micheleandtom.com

I admit that the blue-screen photo here is less than appetizing, but because the hue shows through the clear plastic containers, removing it would be too big a chore in Photoshop. (And this is the color of our dining room table!)

Laid out in all of its splendor in the pic to the left is a bife de lomo (tenderloin), grilled chicken, mashed potatoes (very buttery — not healthy but yummy) and an ensalada mixta (this is a salad with lettuce, tomato and onion). All of this was delivered to our door for approximately $16.50.

This food is the lifeline for our family while living in Buenos Aires for three reasons:

1. We can order this meal from one of a zillion neighborhood cafes at any time of the day or night. (Bottom line, we can eat at 6:00 pm and get the Zs to bed on time — a constant struggle, as you know.)
2. They will deliver it to our door in 20 to 30 minutes!
3. It is tasty and we all enjoy it.

We have learned that the key to a successful cafe food experience is to stick with the menu basics (those listed above) and don’t get fancy. That means we stay away from the three “p”s: pasta (often mushy and overdone with inconsistent sauces), pizza (usually an inch of cheese with no tomato sauce or veggies), or pork (can be overdone and dry).

If you stay with steak and potatoes in Argentina, it’s hard to go wrong.

First, I’d like to apologize to my parents for my Guinness Book of World Records phase. Good Lord, I must have been so irritating.

On our recent ill-fated trip to the bookstore, we purchased this edition of the Guinness Book of World Records and are already regretting it! We have had to institute a “3-record per day” sharing rule. In other words, Zoe and Zelda are only allowed to show us three items per day from this insidious book.

In the meantime, I have learned that the world’s youngest ringmaster was three years old (at least as of this 2007 edition). We have seen the world’s largest and smallest chess sets. We have had the pleasure of viewing the largest bucket of popcorn, the most accurate corner gun ever made (a gun that literally shoots around a corner), and the largest newspaper edition ever published.

“How do they find the world’s tallest person Mommy?” Sigh. “I don’t know, dear,” I reply.

There is a chain of English-language bookstores that we frequent here in Buenos Aires called KEL. (We normally only buy the Z’s books there because it’s really expensive and Tom and I peruse most of our reading material on the Kindle, which we continue to love.)

Since Zoe recently ran out of books to read, it was clearly time for a run, so off to KEL we went. (Today, it was homeschool in the taxi.) Imagine our surprise when we showed up at this normally sleepy shop only to be greeted by a mob scene. All of the shelves and books were cordoned off, there was a huge line, and they had implemented a see-customer-by-number system.

It seems that in February and March, when school starts back up after summer break, the KEL locations have a higher volume of customers. In response, they have devised a novel system for dealing with this uptick — they make ALL of their clients take a number. When a customer’s number is called, they must tell an employee which tome they want, and said employee retrieves the book for the client. NO SHOPPERS CAN BROWSE ANY BOOKS ON THEIR OWN.

Needless to say, this is a ridiculous system — the store is a mess and people wait forever to buy their one English dictionary that they seem perfectly capable of choosing on their own.

I tried explaining to the store clerk, who spoke great English, that we wanted to look through chapter books for the girls and that I didn’t have any specific titles in mind. She got really shirty with me, and her “solution” was to stand behind a shelf barrier and hand us every chapter book they had in Zoe and Zelda’s age range. (Which really struck me as a great use of her time.)

Of course, she brightened up considerably when she realized that we were going to buy a boat load of books. And, even though we were a royal pain in the ass from her perspective, she did throw in this hot book bag, modeled here by Zelda.

This ranked as one of my most ridiculous shopping trips ever! If we hadn’t needed the books so badly, I would have just waited until April.

In “The Glasses” episode, Jerry Seinfeld’s opening monologue is a perfect reflection of how I manage my sleeping schedule.

JERRY: I never get enough sleep. I stay up late at night, cause I’m Night Guy. Night Guy wants to stay up late. ‘What about getting up after five hours sleep?’, oh that’s Morning Guy’s problem. That’s not my problem, I’m Night Guy. I stay up as late as I want. So you get up in the morning, you’re ….., you’re exhausted, groggy, oooh I hate that Night Guy! See, Night Guy always screws Morning Guy. There’s nothing Morning Guy can do. The only thing Morning Guy can do is try and oversleep often enough so that Day Guy looses his job and Night Guy has no money to go out anymore.

