Friday, July 22, 2011

I feel like I have a lot to write but nothing to say.

Maybe it's the other way around. In a lot of ways, I've settled into life here- so much so that it's tough to believe I've only been here for two weeks. Yesterday I explained to an old man which subways lines he needed to take to get where he was going; I've come a long way from riding the wrong train in the wrong direction.

Still, the more I am able to get by in Buenos Aires the further I realize I am away from actually being an Argentine. The city is big and fast and cold. It is hard to connect with people. My best friends are from my language class and are all over thirty years old. The ten year difference between us feels much smaller than the gap between us as foreigners and everybody else.

I have green eyes and brown hair. Here they say I am blond with blue eyes. When I walk through busy streets Columbians with dreadlocks hassle me in broken English and ask if I want to buy drugs.

I've been trying to open up and simply embrace the fact that I am a foreigner but it is hard and I am often embarrassed. Last week, when I was walking down the street I called a friend from home and spoke (quietly) in English. A man walked past me a couple steps before screaming "go the fuck back to America." Nice, huh? A day later, I had ice cream with my cousin and a couple of her friends. The obese one, while eating a 1/4 kilo sized serving of dulce de leche, told me that he could never live in America because he would get fat. I wanted to hit him.

Thankfully however, there are two sides to everything. Yesterday I was walking through a market on Calle Peru where people sell everything from jewelry to pirated movies to junk they literally picked out of the garbage. I saw a couple of vendors playing chess surrounded by a group of seven or eight more of them watching. I stood by a tree and watched them play for a while. I'm pretty good at chess but they were better. They also played very, very quickly. Towards the end of the game, one of the men from the group watching the game asked if I wanted to play. He had long hair, huge sunglasses, and bad teeth. I told him thanks, but I was okay.

He insisted, saying it was only fifteen pesos to play. Really, I told him, I'm okay. The game that was going on ended and the winner, a man in his mid to late thirties with a pierced eyebrow, told me that his friend was just kidding and that if I actually wanted to play it was free. After a long time, I said yes.

I sat down on one of the egg crates they used for stools and looked at the board: sixty-four black and white squares painted on a piece of cardboard cut to be almost square. The men watching were laughing and saying things to my opponent I couldn't understand. When I put my foot through the straps of my backpack under the table so it didn't dissapear, I tried to do so without them noticing. I was very nervous and set up my pieces wrong: putting the King and Queen on the wrong squares. The men laughed again.

I introduced myself to my opponent and he said his name was Marion. The piercing looked like it must have hurt. He was blowing into his hands and drinking something from a styrofoam cup. I told him I was going to lose and when I made my first move I couldn't tell if my hand was shaking from nerves or the cold.

I played very, very well, and eventually won. He asked for a rematch. The group of men weren't laughing anymore- they were interested, and more had come over to watch. I asked what the name of the pieces were in Castellano and they taught me. I checked that my backpack was still there. It was. Then I won again. After that they put me against the man with long hair and sunglasses. I couldn't understand his name when he mumbled it through his rotted teeth. He was much better than me, but I did my best to put up a fight. After, they told me they play there every day and I can come back any time.

I think I will.