John:
Today we wandered out to the nature reserve. It's between the city and the river, on the other side of the new barrio called Puerto Madero (sort of a souped up Albert dock or Butler's Wharf in London).

The nature reserve is the porteños back garden and there were a few there today out for a stroll or a bike ride. I was just glad to be away from traffic and sucking in some fresh air. It was also nice to see the rio plata... which is brown, browner than the mersey used to be on a bad day... and there are big signs saying you shouldn't go in it...

By the entrance to the nature reserve there are loads of little parillas, imagine... barbeques... nothing in our last seven weeks could have prepared us for that now could it? (erm... well... okay...).

So liz had a Bondiola and I stuck with my choripan... and for the purposes of this trip (the little smoky 24hr grill woman needed a name) I was Juan. It seems that the BA back garden was also useful for a government sponsored keep fit campaign so we saw a few people doing boxercise, we, on the other hand were eating apple pie and drinking coffee...

On the walk home we went past a lot of cows... an art project, cow parade 2006. Have a look at the flickr piccies and then follow the cow parade group to see some more. The climbing cow was Liz's fave though, in part because of the sign on the other side that said DANGER: no climbing...
  ¶ 9:56 PM 0 comments

  A brief post because the free/filched wifi is patchy at the moment.

This is Bar El Federal in San Telmo, the old touristy tango and antiques barrio in BA. We wandered along here after yesterday's Spanish lesson. You can see that the bar is low, about thigh high, and the bar staff have to step down to work behind the bar. It does have a lot of character, and a lot of bottles from the past on the shelves, one of the bottles of cinzano looked like it was last opened before the second world war.

Oh and the coffee machine was an ancient italian job, dark copper and huge. The till had two sets of buttons and looked to be an original feature (from 1867). The bar has been designated a bar notable by the city so it should stay that way for ages (that or someone bribed the city so they didn't have to refurbish...).

We only had a coffee and a medialuna (the verb for taking afternoon tea is merendar, afternoon tea is called la merienda) so we can't comment too much on the food but it's an atmospheric place. Liz pointed out the cheese behind the bar, and the stuffed artichokes. I noticed the twenty tins of peaches just behind them (meh!). I couldn't see any pickled eggs though... shocking oversight.  ¶ 8:01 PM 1 comments

  John:
Well, now we're both taking the mate, and it's pretty good. We'll be bringing some back to the UK so lookout.
  ¶ 10:56 PM 1 comments

  John:
It was pretty warm today, around 26C, and I had a couple of hours on the bus: a different one to the picture, I catch the Linea 17 to my lunchtime lesson. Each bus line has a different colour scheme, and they all seem to have some frills around the mirrors or the sun visor. The 17 is dull though, green and usually old, and usually responsible for significant particulate pollution in the city.

I just want to get a seat.

When you get on you just say to the driver 'Ochenta' (80) and put your coins in the machine just behind him. As soon as people are on the step he sets off, no waiting for people to pay, he's gone, I think they get extra points when they hit 60mph in the narrow downtown city streets. And they seem to do that with astonishing regularity.

Oh and they run every 10 minutes or so (except Sundays, when they run half as often) through the day, and they carry on through the night, as we can testify... noisy buses...  ¶ 2:15 AM 0 comments

  John:
So in the morning in the police station, I guess the last guy in has to take whatever vehicle is left....

I like the picture of Jesus in the back window, and I wonder how it would handle a high speed chase, or a corner.
  ¶ 2:09 AM 1 comments

  That's rolling on the floor, laughing.... because we've been looking at Pimp my snack you all should too.... honest....  ¶ 1:36 AM 0 comments

  John:
We spent today at the Feria de Mataderos. Mataderos is one of the most south westerly barrios in BA city proper (which is the limit of travel on the colectivos (buses) for 80 centavos: if you want to go further you may have to pay up to AR$1.30).

The feria (fair, festival,) is a weekly event where 'the country meets the city' and we sat at a table next to three very friendly local ladies who said they came every week because the food was 'economical.' It is also fantastic, follow the photo to flickr to see. There were ten or more asados and parillas, the asados are the barbeques and the parillas are the barbeques inside.

