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"#sunscreen, #insectspray, #bandages and off to #kayaking down the #hudsonriver."

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"Mi Buenos Aires Querido"

In March of 2012 I went to BA for the first time. When I came back I was asked to write an article about it for a blog called "The delicate strength". I don't know if that blog is still around and how long it might exist, that's why I decided to publish the article on my blog too.

Buenos Aires Trip 2012, Part 5

Somebody had warned me that the cleaning lady in their apartment stole some valuables. For that reason I had tortured the landlord with questions about the trustworthiness of their cleaning lady. He assured me that I shouldn't worry about that at all, which turned out to be true. What I should have worried about was the quality of her work. The dirt redistribution on the apartment floor, the unchanged sliminess of the bathroom tiles and the unchallenged dirt on the counter tops made me think that she probably understood her job as the attempt to make things somewhat less dirty instead of really clean. Needless to say that I wasn't happy with her. And yet this wasn't even what really upset me about here presence in the apartment. My distress was caused much more by the fact that she let her 2-year-old son, with a lollipop in his hand, to roam our apartment and touch everything with his sticky hands. After they were gone I discovered that he had left me that same lollipop as a present in a pile of my pills, cellphone and foot products, after clearly playing with them first… Luckily for all participants the week after we had another cleaning lady, who did an excellent job.

You know how they say that trouble never comes alone? Well, on the same day when I discovered the previously mentioned Catch 22 situation with the phone card and found the present left for me by the son of the cleaning lady I had one more trouble, this time at the laundromat. Fairly close to where we lived there were many laundromats. At the one closest to our apartment the clients were not allowed to do their own laundry. For the price of 20 pesos (about $5) per bin of clothes the people at the laundromat wash, dry and fold your clothes for you, which is not bad. What was bad was that they shamelessly charged me 50 pesos at pick up although in a week my dancing partner and I had managed to fill up only 2 bins. Since this was the last straw after all the difficulties of the day I didn't feel like arguing about what's wrong with the math 20+20=50. The next day I returned to the laundromat in a search of a green, lace top, which I thought had gotten lost there and which I wanted to wear at the milonga. "No," said the woman, "we don't have your top… But we have a forgotten batman T-shit… Do you want it instead? :)" Oh Batman, Batman, how elegantly we would have looked at the milonga: me - in a skirt and high heels, you - plastered all over my oversized, dorky T-shirt…!

After I managed to understand the description of services a laundromat offers, and quarrel with the phone company about band widths and refunds, I gotta tell you - understanding people tuned out to be no problem for me. I am pretty fluent in Spanish (but you know - what the porteños speak is not always Spanish) and even if I didn't understand or manage to say everything the way I intended, I found a way to work around it. The only thing that I still don't know is what were some of the veggies in the empanadas I was eating. Although, honestly, I didn't care too much. All I know is that they were good! :) Speaking of empanadas - if you don't like the ones at your closest bakery, try the ones at the next - all bakeries and all pizza places have empanadas and the quality varies a lot. Also, turns out that restaurants usually don't sell empanadas. Go figure. By the way, while I'm still more or less on the topic of languages - even if you don't speak Spanish you have little to worry about. In the milonga, since you will be cabeceo-ing people, you don't need to speak English. In the stores they sometimes speak English but even if they don't often common sense is enough when picking what to buy. In the classes the teachers explain sometimes only and sometimes mostly in Spanish. But even in the second case you won't get very detailed translation. You should keep your eyes open in order to catch what's going on from what the teacher is showing. In the end many of the young Argentines can say at least a couple of words in English and some speak actually quite well if not fluently.

"Mi Buenos Aires Querido"

In March of 2012 I went to BA for the first time. When I came back I was asked to write an article about it for a blog called "The delicate strength". I don't know if that blog is still around and how long it might exist, that's why I decided to publish the article on my blog too.

