micheleandtom.com

It has taken us about a month to transition the kids to our new worldschooling schedule:

06:15: Get up for school.
07:15: Leave for school.
12:15: Pick them up from school.
14:00: Worldschool begins.
17:00: Worldschool ends.
18:00: We eat dinner.
20:00: Bedtime for the Zs.

The basic idea of the schedule is to secure the girls enough rest so they can be happy little non-growly citizens of our home. “Hooray, we have achieved our goal.”

But this Friday night, Tom saw the downside of “hooray.” It seems that our daughters have acclimated to our weanie American schedule so completely that they can no longer make it through a regular Argentinian meal!

Poor Tom has been dying to go out to a genuine restaurant (which means it opens for dinner at 8:00 or 8:30 pm) for the last few weeks. Unfortunately, it is pretty much out of the question during the week, or we ruin the aforementioned worldschooling schedule. Tonight though, he managed to wrangle Zelda and I out the door (Zoe was at a sleepover) for the real deal. After wandering around our neighborhood, we ended up seated at a nicely decorated little joint staring across the table at a passed out little girl who had completely lost her appetite and her ability to form coherent sentences.

Tom is now in mourning over the loss of eating out at nice restaurants as a regular family option in our lives, probably even on the weekends. But, he is perking up over his new plan: attempt finer dining at lunch on the weekends instead!

I’ve witnessed my first robbery here in Buenos Aires. I was sitting at a cafe (inside) next to the windows overlooking the sidewalk tables on a street-corner in the neighborhood of Palermo.

A nondescript young man walking by on the sidewalk snatched a purse from under one of the umbrella-covered sidewalk tables, and then ran off to a motorcycle that had just driven up to the corner and was awaiting the thief. The absconder, once he had the purse in hand, really turned on the jets and managed to execute quite a leap onto the back of the getaway motorcycle.

Stunned silence reigned in the restaurant as the two-wheeled vehicle sped off. Every woman in the place, inside and out, clutched their purses to their bodies for the rest of their meal.

Grillmaster Tom brings you this recap.

Sunday is the traditional day for asado in Argentina. As parties go, this one has a pretty simple formula: start a fire, grill up a big pile of meat, hang out with family and friends for the afternoon, and eat until you are no longer able to move.

Our current apartment comes complete with a beautiful parilla, and we’ve hosted one asado already. But, on that occasion, my duties involved nothing more than making the salad, since our friend Dani expertly handled all of the grilling. For various reasons, I had not yet taken the helm of the parilla. I had not yet assumed the role of asador.

(To my mind’s ear, “asador” is always said with great drama. Think “matador” and say it with a flourish and, perhaps, a stamping of your foot.)

Why the hesitation to grill?

For one, you can’t start grilling until you’ve got some meat, and I’m intimidated by the butcher. Even in the US, I never looked forward to buying meat. I would often go marching up to the meat counter, recipe from Cook’s Illustrated in hand, and explain that I was looking for a specific cut. (Cook’s Illustrated has very strong opinions on which cuts are best for their recipes.) The butcher would then tell me they didn’t have said cut and look at me like I was crazy for asking.

And, that was in English! Here, I get to do the whole song and dance in broken Castellano and pantomime.

Furthermore, I’m totally spoiled by my gas grill in the US. Press a button and you’re ready to cook ten minutes later. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a push-button parilla. Oh no, you’ve got to go all primitive and caveman-like and get a fire started using nothing more than matches and a bag of charcoal.

Since I had no kindling, no lighter fluid, and little experience, I was concerned about my fire-starting skills. Could I really set the charcoal ablaze with some scrap paper and an empty Fruit Loops box? At first, it didn’t look too promising. Zoe offered to help by throwing dried leaves onto the top of the fire, and while that pleased the inner pyromaniac in both of us, it didn’t make the slightest difference to actually getting the charcoal lit.

In the end, Zoe saved the day. She spotted a few dead branches caught in the tree that overhangs our terrace, and using a rope she got at a knot-tying demonstration, she was able to lasso several and pull them down. We broke up the branches, created a little teepee of twigs, and pretty soon we had a roaring fire going.

With that problem solved, I started grilling. And, I didn’t really know when to stop. As the photos show, for just a family of four, I grilled a lot of meat. (We call that having an asado, Ian-style, since he started the family tradition of buying way too much meat for the occasion.)

The results from my first outing as asador:

* Chicken. Perfectly done. Mostly due to Michele’s brining and her expertly prepared wet rub of cumin, lemon, garlic, olive oil and chilies.

* Bife de Chorizo. (New York Strip Steak) Sadly, these were a little over-done. In Argentina, they would call this level of cooking a punto. They definitely were not jugoso (rare). Obviously, I was paying too much attention to chowing down on the chicken at the time, and not enough to my steaks still on the grill.