There are a load of nice craft stalls, specialising in silver, leather and wood. We bought a mate and a bombilla so we can start drinking another drink no one else will like. We got there at 1:30 or so, after almost an hour on the number 92, so we were ready for our lunch. The asado was going strong, I had a vaciopan, which turned out to be bread with two slices of beef cut from a grilled hunk, rare and delicious. Liz went off to queue for some Locra (spicy stew) but the guy next to her in the queue convinced her to try the tamales. In the meantime I found a spare bit of seating next to three old ladies (mentioned above) so we got to practice our Spanish, and I had a little shiver of pride when they said to one another 'los ingleses son lindos' the English are lovely.

Then we saw the gauchos playing darts... or not. What happens is this, hanging from a stand is a ring, the size of a key ring. The rider comes to it at a full gallop and tries to spear the ring with a biro.

They go really fast, look at the photo, it's just on the road... the sand runs out just after the picture and the horses make a great noise and take ages to stop...

Oh, and it's getting a bit Autumnal here, Liz bought a scarf but the 24C temperature meant it was a little redundant.
  ¶ 1:15 AM 0 comments

  (A little mate at 8am)
Liz:
Mate is the national drink here but it's going to take a bit of getting used to. My Tuesday and Thursday morning lessons, 8 until 9:30 at an insurance company, begin with mate (mah-tay). There are 3 students: Jose, Ruben and Sergio who are very friendly and chirpy even though they have to come in to work early for extra English! You may have heard about the hours people keep here, well the mate is the way they stay up at night and wake up again in the mornings. It's a little ceremony with the mate pot, a kind of gourd, and the bombilla (the silver straw which is shaped like the stem of a pipe). The pot is filled almost to the brim with the dark leaves (mate is a member of the holly family apparently) and someone has a thermos with hot water to keep the pot nicely topped up. Everyone shares the same cup and bombilla, passing it around the table. If you drain the pot you are responsible for topping up. Fortunately I have a strong stomach. I gamely took a large gulp and I think my reaction said it all. It's like the strongest, bitterest green tea you have ever tasted, with an aftertaste of tree bark...no delicate jasmine notes here! And with all that foliage in there I daren't smile for the rest of the lesson. I obviously need more practise...that'll be on Tuesday then.
  ¶ 2:29 PM 0 comments

  John:
Well thanks for comments everyone, it's really good to hear from you. And thanks for the congratulations... we are now professional teachers (yikes).

It's Saturday morning and we are in a modern (almost Starbucksian) coffee place with wifi. We have taken a concious decision to not accept any work of Fridays for the moment, not until we're more au fait with the whole lesson planning and preparation thing. So yesterday we went up to see an apartment in a barrio called Villa Crespo, which is really quiet but close to the incredibly hip barrio called Palermo Viejo. I had a call last night and got some work teaching a group of TV production assistants just around the corner so I'm hoping to get the skinny on the places to go.

Then last night we wandered out to go the the theatre and see a Jazz thing called BA Blues. The start time in the paper said 2400, so we wandered to Avenida Corrientes which was like Shaftesbury Avenuue crossed with Oxford Street. At 11:30pm most of the bars, cafes and bookshops (of which there were many) were all open. Mind you, we left the name of the theatre in the apartment and when we got to the right block there was no indication of which theatre had the gig so we just had a beer (Liz had wine) and strolled back. By that time the Cartoneros (who go through the rubbish and pull out anything they can get money for, for recycling) had been around and the pavements were strewn with what they didn't take.
  ¶ 1:48 PM 0 comments

  Just a quick note for Clare (the Chiblin). you know how you like stuffed crust pizza? Well this beastie is the cheesiest pizza in the world (to my knowledge, so far). This is a stffed pizza pizza. The entire base is stuffed with mozarella. It oozes when you remove a slice, as though you had just poured out a raclette... I'm so full... so much cheese... the nightmares... oh no...

Good job it's the weekend, no lessons tomorrow, other than our first Spanish one.
  ¶ 2:13 AM 1 comments

  John:
One of our students Jose (who looks like Pablo Picasso), last week, told us to head off to the Teatro Empire on Avenida Hipólito Irigoyen (that is the name of a road btw) for a free tango show.

What he didn't tell us is that 400 pensioners would be doing the same thing.