Since we have implemented our new homeschooling/family togetherness plan, the only time Tom and I have to hit the gym together is in the dreaded morning. I usually feel like crap as my body is still waking up and my joints ache on the 20 minute walk to the Always Club.

Add on to that the fact that a) we’re trying to push ourselves with CrossFit workouts; b) I keep screwing my morning self by staying up too late; c) homeschooling is a lot of work to get together; d) it’s the dreaded tax time; e) it seems as if every one of the Zs’ classmates was born in February or March, so we’ve had a thousand birthday parties in just the first month of school…well, all of this means that WE’RE FREAKING TIRED!

Slowly but surely though, Morning Guy is trashing Night Guy’s body at the gym, and Night Guy is finding it easier and easier to go to bed early. There may be hope yet.

I believe we may have been the first family to trek on foot over open parkland to the gates of Club Alemán de Equitación (a private equestrian club in the city). At least, that’s what it seemed like by virtue of the look bestowed upon us from the guard attending the gated entry to the club!

We had come to inquire about family horseback riding lessons, but we learned from the guard that even though the club was open, administration went home at noon, so there was no one to talk to. Happily, one of the instructors happened to be driving through the gate as we turned to go, so she stopped and took our information and is going to call us early next week about costs and possible openings.

I suppose if we do sign up for lessons there, we shall have to get used to being “the family that arrives on foot or by cab” instead of the family that shows up in their own car.

Anyhow, since we were close to the hippodrome (horse racing track), and they were running races that day, we decided to pop in and see what was happening at the track after our visit to Club Alemán. Several torrential downpours and soaked Offermann/Reeves later, we managed to:

1. Determine that you can’t obtain coins from the slot machines at the casino located at the track. (Someone suggested we try it as a comment on the blog and you know us, we’ll check out anything that might prove an easy source of monedas.)
2. Be pleasantly surprised by the track and environs. A mix of beautiful old and new buildings that are well maintained and frequented by a wide variety of perfectly normal fans. (This would be a far cry from attending the races at… say…Portland Meadows, for instance, which is just sad and depressing, and a little creepy.)
3. Enjoy the banter between the jockeys and the crowd as they rode their horses out on the track during their warm up.
4. View a race while standing right on the rail at the finish line, which the girls loved.

La vida Argentina isn’t always easy for my oldest daughter, who loves sports and hates short shorts. Examples of the challenges she faces include the following:

1. At school, when she befriended her only American classmate, who happened to be a boy, everyone relentlessly teased them about being in love (this is in 3rd grade last year). In Zoe’s class, at least, the girls and boys do not intermix AT ALL socially — even at recess.
2. Common recess games for girls include one girl pretending to be a boy and the rest trying to catch her and kiss her. Another is to practice their “model walk.” Not surprisingly, Zoe does not find these sorts of activities very engaging.
3. In computer lab, the girls all try to play an online game where you have to kiss your boyfriend as many times as possible while your father’s head is turned, without getting caught. (Again, 3rd grade last year…my God it starts early.)
4. We visited the pediatrician (male) last Friday for the girls to complete their physicals so they may participate in PE at school. Zoe did a typical kid slouch at one point during the exam, which led the pediatrician to explain that the only way to cure her poor posture was to enroll Zoe in some sort of modeling class because “when women are around other women, their competitive instincts will kick in and they will throw their shoulders back and stand up straight.” (Yes, I found this solution rather offensive.) I decided to translate this little gem of advice for Zoe after our visit so that she wouldn’t freak out on the spot. (Of course, now I love to tell her that if she doesn’t stand up straight, I will have to enroll her in modeling class, post haste!)
5. Girls DO NOT play soccer here. It’s a bummer, because Zoe loves soccer. This holds true even at recess, where she can’t play fútbol because a) girls don’t do that; and, b) she would be relentlessly teased about being in love with all of the boys
6. There is little time for after school sports due to the school schedule, nor are sporting programs horribly common for girls.
7. She has to wear a pleated skirt to school and for sports. She has adapted, but boy she hated them at first! (She does look adorable though.)

I recently gave Zoe a whack on the head for suggesting that I offer up some of my precious coins to a cab driver. (The very idea.) Yes, that means that unfortunately, we continue to hoard monedas like crazy people with an obsession for shiny metal objects.