* Pork Roast. This was the wild card. I’m not even sure what cut of pork this is, and since we were all too stuffed with beef and chicken to eat any more, we just wrapped it up and put it in the fridge. Hopefully, it can form the basis of a leftover dinner later this week.

All in all, not too bad for a first attempt.

There is a chain of English-language bookstores that we frequent here in Buenos Aires called KEL. (We normally only buy the Z’s books there because it’s really expensive and Tom and I peruse most of our reading material on the Kindle, which we continue to love.)

Since Zoe recently ran out of books to read, it was clearly time for a run, so off to KEL we went. (Today, it was homeschool in the taxi.) Imagine our surprise when we showed up at this normally sleepy shop only to be greeted by a mob scene. All of the shelves and books were cordoned off, there was a huge line, and they had implemented a see-customer-by-number system.

It seems that in February and March, when school starts back up after summer break, the KEL locations have a higher volume of customers. In response, they have devised a novel system for dealing with this uptick — they make ALL of their clients take a number. When a customer’s number is called, they must tell an employee which tome they want, and said employee retrieves the book for the client. NO SHOPPERS CAN BROWSE ANY BOOKS ON THEIR OWN.

Needless to say, this is a ridiculous system — the store is a mess and people wait forever to buy their one English dictionary that they seem perfectly capable of choosing on their own.

I tried explaining to the store clerk, who spoke great English, that we wanted to look through chapter books for the girls and that I didn’t have any specific titles in mind. She got really shirty with me, and her “solution” was to stand behind a shelf barrier and hand us every chapter book they had in Zoe and Zelda’s age range. (Which really struck me as a great use of her time.)

Of course, she brightened up considerably when she realized that we were going to buy a boat load of books. And, even though we were a royal pain in the ass from her perspective, she did throw in this hot book bag, modeled here by Zelda.

This ranked as one of my most ridiculous shopping trips ever! If we hadn’t needed the books so badly, I would have just waited until April.

In “The Glasses” episode, Jerry Seinfeld’s opening monologue is a perfect reflection of how I manage my sleeping schedule.

JERRY: I never get enough sleep. I stay up late at night, cause I’m Night Guy. Night Guy wants to stay up late. ‘What about getting up after five hours sleep?’, oh that’s Morning Guy’s problem. That’s not my problem, I’m Night Guy. I stay up as late as I want. So you get up in the morning, you’re ….., you’re exhausted, groggy, oooh I hate that Night Guy! See, Night Guy always screws Morning Guy. There’s nothing Morning Guy can do. The only thing Morning Guy can do is try and oversleep often enough so that Day Guy looses his job and Night Guy has no money to go out anymore.

Since we have implemented our new homeschooling/family togetherness plan, the only time Tom and I have to hit the gym together is in the dreaded morning. I usually feel like crap as my body is still waking up and my joints ache on the 20 minute walk to the Always Club.

Add on to that the fact that a) we’re trying to push ourselves with CrossFit workouts; b) I keep screwing my morning self by staying up too late; c) homeschooling is a lot of work to get together; d) it’s the dreaded tax time; e) it seems as if every one of the Zs’ classmates was born in February or March, so we’ve had a thousand birthday parties in just the first month of school…well, all of this means that WE’RE FREAKING TIRED!

Slowly but surely though, Morning Guy is trashing Night Guy’s body at the gym, and Night Guy is finding it easier and easier to go to bed early. There may be hope yet.

I believe we may have been the first family to trek on foot over open parkland to the gates of Club Alemán de Equitación (a private equestrian club in the city). At least, that’s what it seemed like by virtue of the look bestowed upon us from the guard attending the gated entry to the club!

We had come to inquire about family horseback riding lessons, but we learned from the guard that even though the club was open, administration went home at noon, so there was no one to talk to. Happily, one of the instructors happened to be driving through the gate as we turned to go, so she stopped and took our information and is going to call us early next week about costs and possible openings.

I suppose if we do sign up for lessons there, we shall have to get used to being “the family that arrives on foot or by cab” instead of the family that shows up in their own car.

Anyhow, since we were close to the hippodrome (horse racing track), and they were running races that day, we decided to pop in and see what was happening at the track after our visit to Club Alemán. Several torrential downpours and soaked Offermann/Reeves later, we managed to:

1. Determine that you can’t obtain coins from the slot machines at the casino located at the track. (Someone suggested we try it as a comment on the blog and you know us, we’ll check out anything that might prove an easy source of monedas.)
2. Be pleasantly surprised by the track and environs. A mix of beautiful old and new buildings that are well maintained and frequented by a wide variety of perfectly normal fans. (This would be a far cry from attending the races at… say…Portland Meadows, for instance, which is just sad and depressing, and a little creepy.)
3. Enjoy the banter between the jockeys and the crowd as they rode their horses out on the track during their warm up.
4. View a race while standing right on the rail at the finish line, which the girls loved.