We arrived and there was a queue along the block, we were the youngest by far. But the way I figured: imagine going to New Orleans (before Katrina) and you see a queue for a show that is full of old New Orleoneans, who have been listening to the music all their lives...

The theatre was a deco dream, big eagles on pillars outside and faded inside. The seats were the original 1920s wood and leather and the theatre itself was oval, with a ceiling made of concentric circles, like a jelly mould based on the Hollywood bowl.

The show was fantastic. The sort of thing that tourists pay US$60 for... for free. I think it was sponsored by one of the unions and the early evening show is the pensioner special. The dancers were amazing. One guy (in his 60s at least) looked just like Donald Sutherland at his bearded best and he danced with a girl 30 years his junior. The old guys are amazing, they seem to hardly move but they're like kung fu masters, the girls move around them like they're the centre of a storm- very good to watch. The highlight for the crowd was the appearance of Juan Carlos Godoy, a singer who was famous in the 50s. He had an amazing voice and the crowd really did go wild (400 pensioners and me and Liz were on our feet, and for some of them that was a tall order).
  ¶ 1:56 AM 2 comments

  Well, we've had two days of teaching now. And it's 10 past 11, we got home at around 10:30 after finishing teaching at 9 and catching the Subte back and troughing on a sandwich de lomito (steak) and a chopp (draught beer).

The subte often looks like this, and is also often more crowded. You tend to re-evaluate your concepts of personal space. Tonight, however, we were lucky to have a nearly empty train. The downside of that is that the train beggars can move more easily. These range from young kids who go through the carriage and place a pen or a packet of stickers or a pack of plasters on your lap and then go back through the train a minute or two later and pick them up, or pick up the peso or 50 centavos that some kind soul may have paid for them.

Tonight we had two different ones (and thankfully we didn't have the woman who just carries her baby through the train with her arm out). A pen seller and then a ten year old juggler. This boy was very brown and very thin, he got on the train and did his little spiel, then started juggling. On a moving train. I'll repeat... ON A MOVING TRAIN. Try it some time. And this wasn't just three ball stuff. This was five ball cascades and bouncing off his knees, elbows and head. He was pretty good. Ask Martin how hard this is, especially when the train goes round the sharper bends.

So he earned his 50 centavos, a smattering of applause and got off the train to try another carriage.
  ¶ 2:21 AM 1 comments

  So now we have to get ready for work. Liz is doing a lesson tomorrow morning at 8am. We took a stroll through the streets today to make sure we knew where we were going for our lessons.

Before that though was our Sunday breakfast, click on the picture to go to flickr and see what's what.

It's going to be weird tomorrow, I'm going to go to our normal breakfast place and they're going to be asking after Liz. I, I like to think, cleverly, haven't got anything on Monday morning yet.
  ¶ 9:32 PM 4 comments

  So this is the class of April 2006.

Left to right,
Sarah, from Santa Barbara, California
Fotini, from Sydney (a Greek Aussie!)
Dan, from London
Heather from London
Me
Paola, our trainer
Liz

After this we all went out for an 'all you can eat 'buffet. But, before you scoff (which, to be truthful, is what we did), wait until you hear about the General Grant restaurant (or Resto as they're called here).

By the door is the parilla (the grill) where a sweaty man cooks really good meat over charcoal laid over a 6 foot by 2 foot barbie. Further in there are four big (really big, 30 items per counter) salad bar style counters where you can help yourself to anything from salad to tempura to sushi. I had been told to try their pancakes so I went over to the pancake cooking area and looked at the examples, which appeared a little anaemic. I asked the guy to make me an apple pancake (that's what had been recommended). He set to work with two pans, small, well used pans with strips of ragged cloth wrapped around the metal handles. He cooked a normal pancake then added sliced apple and added more pancake batter. Then while that was cooking he caramelized some sugar and syrup in another, bigger pan. Once the pancake with the apple was done he tossed it into the caramel and flambeed it in rum (BIG flames, nicely done) and served it. It was sweet and lovely, I had it with a little cream. It was like a toffee apple pancake.

And this was still part of the all you can eat (for AR$15... 1 hour's teaching)  ¶ 11:18 PM 1 comments

  So we won't be sitting in here tonight.

