New Year's Eve

Since I blogged about Christmas Eve and Day, I think it's appropriate that I describe the New Years celebration here as well.



As in many other countries, New Years here is celebrated with fireworks. From what I've heard, I'm fairly certain they are illegal here....but, the law is more or less disregarded (just as in the states I suppose).



There are two or so weeks of fireworks in Argentina. You begin to hear them in the streets a few days before Christmas. Then at 12, everyone lights off fireworks to mark the beginning of Christmas Day. In between Christmas and New Years, you hear a smattering of fireworks in the evenings and then at Midnight on New Years Day, people light off their remaining fireworks which mainly consist of roman candles, rockets with white trails that bang! once they reach a certain height, and rockets that blossom into an array of colors.



Apart from fireworks, New Years is a time to make asado or to barbecue. Out with the nasty mayo filled salads of Christmas and in again with my beloved meat and assorted cow parts.



My former host family asked if I wanted to join them at a New Year's Eve asado at their friend's house in the now swanky and touristy Palermo Viejo neighborhood. As I've expressed too many times, asking me if I want to go to an asado is a rhetorical question. The better question is, what would I have to be doing in order to turn down or not accept an invitation to an asado? So as I was saying...At about 10 or so PM on New Years Eve, we piled in the 10-year-old pristinely maintained Renault and made the 10 or so minute journey to the adjacent barrio.



The house in Palermo Viejo is three stories with a clear glass domed roof which you can see out of from the base floor. Outside on the ground floor, there is a couryard with a beautiful brick and stonework parilla. Upon walking in and greeting the throngs of family members, I made my way to the parilla and the asador (grill master). The asador was the father of the family and from what I'd heard, he takes great pride in the art of grilling. I knew upon meeting him that even if I weren't able to connect with anyone else that evening, I would have fun talking this guy up about grilling techniques.



By the time I laid eyes on the grill, the asador was more or less allowing the meat to finish off very slowly. The grill was covered, every inch with all of the best cuts of meat and on a separate side of the grill segregated by a brick wall were a few butterflied chicken sections.



The grill master was only too happy to answer all of my questions about his parilla and technique. He made sure that I was aware of how exactly he was cooking the parts requiring the most skill, such as the chinchulinas and mojellas (sweet meats). We then moved on to talking about his house: Three floors, an ivy covered courtyard with a beautiful parilla, exposed brick walls, beautiful wood floors, immaculately maintained. He had bought the place 15 years ago before Palermo Viejo became the trendiest part of town, at a time when it was filled with autobody shops and not much else. Since then and despite the financial crisis of 2001, his investment had more than doubled. He is now in the process of trying to sell his place and in fact almost completed the transaction when the latest financial crisis hit and his buyer backed out. Nevertheless, it is only a matter of time before he will have a new buyer-the location makes it a gold mine.

His plan is to move to a cheaper and more up and coming part of town to do the same thing again. He described how in Argentina you can't trust the retirement system and that you have to therefore invest for yourself. In Argentina, the retirement system(their social security) was privatized during President Menom's tenure (1980s) and just recently nationalized and in the process, tons of money disappeared... So intelligent investors put money in ladrillos (bricks), or real estate.



In AR, people have learned that the only safe investment is Apartments or homes. The stock market here gets crushed every time people get skiddish or foreign investors pull their money out. It cannot be relied on for anything but a quick trade. Nor do people trust the banks who have participated in numerous coralitos, or more or less telling people they can't take their money out of their accounts while it was being devalued by the government. So, the only thing Argentines can have some amount of control over is real estate and if you have extra money here, that's the mattress underneath which you hide it.



At a little after 11pm, we sat down to dinner which consisted of green salads, a pizza I'd made, and the constant flow of different cuts of meat from the grill. Because I had mistakenly mentioned that I liked chinchulinas and had never tried mojellas, I was given a string of crispy intestines probably the size of my own as well as all the prized neck glands. I accepted them graciously and I actually think that the rest of the family members were jealous that I had gotten all of the mojellas but they consoled themselves by telling me that there is a ton of cholesterol in this part of the cow...To which I replied, 'I will die happy then!'

And so I ate for about an hour straight and at that point, a family member next to me grabbed my plate along with the rest to clear the table for dessert. Truth be told, I wasn't done eating, but I realized that what she had done for me was a blessing. It can't be the best way to start the new year with over a kilo of meat and other weird organs in your stomach at midnight.

A few minutes before 12, we began hearing the pops of fireworks. The asador and father of the family beckoned everyone up three flights of stairs to the roof where we waited until midnight and lit off our rockets and roman candles. The father of the family gave me a roman candle to shoot off, but Guillermo, my host father, grabbed it from my hand, thinking that I didn't know what to do with it. Guillermo only means the best for me, but sometimes he treats me as if I were brain damaged or from Mars. For instance, Guillermo has tried to tell me more than once about how cork is used in wine bottles instead of plastic, as if I hadn't learned when I was 5-years-old what a cork is. By the same token, Guillermo didn't think I'd ever shot off a Roman Candle so he grabbed it from my hands as he probably thought I would shoot myself in the eye with it or something.

Anyhow, once done with our brief fireworks show, we headed back downstairs for a toast to the New Year as well as dessert after dessert followed by a birthday cake for the mother of the family whose birthday was coincidentally on the 1st of the year. After all the cake, we sat around and talked well into the morning. I chatted with 4-5 older extended family members about comparisons between AR and the US-always dangerous, but fun territory. By the end, I think I had somehow convinced them that I was sponging off AR, that I was a freeloader. This was not my intention, but in telling them that I was not interested in being certified to be a school psychologist in AR, they construed that as me only wanting to hang out here and not contribute at all to the society. In reality, I contribute quite a bit. I buy private healthcare, have an expensive gym membership, go out to eat 2 nights a week, buy lots of food, give tours, teach English, work with tourists, and direct tourists to spend money in certain places. I think I pull my weight in AR, despite the fact that I am not working constantly here. But my arguments were lost on them. And by the time I left at about 4 in the morning, I was as good as Bolivian or Paraguayan-a freeloader. Oh well.

Despite the bad taste in my mouth, I had enjoyed the conversation. It was lively, loud, playfully argumentative....Very Italian. And at the end of the night, before making the trip back, I had an opportunity to talk with the stunningly attractive oldest 20 something daughter of the family. Argentine women are generally very very pretty, but this girl was one of the prettiest I'd ever seen. I knew that without a doubt she had a boyfriend. Girls that pretty always have boyfriends....But that didn't stop me from talking with her a bit. We chatted about her learning English and how she's going to school to be an orthodontist and about the possibility of doing an exchange program in the states. I didn't make any outright moves to get her phone number or anything like that and a few minutes into the conversation, everyone started heading toward the door so there was no time even to have much more of a talk.

The evening ended with me being dropped off at 4am by my sleepy host family in front of my apartment. I slept in until about 1 the next day and then stayed in bed reading until 3 or so pm. New Years Day was nothing but rest and reading.