Why is this happening?/The adventures of Focksie and Momma Accs

"We have been innundated with the idea that there's a way you're 'supposed' to do life. And it turns out that none of it is true."

-Carey Folbrecht

A long time ago, I mentioned a quote that was taped to the mirror of my room in Buenos Aires when I arrived. It said essentially, "Find a good travel companion before finding your route," and I can't think of a better moment to revisit it. I spent the past week on a trip to Mendoza, Argentina's wine country at the foot of the Andes, and Quintero, a small Chilean town outside of Valparaiso. When I drafted this post, I was in Mendoza, the second leg of the trip, with Carey, a close friend from my exchange program:

I had a moment of panic just now when I couldn't decide whether to return to the city a day early. Why that was even a consideration I'll explain later, but I'd like to begin by expressing my gratitude for the words of reassurance I received that confirmed the fortune on my mirror and one of my deeply help beliefs-that it is the people you spend time with that enrich your experiences and your life, so you should pick them wisely and hold onto them dearly-second only to my belief that we all end up alone and that's the only thing in this life that is constant. No one has ever talked me down so effectively from a state of distress: she was mature without being patronizing, she joked to extract me from my confusion, helped me help myself because I joked back. Thanks Momma Accs.

I want to start with the best parts, so here are some of the amazing things we did on our trip. After a long 24 hours of busing to the small Chilean town of Quintero (an acceptably long ride considering that we traversed the entire continent of South America), we arrived at our beach-side hostel, where we spent the next two nights. The evening of our arrival, we shared an immaculately prepared tradional Finnish meal (supervised by a native, executed by an Australian chef) with an ecclectic collection of international travelers. We slept deeply that night and woke up to a beautiful, misty morning, then had a fresh, simple but delicious breakfast that featured homemade apricot jam. That afternoon, we hitched a ride a few kilometers into town (a common and hostel-approved means of transport) and then returned to spend a few blissful hours on the beach. That evening, we went horseback riding with two other American girls studying abroad in Buenos Aires and coincidentally staying at our hostel.

Let me start by saying that we survived the ride and were not injured except for some sore legs. However, although the views were quite stunning, there were many terrifying moments when my horse would take off at a gallop unexpectedly. During slow-moving horse rides, I'm always secretly hoping my horse will pick up speed, but clinging onto my horse for dear life as we pounded over the sand dunes, I found myself longing for those tame rides. I finally noticed that my horse's sprints were provoked by the sudden movements of the other horses when we were on the last stretch of our ride, trotting along the beach at sunset, watching the stars emerge, the crests of the waves illuminated by moonlight and the fresh ocean air whipping our air about... and that night I had a dream that I was rescuing hostages on horseback (I was, at that point, a masterful rider), so overall it was an incredible experience.

Today in Mendoza we went on a full-day wine tour of our hostel's three favorite bodegas. At the second vineyard, we enjoyed a five-course meal, each dish paired with a different wine. It was a lovely day, but by the end, in the heat, with a sunburn from the beach still smarting and well on my way to San Juan, I was having great difficulty finishing the contents of my glass.

So we ended up heading home a day early for a number of reasons, but what pushed me to make the decision was only having one more pair of clean underwear and not enough cash to do laundry. In addition, we were still stuffering from the not negligible discomfort of our sunburns (I've learned my lesson!), which ruled out a number of activities, such as bikeriding and paragliding, which might involve painful friction against sensitive skin.

In many ways it was the typical travel experience: we met a lot of fellow travelers with far more ambitious journies planned than ours and saw a lot of beautiful things. I also experienced the typical travel ailments that seem drastic at the time, but are really just the result of not being careful with your body. I think I had the delusion that traveling grants you immortality, when really you are even more vulnerable to the things you'd typically be careful about. Altitude sickness, sun sickness, bug bites, nosebleeds, naseau, pure exhaustion and anxiety-just little (and sometimes big) annoyances that served to disillusion me of my misconceptions about my own immunities. It was good that I was with a friend who could both take care of me and make fun of my body's debility afterwards, because we always had to keep our spirits up for the next challenge.

Thanksgiving

This post was intended for publication several weeks ago! Please excuse the delay.

Thanksgiving in Buenos Aires was a success! Last Sunday me and my host family had about 14 guests over, including neighbors, friends, and lovers, to celebrate Thanksgiving Argentine-style. Getting everything together was a huge task, but luckily I had a lot of help with the logistical challenges. The biggest task was transporting a 12 kilogram frozen turkey across the city (not to mention actually finding a place that sold full sized turkeys) and finding a place to cook it. The oven in my house was not only too small to fit the enormous bird, but is designed to cook pizzas and empanadas at high, difficult to regulate temperatures. My host family recommended I ask panaderias in our neighborhood if they could cook our turkey and, after several apparent dead ends and frantic e-mails to my spanish professor/neighbor asking to use his oven, a long-established panaderia agreed to cook and season the turkey, and even to save the juices on the side so that we could use them for gravy.

