Another day, another dollar! So most of this week it’s been a lot of me working. I really have only been exploring certain neighborhoods.  Im doing mostly, you know, simple things. I’ve actually been taking my time to walk around the neighborhoods, notice as much as I can, and admire some of the great and cool street art around Palermo after work, and also see a few different things in the neighborhood that I’m staying at.

I’ve left Belgrano, now I’m staying in another neighborhood, and it’s a really cool loft. It’s near, it’s on Juan B Justo, but it’s not, it’s not considered palermo.  It’s also  not Belgrano, and it’s not, I forgot what the name of this neighborhood is, but anywho, the subte day has been really good in terms of getting around and connecting the different neighborhoods, so that’s kind of what I’ve been depending on.  It’s just really cool to be able to navigate my way around this city as like, as a local, really. I feel that when you are new to a city or new to a place, it’s hard for you to be able to navigate sometimes, and when you live in a city like Buenos Aires, with a reasonable amount of people—or any city, it’s really important that you have some sort of navigational method or way for you to get around that isn’t just driving. 

Not everybody is going to be driving, or comfortable driving, or even want to be driving. So many of these cities and these places, they are packed with people, and when you have so many people in a space, it becomes a little bit harder for you to navigate, for you to be able to get easily from one place to another. Sometimes traffic in Buenos Aires is like that, and having the subte—which I’m telling you—it relieves the traffic.  In the morning, when I’m commuting, it makes a difference because then I can get to work at an reasonable time.

But one thing that I saw that is so interesting,  it’s sort of also innocuous, is that here, the garbage collection is different. The way that the buildings are designed, the living is different. When you’re in America, you see a lot of specifically designed for living together, or it’s designed that way, because they obviously didn’t have the cities before. They had to design these cities kind of up from what they saw in Europe as pitfalls, and they wanted to do better. That’s why New York City is in this grid design. But what I’m saying is that here in Buenos Aires, it’s really interesting because when you’re in a building, you use a califacion because you don’t have hot water, or sometimes even gas itself isn’t mandated to come to the building, or it’s not like a public service like how we have in New York City. 

So it’s something that you have to pay attention to. One of these things is the garbage collection. When you’re taking out your garbage, you take it outside your house, and you put it in these receptacles that are specially made, and then these big trucks come along because some of these streets, they’re designed like very narrow. 

So these big trucks come along, and when these big trucks come along, right on the side of it, they have a way for them to pick up these large trash things, and it picks it up using one mechanism from the middle, and then it comes up, it pulls it up. I wish I had taken a video of this because it was just so cool just to see this kind of… It seems like antiquated technology to me because I’m like, is it compacting the trash? I don’t know what it’s doing. I’m actually not sure what it’s doing, but it’s a cool contraption. 

So it takes a thing from the middle, and then the bucket comes up, and it opens out like a little… It’s a construction thing, but it’s just cool to see that in where you have these different streets, and they didn’t have these… I guess they didn’t have these big pneumatic machines. They opted for a different option in trash collection, and even organizing garbage collection in that way. But it’s cool. 

It’s cool just observing these things, seeing them, and seeing the differences from places like America that I’ve lived for a while. And then even in Jamaica, there’s no garbage collection that is centralized everywhere. It’s really only in, I think, the parishes that are more… They’re more compact. In Montego Bay, there is a garbage truck that you come, and they’ll collect it. But if you’re out in the country like how we live, there’s no garbage truck that comes around here. Ain’t nobody coming around here to collect nothing. You rake up your trash, pull it up in a pile, and you burn it. You good. So that’s that.

When it comes to some of the cool kind of street art stuff that I’ve seen here in Palermo, and just across the neighborhoods, they’ve been pretty cool. I’ve actually enjoyed some of the art installations and things that I’ve seen in Buenos Aires, because I think that there’s a lot of underground artsy things going on here. It is definitely cool to see some of these things where it’s not in my native language, but I kind of understand and vibe with it because it’s still a creative sort of thing. It’s still about your art and putting art out there, being able to express yourself in a different way and in a different language. It doesn’t really matter if it’s a different languages. 

There was so much cool stuff that I saw at the art museum when I went there, and it didn’t matter that I didn’t… Well, a lot of those things weren’t also in English, but it didn’t matter if all of them, I wasn’t able to read or understand all of what they were trying to communicate, but the art itself spoke to me, and I really enjoyed my time there. And I would definitely suggest it for the people that come to Buenos Aires to go to these art museums, MOMA, the Museum of Modern Art here, and the Naval Museum was also really good, other museums. It’s just really cool and seeing the street art. 

And in Palermo, there’s also a lot of art exhibits. There’s art style right where I live. And right where I live, there’s a little Mecca area there that there’s also a lot of artsy things going on in that little square by Juan B. Justo. 

But that’s really it. Oh, one last thing. How did I forget? So last time I was talking about sharing all of the different things with them and I had made fried chicken. So this week, I really couldn’t come up with something and it was hard for me to figure out what would be like something that’s an interesting taste. And I still really didn’t come up with anything good, but I found some plantains. 

They don’t really make plantains here in Argentina, or if they do, maybe just not in this area, because none of them really resonated when I said plantain. And I know that they’ve seen the plantains because we went to this little restaurant right where it’s by this really artsy street, and they make the plantain a sandwich there. So they know plantain, but the way that I fried it and the way that it was not a more, it wasn’t like the green plantain they were accustomed to.

I think that’s what they were used to. They see it as green plantain. You can fry like that. 

But what I did was  special way. I took like a plantain that was already turning. And what I did was I fried it, and then I crushed it just like the same way you’d crush the green plantain. 

I then fried it again. So it gets like this crispness to it, but it’s also very close to being sweet or turned or ripe really.   I sprinkled a little bit of salt on it.

spanish lessions
plantain in office
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So it gets a sweet and salty flavor. So I gave them a little special taste in the plantain. Hopefully they liked it. Well, they did like it. I’m not sure if they loved it. Glenda was probably the one that was most interested because she loves plantains and she is from Ecuador. So she’s more used to eating that kind of food versus everybody else in the office. But it was good to share that with them, that little moment, because that’s like my favorite way of making plantain and plantains are also something that I could nearly eat every day. Um, so it was really cool and that’s it. 

That’s all I, uh, that’s kind of what I did for the week. So signing off. We’ll see how next week goes.

-Tall Black Nomad

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