You’ll be happy to know that about a month ago, the government declared the coin crisis solved when the President mandated that an electronic card payment system be installed within 3 months for all Buenos Aires buses. Of course, in true bureaucratic style, the second she announced this initiative, the agencies in charge of implementation turned around and said it would take at least six months to complete!

Needless to say, we’re not holding our breath.

Photo by J. Used under a Creative Commons license.
(Some great high dynamic range photos of Argentina you should check out!)

Our Ian has just left the building on his way to the airport to undertake the long journey back to the Pacific Northwest. We will miss him terribly!

He has watched the girls (notice how that’s always first on any of my lists), helped us translate, introduced us to fabulous friends, taken us to La Bomba de Tiempo, taught us Spanish, ordered us tons of yummy home-delivered helado, driven me crazy (he is my younger brother, after all), hosted our only asado (with enough meat for a soccer team), made us laugh, washed dishes, introduced the girls to cool music, taught Zelda to jump Ian-style, taught Zoe how to surf, given us the skinny on good restaurants, and perhaps most importantly to our survival in Buenos Aires, introduced us to the Guia T.

As we were putting the girls to bed and they were sobbing over Ian’s departure, they said, “now we don’t have anyone to wrestle with.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Existing without a car and traveling by walking, colectivo (city bus), or cab is part of the fun of living in a city with more density than Portland, Oregon. Leaving the car behind allows us to experience Baires in a more visceral manner. (Truth be told, a little too visceral for some of the upper-middle class Porteño parents in the girls’ school who nearly fall over at the news that we take the city bus to transport our daughters to class!)

However, our love affair with the concept of ditching the car does wane when we are in the midst of a torrential downpour. It is nigh on impossible to hail a cab because everyone else has the same idea. Walking on the sidewalks involves picking your way through a minefield of splorting sidewalk tiles (it is incredibly disgusting when you get the gunk under the tile washing over your whole foot). And, standing on the street to catch your bus is a lesson in dodging puddles sprayed by speeding cars and buses.

Then, there are the rain-with-no-car wildcard issues that take the bloom off the rose a bit more. Today, those would be: 1) We have to get the girls to school in the rain in their cute, clean little uniforms that are not extreme-weather friendly; and, 2) We have to do a big grocery shop (probably in rain gear) on foot today so that we can make some bolognese for dinner!!

Oh yah, and our roof is still leaking in several places, but that is another story… .

A benefit of blogging about daily life is that when crappy things occur, I find myself thinking, at least this will make a good blog post. (Of course, best case scenario is when something crappy happens to Tom because I still get to write about it, but the pain is experienced by someone else!)

Anyhow, this weekend, I lost what seemed like all of my hair in a peluquería disaster. I went to a local salon (walk-in) that had stylists with short hair (important here because the vast majority of women in this country keep their hair very long) to finally get my curly mop styled with an interim cut as I continued to grow it out a bit. (I would say that my locks were falling somewhere between my ears and my shoulders at the time of my ill-fated salon appointment.)

Prior to my cut, I explained to my stylist that I wanted to restore a little shape and movement to my hair, while making it very clear that I was growing it out and desired to keep as much length as possible.

What ensued was a disaster. She cut about 6 to 7 inches off of the top layer of my hair (leaving roughly 2 to 3 inches, which shrinks to nothing when curly). She removed approximately 1 to 2 inches off of the bottom portion of my hair and then thinned out all of the rest in between these two layers. At the end, this debacle culminated in a blow dry that left me with a modern version of an Annette Funicello Beach Blanket Bingo helmet head with flip. (You must look at this picture of Annette here to really have a clear idea of what I endured.)

Hairtastrophe!

Poor Tom, who hates post-haircut fallout, was nervous about my remedy — removing the flip, and indeed the entire lower part of my haircut, with crappy scissors in our bathroom by myself without the benefit of a mirror to see the back of my hair. The result is pictured above. So, yes, I had to pay someone to give me a crappy cut, then go home and remove the rest of my hair myself, but hey, I got a f&*(#ing blog post out of it!

(Just to clarify, I love short hair and have had my own style much lower than this many times in the past…it’s just that I wasn’t planning on having most of my hair removed over the weekend! It’s funny though, I am constantly being reminded of all of the things I like about very short hair — less shampoo, less conditioner, bitchin’ styling products, versatility, easy to swim in, easy to work out with, roll out of bed and look okay, and it grows!)