Lujan

24 Crazy Things I’ve Learned So Far About Luján (and Argentina in general)

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Coming to another country is always sure to involve some culture shock, but when I came to Argentina I really didn’t know what to expect. This is a list of things I have observed and been told about so far during my time here. Argentina is a wild and wooly place! (Disclaimer: obviously, these are observations coming from my own perspective. They are meant to be lighthearted, the impressions of a recently-arrived shanqui, so if you are Argentine, please don’t take these the wrong way! We’re all friends here 🙂 )

  1. No one gives a crap about the rules, about being organized, or about the fact that whoever is supposed to know the rules doesn’t enforce them and often decides to make up random new ones on the spot.
  2. A lot of the police are corrupt. I was told that if you ever find yourself looking to take a romantic pit stop with your special someone, don’t. Apparently cops (especially the local ones here in Luján) have been known to arrest, then kidnap and rape, women in this situation. As an alternative, go to a telo! (See No. 8)
  3. It takes little to no training or education requirements to join the police force in this country. This probably explains No. 2, as well as the fact that we were told that if you ever get pulled over, just slip the cop a 100 peso bill and you’re off the hook. This also probably explains the policeman we saw driving in the middle of three lanes in capital, while simultaneously smoking, eating a sandwich and talking on his cell phone, with no seatbelt, while flashing his blue lights. Why leave all the fun to those lawless citizens, right?
  4. The Luján riverfront is sketchy as F—this is what happens when corrupt government officials decide what gets invested in and what doesn’t.
  5. It floods in Luján (like much of Buenos Aires Province), at least twice a year, and often the flooding reaches up to 7 or 8 blocks away from the river, right where my house is! (Yaaaaaay)
  6. The cockroach should be the national animal of Argentina (or atleast BA Province…) They are freaking everywhere. It doesn’t matter how rich you are or how clean or beautiful your home is. They are everywhere.
  7. A public bathroom with a working toilet, soap, AND toilet paper? SCORE!
  8. Traffic rules don’t exist, nor do stoplights, street lanes, stop signs, or street signs in most places. There are also no seatbelts in the majority of cars. And to cross an intersection, people just flash their lights or play a shameless game of chicken to see who will actually slow down slightly just in the nick of time.
  9. There are literal sex hotels (called Telos) that exist solely for the purpose of getting down, with rooms that can be rented by the hour. Everyone–from sneaky teenagers to philanderers, from parents looking for privacy to priests, swings by these places to get their love on…which brings me to…. Number 10:
  10. Everyone cheats on everyone here, and no one gives a damn if you are taken. Relationship status is barely a bump in the road for an Argentine on the prowl.
  11. The fact that so many people are so thin blows my mind, especially since the typical Argentine diet seems to consist of cookies, dulce de leche, whole milk, milanesas (aka fried steak), pasta, mashed potatoes, steak, gnocci, more dulce de leche, pastries, wine, and the best ice cream you’ve ever tasted. In the wise words of one Haystacks Calhoun, “Dulce de Leche is the Sriracha sauce of desserts: It’s hard to name anything that wouldn’t be improved by it.”
  12. No one wears helmets, ever (on a motorcycle or normal bike), and five people seems to be the full capacity of a motorbike (and hey, why not bring the baby along!)
  13. Expats who are natives of any Anglo-based culture (Brit, Aussie, Kiwi, Yankee, Canuck, you name it) are essentially alcoholics compared to Argentines, who may sip one glass of wine, Gancia or Fernet for over an hour.
  14. The economy is so jacked up from inflation, and the peso is so ridiculously low in value compared to other world currencies, that a vast number of Argentines (even those who speak near perfect English) have never left the country, even to go to Uruguay, which is a hop, skip and a jump across the river from Buenos Aires.
  15. The ABSURD contrast between the haves and the have-nots. Gated “country club” neighborhoods with insane security and houses that look like they popped out of Greenwich, CT with immaculate lawns, pools, tennis courts and Mercedes parked in the driveway are situated 100 yards away over the fence from shantytown slums with dirt roads, houses made of falling-apart plywood and plastic and piles of burning trash outside. The shiny, elegant streets of Recoleta are less than a kilometer from highway-side half-finished buildings with no back wall and no running water where you can see straight into people’s home from the highway. LandRovers driven by bottle-blonde trophy wives share the road with horse drawn carriages driven by a woman under 25 with no teeth and four barefoot children filling the cart with trash from the side of the road.
  16. The electricity regularly goes out in neighboring General Rodriguez because people set up illegal businesses and tap into the town electricity wires via DIY jobs, resulting in the best case scenario in a temporary blackout and in the worst-case scenario in a fatal explosion.
  17. Children regularly get kidnapped in shopping malls, and then sold for various gruesome reasons on the international black market.
  18. There are stray dogs EVERYWHERE and I’m still shocked that they seem to have figured out a mutual system with cars, motorcyclists and bicyclists, and somehow manage to avoid being run over at the last second.
  19. Abortion is illegal in Argentina, oral contraception is hard to come by and often frowned upon. Weed is legal in Uruguay.
  20. Private schools are the only schools available for full day education and care. Public schools are only available either in the morning or in the afternoon, not both. Makes it kind of difficult for a lower-income parent to move up in a career and eventually make more money…while already higher income families are able to benefit from both parents being able to work all day long while their kids are at school.
  21. The difference between private hospitals and public hospitals is INSANE… (although some public hospitals are great, if someone in the government decides they feel like giving them money)
  22. Apparently, the fact that a lot of people are still traumatized from the dictatorship in the 1970’s is the reason why they don’t discipline their children too much – because they believe it’s too reminiscent of a military regime.
  23. The 80 and 90’s have either made a SERIOUS comeback, or never ended. See: the insane popularity of rollerblading, mullets, shiny bowling shirts, scrunchies, acid-wash jeans, platform shoes, and stupid slogan t-shirts.
  24. The gym teachers at the school look exactly like these guys: ziriguidum

