A Culinary Interlude

There's a scene that comes to mind in the midst of eating guinea pig, as if you're not so much eating the beloved North American pet as you're watching yourself eat it. That scene—for me, at least—is from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I imagine myself as the culturally-sensitive Indiana, slurping on the thorax of a large Indian cockroach, smiling, telling his skittish, implacable lady friend, who is audibly pining for “real” food (also me, by the way, just not as adventurous or heroically five-o'clock shadowed), to just eat it, to suck it up, because this is an act of kindness, really, this cultural exchange, this sharing of food and culture, especially food that is considered a specialty and delicious and non-pet-like in this very specific part of the world. When faced with food I'd rather not eat, but would also rather not insult others by refusing, I think of Harrison Ford and his dietary resolve; I think of Doctor Jones.

Andean Highlands

After researching several options for volunteering in the Cusco area, we discovered an amazing non-profit organization located about an hour southeast of Cusco. The project produces high-quality dolls made by women who come mainly from impoverished areas in the Andean highlands, providing them with fair wages, a harmonious work environment, and teaching them real skills—all in an effort to improve their lives and the lives of their children. So we wrote the directors, went to visit the project's utopic campus in the mountains, and decided, yes, this is where we wanted to spend the next two months or even the next two years of our lives.
In what capacity we would be serving as volunteers, however, was somewhat ambiguous upon arriving, and I was a little worried that I wouldn't be able to contribute anything meaningful to the project. We spent the first couple of days getting to know the women and children of the project (there are about 30 women who are steady, full-timers, most of them native speakers of Quechua). After Dacia and I took turns getting food-sick (never in my life have I felt more like a fire hose), we started to figure out how we fit in. I began teaching English to the three women who run the shop in town, which for me is always fun and interesting, and I installed myself as the daily source of entertainment for the children. (They now refer to me as el profesor de trucos, or the teacher of tricks, because I taught them how to do several magic tricks.) Dacia, in addition to learning how to make the dolls, began teaching stretching classes to the women, most of whom suffer from occupational injuries associated with sewing, as well as classes in typing and Internet skills. We've been with the project now for about three weeks and things are going swimmingly.

Aside from my daily English classes and teaching children how to pull off their thumbs, I've been busy putting into motion a project I'd come up early on: a community puppet theater. Since we are essentially living in a doll factory, there are all the necessary materials for creating quality puppets. I came up with four characters and a loose series of stories. Once the theater and puppets are finished, I see us putting on a show every friday night (with popcorn, of course). The shows will be episodic in nature and will have some English mixed in as one of the characters, dare I reveal, is a non-Spanish speaking Gringo. There is also a boy (the protagonist) who is a precocious story-teller, an alpaca (the boy's best friend) who thinks for sure he's a dog, and a woman from the Peruvian highlands.

Cusco and its customers

Like Prague or Paris, Cusco is beautiful in a very unfortunate way.

We learned this little factoid about twenty minutes or so into our week-long stay. Everywhere you turn you're offered massages and/or finger puppets; excursions to Machu Picchu and/or shoe shines. It's really exhausting. And yet, while the amount of solicitation is overwhelming, it’s also completely understandable: look down any one of Cusco's streets and you'll find herded upon its squamous stones anglo-aggregates of safari khaki and convertible pants. They move in droves, with their cameras slung like fruit and their faces bathed in SPF 40. The galaxy that separates the local population from these brigades of travelers-born-again, with their bus fortresses and irrigating capital, is obvious on many levels. And if you're anything like me, you inevitably become self-conscious of your similar-ish appearance to the latter; how such an appearance signifies money and a certain inclination for taking (and maybe paying for) photos of one's Alpaca. Inevitably, you tire of repeating the motto No, gracias, No, gracias and begin to avoid all eye-contact, becoming a devout scholar of the ground as you pass on from one mercantile insurgency to another.

