Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Interlude 18: The one I wish I didn´t have to write

Unfortunately, this one could have been called Crash, part 2. In that article, I spoke about driving in general but in particular one exact intersection - and now it´s happened again (see below).                                                                                                    

Actually, I also spoke about a crash that happened outside my house - and mysteriously two sets of traffic lights appeared the following week. However, in this instance, they didn't put traffic lights in - and it resulted in a police car speeding along (without sirens, I was told by the witnesses) and smashing into another car, flipping it over and again sending it careering towards the coffee shop (who, having got their whole glass entrance smashed last time, must be getting pretty angry!).


The same intersection, at the same time of day, exactly one month after the last one. Apart from this time, people were seriously injured. I think its getting a bit stupid now...


Friday, February 22, 2013

Interlude 17: The Quick Fix

Wednesday was (again) a feriado - so i decided to take advantage and go for a round of golf with some people i met playing last time. We met at 8.30 in the morning and drove another half hour to a country club, which was beautiful - the golf course was actually almost part of peoples houses, with many holes right next to peoples front gardens and swimming pools etc.

Anyway, I wont bore you with actually golf stuff - but I will go on a side point. One of the guys who was playing with us was much older - 70, say. He told me he'd been captain of the Buenos Aires golf club for 25 years back in the day, and at the start he seemed like a friendly old man. However, when we got to the course, he seemed to turn a bit...sour. When we were warming up, he starting cracking some (unfunny) jokes/snide comments and started giving me tips on how to change my technique - pretty much the last thing you want before you start a match, right??

Well, anyway, it put my right off my game and I had a terrible first hole. For some reason there was a long walk from hole 1 to hole 2, and during that time I was getting a lot of evils, as if to say 'why did we bring this young guy with us, he doesn't know what hes doing!'

So we eventually started the second hole and i thought, well, it cant go much worse than the first - I'm going to try and take his tips on board.

Rarely in life can you ever find a quick fix for anything. Normally, you need to wear it in, try out the best way of doing it and see what works for you before you can internalise something. That's why, for example, you could read and read a football textbook (if such a mythical thing existed - 'that was a textbook finish' - where is this textbook!?) until you are as well versed in technique as the professionals, but its practice, not knowledge, that makes perfect. That said - his tips made it like a whole new game, a miracle fix - i ended up playing under my handicap even though i had a +5 from the first hole (for non golfers, its a good thing...).

Interested onlooker...
Anyways, he ended up lightening up - so I couldn't decide whether he was a grumpy old man, or my new life guru. So if i see him again, he´s my grumpy old guru.


Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Interlude 16: Rosario

Well, you know the end of the story - but i wouldn't want to take the gloss off what was a great extended weekend. Rosario is the third biggest city in Argentina in terms of population, and, umm, it has a nice monument to the Argentinian flag. Oh, and che guevara and lionel messi were born there.

It is quite nice though, promise! At the end of the day, its not common to find a city in the middle of a country with an abundance of beaches, right!

When we got to Rosario, the sun was shining, the hostel (was more like a guest house, and for a charity as well) was fantastic - and so we went the beach. The beaches in question are on the shores of a large river probably made, in fairness, with artificial sand. Either way, the sun was still shining when we got there but not for long, as we were hit by a flash mega storm in which we all ended up huddled underneath the parasol with everything getting soaking wet and chairs even being picked up by the strong winds. Not the best way to spend your once a year double bank holiday, as we went home and stayed in until the evening.
'ah its fine, it probably wont rain...'
In the evening we went into town, and after driving around for ages on a wild goose chase for a kosher place (we eventually found a tiny place at the back of some random supermarket) - and went to the most renowned Rosario site, the monument to the Argentinian flag and the accompaying museum. If you happen to be in Rosario, its worth going to!
                                               


Next day, we got up early to go to the beach again. By we, I mean the boys. A couple of hours later, the girls were ready (...) and we got a boat over the river to the 'nicest' beach. Apart from we got on the wrong boat and ended up at...a...welll...OK, it wasn't the nicest beach. In fact, there were plenty of squatters and tents everywhere, the only building in sight was long closed down with all the windows smashed in and there were stray dogs everywhere. Girls immediately freaked out and we got the boat back. Eventually we arrived at the right place:
Ahhhhh

Anyway, so after having spent the day in the sun and playing barefoot football with some locals, we headed home at 4.30 just in time for a cosy dinner and a good nights sleep. Right?
                                     
                                       

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Interlude 15: The Fire

where to start, where to start....OK, lets start at the end.

We were on the way back from our double-bank-holiday trip to Rosario (I'll go over the trip itself another time) - and we had left the beach at 4.30pm to get back to the car. The sat nav said it was about a 4 hour journey including a stop, so we were planning to get back and have some dinner at about 8.30, no problem. Yeah, right...

So about 3 hours into the journey we hit traffic all of a sudden. It was seriously slow, and we were crawling about 10 metres a minute. I'm pretty sure I move more than that when I'm asleep, but anyway - my friends football match started on the radio...and eventually ended, with us having moved about 2.6 inches. After the match we were bored and also conscious of the petrol gauge so we decided to get out and do what the people in front of us were doing - turning off the engine and pushing the car a little bit every couple of minutes, all whilst playing cards on the roof of the car. In the middle of the motorway, obviously.