The Power of a Pink Post-It: The ups and downs of working with Argentine kids

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Little by little, things have been looking up. I honestly do love being at San Patricio, despite the chaos.

One day, after a particularly tough bought of homesickness, when I had been in the midst of that punched-in-the-stomach pit of loneliness, and was seriously asking myself what I possibly thought could be gained from this, an adorable eight year old named Luisa presented me with this:

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Who knew a sticky note could have so much power 🙂

I instantly felt better, and reminded myself why I’m here

It’s hard. And it’s supposed to be hard. And that’s part of the point. But the little moments like these remind me of what I want to learn from this experience – figuring out at least some parts of the life I really want for the long–term. And I’ve discovered the insanely refreshing beauty of doing something for work that genuinely makes you smile every day – and that this possibility actually exists.

Even the days when I’ve been thrown unsuspectingly in with the tiny demons (especially the second graders…), I take a deep, solid inhale (after 5 un-interrupted hours of insane stress and adrenaline), and I smile. Hell, I even laugh.

“Meees! How do you say ‘el shopping’ in English?”

“Um, ‘Shopping Center’, Olivia. ‘Shopping’ is an English word.”

“Meees! In my holidays, I go to Deeeesnay with my fam-i-lee, and we stay at Howard Shonson”

“Wow, that’s great, Facundo, but can you say ‘Howard JOHNSON’?”

“Howard SSShonson”

“Meeees, sos de China?”

“Ummmmm…..no, Maria Luz, what do you think?”

Howard Shonson

I can just have finished four hours of screaming “Coco! Toto! Felipe! Santiago! Santino! MARIA!!! SIT DOWN AND STOP HITTING EACH OTHER!”, and one of the kids (even sometimes one of the trouble makers I was yelling at an hour earlier) will come up and give me a hug and I feel 10x more fulfilled than I ever did leaving my old office building.

Luckily, these hilarious and heartwarming moments are mixed in every day with the bad and the ugly.

Some of these kids are so messed up, and have serious issues, and the lack of even the slightest enforced discipline or regard for authority for some of them makes me worry for their future and wonder how a society can function with kids that are brought up like this. These kids are 100% at the top of the social hierarchy in this town, so I can only imagine what kind of messed up issues some of the kids in some of the poorer public schools here come in with, but the rich kids have their own brand of problems.