But still, Cusco is beautiful, and no form of empire—neither the Spanish nor Old Navy—could have ever made it otherwise. (Pictures to come)

Remembrance of Things Unblogged (Part 2)

“Never sure how to begin these things. It's always so awkward.”

“You could start by telling everyone that you've shamelessly abandoned your blog. Again.”

“I guess there's no way to be clever about it. I'm lazy.”

“Don't worry. Everybody knows.”

“But it's not like Buenos Aires anymore. I'm in Peru. I wake up around 9 am now.”

“Well, well. No longer outsourcing your mornings to mid-western time-zones? I think you actually flirted with the idea a couple of unwritten posts ago. Something about your 'living ambiguously' in Argentina, waking up around lunch time (Breakfast in Texas) after a night of reading and beef-eating, but the parameters of that lifestyle turned out to be a bit too ambiguous.”

“I need structure.”

“You need to write more.”

“I admire industrious people. Like the lovely couple we rented from in Buenos Aires. They were film-makers. Julia, a Porteña, wrote and directed a bunch of movies. Even co-directed a movie called the “The Motorcycle Diaries.”

“Impressive.”

“Yeah. And her partner, John, a native New Yorker, was an equally prolific photographer. Super cool. They had a great library in their Palermo apartment.”

“How'd you come across it?”

“We lucked out. Answered an ad on Craig's list. Such an amazing space. Right next to the botanical garden. Two bedrooms, balcony, great living room, lots of light. They were leaving for six weeks to shoot a film in a town called Urdinarrain.”

“Your spell-checker didn't like that name.”

“Yeah, it's Guaraní for something, I forget though. Urdi, as locals mercifully call it, is a four hour bus ride north of Buenos Aires. One of those old German settlements. Beautiful countryside town full of blond haired, blue eyed Argentines.”

“Hmm. I heard of those.”

“As far as we could tell, they weren't Nazis. Dacia actually has a sub-cutaneous Nazi-detector embedded in her left arm, so I was relieved when it failed to go off.”

“So you guys went up there?”

“Yeah, for a weekend. We wanted to check out 'the shoot' and see how the whole process went down. We also had vague hopes of being extras, but the weather wasn't all that cooperative and they ended up only shooting one scene the entire weekend. That is, one scene without us. I'm not sure if the film's going to make it.”

On Set

“Right. You forgot to write that post on vanity by the way. We're all curious if you have a mullet.”

“I don't. Sorry. But I grew a beard.”

“A beard, wow, how unattractive, and yet so...so South-American-Traveler.”

“Well, I have a theory about travel beards..."

Bearded I travel

“...It's never really a conscious decision or anything, the travel beard. It just happens. A kind of masculine sloppiness that gathers legitimacy after a while and begins to resemble a concerted effort. And that effort, facilitated by the passage of time and puberty, is rather common down here: Why are so many of these 20-something gringos bearded? Are beard-curious backpackers these days just razor shy or is there a more deeply-rooted tradition of travel behind the bristle?”

“You know I can't handle such suspense without feeling too mouthpiece-ish.”

“So I did my research. It turns out that Moses and Odysseus, some of antiquity's greatest travelers, both had serious, food-filtering beards. (Come to think of it, after revisiting Tierra Santa on Good Friday, that religious theme park, it seems that God has one too.) And the Age of Exploration, which entrusted this continent with centuries of identity-issues, was quite a whiskered lot as well. As most pogonologists (those who study beards) would likely venture: there is something definitively itinerant about facial hair.”

“I think you lost a couple of readers there.”

“Not the bearded ones.”

“But they're probably all out hunting or fixing their cars or something.”

“Now you're mixing your mullets with beards.”

“And you're mixing your blog-writing with cheeky, contrived dialogue.”

“But didn't Plato, who I believe was very bearded, do it all the time?”

“Now you're even losing the bearded ones.”