Shame.

We'll be at a bar instead, and we'll get a box at the Colon another day (Colon = Columbus.... not lower intestine)  ¶ 7:55 PM 1 comments

  This is El Cuartito (the little room) where we've eaten seven or eight times so far... really good pizza and beer in tumblers.
  ¶ 5:59 PM 0 comments

  John:
It seems that today there are only the odd cafe worker and the five EBC students who are working in BA. Everywhere is shut for Good Friday. We're still teaching tonight, if anyone shows up that is.

After that the class of April 2006 are going to head to the Teatro Colon to see The Battleship Potemkin, a silent movie, yes, but with a full orchestra. Look at the link though, really. Follow it, I'll wait......

Impressive isn't it.

I'm heading out soon to try and get the tickets. Wish me luck.

Then it's our last weekend before we become professional teachers... eep!  ¶ 5:54 PM 0 comments

  John:
Idle speculation number 46, do they have gaucho plumbers in Argentina?

Anywho... There are three days left until the end of the course and both Liz and I both have around 15 hours work each week (so far). The run down so far is:
Mondays, Liz teaches at an insurance firm at 8am. I teach at a petrolium company at 1pm. Liz teaches at a language school from 7-9pm.

Tuesdays, we both do an 8am at the same insurance company. I do another 1pm at the same petrolium co. We both do a 6:30 to 9pm at the same language school.

Wednesdays, repeat of Mondays without the evening work (at the moment).

Thursdays, repeat of Tuesdays.

Friday: we turn down work on Fridays. This is BA after all....

So that's a fair amount considering we haven't even finished the course yet. I think we'll leave it at that while we settle in to the routine and take more work later on.

At the current rates the following conversions apply:
-Breakfast = 20 minutes teaching
-Lunch = 25 minutes
-A coffee = 15 minutes
-Steak n Chips = 45 minutes
-A bottle of nice Malbec wine = 22 minutes
-1 pint of Guinness = 55 minutes!
  ¶ 2:18 AM 0 comments

  John:
We finished our weekend's homework this morning, and our plan was to head to the BA rural showground and take in some of the Nuestros Caballos show. It's a bit like the horse of the year show. Only, as you may be able to tell from the picture (more on flickr) there were no hunting pinks. We arrived just as the final of the first world Horseball (Pato) championship was getting started. We stood in the sun and watched Portugal take Argentina to a sudden death playoff which they won to the muted disappointment of the crowd. Then, after a choripan (chori=sausage pan=bread) and a beer we wandered round the BA equivalent of Olympia, it was full of stalls selling everything from, well the Pategonian equivalent of horsebrasses, to Polo equipment, to knives and workwear.

We noticed two main styles, but we don't know what they're called. One is like the picture, the hats, leather waistcoats, big leather belts and an air of working smartness. The other uses a beret and kneckerchief look that's pretty spanish. The berets are massive, they can be tugged in any direction to provide shade, some had them like flat caps (Andy Capp is a regular in the BA Herald) and some had them like... well like someone had draped a knitted merangue over their head.

After the Pato and the dressage (the key component of which seemed to be making the horse pelt along very fast and then get it to stop as quickly as possible) there was the bullock bullying. This was a contest where pairs of gauchos would have to use their horses to guide a bullock running at full tilt (or stopping dead if it was a cunning bullock) the length of the stadium. Some absolutely fantastic horsemanship on display.
  ¶ 12:26 AM 1 comments

  So this afternoon the phone went and it was the teaching institute where we had the interviews the other day. They want me to teach two courses starting after easter. Monday and Wednesday, and Tuesday and Thursday. It'll be on site at some companies, and all the lessons are at 1pm (imagine having to use your lunch hour to study another language.... I wonder if I'll have well motivated students).

We had another interview this afternoon too, out in the suburb called Belgrano which is a lot quieter than the centre of the city, almost cozy. I'm waiting for the phone to ring now, Liz is off teaching.

We're starting to think about not eating out every day, so there's a supermarket steak in the fridge and a bottle of $8 wine on the side... Steak and salad with wine for less than £4... mmmm steak....

