Explosions in the sky

Buenos Aires, I love you.

I love you, of course, for the previous reasons (the night life, the amazing restaurant scene, the constant buzz of the city), but this time, I fell even more in love with you because you were just as charming as ever, even though I did none of my typical city activities.  Essentially, I was retired for a week, and you continued to be just as graceful as ever in my temporary prematurely blue-haired state.

The past week was spent at the home of two dear friends of mine, Rosana and Enrique. They were my host parents when I spent the semester abroad in Buenos Aires back in 2005.  They accepted me with open arms and we spent the entire week together doing what they typically do as retired citizens: we took walks, we ate dinner together, we grumbled about how the modern world is going to hell, kids these days; we played with the grandchildren; we went to the country club; we went to bed at 10pm. I relished the routines of these days, especially since I had been spending the last month or so traveling around, bouncing from city to city. I got a solid nine to ten hours of sleep each night, I didn´t go out to any bars or clubs, not even once, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

At night, I read much more of my Gárcia Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera), especially with the help of the giant dusty English-Spanish dictionary from the 1950´s that Enrique still keeps around. It was the perfect tool, because the words I need to look up are often rarely-used and of the specific turn of the 20th century time period. Of course, this enormous brick of a dictionary had all of the words I needed, even if their English translation didn´t always help (okay, be honest: do you know what puerile means?). I loved having this book by my side while I read, because it had such detailed definitions as, for example, ´´zarpazo: the sound of a body falling to the ground.´´ Or, ´´bochorno: the color of cheeks aroused by intense passion. Or, scorching heat of midday.´´ Amazing. I would sit hunched over this giant bible-sized dictionary on the edge of my bed, flipping through it for definitions and writing them in the margins of my book. I live for this stuff. Nerd city.

Buenos Aires is as glitzy and glammy as ever. The women are still impeccable, from toenail to eyelash, and I was a sorry state in my dingey farmer tanktops and saggy jeans. Maybe that´s why the piropos (cat calls) were not nearly as intense or frequent this time around. Even Rosana said, ´´I remember you having lots of pretty clothes last time you came!´´ Yeah. 

Other things have changed in Buenos Aires.  Prices have gone up. I had a minor heart attack when I found out that my favorite ice cream place, Freddo, has tripled in price. The tiniest cone available, which really is about half the size of an American kiddie cone, went from 4 pesos (a little over a dollar) to 12 pesos (four dollars) in four years. I bet you could track Argentina´s inflation quite accurately by paying attention to Freddo prices.

I did not go without the fine dining experience while in the city, however. One day, I made a choco-torta with Rosana and Enrique´s granddaughter, Catalina, who is four. This cake involves only four ingredients: Chocolinas (thin rectangular chocolate cookies--my favorite cookies in the world), dulce de leche, milk, and queso crema, which is kind of like cream cheese. You just dip the cookies in warm milk, line them on the bottom of a large casserole pan, then pour a 1:1 ratio mixture of dulce de leche and cream cheese on top. Repeat two times. It ends up being sort of messy because if you leave the cookies in the milk for a little too long, they crumble and break. You must, of course, eat the broken ones. Catalina caught on quickly; every other cookie ´´broke´´ after a little while, and so we had quite the pile of wounded soldiers to devour. ´´Uh oh, another broken one...guess we gotta eat it!´´ A girl after my own heart. There we were, faces and fingers plastered with chocolate cookie crumbs and dulce de leche. It was not un-delicious.

I also cooked for them one night: made a salad with rucula and radicheta, walnuts, goat cheese, cherry tomatoes, figs, with a mustard-balsamic vinaigrette. For the main course, I made a mushroom risotto, and I considered it a personal success because the 4 and 9 year old grandchildren loved it. Catalina even called for multiple rounds of applauses, kept saying ´´¡un aplauso!´´ and would slap her little palms together, albeit irrythmically, four-year-old style. It´s incredibly satisfying, as a cook, when both adults and children are pleased with the meal you make them. I served it with a bottle of Cabernet by my favorite bodega in Argentina, Escorihuela Gascón (they export under the name Familia Gascón but it´s not nearly as good; don´t bother). It was pure nectar. Yeah, the kids were pretty wasted.

Tasteless joke? I liked it.

One of the most magical nights of my life happend this past week, on New Years Eve.  It was a quiet night; the three of us ate a delicious dinner that Rosana cooked, and then we sat around drinking champagne and enjoying the silence of the pre-midnight chaos. At midnight, the fireworks began. Fireworks in Buenos Aires are not like fireworks in Boston. Not exactly the highly-controlled firearms that need to be smuggled across the New Hampshire border. Instead, pretty much anyone can buy them, and anyone can set them off. And so pretty much every little neighborhood has their own unofficial display.

Now, Rosana and Enrique live in what I think is absolutely the best part of Buenos Aires: beautiful old architecture mixed with modern buildings, tons of parks everywhere you turn, and the bedrooms overlook the widest avenue in Buenos Aires, unobstructed views all the way uptown, with the Rio de la Plata in the distance. This allows for a panoramic view of the city, and at midnight, we stood outside on the balcony from our fourteenth floor apartment and watched all of the fireworks going off from all angles of the city: the famous obelisk had what appeared to be the city-sponsored show, with timed explosions and matching colored gunpowder, while over in Villa, essentially the shantytown behind the train tracks, everything and everything exploded. Rockets went off in all directions, all classes of fireworks, the white loud ones that go off in your chest, the hissing ones that leave the willow-tree residue, the high-up sparkling ones, everywhere, three hundred sixty degrees of colorful explosions in the sky. It was truly magical. The wind had picked up, which was a welcome relief to the intense heat and humidity that usually plague the city during January, and it was the kind of warm summer wind that swirls around like little tornadoes, wraps its arms around your neck and flips up the hairs on the back of your head, no matter how long your hair is, and twists istelf around your extremities. We stood there, hands gripping the rail of the balcony, looking out into the city, and I had this thrilling energy pulsing through my body that made me feel more alive than I had in a while.

I left Buenos Aires last night on a bus for Mendoza, the mountainous wine country. I didn´t want to leave so soon, honestly, but I do need to get to another farm, and potentially find a place where I can learn how to make wine. This is the place for that. Plus, I know I´ll be back to Buenos Aires, and also, it´s not exactly torturous to be spending some time in this new city. I...sort of like wine.

But, oh, Buenos Aires, how you melt my heart.