A whole FOUR hours later, we'd moved 4 kilometres - a distance you normally travel in about 2 minutes - when we decided to casually hop across the dual carriageway to the petrol station on the other side. Once we´d bought supplies, made use of the toilets and taken a stroll along with hundreds of others, we went back to the car only to find everything now at a complete standstill because the police had now not only blocked off the motorway but also the exit.

Why? Because there had been a protest (probably against the government, just like everything else). What sort of protest? Well, they had put down a row of tyres on both sides - and set them on fire.


it was too dark to get a good picture, but it looked like this...
                           

Whilst you may think the image of the night sky (and the motorway itself) being lit up by never ending flames is insane (and it is)- when you think about it, how hard is it for some firemen to come, put out the fire and push the tyres to the side? Apparently very hard in Argentina, because it seems you need some sort of decree from the President to disperse the protest - which wasn't forthcoming, presumably because she was also making use of the bank holiday. I guess the protesters knew what they were doing...

Eventually, at 4.30am, they opened up the exit to allow cars to take their chances driving through the nearby 'villa' (a poor neighbourhood where there had been reports of stone throwing earlier, which eventually caused the police to close the motorway exit). So, we took our chances down the dark country lanes, and despite our satnav constantly warning us to turn around (so useless sometimes...) we managed to get home at 6am, over 13 (sometimes very tense) hours after we first set off. Not bad for a 3 hour journey, right?


Update: I have been told now that the reason for the protest was that the lights/power had gone out in a nearby 'villa' and that they took to the streets to make the government do something about it, and that THAT was the authorization they needed. 
In other news, there was a football match between (I think) Lanus and Colon which ended on that monday evening, and seeing as Colon are based in Rosario where we had just come from, their fans also got stuck on the highway. If you go back a couple of months to the football match article, you will remember that all teams here have a section of hooligan fans, the ones who are always fighting etc - so when they got to the roadblock, they got out their cars, beat the **** out of the protesters and drove through the tyres!!

p.s. if you were involved in the fire and happen to be reading this, you are an absolute son of a bitch!

Thursday, February 7, 2013

Episode 21: funny phrases


Over the course of the last five months, hidden away in long emails or chat messages with people at work are some golden phrases that just sound funny in another language. Obviously, idioms such as these don't translate very well - think the blank look on a foreigners face if you try and translate something like 'too many cooks spoil the broth' literally - but for now, they should pick up your day.

Phrase one: no busques la 5ta pata al gato/no busques el pelo al huevo:
translation: don't look for the 5th paw of the cat/don't look for the hair on the egg.
what it means: don't try too hard
what I thought it meant: egg on your face! but no...

Phrase two: no le llega agua al tanque:
translation: water doesnt get to their tank.
what is means: they're thick.
what i thought it meant: water...doesn't...get...what? you want a glass of water? A new boiler perhaps?



Phrase three, my personal favorite: (see picture)            
Translation:
"What do we want?"
"Get rid of the iphone autocorrect!"
"When do we want it?"
                                     NOTE: the spanish word for NOW = ahora.
"ahorca!" hung
"ahorro" save
"aborda" approaches
"albora" dawn
"su puta madre" argh son of a bitch...

Foto

Monday, February 4, 2013

Interlude 14: Daylight Robbery

Knowing me, you probably think I´m talking about high priced rip offs with a title like that. Well, not this time:

Whenever people talk about the insecurity here, it always sort of had a smack of 'big city crime' about it. For example, i would hear stories of muggings, or pick pockets. Obviously, these things are pretty bad - but they are also widespread throughout every city in the world. So why is it that a major talking point here is the 'inseguridad', which is clearly so bad that it is right up there with socioeconomic woes and corruption? I really didn't think I'd ever find out, until i was given a small taste of it on the way home from work last Friday.

There I was, standing at a (crowded) bus stop in one of the nicer parts of town, listening to some music whilst messing around on whats app on my phone. Suddenly, some ****** comes zooming from behind on his bike, and grabs my phone out my hand and zooms off again. Only problem for him was he underestimated the iPhone´s grip on its headphones, which although were torn from the socket, retrospectively seem the reason why it flew up in the air before smashing the glass back all over the floor.

By the time I'd taken stock of what had just happened, and let off every Spanish swearword i knew at him, he was long gone on his bike. To their credit, the rest of the people at the bus stop came over to help and let me know how much of a bastard he was etc - its just that, weirdly, none of them seemed that surprised. 'well, that's just the country' said one. 'you´re Argentinian now' said another. I should also add (perhaps in my defense) that because he was riding against the flow of traffic and therefore approached from behind, he couldn't have even seen what I was holding (i.e. that it was an iPhone 5 as opposed to something else)

That's pretty scary - we're talking about a crowded bus stop at 5.30 in the afternoon sunshine. Such a shame - not only for my phone (which, admittedly, still works) but more for my opinion of this country. I was beginning to quite like it, but its just gone down slightly in my estimation...