“...And speaking of Plato, whose method was marinated with such interrogative irony: after our six weeks in that wonderful apartment we sallied forth and visited the Jesuit missions in Northeastern Argentina.”

“Might I ask the relevance, dear Grad student?”

“It all begins, just as it does in the bible, with God (bearded).”

“Go on.”

“In the seventeenth century, Jesuit priests from Spain and Italy set up close to forty missions in what is now known as Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil. Tolerated for a while by the Spanish crown, who wasn't all that impressed by the Jesuit's willingness to integrate with the indigenous tribes, learn their language and provide a certain amount of protection from the culture-swallowing of the Old World, the Jesuits envisioned a social project that fashioned their missions on Plato's city in The Republic. Since adopting the political theory of an ancient Hellenic heretic wasn't going to win points with the church, the influence was unofficial, but for those in-the-know, it was undeniable.

Church facade at the Jesuit mission in San Ignacio

“Everyone in the mission had a craft. Be it medicine or pottery, citizens of the mission all had a trade and its practice was a life-long endeavor. You could say that mission life revolved around the need for self-expression. Mastering one's craft, one's 'techne,' was not only self-fulfilling for the natives, but also it became the way the Jesuits evangelized. I was surprised to learn they did this not in Latin, but in Guaraní. Not only were the Jesuits a tad more culturally sensitive than their colleagues, adapting as best as they could to their cultural mores and traditions while inserting their own, but their missions were more or less successful, lasting for three hundred years, and only after the Spanish crown deemed them no longer useful in holding their parking spot in the north. They were expelled from their missions and replaced by the Franciscans.”

“Aren't we snoringly historical?”

“I thought it was interesting. At least it comes with a picture.”

“Speaking of pictures, share with us what the hell these things are:”

Mysterious Herbivores!

“Well, I guess I kind of rushed into the whole Jesuit-Plato thing. Before we visited San Ignacio, we took a bus to a village called Mercedes, which was dusty, quiet, and didn't have any of the afore-pictured animals. We went there because it was the only way to get to the Argentinian wetlands, Esteros de Iberá, which we had read about in a local paper in Buenos Aires. The Esteros are accessed from a small town called Carlos Pelligrini, which is about three hours of bumpy dirt road from Mercedes. The Esteros are special because they have a bunch amazing animals in residence: Cayman, Piraná, and yes, the biggest rodent in the world, the Capybara (above). After arranging an excursion from our ranch, which was already teeming with tarantulas and bats (fortunately not in our room, but also unfortunately for the late-night pee-er, not not in the men's bathroom), we took a boat through this pristine reserve.

Smiling cayman

“After that, and after the missions, we went to Iguazú Falls, which felt like a Gringo convention. But I guess for good reason: they (the falls, that is) are absolutely beautiful. We stayed in your average hostel, which down here meant it's 80% full with post-military service Israelis, and bummed around, marveling at the tropical scenery. The falls form the tri-border zone of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. Since I didn't have a Brazilian visa, we stayed on the Argentinian side and were quite content.

Gravity at work. Iguazú Falls

“After that, being the international jet-setters we are, we took a bus to Buenos Aires, a plane to Miami, met up with my family in the Florida Keys for 5 days, then took a plane to Lima, then another to Cusco, where I'm currently typing and Dacia is sleeping, both of us plump with several layers. It's cold and I'm tired being gimmicky. I will return later with news of our Peruvian adventures, which will most likely concern volunteering in the outlying area of Cusco. It will also be much shorter than this post. Till then."

I already have the aviator sunglasses...