Buenos Aires Trip 2012, Part 4

So often I would ask girls where they bought some great looking tango clothes and almost always the answer would be "In BA". That's why I took two suitcases, filled up the small one and put it in the big one for my flight down. The sweet anticipation of the fabulous clothes and shoes I would buy quickly got substituted for the frustration of not finding any clothes that I like and only uncomfortable or/and ugly shoes. Needless to say that one of my suitcases travelled back empty. I wasn't really desperate to buy clothes but certainly in more than dire need for shoes, so I ended up buying only one T-shirt, which I can't even wear to the milonga, a pair of white lead's shoes from a company called Tango Leike (they are super light and comfy), 4 pairs of follower's shoes from Alanis and 1 pair from Artisenal. Just to clarify, gentlemen - with those 5 new pairs of follower's shoes now I own a proud total of 9 pairs. And I call myself a professional dancer… Anyway, I had never heard of Alanis or Artisenal before. Years ago I started off with Flabella and then moved on to Neo Tango, but since the quality of the Neo Tango shoes dropped so much I decided to switch again. My first impulse was to go and check out Flabella, since I remember liking their quality. The sales representatives there seemed to live in some parallel universe where there are no clients waiting in front of their eyes. The 3 sales women extensively chatted with each other after which one sat down to chill and stare out of the window while I was waiting for somebody to end up paying attention to me. The other client had already gotten some shoes and was trying them on. Turns out that Flabella has some nice designs for small feet but for my "huge" size 9 feet they had only some quite unappealing styles. Same with Tango Leike. Comme il Faut was out of question anyway since they have never been comfortable to me. Artisenal has custom made shoes but they also sell pre-made shoes. The pair that I bought would have been really comfortable if there wasn't a two-finger-wide gap between my arch and the sole of the shoe. Same applies to the Alanis shoes that I bought. Alanis makes shoes in regular width and in wide, which I liked. They produce a batch of shoes and when they sell them out they don't make more in the same colors. On one hand this means that there won't be too many girls out there with exactly the same shoes but on the other hand makes shopping a little more difficult since they always need to check if they have your size in the style and color you like. The internet shows only one Alanis store but they actually have two locations. The one I liked, in Palermo, is not on the internet and since it's quite hidden and not very busy Carmelo, the sales representative, does a great job being super attentive and helpful. Their shoes are soft and well padded, although the longer I wear them the more I have the feeling that the padding is getting compressed and rather useless. In all shoe stores it was definitely best to pay in dollars, as it was in most other stores too actually. In the majority of the shoe places they had additional discounts if one paid cash or in dollars. I hear that things change all the time but for me it made most sense to bring dollars to Argentina and either exchange them there for a much better rate than I got in New York, or just pay in dollars. The stores were offering the best exchange rates of all in order to entice you to pay in foreign currency. The way I see it is that right now the Argentines don't have much trust in the banks AND in the strength of their currency, that's why they prefer real pieces of paper with dollar or euro signs on them instead of electronic numbers in their bank account, or very real but highly inflational pesos. By the way, did you know that the symbol for the Argentinian peso is exactly the same as for the US dollar? I didn't, so when I saw the price of the car service being $200 I think I choked. They sometimes specify AR$ versus US$.

