My first day in India begins in a labyrinthine Old Delhi backpacker ghetto snaked with Steve-O-sized alleyways that are dressed in a complex web of jerry-rigged electrical wires and pipes dripping what smelled distinctly like pterodactyl urine. For newbies like us, the Pajar Ganj feels as if we had been sucked into a third world remake of The Matrix where the leather-clad robot agents were replaced with friendly looking, well dressed Indian snazzballs in knockoff Lacoste kicks who stop you on the street and begin their tourist/target inquisition: “Madam, madam, where you from? Where you going?” It all seems fine and dandy, it’s nice to have some help since our map appears to be in one of India’s 29 non-English languages. “I’m sorry,” he goes on with a shrug, “it’s closed for repairs.” The main tourist office, the one listed in our admittedly aged 2007 copy of Lonely Planet as the ONLY reliable, government-run tourist office in all Delhi is closed? On a Tuesday?
So, succumbing to naïveté and eschewing jadedness, we follow Snazzball McSanjay to the “second branch” of the one and only main tourist office to acquire a map, train schedule, and other organizational fundamentals. But we stop on the way at Snazzball’s friend’s samosa stand, pass by a particular curry joint, then after a brief pitstop in used cell phone store we arrive only meters away from Point A and take a seat in an office of corkboard and rebar.
We discover to our great dismay that our entire six-week India plan is royally fucked and that everything we know about everything is wrong, from the name of the national train system to the location of Mumbai to the name of our own mothers. We are told we’ll have to reschedule our entire trip (we DIDN’T) because the whole darn country is closed for the cricket World Cup (it ISN’T) and it’s too dangerous to walk in the dusty light of day from point A to point B (it’s NOT) and the number one place you wanted to go is actually a miserable typhoid shitmarsh (it AIN’T).
Our first day in Delhi was spent learning the art of navigating the unending stream of misinformation and confusion that is India. Fortunately, we’re fast learners. So we exit the tourist trap undeterred, sit down, sip a Dixie cup full of steaming, sugary chai, and gear up for six more weeks of marvelous madness.
Shippin out to Thailand in T-minus 4 hours. No time for an introduction, but this album is so good I’m putting it on my tiny 8gig iTouch and will be stuck with it for the next four months.
Give me a dollar and I'll show you what Christmas cheer really looks like
I ventured out of the apartment onto Pine Street cautiously, not knowing what to expect from this foreign land. I passed a group of teenage boys and subconsciously braced myself, but nothing happened. One of them met my eye, then looked away and kept walking. That was my first moment of culture shock. Had I been in Buenos Aires, that same group of young gentlemen would have paused, each looked me up and down, then spent the next 75 seconds trying to one-up each other with semi-lewd commentary and a play-by-play of exactly how a night with them would go down, frequently utilizing the well-worn word “rubia” (blonde). Instead, the boys carried on their conversation about Justin Bieber or whatever teenage boys talk about and continued their hike up the two degrees away from vertical San Francisco hill. I can’t say I miss these piropos, the constant running commentary on my tush, hair color, sartorial choices, etc., though the air feels a little too clean without all the dirty words and my subsequent sneers and/or colorfully phrased versions of “go put your balls on ice you pig.” Mostly I just miss the opportunity to curse wildly in public.
Aside from those lovely encounters, being abroad has made me so freakishly pleasant I disgust myself. I passed through ten miles of San Francisco airport security and said all the socially appropriate responses that a non-hungover, non-sleep-deprived, non-bitch person would say (except for exclaiming “balls!” when I realized that my passport was balls-deep in my overweight luggage). I got used to trying to be the exemplary American, exhibiting that we aren’t all super-sizing, death penalty enforcing, decibel unconscious, post-colonial imperialists with a penchant for bellicosity, bigotry, and beer. And yoga. But avoiding the B-trifecta only muted my tendency towards the vulgar and inappropriate temporarily, though I did pick up a few Hunter S. Thompson odes to debauchery just to make sure I still find my ex-roomie’s Slutty Anne Frank costume HILARIOUS.
People and public transportation come on time, supermarkets carry more than steak, spaghetti, bagged milk, and Fernet (which, perhaps due to its “exotic” allure, costs nearly as much as Grey Goose despite its $8 price tag in Argentina), political correctness is like a west coast-wide speech impediment, phallocentricity wears better disguises, and public drinking/drunkenness before 2pm is slightly less acceptable. Unless you’re dressed as a degenerate Santa and running amok through San Francisco streets with 500 other sloshed Santas paper-bagging Maker’s Mark causing general ruckus and holiday mayhem. Candy canes make surprisingly efficient weaponry. Hey, the USA isn’t so bad after all.
As if to say bienvenidos to your mothercountry, Deadmau5 released his album 4×4=12 to limited critical fanfare. The stunner tracks for me are the dub-heavy “Raise Your Weapon,” “Sofi Needs a Ladder,” and “One Trick Pony,” all with vocal assists from a couple of sharp – tongued ladies. The rest of the album is less than stellar, even borderline boring at times with overly repetitive buildups that don’t reward the listener with the usual orgasmic release. Whatever my rodent friend, I still appreciate the hola.
Costa Rica marks the final destination of my nomadic joy ride through Latin America. I spent the bulk of the five months in Buenos Aires teaching English and shooting the shit with some of the most excellent girl friends I’ve ever known, in addition to some significant exploration around Argentina and its neighbor nations.
Last week I was in Bogotá, Colombia visiting my friend Sarah who has been living and working in the infamous city for several months. Every morning she hauled herself out of bed to catch the bus to Usaquen, a neighborhood in the high northern numbers of the city, while I stayed en cama fighting the residual effects of the ubiquitous aguardiente. Aguardiente, or guaro, is an anise-flavored liquor that, according to my careful and extensive research, is the preferred beverage of many Colombianos. It is rarely served mixed, rather, one person holds the bottle and serves up mini shots for any amigos in the vicinity. We practiced this ritual one night in line at the Teatro Las Vegas Nevada where Scotsman Calvin Harris was spinning his electro party-pop tunes for a packed, nearly gringo-less house. Once past the eerily transnational “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada” sign, Sar and I made a beeline for the baños, entering the first brightly lit hallway we came upon. There were bathrooms alright, but the bathrooms were all at the back of seedy little bedrooms, each containing a queen sized bed, a mirror on the ceiling and a selection of lubricants on the bedstand; we were in a love motel. In our haste we didn’t waste time considering the potential organismal grossness of the facilities; we ducked into the first open room, I stood guard at the door, then scampered away before the Danny DeVito-shaped Colombian motel manager had a chance to offer us the fine hourly rate of 30 mil pesos.
On the days not plagued by guaro-induced bedrest, I tooled around the city streets lined with brick skyscrapers set against the backdrop of verdant hills, all swathed in silvery-white fog. I did the requisite sight-seeing, including the impressive Museo Botero and Museo de Arte Moderno, the latter of which houses my new obsession: the shadowy, borderline erotic, colossal corpuses of Luis Caballero.
Although I do enjoy dark and ominous art, my preferred climate is quite the opposite, so Sar and I fled stormy Bogotá for a finca (farm or country house) several hours away from the city in Tocaima, tierra caliente (hot land). I spent the days adjusting my new blue and white polka dot Argentine bikini, trying to attain decent coverage from a piece of cloth no bigger than my Blackberry. Impossible. One early evening we set out on horseback to explore the sprawling hills covered in a thigh-high sea of grass and shrubbery. Having spent the last 10 years doing many things, none of which were riding, I vehemently protested saying, “no tengo botas de montar” (I don’t have riding boots) and “voy a avergonzarme” (I’m going to embarrass myself), but to no avail. I found myself in a size – 5 bazillion gigantic pair of men’s cargo pants and flip flops astride Pinocho (Pinnochio), a small, grey donkey-looking horse already sweating in the evening humidity. Thankfully the whole trip over the rolling hills of the estate went splendidly…except for the part after the first 5 minutes when my horse fell on a hill of loose stones and both of us rolled around on the ground for a few seconds kicking each other (horse=obvious winner). My new Colombian friends persisted that the horse really did fall first and it wasn’t my fault at all, though I don’t entirely believe that. The rest of the weekend was spent with lesser, but still painful blows to my dignity, many of which I still retain now, 2 weeks later on the beach in Costa Rica where the lovely ticos (Costa Ricans) ask me whether I am being beaten by my husband because the black and blue tint of my skin doesn’t quite fit in with the status quo burnished auburn.
Throughout the entire weekend this song was on repeat, both on the rotating iPods and group harmonies of “las manos arriba/ cintura sola/ da media vuelta/ danza kuduro.”
I’m the fattest, palest, and least blonde that I’ve been in years. And I’m also the happiest. I’ve now been in South America for four solid months, enough time to get nice and comfortable right before my Argentine expiration date. In early November I’m off to continue my spastic world tour, jumping up to Bogotá, Colombia, then Costa Rica, San Francisco, Portland, Thailand, work my way up to India, Spain, then finally back to Los Angeles by next May for my dearest Becky’s graduation.