The other day, I thought of an interesting business opportunity for me here in Buenos Aires. I'm contemplating putting it up on craigslist just to see what happens. Hopefully I won't get arrested:

When people travel they like to take pictures of themselves. These pictures usually consist of them posing in the foreground with something noteworthy in the background. While many photos are taken this way, the final result can appear artificial and look-where-I've-been-ish. Enter Gringo Paparazzi. Gringo Paparazzi will follow you around and take pictures of you unawares so your trip is authentically documented. Your covert photographer is given a rough itinerary of your plans in advance, and told how, where, and when you want to be photographed. No more asking strangers if they can take your photo; it's already been taken. Although having a GP agent follow you around doesn't prevent you from taking your own pictures, it will provide you with a perspective otherwise lost—(that is, of course, if you're already under surveillance, in which case, you probably wouldn't see those photos anyway...)

In the end you are given a cd or jump drive of your photos.

After reading what I just wrote, I'm not sure for whose benefit it would serve: the narcissistic tourist or the aspiring clandestine operative. Either way, I'm curious to hear any comments or suggestions.

Flora and fauna

I won't lie to you: the other night, while preparing a lovely green salad, Dacia discovered a frog in our lettuce. It was smallish, about the size of quarter, and clinging stubbornly to the inside of the lettuce bag. I don't know if frogs believe in cryogenics (really, I study literature, not science) but this guy had been living in our refrigerator for about two odd days, since the time we brought him home from the grocery. But it was fine. After we recovered from fact a frog was in our lettuce, we were fine too, and it all turned out to be a very National Geographic moment.

Outside the apartment, there was a guy sitting on a bike, starring at me as I dangled the plastic bag over the bushes. It was too dark for him to really see what I was doing, my little service to nature and all, and I imagine instead of witnessing this heart-felt repatriation, he saw only the unfathomable workings of some gringo. I tried to think of the Spanish equivalent of “hey, it's not what it seems, buddy, it's just a frog,” but I couldn't remember the word for frog, which was crucial. So after a successful bag-to-bush download, I went back inside.

Speaking of resilient species, this guy had a mullet —more accurately, he had a South American Soccer Mullet (mulleto futbolicus), which is everywhere down here. As those who don't play hockey or drive camaros already know, this hairstyle has been officially banished since the 80's. But down here, as if crossing the equator inverts certain northern truths, it's just the opposite. Mullets are worn with such authority and gravitas you feel as if you're observing an alternative path of history—a parallel dimension where the business-bangs and party vines only grew more legitimate with time, more rooted in the social norm. I won't go so far as to quote Michel Foucault, but the mullet definitely harbors power here, and those without them, that follically aberrant company of lesser men, they are sent beggarly to the Porteño periphery, in contempt of all things stylish.

A confession: although I remain mullet-less at the moment, I'm really just a few snips away from having one of my own (see picture). All that really stands between me and my mane of manhood is that cauterized shame brought on by Bon Jovi and his crimped ilk. But I must say, I've felt a remote desire to blend in, to go culture chameleon and upgrade my Argentinity to the level of fashion paragon. As long as I keep my mouth shut, sequestering my fragile Spanish as best I can, I think this foray into dilettantism would go more or less undetected. The only downside—and that may or may not be a mullet metaphor!—would be Dacia having the unenviable task of looking at me and my raccoon hat everyday. But it sure would be interesting. And journalistically speaking, a mullet would grant me unparalleled access to the cabal of porteño vanity—a topic which, in the spirit of brevity and procrastination, I will discuss at length in a later post. Bis dann.

To mullet or not to mullet?

Luis

As far as intensive language classes go, my courses here in Buenos Aires were pretty standard. We met for three hours a day, five days a week, learned the minutiae of the subjunctive, and had the occasional excursion. It was exactly what I needed. I got placed into a level four (out of six), which was awesome, giving me the chance to advance quicker. The class was made up predominantly of Americans, with some Europeans and Chinese thrown into the mix. And although I broke some new ground with my Spanish, the most memorable part of the experience by far was a guy named Luis.