The dinner was definitely a group effort. I was in charge of the turkey and the mashed potatoes, while other guests brought drinks, cornbread, vegetable side dishes and dessert. My host dad helped to carve and serve the turkey, as well as advise me during the mashed potatoe making process. Our guests that showed up early helped transport extra chairs and tables to the terrace from our neighbor's house. We were missing the cranberries (I searched everywhere!) and pies, but the food we did have turned our great and everyone ate until it hurt, so I felt that the American tradition translated quite well.

Jujuy, Rally, Colonia, Asado

Hermanita

It's strange how good news can make you feel sad. Maybe it's because the things that just suck on a normal day seem that much more devastating in juxtaposition. Or because the news confirms that life will go on gloriously without you, even though your heart will be in this place long after you've physically gone.

So here's the good news: Veronica is pregnant again! (Update: Potential baby names include Ema, Antonia, Margarita and Sara) The family told me over dinner on Monday night, and although I'd suspected she might be because of brief comments made during earlier conversations, it's much different when the news is directed at you. And I was a little speechless. But I managed a few "Felicidades" for lack of a translation for "You guys must be so excited!" before I excused myself from the table and collapsed onto the floor of my room and cried.

It seems like I write a lot about crying here. I don't think I cry more than most people, but it happens at such significant moments that I feel like I have to document them. Plus, I barely watch TV here, so it's not like I can expend this crying energy during touching commercials or episodes of Sex and the City. This particular session I think could be aptly compared to the kind of crying you'd do if you were single and reaching an advanced age, and your pretty, well-adjusted friend announced that she was getting married. Of course you'd want to be happy for her, and you tell her of course you'll be her maid of honor, and all the while you're tearing up a little, at first from excitement, but then you realize that excitement is tainted with jealously, and you end up making some excuse to leave immediately before she sees you've become completely panicked.

Well that would be an extreme example.

Also I was listening to Owl City, and I don't even need to explain how crooning pre-teen electronic pop can just cut right through you . Anway, there I am on the floor, my face against the wood, and I could pretty much borrow the passage from Romance Crushed (not my title, btw!) pertaining to animal noises and uncontrollable sobs, except instead of "beautiful, simple thoughts" I was making just one desperate plea over and over: No. It was running through my head, and sometimes slipped out of my mouth in that sad whispered choking tone that's all you can muster when you're upset. And the image in my head was of me, in an identical position and equally broken down, but at the airport, heading home, and leaving this country behind where I feel like I've finally learned to inhabit my body.

But why am I talking about this, really? And why am I actually proud to be sharing this with my online audience? It's because (and excuse my self-righteousness here) change, especially personal change, is really painful, and every time I break down I feel like I'm making space for a slightly broader worldview. Even if it's just accepting that in six months, the trio of wonderful people I've learned to call family will welcome a fourth (But I'm the fourth, insists the finally actualized big sister inside me), at which point a new exchange student will be living in my room. Maybe she'll be wondering, as I did, why a family with such young children would want to host an exchange student, and become frustrated after being woken night after night by the baby's crying. Or maybe she'll be more patient than I was.

It's not the end. But it's exam time and classes are finishing up, and in a few more weeks I'll have only one class remaing: my sociology class at UBA that finally resumed two weeks ago, which has been extended until December 16 and is cutting very unpleasantly into my vacation time. I'm planning for one last adventure though, and all the while my excitement is fused with my dread of saying goodbye, but I remind myself that first I have to make it through tomorrow, which promises to be just as exhausting as today, and more and more it keeps occuring to me, that time is not on my side.

The whole story

I, like many people, am always trying to justify my feelings. If I am stressed, I try to find the root of it. All too often, I attribute my stress to something superficial or circumstantial, looking for the quick-fix instead of seeing my stress as the symptom of a broader problem. More than a month ago I considered changing host families. I felt that I was a burden to them, and I wasn't sure I could stand one more morning of being roused out of my sleep by the shrieks of a two-year-old. And they were actually parenting me; like, did I really need a second family to tell me to clean my room, to set the table, to clean my dishes, to wake up on time, to dry the water that leaks onto the bathroom floor tile after I shower, to keep it down when I come home late at night? Plus, this family doesn't actually have to love me like my real parents do. So I thought I'd just avoid the problem all together and find someone completely negligent who would at least leave me alone.

