy, "is like climbing a mountain."

Firstly you have to actually be on the mountain. Taking evening classes in your home town is the equivalent of climbing on an indoor wall - quite helpful in some ways, but completely useless in others, and you'll come away with the smell of gnarly old bloke permeated into your hands and t-shirt.

The next most important thing is effort. I've watched other people learning languages and everybody has their own technique. Some take months of classes for an hour a day, some go for the intensive two-week course, some study grammar books, some merely ask lots of questions to baffled locals, some learn by watching TV, some hang around in bars and learn through trying to chat up the opposite sex. I've met people who have adopted all of these methods and it doesn't seem to matter which one you choose, it's how much effort you put in that will determine your progress. As with climbing a mountain, if you keep plugging away at it, you will get higher no matter what your technique.

Thirdly you need time. Once you've been in the country (or on the mountain, if you prefer) for about a year, you'll start noticing that your language seems to be getting better all by itself. Things just click and fall into place, and suddenly you won't be struggling to understand people. Give it two years and you'll find yourself able to understand South Park in another language, at which point you'll know you've made it - not, I hasten to add, to the summit, but to a very prominent crest with a smashing view. And from that crest you may, if you wish, drop your trousers and wave your bottom at those who are struggling up beneath you.

Go on, you've earned it.

Next: Which is harder - English or Spanish?

Learning me your language

2006-07-26T11:49:00.000-03:00

Learning a second language is, in my opinion, about the most interesting thing a gentleman (or lady) can do.

For example, over the past year I've learned that the Spanish language doesn't make a distinction between lobsters and locusts, using the same word, langosto, for both. Well why not? They both have big claws, fly around in swarms, live at the bottom of the sea and devour whole fields of crops, so it's hardly worth the effort of distinguishing between them really.

Likewise, the word esposas means both wives and handcuffs, although I couldn't possibly say if that's in any way culturally significant.

So how do you learn a second language?

You mean "how do I learn a second language" - I know already.

So how do I learn a second language?

You need motivation, so it goes without saying that the best way is to move to a country where they speak it, and where they don't really speak yours. Then once your second language reaches an acceptable level, use it to attract a local member of the opposite sex, then speak it all the time with him/her. This method worked a treat for me, although its effect on my girlfriend's English has been somewhat less significant.

Still, as we'll be in England in a bit less than three weeks, she's suddenly become quite enthusiastic about learning English and has mastered a whole page of phrasal verbs without any real problems. Happily it seems that all the time she spent sitting quietly when we went out with our English-speaking friends wasn't wasted after all.

It's hardly Los Nocheros, but I like it

2006-07-25T20:14:00.000-03:00

The government of Salta has banned rock and roll. This is excellent news, as prohibition only makes it more rock and roll!

The local rock radio station has not been able to get its license renewed. Meanwhile, any bands who play anything other than shite folclore, or other Latin music, will find it very hard to find a venue within the city. And when they can get a gig, the police are liable to raid it. Pity my mate therefore, who's got a Nu Metal band.

On the other hand, if you fancy living life as a sort of James Dean figure, who gets loaded and cuts loose to music that's definitely not for squares, but you find that modern society is just too permissive to make you seem properly rebellious, then you might want to consider moving to Salta.

The National Anthem

Nobody can say whether or not it was inspired by prog rock, but nevertheless the Argentinean national anthem features a long instrumental section before the vocals kick in. The upshot of this is that when it's played at football matches, they don't have time to get to the words, so the players and crowd are reduced to humming along with the instrumental bit. So no, it's not because they don't know the words, it's just a quintessentially Argentine approach to anthem-writing, where common sense took a back seat once again.

Not that I'm in a position to scoff really, being subject to probably the shittest national anthem since records began. I'm quite proud of my British identity in a quiet, non-flag waving way, but speaking as a republican atheist, "God Save the Queen" somehow leaves me cold.

The continuing adventures of Ricardo Darín

2006-07-24T12:19:00.000-03:00

Film review day is Monday this week, as I'm short of both time and inspiration:-)

El Aura

Finally got round to seeing this last night, and by 'eck I wish I'd seen it earlier, for it is totally colossal. According to that Fabián Bielinsky obituary I linked to yesterday, it isn't out in the UK yet, but when it is, you must see it!

The story concerns a nameless taxidermist with epilepsy and a perfect memory, who's always dreamed of planning a robbery. Then, while on a hunting trip in a spooky Patagonian forest, events transpire to ensure he gets his opportunity.

It's a new kind of heist thriller, which proceeds at a languid pace, allowing plenty of time to appreciate the stunning scenery, haunting music, lovely cinematography and Ricardo Darín in the most gripping performance I've seen him give to date. The film has a hypnotic quality about it, tipping its hat to the supernatural throughout, particularly through the forest and the presence of a very wolf-like dog, even though nothing supernatural actually happens.

While the first Bielinsky film, Nueve Reinas, is the one everybody here raves about, his second one is the daddy.

dead good director

2006-07-23T12:20:00.000-03:00

The Guardian has finally learned that Fabián Bielinsky's dead, and got round to writing a pretty good obituary. Maybe they found out when they read about it here a few weeks ago:-)

what the world's been waiting for

2006-07-22T16:55:00.000-03:00

I don't watch any reality TV shows, but after five months of living in a house in which the telly is on virtually all the time, I've seen a hell of a lot of trailers for them...

From the creative genius who brought you Political Idol comes this summer's new hit politics-based reality TV series - Government Swap!

Find out what happens when the governments of two countries swap places for a whole year! You'll see how Argentine politicians handle a media who they don't own, and who are accustomed to asking difficult questions! Watch as President Kirchner crumbles completely after a ten-minute interview with John Humphrys at 7.30 in the morning! Meanwhile, you'll laugh as Blair is reduced to complete impotence when his policies on restricting civil liberties come to a grinding halt in the face of crippling bureaucracy! Plus you'll see the consequent changes in the Blair-Bush relationship - which become even more interesting later in the series when Bush spends a year as President of Iraq...

A Day for Everything

2006-07-21T12:40:00.000-03:00

A frequent question I get asked by my students is "do you celebrate Independence Day in England?"
"Well no," I always reply. "It's because we're a nation that other nations become independent from."
"So what do you call your national holidays?"
"Er... they don't really have names. They're just the May Bank Holiday, the August Bank Holiday, stuff like that. No, I don't know why they're called Bank Holidays. Do they need names?"

National days are HUGE in Argentina. Sometimes they're holidays, (Independence Day, Flag Day) but more often they're not.

Yesterday, for example, was Friends Day. On this day people buy presents for their friends and in the evening they go out drinking. Or at least they do if they didn't eat some dodgy yoghurt and have to keep going to the bathroom every half an hour.

But according to a list I found on the Internet, there are many, many more. Over 60 of them in fact. Here are some of the more bizarre ones:

March 4: Brothers and Sisters Day. Pretty much every family relationship gets celebrated at some time of the year.
March 25: Day of Children Being Born. Abortion's illegal here, leading to the proliferation of backstreet abortionists and girls dying in hospital after trying to perform their own. Not sure exactly how that's cause for celebration.
April 12: Day of the Interior Decorator. I swear I'm not making this up.
April 26: Librarians Day. It keeps them sweet, so it's a good day to return any seriously overdue books without them breaking your balls.
April 29: Day of the Animal. In which everyone goes out dressed up as their favourite animal. Not really.
May 6: Taxi Drivers Day
May 12: Grandchildren's Day
June 2: Graduates of Economic Sciences Day.
June 2: Neighbours Day. If you're an Economic Sciences graduate and you live next door to anyone, you'll be feeling pretty special around now.
July 2: Magazine Editors Day.
July 5: Employees Day. The national days like to embrace the general, as well as the incredibly specific.
Second Sunday of August: Children's Day. In which the demanding, greedy little monsters get even more attention. Like they don't get enough in the rest of the year.
Third Sunday of August: Grandfathers Day. Wouldn't this one be already covered by Fathers' Day?
August 25: Hairdressers Day. A chance to celebrate the people who give everyone such horrendous mullets.
First Sunday in September: Aunts Day.
September 11: Teachers Day
September 17: University Lecturers Day
September 21: Economists Day. I think they should consider withdrawing this one until the situation improves here.
October 21: Day of Specialised Newspaper Journalists.
October 24: Graphic Designers Day
October 26: Mother-in-Laws Day.
Second Sunday of November: Grandmothers Day.
November 24: Day of Workers in the Field of Plastics
December 4: Day of Publicity.
December 8: Day of Friendship. Not to be confused with Friends' Day.
December 17: Accountants Day

sandwich

2006-07-20T12:21:00.000-03:00

"I've got classes all day today, so I'll get lunch in town."
"You're still ill! Make sure you eat something bland, like a sandwich."

In Britain in recent years, through hard work, creativity and naked capitalism, the humble sandwich has been elevated to the status of an artform. Brie and bacon, Wensleydale and carrot chutney, chicken tikka, lamb and mint sauce, roasted Mediterranean vegetables, fish and marmalade, the selection is both appetizing and limitless.

In Argentina there are three types of sandwich: ham, cheese, and ham and cheese. The bread will either be a dry roll without butter, or white bread with the crusts cut off, which has been kept fresh by being placed under a towel.

To explain this unfortunate state of affairs, we need to look at other cultural factors at work within the country. 90% of Argentines are Catholic, with the proportion being even higher up here in the North. And if there's one thing Catholics like doing (apart from unprotected sex) it's atoning for their sins. This is where the sandwich comes in. The merest glance at one will tell you that you're not supposed to enjoy it - it's supposed to be pennance.

But as I'm not Catholic, and therefore without sins to atone for, where does this leave me? Currently I am presented with the choice of eating the inedible, or eating something more interesting and possibly being sick all afternoon.

I think I'll go for opción dos.

Note: Credit where credit's due. The basic sandwich-as-pennance-for-sins idea obviously comes from Douglas Adams, in So Long and Thanks for all the Fish. He wasn't talking about Argentina though.

Other Note: "Aha!" you say, "judging from the colour, some of those sandwiches in the picture have clearly got something else in them, apart from ham and cheese." Well you may be right. But let me tell you: El Departamento de la Conformidad de los Sandwiches will undoubtedly come down on the perpetrators like a ton of bricks.

Bleeuurgh. The Alex is unwell.

2006-07-19T12:03:00.002-03:00

Shared experiences form the basis of any successful relationship, so yesterday Beatriz and I drank some dodgy yoghurt and spent the afternoon and evening going to the bathroom a lot, lying in bed feeling distinctly queasy, and drinking herb tea that smells exactly like the stuff they clean hospital corridors with.

That'll teach us not to check the best-before date.

Oh no, it's... Moviereviewsday Tuesday!

2006-07-18T13:17:00.000-03:00

Being the latest in a series of Argentinean films that are not so much reviewed as heartily recommended.

Iluminados por el Fuego
(British title: Blessed by Fire. Literal translation: Iluminated by the Fire)

Given the prevalent Argentinean attitude towards Las Malvinas, you could be forgiven for expecting last year's movie on the conflict to be bursting with anti-British sentiment. But, thank goodness, this is not the case.

In fact, director Tristán Bauer doesn't have much to say about the British at all. Here they are just the faceless enemy, rarely seen, even in the final battle when they are just shapes who loom out of the darkness, shouting "get the Argies!"

Instead the film's anger is directed squarely towards the Argentine government, both then and now. The film opens with the attempted suicide of an Argentinean Falklands veteran. A suicide which we discover was brought on by the total lack of government support given to the traumatised veterans in the years following the conflict.

Then the film flashes back to the soldier and two of his mates, sent to the islands as part of the force that was intended to repell the British. The film highlights the unpreparedness of the soldiers, some of whom have been sent to fight without even proper footwear. Food is in short supply, the freezing fog is a far cry from sunny Buenos Aires, and the officers don't seem to have a clue what they're doing. Unsurprisingly, when the British soldiers arrive there is a massacre.

Most war films, despite their best intentions, end up glamourising war. After all, explosions, gunfire and people running around are just so damn cinematic. Not so here. Bauer achieves a great deal with a limited budget, and his fighting is bloody and chaotic, all hand-held cameras, rather than sweeping helicopter shots of the battlefield, which adds to the confusion and the panic.

All in all it's one of the best anti-war films you could see, as well as being full of detail about the reasons for the conflict, and of its consequences. And fair play to Bauer for having the balls to say to the Argentineans "the British weren't the real enemy, our government was."

social animal

2006-07-17T17:18:00.000-03:00

This is usually how it goes:

Ring ring!
"Is _(insert name here)_ there?"
"No, sorry, I think you've got a wrong num-"
Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Honestly it's like the telephone is a new invention in this country and people haven't quite got to grips with the ins and outs of phone etiquette yet. No hellos, no names given, and certainly no apologies.

In general, Argentines use a lot fewer nicities than we do. It's not so much "can I have a beer please?" as "bring me a beer." However this doesn't mean that they're being rude. People are every bit as friendly here (possibly even friendlier) than people in England, but the lack of pleases and thank-yous does take a bit of getting used to.

It makes sense in a way. Politeness is more an attitude than a direct result of the words you use. Plus of course Spanish verbs have a polite form for people you want to show respect to, so maybe please and thank-you are a bit less important.

As Mattyboy mentioned in his blog, the upshot of all this is that foreigners tend to go a bit overboard with the pleasantries. Although we're actually saying "could you bring me the bill please," to the Argentinean waiter this level of politeness sounds like you're taking the piss. To him, it's as though you're saying "I say, dear chap! Would it trouble you awfully to present us with the account for this delicious meal at your earliest convenience?" So it's best just to say "cobreme" ("bill me") like the locals do, but with a smile so you don't appear pushy.

Well that's what you should do. But I like saying "please" and "thank-you," dammit, and if they don't appreciate it, they can **** off.

Salta Cathedral

2006-07-15T13:44:00.000-03:00

Constructed in 1858 after the old one burnt down, Salta's pleasing vanilla and strawberry-flavoured cathedral stands in the centre of the city. On the inside it contains the virgin who protects the city from earthquakes (fact!) and also houses the remains of Güemes, the gaucho general who dished out a good kicking to the Spaniards in the 19th century. Plus of course the full complement of saints, holy relics, crucifixes, gilt, other virgins who don't prevent earthquakes, pictures of Jesus and everything necessary to leave the visitor in no doubt that it's a proper Catholic church.

The bells seem to be out of order, which is fair enough, as it can't be cheap to maintain a working carillon in this economic climate. But rather than play a recording of real bells or something, the powers that be have opted for something altogether more crap. So every hour on the hour it makes a noise exactly like a very very large novelty doorbell. Given the importance of the cathedral to, well, basically everybody in Salta, you'd think they'd make a bit more effort really, wouldn't you?

Pink Floyd on the run from black people

2006-07-14T14:46:00.000-03:00

Last year I got a copy of the Easy Star All Stars' reggae cover version of Dark Side of the Moon. It's totally fantastic, very amusing, and you can tell that they loved the original so much that they wouldn't stop until they'd covered the whole thing in a style that you wouldn't think would work, yet strangely does.

I played it to a Swedish guy in a youth hostel in Ushuaia.

"It's great but it'll never replace the original," he said.

Eeeek! Did he imagine that this was the album's agenda? That the Pink Floyd version might be taken off the shelves (like the non-digitally-enhanced version of Star Wars was) and that the reggae version would be all you could get? Did he imagine the Floyd being pursued by a troup of rastafarians (looking like the Uruk Hai in the first Lord of the Rings), who would hunt them down and surreptitiously replace them? That all knowledge of the original might be erased (like in 1984) and rock history amended accordingly? But that all this in fact might not happen after all because the original is, well, the original?

I didn't ask. We shall never know.

This post is really just a tenuous link to a link to Mr Biffo writing about the death of Syd Barrett earlier this week.

I can't think of anything to say. It's sad.

Thoughts on girlfriends

2006-07-13T15:03:00.000-03:00

"I like to go out with fat girls. In the winter they give you warmth. And in the summer, shade."
- Argentinean comedian whose name I don't know

My girlfriend isn't fat, although like most of the female population, she believes herself to be, so I have to listen to her complaining about it. Thank you women's magazines and men's magazines for making attractive women feel inferior! Bastards.

What she is though, is foreign. I never imagined myself going out with anybody who didn't speak English as a first language. Well you don't, do you? But we've been together over a year now and it turns out that having different native languages makes very little difference, and if anything it has more advantages than drawbacks.

For one thing I can always get out of having to see her friends. "Of course I like them, but they speak very fast and I can't understand a word they say. I'll see you later. Have fun!" It's the perfect excuse because it's mostly true, although as my Spanish improves it's unfortunately becoming less so.

When we started going out my Spanish and her English were both pretty basic, so the dictionary was often employed during conversations that used to switch excitingly back and forth between languages. But pretty soon my Spanish improved sufficiently to make it the language of choice for both of us.

I'm looking forward to when we go to England (in just over a month!) where her English should hopefully match my Spanish pretty quickly. Plus we'll be able to enjoy private conversations in public places by switching to Spanish.

And that's about it. All surprisingly mundane. Those hoping for hilarious linguistic and cultural misunderstandings won't find them here.

sexism and sensibility

2006-07-12T14:35:00.000-03:00

Spanish really is the most appallingly sexist language. While politically correct people in the UK are busily changing "policeman" to "police officer", "fireman" to "firefighter", "chairman" to "overpaid useless bastard" and so on, in Spanish they haven't even got gender-neutral words for concepts such as "parents," or "children."

The word for "parents" ("padres") is the same as the word for "fathers".*

By the same token, when you ask in Spanish "Do you have children?" what you are actually saying is "Do you have sons?"

"What about the girls?" you may ask, "Why do they not get a mention?"

It goes without saying that society in general is quite sexist - or machista, as they call it - here. As a psychology graduate I'm not going to be suckered into assuming that, just because the language is sexist and the society is sexist, that there's a straightforward causal link. But I bet there probably is a bit of one, or at least I doubt it helps things much.

On the other hand, with the gender roles so ingrained, it's quite easy to impress my girlfriend's female relatives just by doing simple things like cooking, and washing the dishes. The Argentinean male, by contrast, has no time for household duties. I occasionally ask my female students why they don’t get their husbands or boyfriends to do half the cooking and cleaning. “Oh, he’s machista,” they tell me, as though it’s some kind of incurable condition.

The one thing the men do cook is asado, which consists of getting a large piece of meat, covering it in about a tonne of salt, then sticking it on the barbecue until it goes black. Mysteriously, asado is probably the national dish.

* This linguistic quirk may really come into its own in the event of gay adoption becoming legalised. The adopted child will be able to refer to his/her parents as "mis padres" and actually be 50% more accurate than the children of mixed-sex parents. Unless the adoptive parents are both women of course.

Fun with Alzheimer's

2006-07-11T12:27:00.000-03:00

If it's Tuesday, it must be Film Review Day - hey that sort of rhymes.

El Hijo de la Novia (Translation: The Son of the Bride)

The ubiquitous-but-fortunately-very-good Ricardo Darín stars in this comedy from 2001. It was nominated for an Oscar, but unjustly lost to Crouching Tiger Hidden Sausage, or whatever it was called.

Darín plays a restauranteur who's a bit of a geezer. His parents never got round to getting married, but now his dad wants to tie the knot, even though his mum now has Alzheimer's and doesn't have a clue what's going on. If this were Hollywood, the stage would thus be set for weepy sentimental shite of the highest order. Robin Williams would probably be involved.

Fortunately that doesn't happen here. Instead the film is funny, touching and all the things it's supposed to be.

That's what I think.

My Argentinean mate Luciano says that it actually is pretty sentimental and Hollywood-like, but when you're watching with subtitles (as I have to - people from Buenos Aires speak quite fast) you don't pick up on that so much. This may be so, I've no way of knowing. But at least they don't go overboard with cheesy music.

The bottom line: altogether worth searching the foreign language section of your video store for.

It's my party and I'll keep everybody awake on a Sunday fucking night if I want to.

2006-07-10T11:52:00.000-03:00

Yesterday morning I went to the suburb of Vaqueros* with a couple of mates, where we wandered around a bit and I taught them the expression "to give someone a leg-up" and the origin of sticking two fingers up at people. That's what native English teachers are for.

In the afternoon I spent far too much time on Yahoo Answers. Like reality TV, it's full of stupid people and clearly not good for you, yet it's strangely compelling if you haven't got anything else to do.

At about 1am the next door neighbour (not the one who beats his wife, the other one) presumably said: "I know! As we're unemployed and all we've got planned for tomorrow is to watch the Argentinean equivalent of Richard and Judy while drinking wine straight from the carton, let's have a party! We can invite all our unemployed mates, including that guy with the drum, and play our shittest CDs really, really loud."

"Nobody will mind, especially not those nice people next door who run the shop which keeps us and our children supplied with fizzy drinks, fags and sugary snacks. And anyway, Argentinean law states that you can do pretty much whatever you want, as long as you do it indoors."

It all ended around 4am, and I was finally able to drift off.

Until they started again around 7.

* "Vaqueros" means "cowboys", which is a splendid name for a suburb to have.

Letters page

2006-07-08T12:31:00.000-03:00

Gonza posted a comment yesterday which I thought I would put up here, as he makes some good points about life in Argentina:

"i dont really think the reality of salta/mendoza reflects the reality of the rest of argentina, well, the reality of buenos aires (we porteños think of argentina as buenos aires + other places for hollidays)"

Very true - BA is a world apart from the rest of Argentina. It's a lot more European (and modern) in terms of culture, which can be a good or a bad thing depending on how you look at it. The other Argentineans seem to see the Buenos Aires lifestyle as being a lot more permissive as well. When I talk to my students about things like youth subcultures or gay marriage, they tend to say things like "we don't have that sort of thing here, but probably in Buenos Aires..." while frowning suspiciously.

"as for the names, i think it all started at the beginning of the 20th century when people began to come from all over the world. basically it was to turn foreign names into spanish ones... many people have stories of how their italian surname was changed to sound more spanish"

Finally, on the subject of tango:

"I, being 21, know only 1 girl who likes to go to tango clubs, and shes kind of weird, cos tango is used more as a tourist attraction..."

As I mentioned before, tango is rarely heard outside of BA. And in BA there's a huge difference (not least a difference in price) between the tourist tango places and the places where the locals go. The places for locals get a lot less publicity and are a lot less showy, but they exist alright. One such venue is the excellently moody La Catedral, where you can see local people dancing tango for their own enjoyment.

So you've decided to drive a car?

2006-07-07T13:29:00.000-03:00

Driving in Argentina is akin to testing pogo sticks in a minefield. What's needed then, is a handy guide!

What sort of car should I buy?

With the 2001 economic crisis a recent memory, the purchase of new cars is only for the privileged few. Consequently the highways and byways of Argentina are filled with retro-cool. If you're lucky, you'll be driving something like this:

Or this:

But it's also quite possible that all you'll be able to afford is one of these:

But not to worry - there's no MOT test, so your car's road-worthiness will never be called into question.

For the record, all of these photos were taken in a fairly well-to-do area, on a street picked at random, in the space of about two minutes.

How do I pass the driving test?

Don't worry! It's a piece of piss. Your test will be taken somewhere out in the country where nobody goes, or sometimes safely away from the road, on a driving simulator. Ability to drive in real road conditions is not a pre-requisite, but you'll have to keep your wits about you, as the examiner may be trying to out-fox you. I know two people who failed their test after the examiner asked them to park in a no-parking zone.

Are there any rules of the road I should know about?

At a crossroads, in theory right of way goes to whoever is approaching from the right. When a one-way street and a two-way street meet, as was the case outside my old apartment in Mendoza, the scene is set for many an animated discussion involving much waving of arms. In practice, right of way goes to whoever's got the biggest, heaviest vehicle and/or balls. So that'll be the bus drivers then.

According to my girlfriend's sister, "it's not the custom" to wear seatbelts here. I was in the middle of asking what she thought would happen, physics-wise, to a carload of unsecured people in the event of a sudden stop, when I was shushed by my girlfriend. Like sex, road safety is both a wonderful thing and a taboo subject.

It's also not customary to slow down if there are pedestrians crossing the road ahead of you. If it looks like they'll make it, speed up. If not, beep your horn.

Goodness, it doesn't sound very safe!

Well, Argentina has twice the rate of road deaths than the UK - and that's just deaths, never mind accidents and injuries - with far fewer vehicles on the road.

So what can I do?

Do as the locals do: get a crucifix and hang it from your rear-view mirror. If you're a bus driver you've got more room, so it's best to put together a minature shrine to the virgin of your choice. These measures don't actually prevent accidents (see Goodness, it doesn't sound very safe), but they may significantly increase your chances of passing into a happy afterlife, as you pass through the windscreen.

Sweet Jesus! Come inside, your dinner's ready!

2006-07-06T11:32:00.000-03:00

Milking the funny names cow for the second time

After Jeff pointed out yesterday that Caligula is on the Argentine government's list of approved names, I did a brief check and discovered that Neron (Nero to us) and Heliogabalo (Heliogabolus) are available as well. If you want to name your kids after sadistic and/or mad Roman emperors here, at least the government won't stand in your way.

Also up for grabs are Edit (for drop-down menu afficionados presumably), Agatonica (which I like because it sounds like "agua tonica" - tonic water), and the totally fantastic Policromio, amongst others.

Rather than being a means of preventing the giving of silly names, this list provides a veritable goldmine for mischievous parents who find themselve lacking inspiration. A triumph of Argentine bureaucracy!

"Stop taking the piss! My name is government-approved!"

2006-07-05T14:54:00.000-03:00

I learned last week that in Argentina you're not allowed to name your children anything that's not on the list of approved names.

Now generally laws are only made to prevent people from doing things that they would otherwise be inclined to do - driving at over 70mph, smoking a spliff on the bus, murdering all the girls in your class if they don't stop passing notes to each other right now, etc. So I suppose that at some point in the past Argentina must have suffered from a generation of parents naming their offspring things like "Manzana", "Unidad Lunar" and "Colgate Total Doce" until the government decided that enough was enough and they were going to forbid all names that weren't on the list.

To be fair, it's quite a long list, with 9,667 names to choose from. That should be enough for anyone really. But it has to be said that quite a few frequently-used, government-approved names are still posess somewhat questionable sensibility. For example, it's perfectly normal to meet girls called Soledad (solitude, loneliness) or Dolores (pains). On the male side, the stupidest of the common names is probably Facundo (fecund, virile).

Fortunately it's still perfectly OK to call your child Jesus or Dulce Jesus (Sweet Jesus) if it's a boy, or Del Sagrada Corazón de Jesus (Of the Sacred Heart of Jesus) if it's a boy or a girl - I've just checked.

Cracking Britblog (Grommit)!

2006-07-04T18:11:00.000-03:00

I'm so cunning you could stick a tail on me and call me a weasel.

As part of my ongoing self-promotion campaign, a few weeks back I enrolled with Britblog (click on the little General Kitchener icon in the sidebar for a link). It's a directory of bloggers from the UK, organised into various categories, such as lifestyle, travel, humour, religious nuttery etc, as well as the different parts of the world where the bloggers happen to be.

It really does work, as I've been getting some hits from there. This is possibly because if you search for bloggers in South America, there's really only me and a page-full of others. I also put my category as "humour", though only because nobody would want to read the "travel" blog of a complete stranger, while "lifestyle" just sounds too Daily Mail Colour Supplement for my taste.

But how to get more hits?

Easy! The blogs are organised alphabetically. So just change the name of your blog to something beginning with A. While this page is really still called Not a Blog, on Britblog it's listed as "Argentinean Beauty" - in quotes too, as punctuation marks appear higher on the list than A's do.

So now if you search "humour" I'm right at the top of the list. As I said before - pretty cunning. However I acknowledge that being at the top of the list of humorous blogs probably means additional pressure to include more, like, jokes and stuff. Sadly all I can think of right now is a comment I put on somebody else's blog that said "I put a birdfeeder in my pond, but the penguins are still steering well clear, the bastards." I can see I'm going to have to do a lot better.

If anyone tries to get in ahead of me I'll change it again to "Aardvark Argentinean Beauty" or something.

Coming to the foreign language section of a video store near you

2006-07-04T12:19:00.000-03:00

When I started this blog I promised myself that I wouldn't use it to ramble interminably on the subject of movies, because blogs that do that are crap, and shouldn't be read by anyone.

However, Argentina has produced some true classics, which may or may not be well-known in the outside world, and should be recommended so more people watch them, so the producers make more money, so they can make more movies, and so on.

Nueve Reinas (translation: Nine Queens)

Just as all Argentinean pop songs include the word "corazón", all Argentinean movies star either Ricardo Darin or Gastón Pauls. This one stars both, and is the movie that young Argentineans always tell visitors to watch. Made in 2000, Nueve Reinas made Argentine cinema cool again, and quite right too, as it's very fine. It tells the story of a couple of con men in Buenos Aires who are trying to sell some dodgy stamps, amongst other things, and it ends with events that precipitated the economic crisis in 2001. It was remade recently in the US as "Criminals", which is worth watching - but why bother when you could watch the original?

Sadly the writer/director Fabián Bielinsky died last week of a heart attack at the age of 47. His most recent film, his second, was El Aura (The Aura), which I'll tell you about once I've seen it.

Men's fashion

2006-07-03T12:07:00.000-03:00

It's brilliant, having a girlfriend. I can see why they're so popular amongst the male population. Ever since I forked out an unfeasibly large amount of money for mine to come to England, she's been dragging me round Salta's trendiest men's shops, buying me nice clothes. It's like I'm on one of those awful TV programmes where badly dressed people get to spend a thousand quid improving their wardrobe. "Well of course they look a lot better now! They were given a thousand quid and told they weren't allowed to spend it on a holiday!"

On my own I'm crap at buying clothes. Although I like having nice clothes to wear, when it comes to shopping for them I can't be arsed at all. But with my girlfriend's help, in the space of a few weeks I've gone from this...

... to this:

Although I think the wig was a great idea, the handbag is probably a mistake. I shall endeavour to lose it at the airport.

Edit: Since posting this I became a bit worried that you might think the guy in the first photo is really me. Happily he isn't. I found him by doing a Google image search for "bad clothes". The second photo is me.

Ulysses 2

2006-07-02T13:14:00.000-03:00

Raiding the junk mail folder for cheap laughs once again

Is it just me, or is spam getting stranger?

Today's offering started normally enough, trying to sell me pills that would help me to "make BETTER SE X MORE OFTEN! and to bring unimagnable plesure to her," but then ventured into highly experimental literary territory for the second half:

speed than the fastest gull alive. in prison every Sunday. And I really needed a drink--toy thirst wouldn't Jonathan nodded obediently. For the next few days he tried to behave down, and have another cigarette. It meant that I couldn't go into the Zone fiction solely with girls in brass brassieres being rescued from the have spun it? I had never seen any bugs in the Zone. The worst part was that responsibility for their influence, should take note. It can be done, and gardens. The engine was humming evenly under our feet, calmly-- it didn't

It's as if James Joyce had tried his hand at writing Manga.

