Wishing the bro' a happy 39th... hee hee...
  ¶ 1:05 AM 2 comments

  John,
Okay, so BA is pretty cool, but like all big cities there are a huge amount of poor people here too.

This lady spends her days as we see in this photo, and there are thousands like her. Outside the Teatro Cervantes there's an indian looking woman who gives herself the vaguest hint of privacy with an umbrella... she lives on the steps of the theatre. There is a family of a mother and four children who live outside the supermarket. There's another old lady who sits all day, next to a telephone junction box, her hand permanetly outstretched and her voice croaky from asking for help.

You get it all over, but it's hard to walk past. If I have change I'll stop sometimes and hand over a peso. It's 20p for goodness' sake. But for every person you give a peso to there are a thousand, ten thousand living in the most awful poverty.

One step up from the people begging on the streets are the cartoneros. These are the people (some look ten years old) who come out at night and sort the rubbish left on the side of the street (there's a lot of that). It's the sort of job you would give... no I wouldn't give it to anyone... Imagine if instead of the dustmen collecting, they had to sort through your bins and they were paid according to how much recyclable material they could collect... I can hardly imagine it and I've seen it.

I'll return to frivolous posts another time (in the meantime, think on this: April 2 is Malvinas (Falklands) day... where do you think we'll be? The main square?)
  ¶ 12:55 AM 0 comments

  The hairstyles here are one thing, but the tango shoes (and outfits) are quite another.  Apparently, your average pair of Tango heels costs around 250 pesos here (more than we will be earning a week when we qualify)...but by all accounts what you wear on your feet speaks volumes about you, your dancing calibre and can seriously influence the number of guys who ask you to dance in an evening.  We've been informed that the Argentine men check out your feet first before anything else... I could almost sense them shuddering when they looked over.  I was quite happy not to be called upon though. Before I can hope to display any Strictly Come Dancing moves we're going to need a good deal of lessons- fortunately they are free in the parks here at the weekend.  Not to mention a pair of shoes to die for...there seems to be a vogue for metallic green and scarlet this autumn.
 We arrived at 1 a.m. to see the band who were scheduled to start at 12.30...they eventually began playing at 2.00 a.m., and by the time we left at 3.45 a.m. the place was jumping, with the hundreds of couples on the dancefloor just warming up.
  ¶ 2:12 AM 1 comments

  The photograph has nothing to do with the post... I was a little unprepared when we went to the milonga on Friday, it was a snap decision, Heather and Dan, two other students on our course, had met up with us for a coffee at our local cafe (bear in mind this was 11pm, Liz and me had just finished eating and the cafe was still full, people of all ages out for dinner, a drink) and we found that Heather was planning to head to a milonga (a dancehall) later. We tagged along and an hour and a half later we rolled out of the taxi into the Armenian Cultural Centre and into La Viruta milonga. It was the basement... about the size of a couple of tennis courts, with tables all around the edge in two concentric rings (space to move between them without going on the dancefloor) and about 300 Porteños dancing samba.

Later on the tango got started and I'll be posting a lot more about tango later... basically though we could figure out that tango was invented something like this...

1870: Buenos Aires, a seedy warterfront dive. Juan and Marco, two older men, are chatting over a cafe solo.

Marco: It was a flash of inspiration. The whole dance came to me.
Juan: I've seen dances before... what makes this one so special?
Marco: Young pretty girls will line up to dance with older men.
Juan: I like it already. But my friend Carlos can't dance...
Marco: That's okay. The man leads and the standard thing to do is to lead a pretty chica on the dancefloor and get her to stop and (makes jiggling motion)...
Juan: Shake her thing?
Marco: That's what they'll call it in 100 years.
Juan: Nice.
Marco: Oh, and the men ask the ladies to dance by raising their eyebrows so...
Juan: So no-one can see us being rejected. Do you think the women will be pretty.
Marco: Stunners... and we can make like kung fu masters and have them fall over themselves to dance with us even when we get really old... wait... we can get them to wear really high heels so that their bums stick out... oh yeah, and we can make sure only certain types of clothing are de rigeur... oh yeah
Juan: What about the embrace? Can we get to touch some...
Marco: What are you? Some sort of pervert?

FADE  ¶ 9:38 PM 0 comments

  John:
I was going to write a witty little entry about our first trip to a Milonga (it was in the Armenian Cultural centre) that we had last night, doing the Porteño thing and coming home at 4 this morning but...it'll have to wait.

