Blah teaching English blah blah

So, I just got home from teaching English for 11 hours straight without breaks. Which seems a bit illegal, but.. Come to think of it, everything about my employment here is under the table, so whatever. I'm alternately so sick of thinking about/talking about teaching English but then it is kind of the majority of my life here - all of my friends are either English teachers or students. And it has such lovely moments. Like today, I had a new student who is a total beginner, doesn't know how to say hello or how are you, who I was kind of dreading, but then he turned out to be totally sweet and adorable AND, has one of the most amazingly hilarious situations that I have ever heard - after about an hour of struggling through English we took a break and switched to Spanish so we could get to know each other and chat. He showed me a picture of his beautiful wife and three gorgeous daughters and told me that they are all English teachers. Except the youngest, who is fifteen, but she speaks English fluently. I guess they like to chat in English when they want to leave him out of the conversation! He is also very well-traveled, so I can't imagine how he's managed to escape English for so long.
Anyway, after that class I had a student who makes Jude Law look like Quasimodo, who I kind of try to behave normally around but get distracted by his gorgeous green eyes while he's doing the TOEFL speaking section. He's the student who I had a running joke about with the director of my institute, because he has been my student for weeks and weeks and had never brought up his girlfriend - which doesn't sound strange, but if you are studying for the TOEFL, you pretty much have to discuss every aspect of your life with the teacher, and he is a family friend of the director so we knew he had a girlfriend. I like to think it was because he was flirting with me, but who knows. He finally did mention his girlfriend, last week, in the sentence, "My girlfriend's dad is the president of Banco Nacional." Guess I can't really compete with Señorita moneybags, le sigh.
And speaking of my institute, it's totally become like a little home to me, which is really lucky and really rare for English teachers in BA. Most never meet another teacher at their institute and one girl I know picks up her salary from the institute's director once a month on a designated street corner. Safe and classy. But my institute is like a fun, cozy little clique of girls and women. There is hilarious Lili, the recepcionist, who jokes (?) about loving much younger men and recently called one of the students "feo pero, feo feo!" Pobrecito.
There's always celebrity gossip on the computer, various chocolate and candy, and someone to giggle with when the hot students come and go. "Bonbones!" as Lili would say.
There are things I love, and don't want to leave. But then, I kind of remember that I am getting paid so little that it feels more like volunteer work than a real job. Saving money is not an option. It's too bad that that that matters so much, but it does. C'est la vie of being an English teacher.

P.s. (unrelated) Sorry, this is like some horrible stream of consciousness creative writing assignment, but I'm exhausted and ranting. So here's some more: I've been kind of playing the 'naive foreigner' card with this whole political situation, because I don't want to offend anyone that I talk to, but I'm over it. Not that anyone in the United States will know what the heck I'm talking about, BUT - in my opinion, Julio Cobos saved this country's ass, for the meantime at least. If that tax law had passed, there would have been a total crisis. A disaster. I'm sick of seeing all these Pro-Kirchnerista posters about how he's a traitor and "real democracy" would have been to blindly do what his party told him to. Are they serious? The Argentine girl I live with is Kirchnerista and was telling me that it is the president's right to do what she wants and it should be that way, and that the farmers make a ridiculous amount of money. Well. I kind of just said, claro, claro, and smiled when we were talking, because I don't want mala onda, but! I so completely disagree with that. The whole point of a federalist system is that the executive branch doesn't have all the power and can't just act on its own, unchecked. And well, maybe the farmers make a ton of money, but shouldn't the taxes be distributed by income and not by industry then?

Okey. Ya basta. Besoooos...

Politics Shmolitics

Can you totally hear the duran duran when you look at this photo? Yes, it's adorable Barack Obama and his high school basketball team. Although, he's way not as cute as John Edwards. Le sigh.
But I digress. I just read one of the most heinous & silly articles ever - Obama: First Female President? by Martin Linsky, who apparently is a faculty member at Harvard. Which just went down a few points in my opinion.
What does Mr. Linsky say?
That Hillary is acting the masculine role because she portrays herself as an "experienced realist," while Barack is not afraid to show the (feminine?) characteristics of optimism, being unsure of himself and admitting his mistakes, and wanting to talk about problems.
Whatever, read the article, see what you think. But let me say that I am a women's studies major, and we don't like people who obviously know nothing about gender trying to gloss over such a complicated topic.
A quick google search found that cutie pie John Edwards was also called The First Woman President in the NY Sun. Because he cares about freedom of choice.
I guess it's a cute tagline for these scholars & journalists, but seriously? It's ignorant and offensive in sooo many ways.

So, blah blah blah, enough politics.

Still bored & looking for an online timesuck? Read this, oh and in case you were wondering, I'm a Hillary girl. And not just cuz we have the same birthday.

Money Money Money

First, go to Los Alfajores' Myspace and listen to Money is Stupid while you're reading this.
Second, if you're reading this from Argentina, you already know all about it and probably don't want to be reminded.*

For everyone else - all of a sudden it seems like all I talk/think/worry about is money. It's really damn expensive to live in Buenos Aires, especially when you are paying rent prices designed (with love from our landlords) especially for us foreigners. Who in theory have loads of dollars/euros/pounds in the bank. Well, not those of us who teach English. Anyway...