Moms and Dads who are never emotionally present (and constantly jetting off to New York while a family 100 yards away lives in a plastic shack…), yet shower their kids with the newest iPad or whatever, resulting in their child doing whatever it takes to be noticed. I can only imagine how some of them must behave at home with their poor niñeras. If their parents don’t give a crap and let them do whatever they want, (even if its purely by lack of being there to say “no” or model what good behavior is), how they hell does anyone think they are going to listen to a teacher telling them to follow the most basic classroom rules like sitting in their seat, not yelling over others when they try to talk, and not hitting their classmates?

Since when can a seven year old look at an adult with the eyes of an arrogant, pompous grown man and make you feel like an insecure, blithering idiot??? Since when does a kid blatantly and intentionally ignore a teacher who is calling him by name and making direct eye contact from just across the desk? You can spot these kids from a mile away, and after you’re done being infuriated by them, it’s impossible not to feel incredibly saddened. By yourself for caving in to yelling, but not knowing what else to do as an alternative, at their parents for raising them this way, at the school for allowing this shit to fly, and at them for being a tiny asshole! And at the fact that this is where our society is heading (at least a whole bunch of it…)

But so many of them are so, so, so freaking sweet, smart, kind and funny. And watching them learn and grow and improve even on a week-to-week basis puts a huge smile of my face.

I used to feel like I was stuck in an endless rat race, like I was spending countless hours doing nothing but slowly getting older, and not gaining much from it. Pry myself out of bed, painfully exhausted, race to work, spend all day in a weird purgatory of the longest day ever in which nothing happened at all, waiting for the countless hours to pass before I could race home, stress out, stay up too late watching stupid reality TV as I tried to forget my woes, and then go to bed anxious and exhausted so I could do it all again the next day. At this school, I feel happy and excited and like I’m really LIVING and doing something that matters every day. I can see my efforts paying off, and the reasons why I’m there are right in front of me with their goofy (sometimes devilish) gapped smiles.

Knowing that there’s even a shred of a possibility that something I said or I did made a tiny impact on them makes me feel like I’m doing something real – a huge, huge change for me, and one I need to hold on to.

Narrowly dodging the ketchup bottle…and trying not to sink

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The first few weeks have been…tough, to say the least.

The school is definitely a lot of fun, and by far the best thing about being here so far, although I definitely feel like a fish out of water. It’s a pretty big difference from my former life in multiple ways…good and bad.

The good: Being surrounded by smiling children who all speak in cute Argentine accents, stepping outside between every class in the lovely sunny courtyard, hearing Castellano everywhere, and spending all day at work interacting with people directly makes me feel so much more alive than I did in my former daily life.

(Side-note: is it me or are kids with accents automatically 10x cuter? I spent some time with my Irish second cousins last year who are ages 10 and 12 and those mini brogues of theirs upped their already intense cuteness level to about 1000%.)

The bad: The Argentine version of “organization” at an administrative level is pretty much non-existent…laughable even. The first few weeks of teaching have consisted of me frantically wandering around campus trying to figure out where I should be at any given time, since the “schedule” they gave me changes every single day and it seems that no one ever knows anything about what’s going on or who’s supposed to be where at what time, or even whom I can ask to find out.

My fellow teachers are kept just as much in the dark about everything as I am, so if I can’t figure out where I “should” be, I usually just pick a class and go there until one of the administrators tracks me down. This usually progresses to being scolded, “Yes, of course, darling, you should be in Marcela’s class in Quinquela Martin now! Yes yes yes. Thank you” [Walks away].

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Oh, of course, silly me!! Sorry, Nuni, I forgot my mind-reading pills today. Just a few questions… Who is Marcela? Which classroom is that? Who’s Quinquela Martin? Which grade is that? What are they working on? Is there a book I should have? Do I stay just one period or more? When is the period over? Where do I go next?