I promise I'll stop banging on about it once they do.

2006-06-30T21:23:00.000-03:00

For me the issue of the Malvinas is the same as football and religion: I didn't have strong feelings one way or the other before I came here, but being exposed to a single viewpoint non-stop just makes me want to push back, if only for reasons of balance.

There's a very interesting article about Argentina's renewed determination to recover the Malvinas here. Some of the points it makes are worthy of note:

"There are three perennial passions in Argentina: football, the tango and the country's claim to Britain's South Atlantic outpost, the Falkland Islands."

Outside of Buenos Aires you never hear tango, so they're down to two perennial passions there then. The Malvinas, as I mentioned before, are nothing but a distraction from Argentina's real problems, but at least they've still got the football... What? Oh.

"British government officials are privately dismissive, seeing the sudden renewed interest in the islands as little more than a piece of political cynicism, motivated by Mr Kirchner's drive for re-election next year."

Politically cynical?! The Argentinean government?! Pull the other one mate, it's got bells on.

They're going to have their work cut out for them:

Robert Rowlands, who lives in the Falklands capital Port Stanley, said discussion of sovereignty will happen "only when the islanders are ready" and that would be "never".

But the best bit is:

"The strategy of trying to woo the islanders reached its height under the presidency of Mr Kirchner's predecessor, Carlos Menem: Argentinians still cringe over his decision to mail islanders, as a Christmas present, copies of Winnie the Pooh."

Fantastic! I think the Argentineans have successfully managed to bury that one though, or at least they keep very quiet about it. As you would, really.

Next: Something a bit less cruelly sadistic!

It was bound to happen sooner or later

2006-06-30T15:27:00.000-03:00

I'm at number one!

Recently at least two people have typed "Nocheros blogspot" into a search engine, and got me at the top of the list. They probably left disappointed, as this site's only connection with Salta's celebrated folclóre quartet is that I have in the past poked fun at their somewhat sleazy, greasy appearance.

But no more. With the prestige of being at number one, comes the responsibility of providing some kind of hard information for lovers of sleaze, grease, and folk songs about hearts* and thwarted love.

So I can report that the quatro fabulosos are currently busy working on their new album - "La Banda de la Sociedad de los Corazónes Solas de Sargento Pimienta". Juan and Pablo have recently finished recording "Campos de Frutillas Para Siempre", which is expected to be the first single.

I hope you're satisfied, Nocheros fans. Please tell more people to come here!

PS: Actually I'm not at all sure if that photo is really them. At any rate, they don't look a lot like the guys in the other pictures I used. But if they're not the Nocheros, who are they?

* It's a well-known fact that all, and I do mean all, Argentinean songs have the word "corazón" (which means "heart") in them. Such constant repitition can only be the result of some kind of legal requirement to include it (perhaps for tax reasons).

Like Fight Club, but with "English Conversation" instead of "Fight"

2006-06-29T14:43:00.000-03:00

Known only to a select few, its existence communicated solely by word of mouth now that its single advert has been taken down and never replaced, our Wednesday night conversation group is fast becoming the exclusive place to be in Salta on a, er, Wednesday night. And at this great meeting of (English-speaking) minds, great ideas have been known to spring forth.

Last night was no exception. We were involved in a leisurely discussion on the subject of political apathy. Somebody mentioned that in the US more people voted for American Idol than voted in the general election. In this atmosphere of enlightened discourse and litre jugs of house wine, the solution hit me like an Argentinean taxi, driving with its headlights off in the middle of the night...

POLITICAL IDOL!

Twelve presidential hopefuls are put together in a house. Every week they each have to prepare and deliver a speech on a different issue, such as abortion, gay marriage or the war in Iraq. After their speeches are delivered, one of them is voted out by public phone-in. The process continues until only one is left. The winner gets to rule the US for the next four years.

This idea was immediately recognised as a stroke of genius by the other members of the conversation group, who then carried me out of the bar and through the streets on their shoulders.

Factories Without Bosses

2006-06-28T15:55:00.000-03:00

Here's another article I wrote for The Grapevine in Mendoza. I wanted to show that there's more to the Argentines than poor driving ability and unfortunate haircuts.

Charlie the editor rejected it on the grounds that it was "a bit too Socialist Worker for a magazine that deals primarily with wine tourism." He was right, dammit, but it's a great story so I'll publish it here instead. This article is a year out of date now, but if it gets any kind of response I'll do some further investigating and write an update.

Most of the great Argentinean concepts - such as dulce de leche, mate and electronic tango - have sadly failed to make much of an impact in the outside world. But unknown to many tourists and residents alike, some Argentineans are fighting for an altogether grander concept that just might...

Factories Without Bosses

In 1984 Luis Zanon and his family bought a tile factory in the southern province of Neuquen. The family never paid any taxes, the company stole land and resources from the indigenous Mapuche community and, due to a relaxed attitude towards health and safety, the factory had between 25 and 30 serious accidents per month and one fatality per year. Yet despite all this cost-cutting, the place still didn’t seem to be turning a profit. When the economic crisis hit in 2001, the workers were all owed months of back-pay and the factory’s debt was more than $170 million. Clearly something had to be done.

As luck would have it, the family’s foreign bank accounts had somehow accumulated millions over the years, so with this in mind the Zanons closed down the factory and left the country.

The crisis left thousands of businesses bankrupt and the Zanon situation was paralleled up and down Argentina. Many of the owners decided they weren’t going to stick around, and so they fled the country, leaving their workspaces to fall into disrepair and neglect.

Or so they thought.

266 of Zanon´s 331 employees had a more creative solution to the problem: they forced their way back into the factory, restarted the silent machines and continued production themselves. And with the original owners gone it was time for some radical restructuring of working relationships.

Since March 2002 all decisions have been made democratically, by vote in open assemblies. The factory is run by a series of elected committees, but everybody is paid equally. They have paid the outstanding bills run up by the previous owners, attracted new clients and, without profits and management salaries to worry about, managed to pay themselves steady wages. Production is higher than it was under the original owners, 170 new workers have been taken on this year alone and there are no more occupational accidents. The factory is now known as Fabrica Sin Patrones (“Factory Without Bosses”) or FaSinPat for short.

FaSinPat isn’t the only factory run in this way. The Reclaimed Workspaces movement now includes 15,000 workers in over 200 businesses all over Argentina. But it’s not only factories being run in this way – workers have taken over other bankrupt and abandoned workspaces, including a four-star hotel now run by its cleaning staff, a supermarket taken up by its clerks, as well as clinics, book publishers, bakeries and even a regional airline. And as domestic demand for their products, from business suits to ice cream to car parts, continues to grow, the workers have been able to steadily vote themselves pay increases.

The Reclaimed Workspaces operate with the support of their local communities. In FaSinPat a space has been created for art exhibits, concerts and community events. They have also won the support of the local Mapuche community, workers from the Piquetero movement and the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo. And this support is badly needed. According to Celia Martinez, a worker at the Brukman clothing factory in Buenos Aires, the Argentinean government is afraid of them, because it sees the movement not just as an economic alternative, but a political one as well. “They are afraid of us because we have shown that if we can manage as factory we could also manage a country,” she said. That’s why this government decided to repress us.”

Though the government gave many of the Reclaimed Workspaces two-year permits to function, these have all expired. So far the FaSinPat workers and their supporters have resisted five attempts by police (authorised by the Federal Supreme Court) to evict them from the factory using increasingly violent means. Each attempt was countered by thousands of people defending the workers. The movement as a whole also faces terror by hired gangs, kidnappings, direct opposition from local politicians and apathy on the part of the government.

The workers have responded by lobbying the courts to recognise their businesses as legitimate and legal, so far without success. But without legal approval they are unable to secure bank loans for machinery repairs or replacement costs, and as such they are wholly reliant on donations from private benefactors.

The Reclaimed Workspaces may yet have tremendous significance for the world at large. They demonstrate a living, breathing alternative to corporate capitalism, which has proved successful in the face of enormous opposition. It shows that for many Argentineans, their economic problems could be overcome not through the help of the IMF or the G8 nations, but through direct democracy and willingness to challenge the kind of working practices that led to the crisis in the first place. What is needed now is for the government to recognise the solution that these workers have forged.

This article was written by distilling facts and figures from reports found at www.ww4report.com and www.guardian.co.uk.

In which the author runs short of inspiration and turns to translation in desperation

2006-06-27T15:53:00.000-03:00

Writing that title actually reminds me that the Argentines have developed their own crackpot formula for converting Spanish into English. What you do, they say, is get a Spanish word, and put “ation” on the end of it, because they think all English words end in “ation.” It’s an interesting theory, whose only fault is that it doesn’t work, ever.

So by way of one-upmanship I explained the well-known, tried and tested formula for converting English into Spanish. As you know, all you have to do is get an English word and put “o” on the end of it. Unlike their stupid formula, ours works almost all the time. For example, “helicopter” becomes “helicóptero,” “progress” becomes “progreso,” and, er… lots of other examples too numerous to list here.

But enough of that. On with the translationo:

Mirrors
By Alejandro Dolina

Some aficionados of magic postulate the existence of mirrors with memory, which store images even in the absence of the objects they reflect.

The musician Ives Castagnino swears that one afternoon in the café La Perla, in the district of Flores, he made enthusiastic gestures at a young lady he saw in the mirror.

In a certain moment he jotted down his phone number in reverse on a serviette, and held it up to the glass. The girl took note. Supposing that she had accepted him, he turned round to continue the seduction in a more direct form. The girl wasn’t there. He turned back to look in the mirror and saw her sitting there, looking overwhelming in a polka dot summer dress.

Growing tired of optical experiments, the musician calculated that the mirror preserved images from the past, then he went on his way with a tranquil air.

The following afternoon, in the doorway of La Perla, he again saw the girl in the summer dress. After briefly considering the matter, he came to believe that the mirror did not reflect the past, but the future.

The café was deserted. The girl came in and sat down at the same table as the day before. Castagnino – on a whim – sat down somewhere different.

After a while he looked for her in the mirror, but couldn’t find her. So instead he moved towards her table to talk to her, when he saw that she was smiling at the mirror while noting down a telephone number.

At last Castagnino realised the truth: in the mirror of La Perla in Flores, one could see the past or the future, depending on where one sat.

Perplexed by those reflections, he made for the door and went to look for a café without mirrors.

Esta en un nube de pedos

2006-06-26T13:44:00.000-03:00

Now that the effects of the red wine have dissipated, my mind is clear and my thoughts and deeds are pure once more.

So it's time to talk about farting. Lamentably, Spanish doesn't boast anywhere near as many swearwords as English does. But over the years the inhabitants of Buenos Aires have developed slang so colourful and robust that it makes even Australian slang seem lacklustre by comparison.

Take for example "un kilombo," which means "a mess," "a cock-up," etc. But what it means literally, or so I'm told, is "a police raid on a whore house." You have to admire any culture that has a one-word expression for that.

But for some reason the majority of Argentine slang revolves around farting. "Fart" is "pedo" in Spanish, so we have:

Estoy en pedo - I'm pissed
Estoy al pedo - I'm doing fuck all
Estás en pedo?! - Are you crazy?!
Qué pedo me mandé! - I've fucked up
No sé un pedo - I know fuck all
Ni en pedo! - No fucking way!
De pedo - by chance
A los pedos - very fast

And even better:

Esta en un nube de pedos (he's in a cloud of farts) - He's in a world of his own

And when something is very old, you say "Es del epoca cuando tiraban pedos con un onda," which means "It's from the age when they threw farts with a sling."

But my favourite piece of Argentine slang is the totally magnificent "nos dan con un caño", which means "they're giving us a hard time", in the sense of a right slagging-off, or a drubbing at football. But what it literally means is "they're beating us with a pipe." It sounds better in Spanish because the words have a nice assonance to them.

(Insert your own pipe-beating sound effects here.)

Normal service will be resumed tomorrow

2006-06-25T18:44:00.000-03:00

I feel I ought to be commenting on yesterday's dramatic post in which I said I was going to take my girlfriend to the UK, but today we went to what was possibly the best asado ever (an asado is to a barbecue what a centurion tank is to a Nissan Sunny), and after several bottles of wine, all I can think of to write is this Argentinean joke:

An Englishman, an American and an Argentinean are in a sauna. Naked, of course.

After a few minutes the Englishman starts pressing the fingers of his right hand into the palm of his left hand. "Awright mate!" he says to his left hand. "I'm in a sauna!"

The Argentinean is amazed, so the Englishman explains, "in England we all have mobile phones grafted into our palms."

A bit later the American whistles sharply, then says "Dude! I'm in a sauna!"

Again the Argentinean is amazed, so the American explains, "In America we have mobile phones grafted into our ears. We just whistle, and start talking."

The Argentinean thinks, "shit, how can I possibly compete with this?"

So he excuses himself and goes into the bathroom. When he returns he has a stream of toilet paper hanging out of his ass.

"Excuse me, guys," he says, "I'm just receiving a fax."

Daughter theft!

2006-06-24T20:32:00.000-03:00

"So you're going to steal my daughter?"

The only response I could think of was the distinctly weak "she'll come back."

Yes, on Tuesday it was Beatriz and I's ("I's"?!? What kind of grammar is that?!) first anniversary and this morning we celebrated by buying tickets to England for the 12th of August. Yay! After over one and a half years in Argentina I finally get to go home!

I'm looking forward to it tremendously, though Beatriz is a bit nervous. As well she might be, at the prospect of having to learn English, get used to the culture, meet new friends and look for a job as a Computer Systems Engineer, while her boyfriend works the kind of hours he hasn't attempted in quite some time, in an attempt to pay the bills and put food on the table. Still, our relationship is in fine form and I'm sure we'll manage.

This plan had been in development ever since I failed to get that job a few weeks back. Beatriz's mum was aware of it in a general way (if only due to my much-increased cheerfulness recently), but it was only on Monday night that we told her that it had become concrete. Luckily she took it pretty well. Basically she wants Beatriz to be happy, while Beatriz wants her mum to be happy. So we can go, providing we do come back at some point. I think Beatriz's mum must quite approve of me as boyfriend material, to let us do this.

On Challenging the Misconception of the Five O'Clock Tea

2006-06-23T11:42:00.000-03:00

The Argentineans have got us pegged as a load of repressed yet very polite, fish-and-chip-loving ardent royalists, who drink tea at five o'clock in the afternoon* and have a soft spot for Margaret Thatcher.

It's hardly their fault. Their English excercise books are full of castles and double-decker buses, while the American movies they see which feature British people leave much to be desired. Richard Curtis movies don't help either, mind.

So at the invitation of one of the English schools, yesterday I spent one and a half hours doing my level best to set the record straight.

I started with the boring geographical data: Argentina, at a whopping 2,791,810km2, is 11.4 times bigger than the UK. But while Argentina has a population density of 14 people per square kilometre, the UK has 245. To give them a better sense of perspective, I pointed out that the province of Salta is bigger than the whole of England (but not Great Britain), though it boasts a mere 6.4 people per square kilometre, versus England's 383.

"Wow, it must be crowded there!" said the students, because they all think Argentina is a normal size for a country to be.

Next came more comparisons, such as the average family having 1.5 kids, whereas in Argentina it's 2.4, rising to 3.77 in the north. That actually sounds low to me, since I frequently meet people who have six or eight brothers and sisters.

And of course the income thing. The average person in the UK earns almost 20 times more than the average Argentinean. This, coupled with a much smaller country, means that people in the UK have much more freedom to move to a different city without travelling for 12 hours, to live away from their parents and to adopt the lifestyle of their choice, leading to a proliferation of subcultures almost wholly absent here.

Finally I filled them in on all the cultural stuff that never makes it into their exercise books, namely: Large-scale indifference towards the monarchy, Isambard Kingdom Brunel as a national hero, MOT tests, Thatcher-loathing, English eccentricity, Blair's unpopularity, the ageing population, curry as a national dish, the book of Crap Towns, widespread unsubstantiated fear of paedophiles, tolerance/indifference towards people of other races, binge drinking, love of foreign foods, the obesity epidemic, the average Briton having 126 CDs, and irony.

The only things I didn't mention, but should have, were the proliferation of security cameras, gravy, and Doctor Who.

What a shame then that the students' level of English was pretty basic, so they probably didn't take it all in. But at least the teachers enjoyed it.

* The Misconception of the Five-O'Clock Tea is particularly prevalent. I found one possible source for it under England in the Spanish-language edition of Microsoft's My First Encarta. So I'm blaming Bill Gates, the bastard.

Cheers!

2006-06-22T22:31:00.000-03:00

I don't know if it's a result of yesterday's post, but today my traffic has shot up to a record-breaking 27 hits! That's about one recommendation from every reader, so I guess the Nocheros won't have to be called out after all. Sorry.

A perfect blend of two cultures

2006-06-22T19:45:00.000-03:00

While strolling down one of Salta's two pedestrian precincts yesterday, my eye happened to chance upon a street vendor selling all manner of world cup merchandise. There were the usual soft top hats, jester's hats, scarves etc, in the famous blue and white. Yet something else caught my eye, and caused me to do a classic double-take.

Blue and white bongs. And not just any blue and white bongs, but blue and white telescopic, collapsible bongs. Until yesterday, I'd never seen a bong anywhere here. I don't even know the word for them in Spanish (although I'd like it to be "el bongo").

Argentina doesn't have much of a drug culture compared with England. There are drugs of course, plenty of them, but the people of Salta are slightly (by which I mean "rabidly") conservative, and have no truck with that sort of thing. Besides, being caught in posession will get you banged up in the slammer for four and a half years minimum.

"But what better way to celebrate a goal-less draw with Holland?" I thought, as I continued on my way.

Grabbed by the Nocheros

2006-06-21T13:45:00.000-03:00

One of the (lesser) reasons I wanted to keep this blog was to have a referrer log. For the uninitiated, a referrer log is a list I can look at to see the pages that people who visit this blog looked at before they came here. It also shows any Google search words they typed in to get to this page.

Favourites so far are: "Mutant camels interview," "Monopoly rules" and "person in the rain." I honestly hope those people found what they were looking for here (and that they came back).

Over its first month of life, this blog has managed to pull in an average of not 100, not 200, not even 300, but 12 readers a day (Rising to 14 in the last couple of days). In the words of Uncle Jimbo - "Holy shit! We could get an Emmy!"

It's pretty cool knowing that people I've never met enjoy reading what I've written, and I'm more than happy to write for an audience of 14. But I do think I could do better...

So today's task for you, my 12-14 readers, is to draw more people to this blog, using whatever means necessary. Links, e-mails, or just shouting as loud as you can in a public place, while wearing a "thealexlife.blogspot.com" sandwich board)

This being the internet, the task of passing the message on has to be accompanied by a spurious, superstition-based system of reward and punishment.

Tell one person about the site and you will see an attractive member of the opposite sex, or a relative of one, sometime in the next 24 hours.

Tell ten people and you will get a free iPod, because that's how Apple are choosing to distribute them these days, according to an e-mail I got. Sounds to me like they'll be making a catastrophic loss there, but then I did drop out of A-Level Economics after a year, so who am I to judge?

On the other hand, if you tell no-one, the Nocheros will come for you.

The Nocheros: they'll be pleased to see you.

Preservativo Woe: Part 2

2006-06-20T17:17:00.000-03:00

Sex in Buenos Aires

Last night on the news they ran a feature entitled "park of sexual enjoyment," in which they revealed that every morning the park wardens in Palermo, Buenos Aires, have to collect and dispose of 1,100 condoms, which are to be found scattered about in the undergrowth.

1,100 is a lot of johnnies, but it is good to know they're using protection. However, although the parks in Palermo are big, they're crisscrossed by busy main roads, so it must be difficult to get much privacy there. The couples must have to form queues in some places.

Argentineans have a funny attitude towards sex. It's everywhere, but sensible people try really hard to pretend that it isn't. This is quite comforting, as it makes the English attitude seem open and sensible, but I digress.

On the one hand, no magazine cover here is complete if it doesn't feature a busty female showing her bottom - and that's just the women's magazines. Many TV shows have scantily-clad females bouncing around in the background, and on the news last night they visited a strip club in Germany (tenuous World Cup link, you see) an item whose sole purpose seemed to be to show as many lingering close-ups of girls' bottoms as possible.

On the other hand, for economic and cultural reasons most people live at home until they're married, and the idea that a couple might actually have sex in the family home is absolutely unthinkable. It's an odd attitude...

Mother: Darling, I feel distinctly ill at ease with the idea of our 20-something daughter having sex in our home.