I recently gave Zoe a whack on the head for suggesting that I offer up some of my precious coins to a cab driver. (The very idea.) Yes, that means that unfortunately, we continue to hoard monedas like crazy people with an obsession for shiny metal objects.

You’ll be happy to know that about a month ago, the government declared the coin crisis solved when the President mandated that an electronic card payment system be installed within 3 months for all Buenos Aires buses. Of course, in true bureaucratic style, the second she announced this initiative, the agencies in charge of implementation turned around and said it would take at least six months to complete!

Needless to say, we’re not holding our breath.

Photo by J. Used under a Creative Commons license.
(Some great high dynamic range photos of Argentina you should check out!)

Existing without a car and traveling by walking, colectivo (city bus), or cab is part of the fun of living in a city with more density than Portland, Oregon. Leaving the car behind allows us to experience Baires in a more visceral manner. (Truth be told, a little too visceral for some of the upper-middle class Porteño parents in the girls’ school who nearly fall over at the news that we take the city bus to transport our daughters to class!)

However, our love affair with the concept of ditching the car does wane when we are in the midst of a torrential downpour. It is nigh on impossible to hail a cab because everyone else has the same idea. Walking on the sidewalks involves picking your way through a minefield of splorting sidewalk tiles (it is incredibly disgusting when you get the gunk under the tile washing over your whole foot). And, standing on the street to catch your bus is a lesson in dodging puddles sprayed by speeding cars and buses.

Then, there are the rain-with-no-car wildcard issues that take the bloom off the rose a bit more. Today, those would be: 1) We have to get the girls to school in the rain in their cute, clean little uniforms that are not extreme-weather friendly; and, 2) We have to do a big grocery shop (probably in rain gear) on foot today so that we can make some bolognese for dinner!!

Oh yah, and our roof is still leaking in several places, but that is another story… .

A benefit of blogging about daily life is that when crappy things occur, I find myself thinking, at least this will make a good blog post. (Of course, best case scenario is when something crappy happens to Tom because I still get to write about it, but the pain is experienced by someone else!)

Anyhow, this weekend, I lost what seemed like all of my hair in a peluquería disaster. I went to a local salon (walk-in) that had stylists with short hair (important here because the vast majority of women in this country keep their hair very long) to finally get my curly mop styled with an interim cut as I continued to grow it out a bit. (I would say that my locks were falling somewhere between my ears and my shoulders at the time of my ill-fated salon appointment.)

Prior to my cut, I explained to my stylist that I wanted to restore a little shape and movement to my hair, while making it very clear that I was growing it out and desired to keep as much length as possible.

What ensued was a disaster. She cut about 6 to 7 inches off of the top layer of my hair (leaving roughly 2 to 3 inches, which shrinks to nothing when curly). She removed approximately 1 to 2 inches off of the bottom portion of my hair and then thinned out all of the rest in between these two layers. At the end, this debacle culminated in a blow dry that left me with a modern version of an Annette Funicello Beach Blanket Bingo helmet head with flip. (You must look at this picture of Annette here to really have a clear idea of what I endured.)

Hairtastrophe!

Poor Tom, who hates post-haircut fallout, was nervous about my remedy — removing the flip, and indeed the entire lower part of my haircut, with crappy scissors in our bathroom by myself without the benefit of a mirror to see the back of my hair. The result is pictured above. So, yes, I had to pay someone to give me a crappy cut, then go home and remove the rest of my hair myself, but hey, I got a f&*(#ing blog post out of it!

(Just to clarify, I love short hair and have had my own style much lower than this many times in the past…it’s just that I wasn’t planning on having most of my hair removed over the weekend! It’s funny though, I am constantly being reminded of all of the things I like about very short hair — less shampoo, less conditioner, bitchin’ styling products, versatility, easy to swim in, easy to work out with, roll out of bed and look okay, and it grows!)

There is nothing that a Buenos Aires cabbie hates worse than a passenger slamming their door while entering or exiting the vehicle. (I’m serious, they get super pissed.) Tom feels horrible when he inadvertently closes his door with hulk-like strength. And then, he gets to feel doubly bad when he can’t sufficiently apologize in Spanish!!

We’ve noticed that cab drivers seem to associate door slamming with Americans. We’ll often be on the receiving end of “Don’t slam the door,” from the taxista, followed by the question, “Are you from America?”

These types of conversations have led us to the realization that, OMG, we are gouache American passengers. Tom and I try not to be gouache American anything, so we are diligently working on implementing a kinder, gentler door close. (Perhaps this is a good reason to skip workouts!?!) I try to explain to our yellow-car conductors that we have kids and owned a minivan back in the States with very heavy doors…blah blah blah. Unfortunately, this explanation seems to lead them to believe that I’m really a wordy gouache American, so I’ve quit!

Anyway, all of this leads me to wonder, does every nationality have its own door closing technique? Can cab drivers roughly tell where your from by how you handle taxi etiquette?