In Argentina you often need to leave some extra time for things to get done. Like one porteño said: "Here there is a line for everything." At first I didn't feel that. On the way to BA the procedures at the airport went fast and I got to the apartment 1.5 hours after I landed. For that on the way back I had to spend 2.5 hours at the airport itself waiting on 4 consecutive lines. In the end saw myself forced to cut the last line and run to the gate in order get on the plane 10 min before the door closes and I would miss the flight. The other time when I really felt it was when I went to the company "Personal" to buy a phone card. If you ever need a phone card go to "Claro" or may be one of the other providers, but never to "Personal". At the "Personal" store my dancing partner and I had to wait 20 min for the "receptionist" to ask us why we were there and take the data from our passports. (Yes, you need to bring a passport if you want to buy a phone card.) Then we sat down and waited for almost a whole hour for the 3 people in front of us to get taken care of by the 4 employees in the store. When we finally sat down in front of a representative the information field on her computer was showing that we were being "helped" for 20 min already, while we were stunned with the info that they are currently out of phone cards. No arguing that the receptionist told us that they have them could make one magically appear or undo all the waiting. Sadly. What I also learned from the continuation of this experience was that an Argentine phone card does not work in an European phone. But the phone company won't tell you that. Or at least not at the moment of you buying the card. Then, once you have it and want to return it you find yourself in a Catch 22 situation from which you can come out only in two ways - either with a phone purchased from the company who sold you the phone card, in which phone that card will work; or if you don't want to buy a phone - with the same Argentinian phone card, which is yours to keep just like the money you paid for it is theirs to keep.

findthevanja shared an Instagram photo with you

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findthevanja just shared an Instagram photo with you:

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"Does it get any more beautiful? My #enchanted #forest. :)"

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The Instagram Team

"Mi Buenos Aires Querido"

In March of 2012 I went to BA for the first time. When I came back I was asked to write an article about it for a blog called "The delicate strength". I don't know if that blog is still around and how long it might exist, that's why I decided to publish the article on my blog too.

Buenos Aires Trip 2012, Part 3

After seeing a little of it I have to say: Buenos Aires is beautiful! It reminds me of Sofia (Bulgaria) in the late 1990s: the houses are a little run down but not too much; the majority of the cars on the streets are from the mid-nineties and some even from the eighties; there must be rich people in BA because they have some quite expensive stores but I didn't see any ostentatious locals; people know how to enjoy life, take the time to do so and take pride in doing it; most people seem to be still equally poor and mostly the young people spend a lot of time socializing on the streets. In BA young people sit in the middle of the sidewalk, sometimes even on a cushion, especially brought for that purpose, and drink mate or alcohol. Once I saw two guys spread on the sidewalk, having a drink and listening to the music, which played from the open window of the car next to them… So romantic, relaxed and charming. That's BA! To me it felt like a journey back in time to the years before I left Bulgaria.

As you can imagine, a lot of the social life in BA happens on the streets. In Palermo for example there are ALWAYS people out. In 3 weeks not even once was I alone on the street at night and that regardless if I was going to the first milonga, moving to the second around 3am or leaving it between 4 and 6am. It's a southern culture, which means that they start gathering in the cafés and bars around 7pm and the later it gets, the fuller those get. I think that the peak "social time" is between 11pm and 12am. Some of the local bars were open as late as 3am and always full of people, sitting at the outside tables. I am sure that part of it was due to the fabulous weather we had. In March - the end of their summer - both the temperature and the humidity are lower than in the peek of the summer, although we still appreciated having an air conditioner in the apartment (and that even though I don't like ACs and hardly ever use one).

When you start packing for BA keep in mind that the milongas often don't have an AC and usually only an insufficient number of fans. At 70-75F outside temperature this meant that even somebody like me who hardly sweats is well moist after a single tanda. After 2-3 tandas one is drenched in sweat, sticky and with little chance of drying out. No wonder the porteñas dance in shorts or mini skirts! Seldom in my life have I been so grateful for a shower as I was after a class followed by a night in the milongas. Probably at really traditional milongas one would need to dress up properly but at the younger milongas everyone wears whatever they want. At the same milonga you can see people in evening dresses or suits, in cargo pants, in shorts, or even in tiny, short dresses which show most of the bra. I guess anything goes as long as it helps you combat the heat and humidity in the milonga. Already the first couple of nights helped me understand why Argentine tango dancers put so much product in their hair to sleek it back. Well, without clips or gel in my hair after an hour of dancing I looked like a dandelion, and I don't mean the cute yellow ones but the big, puffy, white ones from the end of the summer!