We went for a stroll this afternoon, it was a glorious day, blue sky, but not too hot. We ended up at the Recoleta cemetery where on sundays there is a big open air craft market. The usual suspects seem to be sold, leather goods, mate paraphenalia (that's mah-tay), sculptures made of wire. There were plenty of people around. We went to the Recoleta cultural centre to see the exhibition marking 30 years since the coup that put the military junta in place. The exhibition was packed, at 8pm, with a fantastic mix of young and old. The photograph is of a sculpture which deconstructs a Ford Falcon, the car that is most associated with the midnight abductions of the disappeared. Almost everything in the media this week has been about the 30 years anniversary, there were 100000 people in the Plaza de Mayo yesterday (we were in school, no holiday for us) but I was struck by the depth of feeling, the utter conviction with which the Argentines are saying Nunca mas (never again).

The exhibition included work by 30 artists, most of it was pretty strong, and it was quite tiring to look at, because there was so much emotion there. I was particularly struck by some photographs of survivors (of 'the process') that were processed using old methods so the images came out ghostly, as though the people in the photos were unreal, and it was pretty jarring. The main corridor in the cultural centre was lined with blowups of 300 articles from the newspapers of the time, each instance of words like murder, abduction, killing and torture was underlined in shaky pencil... a graphic demonstration that stops anyone saying 'but we didn't know what was going on.'

I am impressed at the way that Argentines are so committed to finding the truth about what happened between 1976 and 1983, about the disappeared and the children who were taken from their parents and given to new (and approved) families. Every day, it seems that a new set of records is unearthed. The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo still hold a vigil each Thursday and the government is committed to overturning the pardons handed out to the members of the Junta. There have been art events all over the city, we stumbled across the end of a dance troupe performing this afternoon. You can read all the history books you want but it doesn't have one tenth of the impact of a well realised piece of art.
  ¶ 1:27 AM 1 comments

  Liz:
My lesson was with an Intermediate Group this evening and the topic was the big rise in UK tourists to Argentina (as reported this week in the Buenos Aires Herald).  I only had a small group, all semi-retired people as it turned out (who each gave me a kiss at the end of the lesson...not sure how 'professional' that looks, but eh well). My lesson was at 5 p.m. and that's a bit early for the stockbrokers and doctors (yes, we'll have a real mixed bag).
Our trainers are sitting in on all our Teaching Practices and making notes throughout, which is a little unnerving.  Tomorrow we get our feedback and the chance to do it all over again (this time with an Advanced Class at 7) but on a completely different theme...mine is Optimism and Pessimism...so with my glass half-full I'll sign off here.
    ¶ 1:32 AM 0 comments

  John:
English is hard. Just think for a second.... It's a carrot, I like carrots, Elba likes carrots, Richard doesn't like carrots... if you're a native speaker you probably wouldn't give that a second thought but consider what changes between these...

The Porteños get that it's a carrot. They think I like a carrot, until we have the discussion that that means all carrots. Then Elba (a nice lady of around 50) like a carrot, and we have the discussion about I like and she likes, which is, you know, not easy to explain when you consider you're teaching people whose vocab is being stretched by the addition of a carrot (and they're clever people, English is, as is becoming apparent, hard). Then we add that Richard doesn't likes a carrot and you get the whole "why the hell is there two more words in there now just to say Richard no like carrot" which is interesting.

Anyway, the upshot is, I enjoyed it and the class were all great, and that's pretty good because I feel I can do this now... only another 7 teaching lessons to go... tomorrow's is on Ireland, you think anyone in BA needs to know what a Leprechaun is?  ¶ 12:52 AM 1 comments

  So here I am, waiting to do my first observed teaching. And I have to say: I'm pretty nervous. It's a beginners class and it's a vocab lesson, so I have a bag of fruit and veg (ones where the names are a bit different to the Spanish) and I'm now worrying about plurals and how to explain to the class when they use like and don't like (which may be hard enough) they have to use plurals. Well at least the poor souls aren't paying for these lessons. I guess the nerves are more to do with never having done exactly this kind of thing. I've done training sessions by the bucketload but somehow this is different, you have to think about every word you use, and pitch your use of language at the right level... and the difficulty is that we have no real idea of who will turn up. It might be a class of utter beginners or a class that will get it all very quickly and be bored stupid.  ¶ 8:40 PM 0 comments

  It's 11pm and we've just put down our homework. Okay so we had a bowl of pasta on the balcony at 10, but we've both been working hard on our lesson plans for the next two days. First time is hard...

The course is living up to the 'it's pretty intense' billing it got from the few people we know who've done it. By the time we finish for the day at the school it's 5:30 and we grab a quick coffee on the way home, then Liz will head out for a walk and I'll read a book for an hour or so before hitting the books. It'll only get harder.