Luis, whose real name we never learned, was from Hong Kong. Like many Chinese students at the school, Luis assumed a western name to help others refer to things he’d say during conversations. The only problem was that Luis never spoke. When called upon by the teacher, he would just smile and shake his head—every time, no variation, the same exact way. As English speakers, we have a tremendous advantage over those from China when learning Spanish, I know this, but Luis didn’t even pretend to try. When we formed groups, it was a hazardous roll of the dice for those who cared: whoever got stuck with him was busy talking to a statue for ten minutes. Nobody wanted to work with him.

But this isn’t why Luis is blog-worthy.

As the course started to come to a close, we learned that an oral exam was required for the successful completion of level four. It was to last ten minutes and would take the form of a speech concerning a ‘social problem’ of our choosing. This meant that after a month of malingering, Luis—if he even came to the test—would have to speak in Spanish, uninterrupted, for ten minutes. It had all the mounting tension you’d come to expect from some 80’s movie, where a marginalized, misunderstood character rises above all odds in the end to flummox all the nay-sayers (read: Bill and Ted; Daniel-san; Willow; innumerable others.) I wanted this to happen. I wanted the class to burst into applause, tinker tape everywhere, metal ballads abound. I wanted to like Luis.

His chosen topic was how homosexuality is a social disease and that its sufferers should perish. We were flabbergasted. He had been writing this speech while others we giving theirs, frantically flipping through his dictionary for the right words. When it came time for him to go, there was a hush of curiosity. Some of us never heard him speak before. When he began, we weren’t entirely sure what he was saying because he mumbled. So we shut off the air-conditioner and readied ourselves, our heads down, concentrating. We heard the peppering of opinion here and there, but it was still unclear what he was really talking about. Like his namesake, Luis was still an encrypted discourse for us.

But then little by little we found the signposts, polysyllabic billboards like homosexualidad and enfermidad, and one by one our heads began to bob up in shock. Javier, our teacher, interrupted Luis for fear his speech was being grossly misunderstood, but Luis confirmed it wasn’t. Here was a guy who didn’t utter more than a few words the whole month, and now this. Luis wasn’t winning anyone over.

The Americans gave him the hardest time, leafing through their pocket-sized dictionaries, just as he did, but now with added purpose. Someone, without a dictionary, chimed in. Do you know anybody who is gay? What if I were gay? Would you think I’m sick? Luis responded with the same robotic arguments, reading them from his notes. Four weeks of learning the subjunctive prepared us for this moment. You could say that, grammatically, it was a subjunctive bloodbath: we were inundating Luis with our opinions, our derisive judgments—everything our level four Spanish had to offer. If his speech weren’t for real, it would have been the perfect test. (And if it had been a hoax, and Luis—a fluent speaker of Spanish—was in cahoots with the language school, then that’s quite a pedagogical approach.) It provoked us to use all the linguistic tools at our disposal, to make ourselves clear, to expose and challenge such intolerance. But Luis was unmoved, if not confused by our protest. And in the end there was no enlightenment—just a heavy, humid silence. So after some diplomatic remarks from Javier, it was over, and the class ended.

But now for the most awkward part: It being the last day and all, we parted ways with Javier the Argentine way: with a kiss on the cheek. For those of you who don’t know, in Argentina it’s universally accepted and customary for men to kiss other men when saying goodbye. So we were all lined up, kissing Javier, thanking him, wishing him the best, and then, at the end of the line, came Luis. Not knowing what to do, Javier forwent the beso with a nervous chuckle, and shook Luis’ hand instead. Pretending not to watch, I think we were all hoping for that kiss.

Simulacra and salvation

Besides my lifelong hobby of motion sickness, I have many reasons for not attending theme parks—long lines, expensive food, pushy people, etc. But this all changed last week. In Buenos Aires, Ladies and Gentleman, I found hope.

Tierra Santa, or Holy Land, is a Judeo-Christian theme park set in the image of ancient Jerusalem. The park has no rides and hardly any lines. It hasn’t height requirements or ominous warnings for epileptics. Instead, its main attraction is a forty-foot animatronic Jesus that resurrects, every hour, to a crowd of emotional Argentines.