You can probably see that my logic was backwards all along, but I needed my program coordinator to talk some sense into me before I could see my error. "My family is driving me crazy," I told her, "and I'm thinking of moving out." "Okay Marie, we can certainly help you find new accomodations, but in my experience the student's living situation is the first thing that comes under attack when there's a bigger problem under the surface." And that's when I started crying, so I knew she had touched on something true. Switching families seemed like the immediate solution, but as my coordinator explained later in our session, I would expect the new arrangement to fix all my problems, and then be even more devastated when my familiar adjustment issues came surging back. The act of wrongly attributing my unhappiness to my host family caused the distance between us to grow, but overcoming it was certainly more rewarding than finding a new familiy. And now that I'm here emotionally and physically, I couldn't imagine being with anyone else.

My question now is, what do you do when the feelings and their respective causes are changing and confused? When the distinction between your life and your experiences, and the events of the nation and the people around you is increasingly blurred. Argentina lost a much loved ex-president on Wednesday morning, October 27, the same day as the national census that takes place once every ten years. Everyone was already at home, waiting to be counted, when the news broke and their phones started ringing. By Wednesday night thousands of people had gathered at the Plaza de Mayo, and by Thursday evening more than 25 city blocks of people (in addition to the thousands of people who had already passed through) waited to pay their respects to the body of Nestor Kirchner in La Casa Rosada.

Throughout Thursday, Christina Kirchner, Argentina's current president and the late Nestor's wife, remained by the casket as the multitudes passed through. Many Argentinians were crying or shouting, some gave impassioned speeches in their few moments close to the casket, and others threw their fists into the air or blew kisses to Christina, sending her strength. During the live TV coverage of Thursday's procession, an announcer commented that the women on the scene seemed particularly affected, he imagined, because they were putting themselves in Christina's place. The huge turnout of youth at the La Casa Rosada was also remarked upon, promising a future of (continued) political activism. This morning, the funeral caravan will have to inch it's way through the tightly packed crowds lining the streets between La Casa Rosada and the airport, where the ex-president's body will be taken to Rio Gallegos, near his birthplace. Both an homage to a political figure who represented the popular classes and led the country to economic recovery after the crisis of 2001; and a testament to the obligatory voting system that demands some level of political involvement, the massive amount of Argentines present to pay their respects to the ex-president is incredible to witness.

The death of the ex-president completed the trio: two older family members and the former president of Argentina. So when I passed a group of people gathered around an accident on Wednesday afternoon-a motorbike overturned, a few cars on the sidewalk, medics trying to revive a man lying still on the street-what might have been an anonymous tragedy on any other day felt like a sure sign the world was coming to an end. Deaths can't come in fours. Or maybe that's only the rule for celebrities, but it's like when the universe knows you've detected a pattern in the way it operates, it upturns everything just so you remember that it's in control.

What an odd time for my parents to be visiting. They're getting a powerful glimpse of Argentinian culture, but far from home and out of touch at a critical time for our family. "The one good thing about us being here," said my dad after receiving sad news from the states, "is that we're together." Which is the scariest thing when I consider the future of my own life, on a small scale, and on a much larger scale, that of Christina and Argentina. And how you can be expected to continue representing yourself in the truest way possible when you are apart from the people that make you whole.

Or if that was unclear

I'm dating Wolverine. Also... I know you've all been desperately waiting for a new post. So much so you've resorted to checking OTHER people's blogs who are also in Buenos Aires, which I just can't abide by. Unfortunately (but also thankfully), there's not too much to report from this hemisphere. After a long, but ultimately rewarding, adjustment period, I'm actually starting to see myself here permanently, so it's crazy to think that I'm nearly half way through the "academic" semester. Although academic is a generous term for describing the university system here, considering that only now am I starting to think about catching up with my readings. In addition, certain departments of the University of Buenos Aires are in the midst of a student takeover (related to the poor condition of many university buildings), so I've been over a month without my Sociology of Culture class.

I've been observing in a minimalistic sense most of the recent Jewish holidays and seeking out cafes in which to pass hours ordering pastries to make doing homework a little more glamorous. I've been checking things off my Buenos Aires to-do list, like exploring the Chinatown area of Belgrano (although I have an external motivation for going there as well), seeing Fuerza Bruta, this wild and creative acrobatics/dance company, visiting the Japanese Garden, the Botanical Gardens, and the Palermo Zoo, eating good pizza and hot chocolate and churros and taking advantage of the fact that I can drink legally here by ordering fancy delicious drinks (and even beer, which it turns out I love!). Well, I'm rambling, but these past few weeks have been beautifully indulgent.

Now I'm finally buckling down since all my work is catching up with me. My studiousness may be shortlived, though, since we have a program trip to Jujuy this weekend, which I hear is amazing, and it's feeling more like spring every day in Buenos Aires. I know it's been a long time since my last post, but I'm going to try to be more dilligent about keeping current in the coming weeks. Thanks for following and my thoughts are never far from home.

Lol this pretty much sums it up