Still, at least we're not just swanning around any more...

And, we've found a good place for lunch, a big vegetarian cafe called lotus. It's run by a bunch of Vietnamese and they're really cheerful, even in the midst of a manic lunch service. We're practicing our Spanish vegetables because we're having huge plates of fresh crispy greens, about eight-a-day rather than five. That lets me consider eating the thick juicy bife de chorizo at nights...
  ¶ 2:13 AM 0 comments

  Well, we've had the first day and if one nagging question was 'how do you teach English to people, who don't speak English, in English?' it's not any more.

This was demonstrated as our first lesson was a tutor demonstration lesson conducted entirely in Shona (a Zimbabwean language). The expressions on all our faces was priceless as the tutor said 'Mangwanani' and repeated it until we figured out we were meant to repeat it back. Then we went into a hello how are you (at least I think it was) and counting. The tutor was excellent and it was a real eye-opener. We wandered out to el Cuatrino for lunch: a real Porteño hangout, fast pizzas, we ended up saying 'want that one' when the next table over had their pizza delivered: it was half neapolitan (ham) and half Calabrese (spicy sausage)... very nice.

Apparently we're a very English intake. There are only six of us, one American, one Australian and the remaining four brits (okay I'm Irish, I know, I have the piece of paper).  ¶ 10:55 PM 2 comments

  Well, we must have walked at least 30 miles during the past six days...but we used the Subte (Tube) this morning, as we needed to save a bit of energy for more chewing on steaks. And to think I was a vegetarian for most of my twenties. The Argentine ladies invented the Atkins Diet..no carbs, just tons of protein. I'm worrying about halitosis.
Now I have to go and complete my homework for the TEFL course beginning tomorrow. John finished his 10 days ago.
  ¶ 8:56 PM 0 comments

  So this is the greeting I get from young Joshua (the nephew). I think he was put up to it by his dad. Can't think why, I mean today for instance, we wandered out, had coffee at 9:30 took a train up to San Telmo and watched the tourists watching the tango (and looked at the antique market: they have junk here too you know). Then we had a little lunch (the BEST beef I have ever tasted, seriously, it was vuelta y vuelta (rare, very rare, raw in fact, in the middle) but it was like eating beef mousse, so tender).

The waiter was from South Africa and he was chatty & friendly: apparently the Porteño thing is a kiss on the cheek, even for guys... erm... beards are weird aren't they). I blame Liz for being friendly, time was I would have slouched out without a word... not any more). But the beef was divine.
  ¶ 8:22 PM 0 comments

  Well after six days we are obviously experts on BA so we feel that we can reveal the top three smells... You can blame the Leeds Writers' Circle for this one, once, in the travel writing competition the judge told everyone off for not mentioning smells.

Number 3 is the smell of dog faeces. Not nice but there you go. Expecially walking on the paths next to the jardin botanico (dogs aren't allowed in there, there are hundreds of feral cats and I guess the city fathers thought that a thousand body tom and jerry scene wouldn't go down too well. The dog owners seem to have taken revenge by encouraging their dogs to hold it in until they are walking them on the path on the edge, there are hundreds of the little 'packages' and many, what can only be termed skid marks on the path).

Number 2 is the smell of diesel soot. Everywhere...

Number 1 is the smell you get in the UK on a sunny August weekend. That's right, barbeques, only no one here is barbequeing, the smell is thanks to the Parrillas carbones. Almost every block has one of these and they produce the best beef you could wish for. More on the beef later... for now let's say: I have had beef here so far that is at least as good as anything I've had in Europe, and so far we haven't been trying.
  ¶ 7:23 PM 1 comments

  So we walked down to Retiro, the part of downtown BA that has the Irish pubs and the place where they celebrate la noche verda (the green night) for St Patrick. To be honest the thought of 50000 porteños, who normally only drink the odd glass of wine or a beer or two, and the litre plastic cups of beer (un litro vaso a measly AR$10) was less than appealing. When we got there we found that the police had closed the streets to vehicles (as we expected) and the closed off streets were full of people milling about, punctuated with the odd TV camera waiting for something to kick off. At the same time we saw that the pubs had put a AR$25 cover charge just to get in. I thought about proclaiming my Irishness (I can prove it you know) to get in but just thought 'why bother' so we wandered off and found a sushi bar with happy hour (what a great concept) and had their 8 pieces and a chopp (a beer) or a champagne for a very reasonable AR$15 a piece.