Father: I quite agree, dear. Sex is something only married people should do. I think it would be infinitely preferable if she didn't do it here.

Mother: I'd really rather she did it in an abandoned car park or an alleyway or somewhere. I have no desire to know who she's with, or if she's safe.

Father: Quite right, dear. We are respectable parents, after all. (Glances at television.) Whoar, look at her!

So what's a couple to do? Well there are hotels who charge by the hour. But if you're a bit strapped for cash, well, there's always Palermo park.

I think I should submit this to Frommer's.

"Two bald men fighting over a comb" - Borges

2006-06-20T12:04:00.000-03:00

Epilogue to yesterday's post

Big argument with girlfriend last night. It was Flag Day, and a military band were playing "March of the Malvinas" or some such, on telly.

Our argument was basically "The Falklands are Argentinean" vs "The Falklands are nothing but a big distraction from Argentina's real problems".

Or "A lot of Argentineans died! The Malvinas should be returned to Argentina in remembrance of them," vs "649 Argentineans died! More people than that die in road accidents here every month, yet the people don't give it anywhere near the same importance!"

And so on, and so on... Each of us failed to convince the other...

I'm posting this to illustrate that the subject really is very touchy, even amongst lovely, calm, rational people like my girlfriend.

Next: Further Preservativo Woe...

Concerning the ownership of a certain group of small islands.

2006-06-19T13:27:00.000-03:00

This post isn’t funny. It is pretty interesting though. Or at least it may be if you’re English or Argentinean. Go on, read it anyway!

"It is forbidden to forget them. They are not negociable!" says the sign, in Córdoba city centre. And in case you ever wondered what happened to all our lovely red phoneboxes...

When I started teaching English, over a year ago, students would occasionally ask me – somewhat coyly – what my opinion was regarding Las Malvinas, or The Falklands, as they’re known back home.

I didn’t really have an opinion, but I had read the history section in my Lonely Planet, which gave the basic facts about the war – and warned that it’s still a pretty touchy subject for many Argentineans

So I responded with something carefully-worded and diplomatic, along the lines of “well it was clearly a very stupid war. It was just an effort to drum up popular support for the governments on both sides really. That’s not a good reason to have a war.” It was a good reponse, and it’s pretty much my opinion now. An opinion that was reinforced after seeing last year’s excellent Argentinean film Iluminados por el Fuego, which has a lot to say about the fatal mixture of warmongering and unpreparedness at the Argentinean end.

But over the past year and a bit, I’ve been asked about Las Malvinas so many times that my careful diplomacy has started to slip. Plus I’ve had more chance to think about the issue. My responses now tend to be more like this:

“What exactly do you want them for? How will getting the Malvinas back benefit Argentina in any noticeable way? If you had to make a list of problems that face Argentina today, the fact that the Malvinas don’t belong to them wouldn’t even make the top 50.”

And:

“Argentina covers 2,791,810 square kilometres and is the eighth-largest country in the world. And you want more land?”

And:

“Why do I never hear anyone complaining about the large area of Chile that completely cuts the bottom part of Argentina off from the rest of the country? Instead you’re always bitching about some crappy little islands off the coast.”

And:

“The people who live on the islands are self-governing and do rather well for themselves. They don’t want to be governed by Argentina. And although most Argentineans think the Malvinas should belong to Argentina, you’re not exactly clamouring to go and live there.”

And not least:

“What language are we speaking? Is it the Mapuche language of Argentina’s native inhabitants, who were pretty much entirely displaced and/or wiped out by the settlers? I don’t think it is, is it? But it’s OK for you guys to invade a whole continent, but not OK for another country to take a few islands off you?”

So in conclusion, the whole issue - still very potent almost 25 years later - seems like a diversion, a way of uniting the populace by creating a national obsession of blaming foreigners for problems that don’t really exist anyway, while ignoring other ones that do – such as the fact that thanks to the policies of successive Argentinean governments, 35% of the population lives below the poverty line.

The humour returns tomorrow, humour fans!

Of course it's all OK to carry on that way.

2006-06-17T14:38:00.000-03:00

I live with my girlfriend’s family, who run a grocery shop.

Typical conversation between my girlfriend’s mum, and one of the locals coming into the shop.

"Can I have 20 centavos’ worth of carrots?"

Half a carrot dutifully produced and handed over.

"And half a loaf of bread (to provide nutrition for my four children)."

"Half a loaf of bread… 40 centavos."

"And two packs of cigarettes and a carton of red wine."

"That’ll be eight pesos then, please. (Good to see you've got your priorities in order, madam.)"

"Can I have it on credit? I’ll pay you tomorrow."

More football-related translation fun

2006-06-16T15:45:00.000-03:00

Argentina boasts some very fine authors who are virtually unknown in the rest of the world. In fact they're by no means famous here either, as the average Argentinean would run 1.4 kilometres rather than pick up a book. A couple of days ago my mate Luciano asked me to translate a couple of football-related pieces for him. I'm not into football, but I do like the challenge of translating!

(see also "The Goal", from yesterday)

The Courtyard of the Lost Balls
By Alejandro Dolina

The thieving demons prowl near the edges of the football pitches. When the ball lands far from the field, they hide it amongst the weeds and ditches, where the players will never find it. Then when night falls they spirit the lost balls away to a secret courtyard.

The demons also form underhanded agreements with any unfriendly neighbours, and in the early hours of the morning they run over the roofs, gutters and terraces in search of further spoils.

Nobody knows where it is, but in the courtyard lie all of the lost balls. Rock-hard relics, brand-new professional leather balls, humble rubber balls, the infamous balls of plastic which change direction in mid-air, and roughly-stitched veterans that have known a thousand patch-ups.

One day there will come from the south a good elf, whose task will be to release the lost balls from captivity and return them to their owners. And on that day everybody will feel the emotion of reliving long-forgotten glories on the field.

in need of an English teacher

2006-06-15T18:10:00.000-03:00

It's all too easy to use the contents of my junk mail folder as a readily-available source of cheap laughs. So I say I might as well.

Never-seen Every man wishes it.
Woo-hooo!
Impress your girl with prolonged hardness, plentiful explosions and increased duration

So I did. I sent them 50 quid, and they sent me a boxed-set of 24, with forty-five minutes of extended scenes. It was exactly what I wished for, and my girlfriend was well impressed. Thank you www.hoopcc.com!

I'll get me coat...

Jack Bauer: hard

The Goal

2006-06-15T11:41:00.000-03:00

The goal is the orgasm of football. And like the orgasm, the goal is less and less frequent in modern life. Half a century ago, it was rare that a match would finish without goals: 0-0. Two open mouths. Two yawns. Nowadays the 11 players spend the whole match hanging from the crossbar, dedicated to the avoidance of goals, and without time to score them.

The enthusiasm that is released every time the white ball hits the net could seem mysterious, or madness, but it must be born in mind that it is a miracle that happens rarely. The goal, even if it is only a little goal, always results in “gooooooooooooooooooooal!” in the throat of the radio commentator, a thunderous note capable of leaving Caruso mute forever, while the crowd goes crazy and the stadium forgets that it is made of concrete, as it leaves the ground and leaps in the air.

By Eduardo Galeano
Translated by me!

What else is on telly?

2006-06-13T15:40:00.000-03:00

A couple of weeks back we looked at Argentinean prime time evening televisual entertainment (and found it wanting). But what's the best of what's on offer during the rest of the day?

El Chavo

This doesn't, lamentably, translate as "the chav". Actually from Mexico, this is a comedy whose hilarity derives from the idea of middle-aged adults dressed up as young children. The series looks to be from the 80s (or perhaps is just extremely dated) and is repeated endlessly. I will grudgingly admit it's quite funny in places though.

The News

Stories of burglaries, rapes, and car crashes mostly, each dwelled on for an excessive amount of time. They like to dramatise it to a certain extent, meaning plenty of footage of crying women wherever possible, accompanied by ominous or heart-wrenching background music.

Last night's story was of a ten-year old girl who has given birth to a child. It must have lasted for 20 minutes or more, and not once did anyone ask questions about who exactly it was who had sex with a ten year old. Some might call that a lack of journalistic rigour. The background music was an instrumental version of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."

The Day After Tomorrow

The film. Seems to have been playing on various channels at different times, at least once a day for the past 6 months. I invariably miss the first 10 minutes of quality special effects and the destruction of America (if that's not entertainment I don't know what is) and always turn on during the much longer and more boring rest of the film. After less than a minute of that, I swiftly turn the TV off.

The Chaos

2006-06-12T14:08:00.000-03:00

Luckily I only have to teach kids for 3 hours a week. The experience gives you a whole new perspective on lessons from the one you dimly remember from childhood.

Teacher says: OK, hi everyone. Today’s class is on the subject of The Oscars.

Student thinks: Must draw something. But where? Surface of desk looks pretty inviting.

Teacher says: For the first part, you have to read this short passage and fill in the blanks using the words from the box. The way to do this is to identify whether you think the missing word should be a…

Student thinks: How the fuck am I supposed to do this? I know, I’ll copy Jorge.

Teacher says: …verb, adjective, noun or whatever, from its position in the text, next....

Student thinks: Jorge’s only got two answers. I’d better fill the rest in at random then.

Teacher says: Use a dictionary to look up any words you don’t understand, or ask me.

Student thinks: All done. Shit – Jorge’s stolen my pencil, the bastard.

Teacher says: Stop fighting you two, and do your work! Give Jorge back the pencil.

Student thinks: Unfair!

Teacher says: Can I see your work? That one’s OK, good. Good… good… no that one’s wrong… no… no… “after receiving their Oscar, the actors usually make a __film stars_”? I think you need to look at these again.

Student thinks: I’ll copy Jorge. Shit. He’s copying me. I’ll write on the desk with tip-ex. Mmmm… it’s great stuff, tip-ex.

And so on until the lesson is complete. Students fail to learn English, but succeed in covering their desks in tip-ex, the floor in sweet wrappers, and their exercise sheets in semi-legible scribblings. A few mobile phones are separated from their owners. One student told to get a cloth and clean his desk.

Teacher muses on American high-school massacres, and wonders why it’s never the teachers doing the shooting. Briefly feels bad for doing so, but not really.

Preservativo woe

2006-06-11T14:01:00.000-03:00

One of the features of being in a relationship is the continuing necessity of purchasing contraception.