And… it gets even better. In a few instances, after this course of events, I have arrived at said mystery classroom (after I finally figure out where it is…) only to discover that – Surprise! – the teacher I’ve never met is absent. YAY!! “Okay,” they say, dropping me like a piece of bait into a piranha tank of 8 year olds, “let us know if you need anything!”

Umm….just a few things!!

The first time this happened, it was a fourth grade class of hyperactive locos. It deteriorated almost immediately after the kids quickly realized I had no idea what they were working on in class, and my attempt at covering the most basic topic using goofily drawn cartoons on the board failed miserably.

“MEEEEEEES!! MEEEEEES! NO ENTIENDOOO! NO QUIEROOOO”, they shout like a chorus of angry baby geese. They make fun of my accent, hit each other, throw things, roll around on the floor, shout over me, steal each other’s pencil cases, and I end up shouting at them in a weird mix of Spanish and English which just makes them laugh at me even more. I try to appease them by playing a game of Pictionary on the chalkboard, but that goes downhill just as quickly as they practically kill each other fighting over who is on whose team and which team gets which side of the room.

After shouting doesn’t work (and I feel terrible after having given in to that in the first place), I try a new approach of waiting patiently with my arms crossed for them to be quiet, until Bauti is hitting Lauti because he ripped his book, and I have to dive in and physically separate them, yelling “BASTA!! Chicos!! No peleamos en clase!!” to which they collapse in a fit of giggles. Despite what I thought was my relatively good level of Spanish, I probably sound like Borat to these kids.

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UGH! This one particular morning was topped off by a lovely experience in the cafeteria, where the babysitting continued. I was sitting at the head of the table after finally getting the mini Argentines to sit down and start eating in relative peace. I’m minding my own business and focusing intently on my salad from the salad bar (which is actually really good!), when I look up to see four or five of these same boys all leaning in staring at me and silently giggling as they sit with a ketchup bottle ready, aimed and about to fire straight at me. THANK GOD, I looked up right before the iron eight-year-old dirty fist squelched down on the bottle and narrowly avoided being showered with ketchup on my 5th day at the school.

That was definitely one of the moments when I almost cried, although I held it together in public, luckily.

But these past couple of weeks have involved lots more crying than I ever thought I would do. Turns out, moving halfway across the world and having only one friend that you just met is Really, REALLY lonely. I should have known this before I left, and on some level, I did, but I have never experienced such long-standing homesickness and loneliness like this.

I always have a really tough time with transitions and I have always hated saying goodbye to people and places I love, but usually once I arrive in the new place I get comfortable really quickly, almost in an “out of sight, out of mind” kind of way. Even when I went away to college, I felt instantly comfortable and at home. Coming here was a different story.

It sometimes feels like I’m in a box of isolation at the bottom of the ocean, and I can see my loved ones and the comfort of my former life through the blurry surface of the water far above me, but I have no hope of swimming to the top. And it was my choice to dive down here. In fact, I had been daydreaming about and planning for this dive for the past decade of my life!

As hard as it is, I know that I came here for a reason, and that I’ve had this dream for a reason. This whole experience will surely be transformative in some way, I just need to ride it out and accept the discomfort until I figure out what the point of all this will be.

First Impressions of Lujan- What now?

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We arrived in Lujan early on Saturday morning, tired from a week full of fun in Buenos Aires and not quite knowing what to expect.

Cristina brought us over to the station for the mini bus “Combi” – the more expensive way to get back and forth from downtown to Lujan, which costs only about 80 ARS (approximately 8$ US) and boasts air conditioning, a slightly calmer crowd, and a station near the obelisk. Of course, my GIANT suitcase barely fit on the minibus…resulting in a highly embarrassing and classic moment in which myself, the bus driver and Cristina (saint that she is) were heaving and hauling for five minutes to get it on board. I wanted to crawl under my seat and die from embarrassment, especially when it became apparent that the only place on the bus the bag would physically fit was on the floor in the aisle, and one elegant-looking Lujanera loudly complained to the bus driver that he was compromising all of our safety by blocking the aisle. At least she left out the part about the stupid Americans. Making friends left and right and entering Lujan with a bang, woo! Anyway, the fact that Amanda and I made conversation so easily on the hour-long journey was a reassuring sign, since we still didn’t know each other too well yet at this point.