So if anyone reading this is disappointed with our lack of party skills, feel free to come on over and show us how it's done, we'll be cheering you on while working our way through the unknown ice cream flavours at the local heladeria...
  ¶ 7:09 PM 1 comments

  John:
This morning we woke to the forecast of more rain. Yesterday 37mm fell in an hour or so (Gatos y perros). We took a stroll down to the Retiro bus station to check out the prices of the coaches to Chile and to Cordoba but when we got back Liz insisted I photograph the hair so that she can get some commiserations from the mates (hint hint to the mates there...). Oh and the forecast was spot on, it's just stopped raining in time for us to head to the St Patrick's day shenanegans... apparently last year there were 50,000 people and, according to the paper things got "erm, a little out of hand" so we will be careful. Slainte
  ¶ 9:12 PM 4 comments

  Liz:
Bad Hair Day number 3...I'm resigned to eternal curliness. 96% humidity is not a girl's best friend. The Argentine ladies seem to thwart this descent into frizzy dishevellment effortlessly. There are DAILY visits to the hairdressers, I've noticed. Just 50 metres from the door to our apartment block there is a salon with (I'm guessing) 40 places..and it's very busy in the mornings between 8 and 9. A wash and set costs only 9 pesos..that's less than two pounds sterling. I may become a convert soon...if I can master a few set phrases. I'm helplessly babbling in Italian at the moment, but it's being very graciously received.
  ¶ 7:33 PM 2 comments

  John:
We took a trip up to the Recoleta cemetery this morning. Through the rain, though we stopped in Cafe 1234 for a cafe cortado (a little coffe with a bit of steamed milk) for Liz and a cafe chiquito for me... I've got to stop asking for cafe solo here, they call a little coffee a cafe chico, or chiquito (it's the same as a Spanish cafe solo which is a bit bigger than an espresso). Liz also took the opportunity to try dulce de leche with her pan negro (wholemeal toast) which is like having toffee fudge spread, nice but a bit sweet for me to have every day. I stuck to my medialunas.

Recoleta is huge. It is also one of the least democratic places there is. To get in permanently there are two requirements: you have to be dead and you have to have lots of money. The necropolis is filled with ornate monuments, and there seem to be two ways of going about things. The first is that you might have filled up your vault so you keep your coffins at ground level, maybe with a little kneeling place and a bit of stained glass. The second is to have the same pew but instead of keeping the coffins above ground, you have a nice little set of steps down to them.

Eva Peron's grave is there but it seems very ordinary compared to some of the excesses of the BA elite and the pirate heroes like William Brown (Pirate and saviour of the Argentine navy when they went up against Uraguay in 18 something.... what is this a guidebook?... wikipedia is your friend if you want more information. I'm writing this sans internet access, saving it to a USB stick and taking it over the road to the nearest locutorio that has a USB capable 'puter). It rained, which is good for a cemetery visit, but as we were walking back it started bucketing down (and we're talking big buckets, not your yellow beach bucket 'n' spade buckets no, these are your black builders buckets that hold gallons and always have grit in the bottom). It hasn't stopped yet, just keeps easing off enough so that the Porteños come back out before hammering at them again. It doesn't help when the pavements and streets are so pot-holed that there are deep lakes here and there which will swallow the unwary, another thing to watch for when walking (the other, if I haven't mentioned it yet is thanks to the city's canine population).
  ¶ 7:33 PM 1 comments

  John:
I had read in the guidebooks that BA is a pretty noisy city, you know, bustling... well it is, to be honest, deafening. At least it was, but I think the tinnitus is kicking in now. They have special buses here, the loudest of which is comparable to standing next to a jet engine while it runs up to takeoff speed, accompanied by gouts of sooty smoke. If the window to the balcony is open you can't hear anything else.  ¶ 7:23 PM 0 comments

  John:
The apartment is small but we're beginning to get used to it. There's plenty of room to read, write, lounge about watching TV. And on the subject, if you thought NTL channel surfing was fun, try the cable we get. There's no radio stations on the telly but you get channel 2 (Arte) which seems to consist of a woman on a leather sofa in a white studio who drinks red wine and gets her chums in to talk books or play the odd tune on the guitar. Channel 7 is the tango channel, with, erm... tango. Last night there was a tango group on made up entirely of under tens. The intervening channels are news channels. Now it may be the language but the news seems a little... Americanised, the top story this morning is the ongoing heart operation on a little boy called Roderiguo. The next story is the football and only then do we get to the politics (which at the moment swings from the president telling people not to buy meat so that they can force the price down to the vote to have a public holiday to celebrate the coup in 1976 (that one went through this morning)). A quick flick down gives you about 15 channels that show nothing but films, the majority are subtitled, and it is quite weird to watch a Russian film with Spanish subtitles.  ¶ 7:21 PM 0 comments

  John:
Yesterday was very sunny, 28 degrees and a bit of a shock coming from snowbound Yorkshire.
We got to the apartment late, after messing about at the airport for an hour or so while we tried to find our luggage. Yes we were struck by the missing luggage thing... Liz had said when we booked the tickets that this might happen because the transfer in Frankfurt was only 40 minutes, and we landed 10 minutes late. So yesterday part of the shopping experience was the buying of emergency clothes.