I’ve found yet another somewhat unpleasant I’ll-look-back-on-this-after-my-20s-and-laugh kind of job freelance writing for what is basically the Walmart of writing jobs. Although it isn’t exactly the most glamorous job out there, it doesn’t interfere with my life/travel plans and the article options crack me up on a daily basis. These are real articles people can choose to write in return for 15 buckaroos:
“How to Get a Hippo Out of a Bathtub”
“The Responsibility of a Hospital for the Loss of False Teeth”
“What Is the Vibratory Snore Index”
And that’s just today’s selection.
Dirty minds think alike: I spent an entire class wondering what in the world was below "Men can have a big/long..." on this poster in one of the classrooms. Age appropriately, they say "beard" and "moustache."
Last week I taught a seminar on American slang. Here’s my lesson plan:
Shotgun (as in “I call shotgun”)
Cougar
Shady/sketchy
5-O/po-po/cops
Hipster
WASP:
Sugar daddy/mama
Benajamins/dough
Redneck/hillbilly/hick/white trash
Mullet
Hella/wicked
Ghostride the whip
Business in the front, party in the back
Knuckle sandwich
Couch potato
Cankle
I used visual aids to describe the more complicated terms.
WASP
Redneck/hillbilly/hick/white trash AND mullet (I killed 5 words with one Joe Dirt)
- Ghostride the Whip
- Hipster
I love teaching. I think now the kids have a fairly accurate image of Amurrica.
Maldito Chicken Brat
Despite having arrived in Buenos Aires in the depths of the southern hemisphere’s winter, Becky and I eschewed our sensibilities of season and decided to go WWOOF on a vineyard in the province of Salta in northern Argentina. We caught the 18+ hour Flecha Bus all pumped and ready to work for our room and board, then found ourselves stuck in the Salta snow, not due to the weather, but to the first of many transportation strikes we would encounter on our journey.
Like the Johns Ford and Wayne, I maintain a healthy obsession with the American southwest. However, the bus ride through the Quebrada de Cafayate put even Monument Valley to shame, so I kept my nose glued to the window while thinking all kinds of superlatives. Our destination, Cafayate, sits in the Calchaqui Valley in the midst of marbled red, pink and green peaks that typify the northern Argentine Andes; the recent snowfall only heightened the impact of the picturesque panorama.
Becky and I spent the week “working” on the vineyard/farm/happiest place on earth belonging to Maud, a Dutch export who has lived in Argentina for the last 30 years. And our week was the coldest she had ever seen Cafayate. Because of this, we spent more time gathering twigs and huddling around the wood stove in a futile attempt to warm ourselves in the airy (drafty) house designed to be cool in the desert heat. Our primary responsibilities were feeding the ducks and chickens twice a day and keeping the cats from murdering the chickens when the bird-brained fuckers attempted their daily escape from coop to freedom. Catching chickens with no net, box, or any other trapping device is far more difficult than I ever presumed.
Instead of asking us to slave away in the subzero temps, Maud took us to hang out with her artist friends around Cafayate and the neighboring town of San Carlos. With the torrontés (the tasty white wine cultivated in Andean northern Argentina) flowing, we befriended a group of ceramics artists who were all in town for the San Carlos ceramics festival. To kick off the week of artistic adventures, they held a frigid outdoor asado (barbecue) one midnight (dinnertime in Argentina) featuring three cow heads roasted in subterranean ovens they constructed themselves. Very cool. Except that when it came my turn to get some roasted cow to put in the middle of my hunk of french bread, I unknowingly got the least desirable part possible. Now I’m really not all that squeamish, but I got THE EYE. The cow’s eyeball. Brains, balls, kidneys, whatever, they all sound gross but none of them come adorned with an optical nerve. After one bite my stomach revolted and regurgitated before you could say “polite appreciation of another culture’s tastes.” For weeks after that night I couldn’t tell the story without my stomach trying to reenact it, nor could I look, much less eat much animal product without the memory coming back to wreak vengeance on my mealtime.
Aside from the culinary complications, the WWOOF experience was incredible. Becky and I even learned a few Argentine folk dances to this kind of music:
Sweet Argentine Folkloric Song
Another Sweet Anonymous Argentine Folkloric Song (Chacarera)
Buenos Aires is a difficult city to adore, but today, after two months, I fell in love. I woke up bright and early at 10am and attempted to fall back asleep to achieve my full 7-8 hours of slumber. Given that I didn’t get home until 5, as usual, I needed at least a noon wake up call. Unlike most days when I wake up and 2 or 3 hours later the sun begins to set, I was itching to move. I turned on the new chromeo and did an awkward mixture of pilates, yoga, kickboxing, and general jumping around in front of my rather revealing window to the world of Palermo outside, but given the ungodly hour I figured no peer of mine would be awake, much less outside. I went downstairs for a run and was pleasantly surprised to find the streets packed as usual…with old people! Jurassic Park as my roomie Roberto would say. I warmed myself up by speed walking, or rather normal walking but it seemed speedy compared to the current of the geriatric sea. I jogged through the Jardín Bótanico and immediately felt the weight of two months of cigarettes, air pollution, and nightly malbec impeding my momentum, so I stopped to smell the roses. Or rather Birds of Paradise, high on my very short list of beloved florae, a flower/creature that seems more like a carnivorous reptile than a blossom sharing space with lavender and various succulents. The garden was host to multiple tercer edad (senior) aerobics classes as well as every stray cat in the Palermo neighborhood, both of which I treated as hurdles on my racetrack. Kidding, sort of. I find old Argentine men incredibly adorable, so running through the Jardín was akin to the time Pomona College brought in dozens of puppies for students to play with during finals week to alleviate their O Chem stress. Only slightly less cooing. I felt instantly rejuvenated.