Thanks for comments everyone who's done the commenting thing... I added an rss feed (if you don't know what that is you needn't worry [see that, needn't used as a modal auxilliary to advise that the action -worry- isn't neccessary]... that's the sort of thing I'll be doing for a while now... English is hard...  ¶ 9:57 PM 0 comments

  John:
We wandered out to Restaurante Norte this evening after a busy day's lesson planning. No joy on the job front but there's another interview somewhere else tomorrow. Norte is cheap, sirloin and chips for AR$9.50, wine for AR$6, mind you we will be earning AR$15 an hour so we're starting to think of food in terms of hours worked.

There was a steady stream of delivery guys out of the restaurant, everything here is available for delivery. Restaurant food, empanadas (like pasties, see the picture, usually with an egg and cheese or ham), the supermarkets all deliver, the laundrette delivers... If we feel really lazy we can phone down to the Bird Garden cafe (in the lobby of the building, along with 'closing down sale' clothes shops and mobile phone geezers) in the morning and they'll deliver a cafe con leche and medialunas for no extra charge. The only problem is, with our Spanish, we'd never know what we were getting... that'll change as soon as the course is out of the way.  ¶ 1:45 AM 1 comments

  John:
So, at about 11 today, Paola, our trainer, came into the room and asked if I wanted to go for an interview. The school had had a call from one of the local language schools who needed a teacher ASAP. Well, seeing as how that's the whole reason for being here I said yes.

So we've had our first interviews. And it all seems fairly positive. There's a round of courses starting after Easter weekend so I think it's likely that we'll both be working then.

Mind you, it could have been easier. The interview was at 5:30 some 15 blocks from our apartment. It's a humid 26 at that time in the afternoon and there was a bit of a strike cum demonstration that was bringing traffic to a standstill and, I think, having some sort of effect on the bus engines: they seemed to be belching more smoke than usual. We got to the institute and found that it was on the sixth floor. Waited for the lift for a few minutes, then decided to walk up. So in the manual on how to have a good interview I'm not sure it says 'arrive sweaty and out of breath' but the staff were all apologetic once we blamed them for the lift .

I was interviewed by the institute director, Liz by her assistant. I think I was interviewed about a different job, at least I had a different set of questions, but no problem: my Irishness helped, the director's daughter lives in Dublin so we had a little chat about that.

The phone has stubbornly refused to ring though (weird thing, my mobile is 64469244 but if you ring it from a land line you need to put 015 in front, from a mobile 011, goodness knows what you need to do from another country).

  ¶ 1:48 AM 3 comments

  John:
We've just come back from our Sunday desayuño (breakfast). The way they do things here in the cafes is really quite nice. We had the standard breakfast: coffee and toast, and a glass of orange juice. We were at Cafe Plaza de Libertad, where the waiters are all in waistcoats and white aprons (mind you, that's the same at so many cafes). Here they bring you the cafe con leche (or sin leche if, like me, you think that milk in coffee is an abomination) and everything else on big silver trays. As always, coffee is served with a little shot glass of agua con gas. The toast comes with a mound of cream cheese (which is more creamy than cheesy) and some strawberry jam. The thing to do is to spread the jam on the toast first and then slather on the cheese... it's really good. We spent an hour reading the paper (and doing lesson planning) without anyone rushing us or looking at us like we were taking up valuable real estate: and it seemed that everyone else was doing the same. Liz reckons that it's to do with living in small apartments, everyone needs to get out and spend a little time. Very different to the italian 'stand up for coffee' thing and a million miles away from Starbucks- the coffee is vastly better for one thing.

Oh and today is the commemoration of the invasion of the Malvinas. There are a number of events going on, most of them seem to be related to the whole coup thing. A couple of people I've spoken to have told me that most people are resentful of the junta that sent the troops there. 700 Argentines died in the war, many more have committed suicide in the last 24 years. They came home to a government that didn't want to know. The veterans are marching today for scholarships for their children and for pensions for ex servicemen, and for the revokation of the pension givent to the Malvinas military governor... There's still the whole sovereignty thing (and I have to say, HMG seems a long way away, 1833 was a long time ago, and the Brits who occupied the island then were pirates)... One thing I believe very strongly is that the islands are not worth the pain of even one of the limbless beggars I can see every day.
  ¶ 8:14 PM 1 comments