And this was all I needed to know.

Visually, the park is one part Disney’s Aladdin, one part Gladiator—with a cartoonish display of fake palm trees, diminutive minarets, and faux-limestone colonnades. But don’t let that fool you: Tierra Santa is taken quite seriously by its guests, many of whom are nuns and priests and other god-fearing gentry. Visitors of the park can witness some of the Bible’s greatest moments in little over an hour; milestones such as The Last Supper—housed in an intimate, chapel-like setting—and The Birth of Christ, which takes place in the iconic manger, alongside sedate cows and fly-by cherubs. The main event, however, is the Godzilla-sized Christ rising from the calvary mound. With Halleluiah blasting from the PA system, the rotating Savior greets Jerusalem and its guests like any proper emcee. Many are visibly stirred by this. They cry; they sing; they shower Him in bursts of digital flash like some ecumenical paparazzi. Others, such as myself, are quietly incredulous, wondering if this is for real.

And it is. Everywhere you turn there are life-sized effigies of Jesus, The Virgin Mary, Pontius Pilot, and dozens of nameless Roman soldiers—all staging important and surprisingly photogenic chapters from the Good Book. There is also a Wailing Wall, with its cracks and crevices packed tight with written prayers, and a laser show detailing the Pink-Floydish workings of creation. Although Islam is understandably absent, as its laws strictly forbid these forms of representationalism, the park does allow for other players in the piety market such as Gandhi and Martin Luther, who have their own corners in J-town. It seems that the park has something for everyone—even those who just want to chow down on some baklava and catch a quick belly dancing show (we did both). In a way, Tierra Santa is the praying-man’s equivalent to one-stop shopping, an all-you-can-believe buffet of religious iconography—and it will only cost you about five US dollars.

But the park is more than just the sum of its parts. Tierra Santa is officially holy. Having received endorsement from the Roman Catholic Church, the theme park is not only promoting fun, but also promulgating faith. In its quest for verisimilitude, Tierra Santa has its employees dress in Middle Eastern-like attire: Palestinian headscarves, genie pants, rustic sandals, and the occasional sword. This makes for a strangely immersive experience—you feel as if you are navigating the collective imaginary of Christianity, with a little Indiana Jones mixed in for adventure.

But clearly, historical accuracy isn’t one of the park’s virtues—and I’d venture to say that Tierra Santa isn’t all that popular amongst biblical archeologists. The park’s secular neighbors are an airport, a water park, and a driving range. Planes come tearing through the sky at apocalyptic decibels, seconds away from landing;[1] splashing and screaming can be heard from the pools just beyond the creation cave; and large, golf ball-catching nets line Jerusalem’s eastern border. After a short hike up Golgotha, the centerpiece of the park, you’re treated to a panorama of ancient Jerusalem and these anachronistic hinterlands. It makes you think this gravel-strewn city[2] is under siege by the encroachment of time, and that you stand on one of its last dogmatic strongholds. And although Noah’s ark is sadly missing from the park’s exhibitions, at that height, overlooking the churning madness of Buenos Aires, you begin to feel that Tierra Santa is the ark itself, adrift in some other world, bent on its own preservation.

While it didn’t make me more or less a believer, Tierra Santa did give me a lot to think about—and just in time for the holiday season! I’ve never seen any quite like it and don’t think I will ever again. That said, whether its miniature golf or God, we all have our fixes, right? Some just prefer it with a little extra kitsch on top.

[1] While writing this I realized that theoretically, with the right seat and timing, it’s possible to be greeted by a towering Jesus when landing in Buenos Aires. Now that’s just amazing.
[2] This may or may not be the park’s most high-concept exhibit, challenging at every step the would-be, blog-writing heckler—the heckler who is without sin, who is without his own quixotic flaws—to cast the first stone at Tierra Santa.