In any civilised country (i.e. England and a few other places) condoms are to be found on the pharmacy shelves, thus allowing the gentleman (or lady) to browse the selection at his (or her) leisure, select the variety that he (or- oh you get the idea) prefers, and then proceed directly to the checkout to make his purchase with the minimum of fuss. Not so here in Argentina. Here, upon entering the pharmacy you are immediately accosted by a shop assistant (invariably female) who asks you what you’re looking for.

“Preservativos” you say.

“¿Cómo?”

“PRESERVATIVOS.”

She then gently leads you towards the counter where she talks you through the selection available…

------------------------------------------------------

“I’m not going again,” I said. “The next time we need condoms it’s your turn.”

“No it isn’t,” said my girlfriend. “I have to tell the pharmacist that I want to buy the pill, and which type I want, and that’s a bit embarrassing for me too.”

“A bit embarrassing? At least you don’t have to stand there in front of everyone in the queue and two shop assistants, while one of them asks if you’d prefer sensitive, extra-lubricated or strawberry flavour.”

------------------------------------------------------

“I see your point. But it’s still not my turn.”

Curses. And woe.

Virgins!

2006-06-09T11:24:00.000-03:00

"There's virgins sir, founsands of 'em!"

To say that the people of Salta have a bit of an obsession with virgins would be putting it mildly. Argentina is 90% Catholic on average, and probably even more so in the north. And no Catholic home is complete without a full complement of crucifixes, pictures of Jesus, porcelain figures of Jesus, pictures of saints, pictures of virgins, statues of virgins, pictures of statues of virgins, and little porcelain children with wings.

Not content with merely filling their churches and houses with the images of young ladies who haven't had sex yet, the streets are full of them as well. Little shrines abound at every crossroads, and are also dotted at random throughout all 2,791,810 square kilometres of the countryside as well. And that's a lot of virgins.

It goes without saying that some virgins have special powers. There's a famous one in Salta cathedral who has protected the city from earthquakes for the last 400 years (100% Science Fact). There's another near Mendoza that sprays holy dust at people. And there's one in a bunker in Córdoba who shoots laser beams from her eyes and can walk through walls (although she's only a Class 2 Holy Relic).

"Your chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!"

2006-06-08T17:20:00.000-03:00

My mate Steve recently started www.saltainfo.com, for the benefit of those searching for info on, er, Salta. It's very much in its early stages, but with a bit of work it could be a very Good Thing.

Steve's a guy from the US who wants to start his own business empire here, involving English classes for (Argentinean) English teachers, translations, websites for local businesses, and teaching Emotional Intelligence to teenagers.

There's huge potential in all of those ideas, if you ask me. There are loads of tour agencies in Salta, all trying to sell tours to English-speaking tourists - yet virtually none of them have websites (let alone websites in English), so they have to rely on getting the tourists' attention by waiting until they arrive in town, then handing out leaflets in the street - amid stiff competition from the other tour agencies.

The only problem is that Salteños can be very tradition-oriented (read: "set in their ways") and
sometimes need a bit of persuading on the importance of English to their business.
__________________________________________

To help Steve out, I wrote some restaurant recommendations for his website, then knocked this together (but decided not to send it):

(I like the place really.)

You know what really annoys me?

2006-06-06T16:15:00.000-03:00

Well yes, that goes without saying.* But I'm pretty much shielded from the Daily Mail, by virtue of being in Argentina and only hearing about it via the jokes of columnists on www.guardian.co.uk.

No, what particularly annoys me, and is probably inescapable no matter where you go, is: things that are designed to do only one thing, but which can't do even that.

Curtains that don't keep the light out.

Can-openers that can't open cans. (Would they be called "can't openers" then?)

That guy who charged a small fortune (by Argentinean standards) to cut my hair, but who spent so much time washing it and fannying around it with a razor, that afterwards it (a) wasn't much shorter, and (b) looked shit.

Yes, this annoyance extends to people too. Very much so in fact.

Shop assistants who don't have a clue about the products they're selling.

Restaurants which serve food that you could have cooked yourself, only better, in half the time and for a fraction of the price.

There have got to be loads more, but after listing these few I feel better already. :-)

* Good god, just look at the number of incredibly annoying things on that one page! Reading from the top down, I'm into double figures before I even get to the headline.

what absolute twaddle

2006-06-05T21:45:00.000-03:00

As I entered the conference room, which doubles as a classroom for my Business English class, I noticed that all the chairs were occupied by people, except for one, which was occupied by a handbag. I removed the handbag and put it gently on the (perfectly clean) floor next to my student.

"Don't put my handbag on the floor!" said my student.
Before I could respond, another chipped in with, "she'll lose money!"

All I could come out with was, "really? How does that work?"

Nobody could answer me.

It got me thinking on why anybody would bother inventing a superstitious reason not to put bags on the floor, when there are loads of perfectly sensible reasons not to do so (none of which were applicable here, I hasten to add).

In the real world your bag may get dirty. Somebody might steal it. Somebody might tread on or fall over it. But here in Salta you can't put your bag on the floor because you will lose an unspecified amount of money in some unspecified way, at some unspecified time in the future. And adults will tell this to other adults while still keeping a straight face.

Bryan Adams' secret double life

2006-06-05T12:02:00.000-03:00

One of the funniest things about living in Argentina is hearing English-language pop stars making absolute arses of themselves by singing in Spanish. Robbie Williams, Madonna, Bon Jovi, Bryan Adams - they're all guilty of doing it at one stage or another.

But it's a little embarrassing too. It's like uncovering a relative's secret double life that they don't like to talk about. Part of you just wants to drag them away, saying "stop it Robbie, they don't need to hear this."

And while to my untrained ears they seem to do an OK job, according to Beatriz it's painfully obvious that Spanish is not their mother tongue, as they struggle to get to grips with all the rolling R's. And even I can tell that while "everything I do, I do it for you" is a pretty shit lyric, at least it kind of flows - so it's pure gold compared to "todo lo que hago, hago por ti".
_________________________________________________

On a related note, that song "Let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel" is very popular here and often played in supermarkets and (probably) children's parties. It's always fun explaining to people what the lyrics are about.

The kind of place Grandaddy sang about

2006-06-04T13:17:00.000-03:00

A typical Saturday here consists of spending the morning waiting for Beatriz to finish work, then lunch, then housework. By the time we can do anything even remotely enjoyable it's about four in the afternoon and by that time I'm usually pretty depressed and lacking in energy.

So yesterday I decided to give all the tedious waiting a miss, and head out on the bus to San Lorenzo straight after breakfast.

San Lorenzo is a lush green neighbourhood on a hillside overlooking the town. It boasts wide, tree-lined streets, where Salta's posh people have their mansions. It's a world away from the jostling crowds, narrow pavements and traffic fumes of the town centre. The people of Salta come here on sunny weekends to drink coffee in the cafe and sit by the river. But despite Salta being surrounded by beautiful green countryside, your average Salteño would run 1.4 kilometres rather than venture away from the crowds and into the country. Consequently if you follow the river upstream for more than ten minutes, you quickly find yourself alone, apart from the occasional English-speaking tourist.

So for two hours I followed the river upstream, leaping nimbly from rock to rock, and talking occasional photos of the excellent hairy trees.

Wait a moment - this tree isn't hairy. It does have nice twisty branches though.

After a while the river became too narrow, and the rocks became too slippery to continue, so I turned back and retraced my steps back home, with the sense of a Saturday well-spent. Certainly much more exciting than waiting for the siesta to end in order to plod around the shopping centre, I think. :-)

crystal bollocks

2006-06-02T15:19:00.000-03:00

Today all the talk is of the mentalista (ha ha, yes) who has predicted that the final of the World Cup will take place between a team that plays in white, and one that plays in red.

As predictions go, that's up there with one I read in Australia once: "the lottery winner will have a name that begins with B... or sounds like B."

Note: This is hopefully the first and last time that football will be mentioned on this page.

What's on telly?

2006-06-01T23:05:00.000-03:00

Argentinean TV is dominated by US shows with subtitles - if you have cable. But what if you don't? Or what if you're just thirsting for more homegrown entertainment?

Well, for your viewing pleasure every night this week, and every week, for the rest of your life probably, Channel Nine presents Showmatch - two or three hours of talent contests, singing children, and minor celebs throwing basketballs into hoops. In order to prevent viewers from getting bored and gnawing their own legs off in an attempt to find some more fulfilling form of entertainment, the show makes cunning use of non-stop shouting and cheering, confetti pouring from the ceiling, and - the staple of most Argentinean TV - girls wearing very little clothing, dancing around a bit in the background at all times. It's a winning formula and it clearly works, as Showmatch shows no sign of being taken off our screens. Ever.

_______________________________________

Alternatively, if you'd like a bit less shouting, and fractionally fewer scantily clad beauties, but you're hungering for more singing children, you should try Susana Gimenez on Channel 11.

Susana was quite a looker back in swinging 1969.

Nowadays, thanks to the aid of a crack team of surgeons, soft-focus camerawork and make-up rivalling that of many of the actors in Lord of the Rings, she seems hardly to have aged at all.

And a good thing too. Otherwise one of Argentina's biggest stars would be a chat show host who looked like Davros.

(Actually that'd be quite good.)

Bodysnatchers

2006-05-30T14:51:00.000-03:00

I can't help but notice that Argentinean ants seem a lot more industrious than their English counterparts. No siesta for them; they're all too busy carrying leaves and bits of twig from place to place.

But where are they taking them? And what for? After all, ants aren't termites, and don't build great big mounds - or at least, the ants nests I've seen don't seem to involve leaves and bits of twig in any significant way. So what are they doing with them?

These are questions that need answers, not least because, according to the Discovery Channel documentary I saw the other day, Argentinean ants have spread to a great many countries and seem bent on world conquest. Well, the sound was down low and it was in Spanish, but I think that was roughly what it was saying.

Putting my eyewitness testimony together with the Discovery Channel documentary and the above photographic evidence, the logical conclusion is that the ants appear to be using leaves and bits of twig to construct some kind of boiling water-resistant robot. Which will be Trouble for all of us, probably.

This blog entry was brought to you by THE INTERNET - the world's most reliable source of HARD FACTS and VERIFIABLE INFORMATION.

So if I didn´t get the job, then who did?

2006-05-30T13:18:00.000-03:00

This morning I had a class with my student, Maria*, who told me about the job in the first place. Naturally I had a few questions to ask...

The boss of the international mining company's Argentinean branch told Maria's business consultancy that they were looking for someone who could write in perfect English, was independent, and preferably male. They said that experience in the technical aspects of the job was unnecessary, but it was very important that they could write in English.