We also met Florentina, the owner of the apartment. She was exceptionally friendly, or maybe not so exceptional but certainly friendly. As soon as she found out our luggage was missing she instructed me to take Liz shopping and told me where the best 'sheep' shops were. As with the other porteños (denizens of BA) we've met so far she apologised to us for her English... I can apologise for my Spanish, but not much more yet. The apartment is on a street that is as busy as the main loop in Leeds, and the buses have a bass rumble that you can feel through your feet. Noisy? not really, once Liz had unplugged the fridge, I'd turned off the aircon and the Porteños had gone to the milongas for their tangos.

Then we woke to grey skies and heavy rain this morning and we have spent the day so far walking, developing my umbrella skills (the pavements get narrow and the kiosks and building work mean that one umbrella is sometimes too wide and two is a real struggle. We tried out one of (the hundreds of) local cafes, Cafe 1234 is at number 1234 on Avenida Santa Fe. It's one of those dark wood cafes, there are a lot of them here, and it's open 24hours a day, it'll deliver a cup of coffee and pastries to your door... the staff all wear starched white aprons and are impeccably groomed. A cafe con leche and 3 medialunas (Sweet miniature croissants) comes to $5.80 (that's pesos not dollars, they use the same sign and sometimes don't say which they mean, sometimes it's U$S or AR$... I know this was pesos because that's what I paid with and I wasn't chased into the street with a stick). The peso currently goes for 20p and our walk led us past places that suggest we were eating in a posh cafe... I suspect our wages will be correspondingly meagre.

Photos will follow soon, check http://www.flickr.com/photos/itsjustanalias/ if you want....

Liz: Our luggage is on the way from the airport. It's always a relief to hear that it's arrived...even though it has happened to me (and various members of my tour groups) several times during the last few years. The apartment has a little balcony overlooking the street which last night saw its two little chairs strewn with our handwashed underwear and socks. We slept for 12 hours before being roused by the morning rush hour and the sound of rain, something that we were fully expecting, having chatted to some of my colleagues at Travelsphere who had warned me about sudden torrential downpours. It feels very tropical here to me (I don't think that was something I imagined Argentina to be) probably due to the enormous delta on our doorstep. There are huge flowering jacaranda trees and palms along the avenues. Today there were lots of big drops falling from them. I think I'm going to be having a few Bad Hair Days...it is so humid here my hair has gone very curly.  ¶ 8:08 PM 3 comments

  John: So, here we are, waiting at gate 28 for the 1810 to Frankfurt. Goodbyes have been said, but then it seems sometimes that we've been saying goodbye to various people for the last month or more. Yorkshire said it's goodbyes to us today too with a dump of snow that seemed to come from nowhere and gave me a moment's pause (just how early should you set off to the airport if you think that you may get stranded on the Saddleworth section of the M62). At the same time it was a great incentive to head to BA (no, I'm not being precious: lots of people call it that) where the temperature today was a sunny 26C.
Have to admit to some butterflies now, a little late to get all excited but there you go. I am actually quite (very) excited now.

Liz:It feels very odd to be here at Manchester Airport and not worrying about my tour group. I keep thinking I should be doing paperwork or checking my tour details...'phoning a local guide in Kathmandu or a coach company in Las Vegas!Yet, it doesn't really feel as though we're going on holiday either...flying to Frankfurt on a Sunday evening...mmm.. It's get in the queue time...yikes. Very excited.  ¶ 8:07 PM 0 comments

  Well, we arrived. Then I tried to use a USB key having created a couple of incisive posts earlier on t´laptop. We´re in a Locutorio at the moment, a concentration of telephone kiosks, all with air conditioning. They won´t let me use the USB key. Early days... they pointed me in the direction of a place that will so no one gets away from my ramblings.... for now though it´s time to pound the pavements and play dodge the porteño, a game I shall elaborate on later  ¶ 7:51 PM 0 comments

  Just making sure I can blog from flickr as well as other ways...

It seems that I can...

This is nothing to do with the trip, just a messed around photo from when we were in Barcelona last year.  ¶ 5:50 PM 0 comments