When we pulled in to “downtown” Lujan and hopped off (very tentatively) at what we were hoping was our correct stop, we felt completely like fish out of water. Here we were on the grass curb of someone’s house, sticking out like sore thumbs and with all of our giant bags, and it wasn’t even 10AM yet. After a few minutes, Carla pulled up in her car (as Cristina had promised that she would, although we weren’t so sure at first), and drove us a few blocks to our apartment. We were greeted by Veronica, one of the other school administrators, and Betty, the landlady, and once again I suffered the self-inflicted humiliation of having packed wayyyy too much crap as I hauled my bag up the stairs hoping I wouldn’t drop it and crush somebody.

The apartment is fine, with nice hardwood floors and big windows. The kitchen and bathroom are pretty dingy though, and it took us several attempts to get past our somewhat irrational (or maybe not) fear of the gas stove, which you have to light with a match. We were pleasantly surprised to see how nice the place is, until Betty showed us the cleaning supplies left behind by the previous tenants….complete with…ROACH SPRAY!! Yaaaay! And the can was almost empty. Yuck yuck yuck yuck. My heart sank and my irrational battle with these little demons began. But at least we have wifi! After giving us their respective phone numbers and asking us if we had any questions (ummm….no? I don’t know what questions to even ask at this point?) they said goodbye with a cheerful bustle of hugs and cheek kisses like a bunch of clucking hens and then left. And we were on our own in Lujan.

So what now? We were starving and hadn’t eaten yet. We decided to go out on a quest for breakfast, which in Lujan (or anywhere in Argentina) is quite a difficult feat, more than you would think. We went around the block a few times, struggling to orient ourselves with the lack of street signs, until we finally stumbled upon a café called “De Ja Vu” which only had about two other customers. We realized that it looked much more like a bar than a café, but it was the only thing we could find that was open, and we were hungry. We got some good coffee, but unfortunately, like everywhere else in Argentina, it’s pretty much impossible to find anything for breakfast besides medialunas (croissants), which are delicious but not exactly a hearty meal. We sat for a while, people watching out the window, and began to realize what a strange little place Lujan is.

As people started to emerge on to the deserted Saturday morning streets, we saw dreadlock mullets, packs of Argentine bros (the bro love is strong here- more on that later), horse and buggies filled with trash, and a family of four on a motorcycle, with the young mother on the back loosely clutching an infant in her arms in such a way that it looked like he would tumble on to the pavement the next time they hit a bump. We also witnessed about three almost car-crashes within about a half an hour, due to the complete lack of street signs, traffic laws or turn signals.

Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore….

After people-watching with stupefied looks on our faces for about an hour, the café started filling up more and we started to feel like animals in a zoo- we definitely stuck out, and the other clientele started staring us down, so we decided to leave.

We spent the rest of the day unpacking, attempting to get settled in, and walking around. We went to check out the basilica, which is pretty much Lujan’s one and only attraction, and completely comes out of nowhere. The rest of the town makes you feel almost like you’re in Mexico or Puerto Rico, (much more “authentically Latin American” than Buenos Aires) and then out of nowhere this huge plaza opens up with this enormous pink sandstone cathedral. Although noticeably much newer than cathedrals of similar grandeur I’ve seen elsewhere, the stunning and elaborate gothic architecture seems more like it belongs in an ancient European village than in this strange little town in the middle of Argentine farmland.

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Apparently, it’s a really big deal, though, and every year twice a year, thousands of people make a pilgrimage journey on foot to come see it and get #blessed. The story behind it is a little stupid – sometime in the 1800’s, some dudes were transporting an important statue of the Virgin Mary from Buenos Aires to somewhere else, and miraculously, their horse and carriages refused to move any farther than this spot by the river about 60 kilometers from the capital. They deduced that it must be a blessed spot, since the Virgin Mary refused to move from this hallowed ground, so they said, “Yay! Lets make a huge-ass cathedral and build a town around it!”

