Parent Edition

The parents left yesterday morning for the Salta province in the North of Argentina, close to the Bolivian border. It's about a two hour flight from Buenos Aires to Salta and the resultant change in geography brings with it dramatic differences in climate, food, and culture. Buenos Aires is flat, humid, and concrete. From what I gather, Salta is mountainous, dry, and far more natural. The culture and food are different as well. Buenos Aires is a big city where you learn for better or worse not to trust people until you're almost sure you know them. Salta is supposedly more like middle America, a place where the people are kind and giving from the outset. And while Buenos Aires is dominated by an Italian/Spanish food mix, Salta apparently offers more indigenous fare like locro stew (beans, different cuts of beef and pork, sweet potatoes etc), tamales, choclo (corn stew), and even llama. The weather is also different in Salta province, with more sunny warm days in the winter and almost unbearably hot ones in the summer. As an example, today was a dark 50 degree winter day in Buenos Aires and according to my parents, it was sunny shorts weather in Salta.

Anyhow, the past week with the parents was fun. As many of you know, their flight was delayed an entire day as a result of thunderstorms and the arrival of King Bush errr president Bush to the Atlanta airport. Apparently when Bush flies into an Airport, all flights are grounded and none can land either. I suppose it's the least we as citizens can do for a man who has done errrrr... so much for the U.S. during his time in office. But I digress....

Despite mom's profound frustration at being delayed a day for a trip she has been planning for half a year (by a guy she didn't vote for...twice), her mood had changed noticeably when she exited the remise(sort of a private taxi service that I set them up with). Before I get to that, I want to mention that the remise was almost an hour and a half late, or later than I had anticipated. So I was totally worried, already having created a worst case scenario in my head for what had happened. The parents were caught up in customs having to pay import fees on all the stuff I had them bring me from the states. The remise driver hadn't connected with them and they were trying to figure out how to get to my place or had accepted a ride from a crooked cab driver. The guilt was sinking in. Why didn't I meet them at the airport instead sending a car for them!?

My fear eased when I saw my mom coming down the road in a nice mid size taxi type vehicle driven by an older female remise driver. Except, before reaching my apartment, the remise turned and circled around my block. I ran after the car at top speed hoping to catch up with her at the next light, but she was already gone. The car was circling the block, trying to find my address once more. On the second trip down my street, I ran on the sidewalk toward the approaching car and could see my mother pointing to me from the front seat. I herded the remise next to my apartment and soon learnt that the driver had a number of problems finding not only my apartment, but my street as well. I knew then that the driver more or less had no idea what she was doing. The street on which I live is one of the major veins of BA and if you don't know Paraguay, you haven't been around the city much. In any case, my parents told me that the driver treated them very well and drove safely. This reassurance in itself was enough for me not to care that the driver charged me extra as a result of her inability to find my street.

The parents were in and out of my apartment in less than 15 minutes as they we needed to catch the subway to start their first Spanish class in the leafy well-heeled Belgrano neighborhood inside the heavenly Esmerelda cafe where fresh pannetones are regularly pulled from the oven and placed temptingly in front of the coffee drinking crowd. On the way to the subway, we stopped in to a local bakery and bought fresh empanadas because....because we could. At 66 cents a piece, a fresh beef, chicken, or ham and cheese empanada is the perfect cure for low energy or just about any other ailment. And that is a scientific fact.

We made it to Belgrano only a few minutes late. Upon entering the bakery, my parents were mesmerized by the unprecedented array of amazing sweets. I practically had to pull them away from the display cases to their waiting teacher, my friend Silvina, a translator and BA native. After settling the folks into their new morning home, I left the class to spend time in an internet cafe studying Argentine history to prepare for my job as a tour guide.

The second half of our first day involved searching for a foam mattress to cover my sandbag-like futon so that my parents wouldn't have to visit a chiropracter during the trip. For me, the walk to the Villa Crespo neighborhood was a normal day's journey, nothing out of the ordinary. I forgot that for my parents it was not. We found the foam, but the walk proved fatal. My dad estimates in the end that we walked over 10 miles on their first day. On the bright side, we packed a ton of sights and sounds into one day, easily two days worth, thereby making up for the lost day. The downside was that my mom's reoccuring leg injury flared up and more or less put her out of commission for the next few days. I had forgotten about this injury and my mom, like her daughter and grandaughter, is not one to complain. She was far more interested in this new experience than in protecting her leg.

That night, I took my parents out for their 40th wedding anniversary at my favorite restaurant, El Remanso. We arrived at about 8:30 pm(the first customers in the restaurant). I knew the parents would share their food so I ordered for them, two dishes I felt they needed to try, a full sized filet mignon and a large serving of paella. I ordered pollo a la plancha, or a simple grilled chicken with some fried eggs. As an aside, the pictures from the parent visit are coming. The parents have them all on their camera and I will include them when they are back in town in a week and a half. As I was saying, the arrival of the filet mignon signalled my father's first lasting smile of the trip. Granted, he had smiled earlier in the day upon seeing pannetone fresh from the oven. However, dad was clearly smitten at the amazing cut of meat before him and the flavor did not let him down. We tore into our meals and left nothing save a few pieces of bread. More than satisfied with the first meal, we caught a cab home and my parents fell quickly asleep and stayed that way until after 9 am the following morning, uncharacteristically late.

