Clouds Over Buenos Aires

A blog entry with a title describing the weather is not a harbinger of a worthy post. I'll keep it short tonight. It was a cloudy and drab Buenos Aires day, very typical of the winter here. I allowed myself to sleep in late and ran a few unimportant errands in the morning before heading off to my final interview in the afternoon for a job teaching English in the center of town.

Walking all day through the streets of Buenos Aires is likely equivalent to smoking at least half a pack of cigarettes. Por eso, even though you're getting plenty of exercise dodging kamikazee cab drivers and killer whale buses, it's still an unhealthy activity. Buenos Aires is a tempting city. There are so many fun and stimulating places to explore that you want to walk around all day, bend around every turn to see what new unique shop or breathtaking corner apartment is next. It's like cheesecake that you just want to keep eating, but really shouldn't. I realized this today as I began to feel the effects of walking too much in the city, which can manifest in the form of carbon monoxide poisoning (headache, achiness, feverishness). If you're not already a smoker or used to dirty air, it's even harder. Being from Ohio, one of the dirtiest states in the union, I thought I'd become hardened to dirty air. BA is on a different level. The colectivos or buses that growl past you every 15 seconds spew out giant unfiltered plooms of diesel exhaust and every other Argentinian Cole Trickel driven cab chokes the air with oil exhaust from his gunked up engine that has been pushed too hard for too long.

Luckily, the carbon monoxide poisoning feeling lifted by the time I'd made it to the downtown office where the interview was to be held. It didn't, however, lift soon enough for me to have my wits about me. As instructed, I took the elevator up to the 9th floor of the building. There, I found a sign on the door 'American Forum', the name of the school by which I was to be interviewed. Inside, I found a number of classrooms with a conference room in the middle. No one was tending the conference type room in the middle and I decided that the reason for this must be that my interviewer was going to be late due, as she had told me previously, to a meeting she had scheduled before mine.

I waited and waited, almost fell asleep in the unattended conference room in a big leather swivel chair when it occurred to me that someone might be waiting to interview me in a different office on the 9th floor. The only other office was one with a sign that read 'Argentinian FORO'. My brain told me 'Argentinian Foro does not equal American Forum' and I couldn't think of any acronym for FORO that means a school for teaching English, but my common sense told me that I should at least walk in the office and see if that's where someone was waiting to interview me......And it was.

By this time, I was a good...20 minutes late. A great first impression for the supposed hardworking Midwestern American that I tried to portray myself as in my resume. As an aside, this was dually noted at the end of the interview when my interviewer said, 'I thought to myself, what kind of person comes to an interview for a job late?'

In spite of this, the interview went well, except for the most important question. The deal or no deal question. I was asked to explain how I would explain to an Argentinian the importance of the present perfect tense. The thought of not being able to answer the question did not make me nervous for the sake of possibly not getting the job. I wasn't particularly excited about this job in light of the prospects I checked out yesterday. However, there was a pride issue at stake and I did feel a challenge. I was the wannabe writer a year or so shy of a doctorate being asked a relatively simple grammar question and I was totally stumped. What the heck is the present perfect tense? Think Think. So what did I do? Here's how it went down...

Interviewer: So what do you do if an Argentinian says to you, why do I have to know this stupid present perfect tense. In Spanish, we just use the past tense.

Me: So do you mean, how do I explain the importance of different grammatical rules in general and why we should make an effort to use them? (this followed by a wise and long winded answer about the importance of cultural and linguistic acceptance even if it doesn't seem to make sense, paralleled with the seeming senselessness of masculine and feminine nouns and modifiers in Spanish).

Interviewer: Very good. But now tell me specifically, how do you say to an Argentinian that the present perfect tense is important?

Me: Do you mean philosophically. I'm not quite sure what you're getting at, could you say it another way? (As if to imply that the shortcoming was hers because her English wasn't good enough to convey the question)

Interviewer: Maybe I'm not expressing the question well. Here's an example. Argentinians say I had worked at this job for many years instead of I have worked at this job for many years. How do you expalin why the difference is important?

Me: (Score! an example. I don't know what present perfect tense is but I can figure this example out. I put my head down for 5 seconds to think and came up with the answer.) I had worked implies something that occurred in the past that is no longer the case. I have worked implies something that happened in the past, but continues.

Interviewer: Very good.

Cost of an undergraduate and two graduate degrees: $50,000. Cost of a one-way ticket to Argentina: $500. Ticket on the subway to get a job as an English Teacher: 90 centavos AR. Almost being stumped with an easy grammar question by a non-native English Interviewer: Priceless.

For some reason, the interview ended with me being offered the job. Granted, it's peanuts compared to what educated folks make in the U.S., but it's actually pretty darn good job in Argentina. I felt bad for not being able to muster the excitement about the offer and for not seeming as grateful as I probably should have when the interviewer explained that in 2 months, I might be able to ask for an extra 2 pesos per hour of work. The fact is, though, that I'm not desperate (yet) and teaching English for what to me is still minimum wage would be more for the experience than as a cash generator.

Anyhow, I was happy to have the option and did my best at the end of the interview to express my gratitude and to somehow undo any signs of pretentiousness I had conveyed. The interviewer explained to me that the option existed to work part time or full time and that I need only tell her what I was interested in doing.

I decided to walk home instead of taking the subte. I cut across Cerrito Street downtown past the perpetually closed for rehab world famous Teatro Colon Opera House and took a left at Avenida Cordoba, a street that would more or less take me straight home after a 3 or so mile walk up one of the busiest streets in Buenos Aires. I've always been partial to this particular street because it contains more health food shops and restaurants than any other in Buenos Aires. I hadn't walked up it since last year and was eager to see how my old haunts were doing. I did wind up stopping in a few old favorite stores and peering in the windows of Lotus and other granolay cafes, but what impacted me more this evening was the eery sky mixed with the perpetual motion and energy of Buenos Aires. The clouds were moving slowly but noticeably across the horizon with the distant winter sunlight breaking through meekly, just enough to paint soft oranges and pinks. Mix with this the rush hour of heavily scarved Argentinians rushing through the sidewalks and ascending elevators to refill the city's apartments. The smell of meat thrown on grills, the steam from which rose up past the neon store lights and on to the heavy winter clouds. The sensation of rain without it ever materializing. And me moving through the middle of it all, happily out of context.

Every different weather pattern and sky mixes with the city's vibe to create a new sensory soup of the day. Today's was something special that I'd never tasted in BA or any city for that matter. It felt like any number of first time experiences I had when I was a kid. But somehow it was even better because it was a more conscious recognition that it was indeed a special moment and feeling that would not soon be matched. It's moments like these that undo all of the negatives of having uprooted my life to move to the other side of the world....