Cynics/horrible people we may be, Amanda and I were speculating that maybe the guys with the horse and carriage just drank too much beer and didn’t feel like going any further and, or one of them forgot to bring the horse food, or something like that that they couldn’t tell their boss…so they said “Praise be! Let’s build an unnecessarily large and expensive church in the middle of a field to cover our butts!” No offense whatsoever to Christianity or Catholicism, but this seems like a slightly more realistic, not to mention more entertaining, version of the story…

That night we didn’t know what to do with ourselves, and were skeptical about going out anywhere, since Carla had told us “don’t go out late”, but we had failed to ask what her definition of “late” was. Does that mean after dark? After 8:00? After midnight? Or should we just not leave the apartment at all since we’re blatant yanquis and might as well have targets on our backs? We called her up to clarify and ask for a restaurant recommendation, and determined that we could go out after dark but shouldn’t stay out past midnight, and that there is a good place to eat called “El Mason” about a block from our apartment. Ok, easy enough, we can handle this, we thought.

45 minutes later, after wandering in all directions on the street sign-less blocks surrounding our apartment, we finally found the restaurant she was talking about- which was, as she had said, less than 100 meters from our house. ‘Doh!

El Mason is probably the nicest restaurant in “downtown” Lujan, with surprisingly trendy décor and a nice outdoor patio. I was not exactly expecting the quantity of bugs everywhere, though, buzzing around the streetlights in giant swarms and crickets hopping around everywhere, even inside such a nice restaurant. I guess that’s what rain + weeks of intense heat + river + farmland creates, though. Oh, and there were stray dogs wandering in between the white, candlelit tablecloths. I was comforted by the delicious homemade pasta with Bolognese sauce washed down with the first of many bottles of vino tinto that Amanda and I would split, mixed with good conversation. We arrived home safely, but were unpleasantly surprised to find the apartment buzzing with swarms of gnats, mosquitos and crickets, though, after we made the mistake of leaving the windows open all afternoon. Lesson learned! That night was my first of many tossing and turning with the sheet pulled all the way over my head.

I know, I know, I’m a total wimp. But hey, at least I admit it.

The next day, we ventured out to a grocery store we found just down the street from us, although we would eventually find a much better alternative. This one was really small and pretty dirty, with a sad collection of produce. We stocked up on the bare essentials, and mostly canned and dried foods.

The owners of the store were a Chinese family, and we were pleasantly surprised to see some fellow foreigners, although the cashier didn’t understand me when I repeated about five times “Somos de Estado Unidos” after he asked where we were from. I guess English to Spanish to Chinese doesn’t translate that well.

After our first successful but odd home-cooked meal of soup from a packet and rice, eaten out of Tupperware (its like camping, yay!), we spent the rest of the day people watching in the park in the sweltering heat. After three hours of this, we wandered down to the riverside, where all of the people were! That explained the somewhat strange lack of people in the rest of town. They were all by the river for this international food festival thingy, which, like the basilica, seemed to come out of nowhere! It was packed with people, stray dogs, and food stands from a surprisingly diverse number of different foreign countries and regions of Argentina. We were tempted by the frozen tropical drinks from Haiti and the Dominican Republic, but ultimately settled on some German beers due to the long line and lots of flies buzzing around the sweet fruit overflowing on the counters.

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The riverside is…strange. It looks like it probably was really nice about 30 years ago, but since has been tainted by pollution, littering and a lack of updates, which collectively makes the surrounding attractions (especially the old amusement park) look kind of creepy. We noticed some strange white lines on all the trees, about three feet up, which we assumed had been painted, only to find out later that…those are the results of the intense flooding, which happens several times a year! Woohoo!! After taking a look around, the intense asado smoke and swarming flies and mosquitoes made us head back to the apartment.

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Lujan is definitely a lot to take in, and the level of difference from Buenos Aires (especially coming from the US) is a bit overwhelming. We still are fresh off the boat, however, so I am trying to keep an open mind and remember that I signed myself up for this and living abroad to teach English is something I’ve wanted to do as long as I can remember. I’m sure Lujan has its charms.

I guess we’ll just have to see what we’ve gotten ourselves into here…stay tuned.