Hence Maria's consultancy put an ad in the paper with that job description, and designed the tests with that in mind. The other three applicants did badly at the report-writing in English, while mine was perfect, apparently.

And as it turned out the successful applicant was a girl, whose English was terrible. She had experience in chemistry but the psychological tests showed that she wasn't particularly independent. Rather dependent, in fact. In other words exactly the opposite to the person required on the job specification. "The boss has a habit of choosing dependent females," Maria told me.

"Do you think she's right for the job?" I asked.
"Certainly not! To get to the mine she'll have to travel for three hours along a highway full of truck drivers. It won't be safe for a woman to travel alone so they'll have to send a guy to accompany her and it'll cost them double. Plus she doesn't speak English, so those reports are going to be a real bitch."
"Well if she needs classes, you've got my number. And I know her salary, so she can easily afford them."

I wonder if the head office in Australia has the slightest clue about how the selection process has been carried out at the Argentinean end?

*Not her real name. You never know... :-)

On the dangling of the false carrot of hope before my nose

2006-05-27T14:23:00.000-03:00

Well I didn´t get that report-writing job. They found me wanting in experience of chemistry and/or mining. But rather than just refusing me the job almost two weeks ago on the grounds that my CV is a chemistry and mining-free zone, they decided to give me two interviews and a battery of psychological tests (well, two), first.

(animation of guy banging his head against a desk urgently required at this point)

So I´m not annoyed that I didn´t get the job, as after all I don´t have the requisite experience and I can´t do much about that. However I am annoyed that they wasted my time, and their own time, in all those interviews when they could have just taken a minute to read my bloody CV. What kind of company operates in such a terrible way?

But most importantly, if I´d known I was never going to be able to get the job anyway, I could have drawn this as part of my psychological test, just to see their reaction:

Oh balls to it. I´m off to see X-Men 3…

Why you no speak the English?

2006-05-26T12:28:00.000-03:00

Here´s how to conjugate the verb "go" in English:

Present tense: go, goes, going
Past tense: went
Past participle: gone

It´s a little irregular, but there´s only five different conjugations, so it´s not a massive problem by anyone´s standards.

Now, here´s how you conjugate "ir", which is "go" in Spanish

Present: voy, vas, va, van, vamos
Past tense: fui, fuiste, fue, fueron, fuimos
Other past tense: iba, ibas, iba, iban, ibamos
Future tense: ire, iras, ira, iran, iremos
Continuous form: yendo
Past participle: ido

But wait, there´s more...

Conditional: iria, irias, iria, irian, iriamos
Subjunctive: vaya, vayas, vaya, vayan, vayamos
Past subjuntive: fuera, fueras, fuera, fueran, fueramos

Now that´s 37 different conjugations for each verb. Plus there are actually two versions of the past subjunctive (which one you use is entirely optional), and to include both would bring the total conjugations up to 42.

Over the last one and a half years I´ve learned all the conjugations for every single verb I know - as you have to if you want to speak Spanish.

So why oh why is it that, when faced with the extreme simplicity of English verbs, and after years of study, some of my students still come out with "yesterday I go to..."

(pretend that there´s an animation of someone banging their head against a desk here)

inept subtitle woe

2006-05-24T18:50:00.000-03:00

Here in Argentina movies are almost always subtitled. Now you would imagine that the subtitler´s job would be a skilled one, requiring expert translators with finely-honed language skills, able to render not just the basic meaning of what the characters are saying, but the finer nuances of their colloquial expressions as well, in order to bring maximum enjoyment to the non english-speaking audience.

Or if that proved to expensive, you would at least expect the subtitlers to have a copy of the screenplay, a dictionary and a modicum of common sense. Well, wouldn´t you?

While watching The Wild Bunch this afternoon...

Mexican: The gringos have attacked the train!
Subtitle: Los vikingos asaltaron el tren!

Junior Subtitler: Did he just say "vikings"?
Chief Subtitler: Sounded a bit like "vikings." Yes I think he must have done. Or it might have been "gringos."
Junior Subtitler: It´s impossible to guess. Damn this job is difficult. Shall we have another spliff?

How to get through psychological profiling

2006-05-21T21:02:00.000-03:00

So on Friday I had my second interview: the psychological tests.

Now my degree is in Psychology and Sociology, so I know that if you´re asked at an interview to "draw a person in the rain", you should steer clear of drawing this:

And you should never in any circumstances draw anything like this:

So instead I drew a guy in a suit and a bowler hat (to show that I´m work-focused), holding an umbrella (to show that I´m prepared for all eventualities) and looking happy (to show that I´m well-balanced, psychologically).

The interviewer said my drawing showed that I´m good with other people.

Sorted!

Next interview sometime this week...

Teatime of the Dead

2006-05-20T18:04:00.000-03:00

In a lot of ways, Argentina is like England circa 1950. Not that I´d know from personal experience, but that´s the general vibe I get. Same conservatism (particularly with regard to gender roles), same boringly limited diet, same everything being closed on Sundays.

The exception of course is the shopping mall, or "El Shopping" as they call it here.

No weekend is complete without a trip to El Shopping.

But in Argentina it´s not enough to restrict this unbearable crapness to Sunday. Here they go one step further: the siesta. It´s a four-hour slice of Sunday grafted onto every weekday between 1pm and 5pm. It makes excellent sense in the heat of summer, but between March and November it´s just a pain in the arse if you have any business to deal with in the afternoon. And dare I suggest that closing down all the businesses for four hours after lunch while their owners have a bit of a sleep, is maybe not what the economy really needs in order to get back on its feet?

Do you want it, sir?

2006-05-20T17:09:00.000-03:00

"I have something in my fridge. Do you want it?"
"What is it, exactly?"
"I´m sorry, I´m not allowed to tell you."
"Well, if it´s a lemon meringue pie, then yes, I would quite like it. On the other hand if it´s a cloud of (probably deadly) orange gas, which formed after someone poked through the fridge´s plastic lining with a sharp object,* then I would have to pass."
"I´m not telling you, but you´ll have to decide quickly."
"OK, I think there´s a reasonable chance it´s a lemon meringue pie, so I´ll say yes. Now will you please tell me what it is?"
"Of course not. Instead I want you to write a letter explaining exactly why you want it."
"Is this sort of behaviour normal in Argentina?"

One of my students works for a business consultancy firm who are currently doing the recruitment process for an Australian mining company, who want someone to write reports in perfect English on the progress of their plant near Salta. The pay is excellent and it would offer ample opportunity for career advancement. My student hinted that I would be excellent for the job.

So, after talking it through with a (delighted) Beatriz, we translated my CV into Spanish and emailed it to the business consultancy people... who steadfastly refused to tell me anything at all about the job I was applying for. They wouldn´t even confirm or deny what one of their own employees had told me.

So come the first stage of the selection process I was pissed off, yet confident. After all if you don´t know what the job is, and you already have a job in any case, you have nothing to lose.

The first task was to write a letter in Spanish, explaining why a wanted this job (when I had only the vaguest idea of what it actually was). Besides only being able to detail ambitions of the most general kind, I´d never actually written a letter in Spanish before, so I have no idea how they format their letters or say things like "yours faithfully", etc. So the end result was short, and probably pretty piss poor.

Things improved dramatically in the next stage, where we had to write a report (in English), based on information (in Spanish). While the three other candidates sweated over their dictionaries, I breezed through it, no problema.

The final task was a series of questions asking me to write out formulas for Microsoft Excel, to do basic calculations like adding up cells A1 to C13, how to view the values in the cells to two decimal places, and so on. Now I´m sure I could do all of this if you sat me down in front of Excel, but from memory?! So I left that whole section blank.

Despite (probably) fucking up the letter, and leaving out the Excel section entirely, I still got invited back for the next stage: psychological profiling.

To Be Continued...

*This is really what happens, according to my friend Rich.

"done an excellent joke"

2006-05-16T18:43:00.000-03:00

Go to www.biffovision.blogspot.com at once, and scroll down until you find today´s entry (May 16th). Read it and check the comments.

In response to my comment, Mr Biffo says (and I quote): "the alex has done an excellent joke. I may have to steal that, in order to pass myself off as witty."

That´s praise indeed, coming from the writer of the funniest blog I know. It´s like Michaelangelo telling you that you´re a dab hand with a paintbrush, or Pavarotti asking if you can fill in for him while he goes and gets a quick bite to eat.

I´m proud. :-)

Schematic of a Ford Mondeo

2006-05-14T19:48:00.000-03:00

The final part of a week in the life of an English teacher in Salta, written to elucidate and delight the casual observer.

(Yes I know I´ve only written 3 days including this one, but Thursday is basically Monday crossed with Tuesday, while Friday you´ve already heard about.)

Wednesday

After a pronunciation class in the morning it looks like my work may be done, but then I get a call from a woman who wants private classes. She´s a friend of one of my other students (the Anglo-Saxon poetry lady), which is how the recruitment process often happens round here.

This woman´s English is bad. She shows me a letter she´s written and in it she´s got confused about when to say "his" and when to say "your". That´s how bad we´re talking here.

Which would ordinarily be fine, but then she shows me what she´s studying at the moment. She has pages and pages of really in-depth excercises on linguistics, sentence structure, verb phrases, noun phrases and so on. Honestly it´s like someone studying a fully-detailed schematic of a Ford Mondeo in the hope that it´ll teach them how to drive.

What´s really strange is that she doesn´t realise just how vastly out of her depth she is. You´d think that her teacher at least would have explained to her: "Look, love, your English is basic at best. This stuff is totally unsuitable for you. What you need is basic grammar and conversation practice. That´ll sort you out." But no. So it falls to me to explain the problem to her and her boyfriend, and also to schedule some basic grammar lessons with conversation practice. Ho hum.

In the evening I go to my pub conversation group. I started it a couple of months ago with the aim of meeting new people. It´s not a class and nobody has to pay anything. We just go to the pub, drink beer and speak English. The group has attracted an interestingly varied bunch of English-speaking Salteños of all ages, and there are different people every week, so lively conversation is guaranteed. I haven´t had to advertise it since the first week, as after that the message started spreading purely by word of mouth.

That´s all.

smashing bloke

2006-05-14T15:29:00.000-03:00

It seems my deductions were correct. The guy next door is unemployed (see previous post).
And he´s a wife-beater.

His wife reported him to the police a month ago, but he got off.