By one I was bathed, fed, informed of the state of the world, and bored and my roomie was still snoozing. I’d heard tell that there was a fairly decent artesenal market in the nearby Plaza Serrano on Sundays that has clothes, something that for the first time in my life (aside from the Naked Bike Ride in Portland) I am seriously lacking. However, I had no idea where the plaza is located due to the fact that Plaza Serrano is like mecca for drunk Americans who ritually face that direction every Friday night and pray to the gods of Jack and coke, or Fernet if they want to “go Argentine.” Normally I would avoid the place like poly blends or Hot Topic post age 12. Ok 14. I picked a green square on my Guia-T (mini map book that “helps” you navigate the mean streets of central Buenos Aires that literally everyone and their mom has) that seemed the right shape and size and successfully got myself there…to the wrong plaza. I mistakenly found myself in Plaza Güemes, also known as Villa Freud because of the high number of psychotherapists populating the area.
While bumbling about with my nose buried in my Guia-T (I ran into a bus stop, no joke), I stumbled upon my new home away from home. While living in Spain I felt more at home in my coffeeshop than I did in my borderline creepy flat that I shared with 13 other foreign students, perhaps due to the fact that I was ritually sexiled by my French roommate. I spent hours every morning writing and doing my homework over perplexingly delicious cups of café con leche and letting my freshly-washed hair acquire the particular blended scent of strong espresso and morning cigarettes. After receiving the news that my now-ex boyfriend was most likely ill with brain cancer, I went to my coffeeshop and, without saying a word about the news, my favorite waiter set a cup of coffee and a pastry in front of me, on the house, and took the time to figure out why my eyes were so swollen and red. Such TLC in a foreign land sticks out in my memory. Anyway, I believe I’ve found my replacement for Cafetería Roca in Casa Mua – it was love at first sigh, taste, sip, amor. Plus I saw a dog outside that looked like Snuffleuffigus. Good omen.
On the same day I was introduced to Bajo Fondo, an electro-tango group that remixes classic tango music, including the untouchable Carlos Gardel. They also work with contemporary artists like Mala Rodriguez, who, as her name would suggest, is a badass Spanish hip-hop artist.
Intent on being humbled by the grandiosity of Mount Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Americas, last week my travel companion David and I left the relative comfort of Mendoza’s Hostel Damajuana and its collection of characters, both stock and singular. We caught El Rapido, a misnomer for the tediously poky bus that sluggishly winds its way through tiny Andean towns like Puente del Inca, our final destination. Our omniscient copy of Lonely Planet Argentina 2008 told us there was a climbers’ refugio, aka super cheap, super basic hostel, where we could shake off our backpacks and snooze, but upon arrival we discovered that the refugio was undergoing some renovations and had no bathroom or running water. Before we had a chance to contemplate our predicament, a tiny voice asked us if we wanted empanadas and directed us towards a crumbling stone house that was originally part of the Puente station for the now-defunct train to Chile. We obliged, letting our rumbling tummies overrule our own personal housing crisis and were welcomed into the 2-bedroom home of the 7-person Quinteros family. We wound up staying not just for empanadas, but for dinner, a few rounds of mancha congelada (freeze tag) on the school soccer field (an open dirt area with goals and boundary lines marked with rocks and treacherous patches of wire) and for the next two nights.
On the first day the kids led us around the climbers’ cemetary and we huddled together trying to block the unforgiving mountain winds so we could light candles marking the haphazard gravesites. We put plastic flowers on the gravesite of Hans, the Quinteros’ resident ghost, a German climber who died long ago either trying to rescue his wife or in a debacle concerning the wife’s lover, depending on whether you ask the kids or the parents. We compared versions of the themesong to Bob Esponja/Spongebob Squarepants and practiced our Spanish reading skills, both the kids and pseudo-adults stumbling over the multi-syllabic words. All the while the song Niña Bonita by Chino y Nacho was on repeat.