The remaining week before my parents flew off to Salta was an exercise in Frato indulgence. Mom couldn't walk as much the following days as the first. So, we spent a good deal of time sampling foods and seeing local sights instead, as well as making one touristy trip per day to places like the Plaza de Mayo, the Casa Rosada, the Obelisk, and the San Telmo street fair. We also made trips to some of the biggest grocery stores in the city, Jumbo and Coto Abasto, as a means of giving my parents a better sense of all the types of food that Buenos Aires has to offer. Further, I indulged my parents with a different Argentine food every day. The following is everything that my parents stuffed their faces with in their first week here: Empanadas (beef, chicken, ham and cheese, and choclo), pasta frola, veal milanesas, fresh ravioli, boulagnese sauce, multiple loaves of pan del campo (country white bread), Argentine pears, Argentine Pink Lady apples, giant croissants, facturas, medialunas, alfahores, dulce de leche with brownie ice cream, super dulce de leche ice cream, pistachio ice cream, and boisenberry and chocolate icecream, roasted red pepper, ham, and cremoso cheese pizza, torta de calabaza, torta de espinaca, torta de jamon y queso, una parillidita, and filet mignon (4 nights).

I know my dad doesn't like big cities. He spent much of the first week pointing out the trees and birds and wondering which direction was North, a futile exercise when the buildings are so tall that you rarely see the sun in the winter. Watching dad try to relate to the city was kind of like watching the movie Crocodile Dundee. Granted, my dad grew up in the inner city and is no stranger to it. Regardless, I don't think he is comfortable with or made to be in such a perceptually deafening and unnatural place. To ease his time here, I made sure to appeal to his love for good food. In fact, in addition to the aformentioned indulgences, we bought a porcelain covered cast iron grill for my stove top so that we could grill up steaks. To date, we have grilled filet mignon and fresh eggplant 3 nights on the little grill. With filet at 7-10 dollars a kilo, we could not justify restraint.

Mom seems to have connected with the city a bit more. I can't say that she seemed enamored with it, but she certainly seems to have enjoyed exploring, learning Spanish, trying new foods, and learning about the culture. Speaking of which, we were able to meet up with my former host family on two separate occassions, once for dinner at their house and the next time for coffee and cakes. Both events were successes, the two families connecting very well despite an almost complete language disconnect. My former host family speaks no English, save a few words and my parents speak barely more Spanish than my host family speaks English. I was forced into the position of translating as much as possible, which becomes extremely exhausting (if you've ever been put in this situation you know). Nevertheless, basic connections were made and both evenings ended more warmly than I thought possible for two groups of people who could barely understand each other. Surprisingly, my parents expressed that they enjoyed both of these encounters, pointing out that these types of cultural events are what make great travel. I hadn't considered it, but it's true. The cultural connections I made sitting at my host family's dinner table sharing coffee and cake for hours and hours were the memories and feelings that stuck with me as I made my decision to move back down here for a year. Despite how much I talk about it, it wasn't the food that brought me here. It wasn't the draw of big city life. And it wasn't just the opportunity to practice Spanish. It was the emotionally substantive connections that I made with people through conversation, made that much more interesting by communicating in a second language.

The highlights so far of my parents stay have been our first night at El Remanso, A fun day walking through the San Telmo street market, a wild trip to Retiro station to buy bus tickets, Dinner and coffee with my former host family, and our second try at grilling filet mignon which resulted in what can only be described as a dinner of dreams.

In general, though, it has been fun to have my parents in the city. It makes me realize that my family certainly isn't the reason why I left Ohio for the year. Sharing this experience with my parents has revealed to me that I can continue to be challenged and grow despite the presence of my family. Having my parents here has given me the best of both worlds, so to speak. The loneliness of being in a place without family has been alleviated, but the excitement remains.

In less than a week, I'll leave on an overnight bus trip to meet my parents in Cordoba, on the West side of AR. From there, we will drive out to the surrounding countryside to, I hope, spend some quiet time in the hills before returning to Buenos Aires a few days later. My parents will then have almost another week in Buenos Aires before heading back to the states to start the work year. At the same time that they leave, my daily workload will increase and I should enter into a routine that will define my life for at least the next year here. My hope is that the routine I create is healthier and more people filled than the life I left in the U.S. I'm finally beginning to feel comfortable in the city again, content to read on the subway without worrying too much about pickpocketers and the like. The language is beginning to come to me almost spontaneously. And I can saunter as opposed to rush walk when I concentrate.

I think it's still too early to tell whether I'm a country or city person. Certainly I'm more comfortable in the country or small towns, no doubt about that. But despite my lack of comfort in the city, it does seem to be the only place in which I feel truly alive, forced to be in possession of my wits. In small town U.S., I can daydream through life. Here, I am forced to live in the present. And the truth is I spent way too much time daydreaming of excitement when I was a kid. Now is the time for the actual adventure.