The point is, I'm so sick of talking and thinking about money all the time, but it keeps coming up. Today I had a break between classes and went to go lie on the grass in lovely Plaza San Martín in Retiro. I decided to buy a magazine on the way. Well, I ended up buying Vogue Latinoamérica, but not because I was being good and trying to practice my Spanish reading skills. I bought it because English Vogue was... drumroll please... 69 pesos (over $20 USD.) (The Vogue I bought was 10 pesos.) Well, some economists may measure how the economy is going based on staples like milk, bread, and eggs, but I'm judging based on Vogue. When I was here in March of last year, I bought Vogue in English for 15 pesos. Which brings us to...

Inflation.
The government says the inflation rate is something like 8 to 10%. My highly scientific research that is based on actually living in Buenos Aires and functioning as a person here, buying groceries, etc., tells me that this official inflation rate is total bullshit. The actual inflation rate is supposedly closer to 20%.

In certain parts of Buenos Aires, the parts that are all most tourists ever see, it's easy to forget where you are. With the stylish, cultured, well-educated people, European architecture and avenues, overt leisure (people sitting in cafes all day, rush hour around 10 am in the morning), etc., etc., you forget about the recent and not-so-recent history of instability and lack of stable economic infrastructure, the sense that crises are always just around the corner. But as my students remind me all the time, this is Argentina. There's still a lot of fallout from the 2001 crash and the horrible damage that Menem did to the country.

I don't know that much about it so I'll shut up at this point, but it's enough to say that I am having a hard time keeping my head above water financially. It's not like my life is about to turn into a Dorothea Lange photo shoot, but it's not easy. And if it's hard for me, with this being my cute little 'escaping the USA idealistic twenty-something expat' social experiment, having lived here for all of 5 months, what must it be like for the real residents of the city?

*The picture on the left was not taken by me - I don't have that much money! It also isn't the current Argentine currency.

Damn Yanquis

I debated about whether or not to deface our precious blog with a picture of smirky, evil to the core Dick Cheney, but in the end I decided this post just wouldn't be the same without a visual of Dubya's #2 man. Yeah, pretty hot.

So anyway, yesterday Cheney made the following remark while addressing the World Affairs Council in Dallas. The subject of his speech was Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.

"The people of Peru, I think, deserve better in their leadership, but that's obviously a matter they've got to resolve themselves."

Well. I'll just let that sink in. I don't think I need to explain all the different levels of horrifying contained in the comment. I guess Dick (or whoever briefed him for the speech) should have wikipedia'd Hugo Chavez beforehand, or I don't know, read the newspaper at some point in the last 10 or 15 years.


En serio, ya basta. If you'd like to witness this moment for yourself, check out the Youtube video below. I think we can safely say that Dick Cheney is not cut out for FOX's Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?

Politics & Sushi...

Are not really related. But before delving into the subject of Argentine politics, I wanna give a quick shout-out to the fabulous sushi we had last night at Moshimoshi (Ortega y Gasset & Soldado de la Independencia.)

We started with some delicious cocteles... mine included a list of ingredients that sounded totally dubious in combination - sake, green tea, apple juice, honey, and mint - but it was amazing. The sushi itself was fantastic, fresh, and creative (langostina tempura roll coated with cornflakes) and even the old Bs As standby, the Philadelphia roll, was exceptional. The restaurant itself was well-styled, both modern and warm, with a fashionable and groomed clientele that reminded me of my UCLA days and nights out in Beverly Hills. AND, the waitress actually asked us - on two separate occasions - if we were enjoying our food, an almost unheard of occurence here in Bs As.
As a sidenote, that is actually something I love about restaurants here, you can enjoy your food and chat without constant interruptions from a waiter/waitress asking if you're ready to order before you've even opened the menu, asking to take away your plate if you set down your fork for just a minute... But I digress.

The real point of this post was meant to be the presidential election tomorrow in Argentina. I really don't know enough about the politics behind each candidate to comment (the last time I tried to discuss the election with a friend from Argentina, it went something like this: "So who are you voting for on Sunday?" "I don't know, probably I won't go." "Really? What about Cristina?" "Uyy, it makes me sick, let's change the subject.")
So I'll stick to what I do know: how they look. The forerunner here is the current first lady, Cristina Kirchner (and by forerunner, I mean that by all accounts she already has it in the bag.)



The first thing you notice about Cristina is - well, the copious amount of mascara she wears. Does she not have a team of handlers and stylists to say, "Che, Cristina, take it easy on the mascara"? But, en serio, I think it is very cool that in Argentina female politicians are allowed to look feminine and even sexy, and not forced into the obligatory Janet Reno haircuts and bland powersuits of the women of Capitol Hill.
Although, as a feminista, I have to wonder: Is it just two sides of the same coin?
There's a lot more to be said on that topic... I find myself wondering how we can casually discuss the machismo in South American cultures like it has nothing to do with us, while we are the ones who devote entire articles in serious newspapers to Hillary Clinton's cleavage.
But I'll save that tangent for my master's thesis, or something.

Here's a final thought on politics, courtesy of an anonymous Buenos Aires street artist: