Exploring Palermo

So I know I promised I'd post about what the work has been like lately, but first I thought I'd post some pictures I've taken on my favorite walk around Buenos Aires. A few weeks ago I went for one of my need-to-clear-my-head-and-get-outside-for-a-while walks, and ended up finding an amazing route to explore. (As my Facebook friends might remember, I figured out the walk was more than 10 miles - it took almost four hours!) I liked the walk so much that I've made it a permanent route, and I walk it pretty regularly now. It's the perfect combination of exercise (I'm also swimming a lot at a pool close to my apartment, but I still can't run because of my injured knee), a break from the stress, and a way to get out and explore the city. I love being in a part of the city where I can get out and explore parks, lakes, interesting neighborhoods, and whatever else I come across, without the chaos of living downtown.

There's not enough room to post many of the pictures from my exploits in Palermo, but here are some of the highlights of my walk:

These two pictures are of the Islamic Cultural Center of Argentina, which is one of my favorite spots in the city. I still haven't taken a tour of the inside, but I'm definitely planning to when I find time.

This is a really cool building that's part of an athletic club (the clubs tend to be really big here). This photo doesn't really do the building justice, but it's a really interesting color, and the architecture is pretty cool.

Here you can see both a bridge the commuter train goes over, in the foreground, and a pedestrian bridge in the background. The pedestrian bridge connects the two parts of a massive park in the northern part of Palermo, the place I've been exploring the most on my walks.

This is a tiny section of an absolutely massive complex that's used as a water purification plant. When I first saw it I thought it had to be some kind of major tourist attraction, like a museum or something, because the architecture is incredible. Alas, there's actually a practical use for it (ha).

An incredible weekend

After some due prodding from Nick, here I am again, finally. I apologize for another epic delay in posting, dear readers! Once again there's so much to write about it's hard to know where to start. Here’s the game plan: I'll catch you all up on the work side of things next time around, but for now I’ll write about my latest greatest Argentine adventure. Here goes.

Last weekend was a four-day weekend, because Tuesday (May 25) was the celebration of the bicentennial of the May Revolution of 1810, when the inhabitants of what would become Argentina rebelled against the Spanish colonial government. In some ways Argentina's May Revolution could be compared to the U.S.'s Battles of Lexington and Concord - both were the beginning of long wars for independence from European colonial rule.

Because of the long weekend, my friend Patricio (who I've posted about before - and who I met through Anna, the British TA I’ve been working with) invited me, Anna, and his Argentine friend Lucila to his family's farm in the countryside, 500 kilometers west of Buenos Aires. The farm is where Patricio grew up, until he and most of his family – his mom, younger sister, and one of his younger brothers – moved to Buenos Aires so that Patricio could go to college and still be with the family. Patricio’s dad and other younger brother still live on (and run) the farm year-round, whereas the rest of the family lives in BA during the school year, and goes back to the countryside during school vacations and long weekends, so that the family is all together.

So on Friday afternoon Patricio, Anna, Lucila, and I piled into one car, with Patri’s mom, dad, sister and brother in another, and we all retreated from the chaos of metropolitan Buenos Aires, passing through the massive plains to the west of the city. The family’s farm is literally in the Middle of Nowhere, Argentina: not only is it a six hours’ drive from Buenos Aires, it’s also about 40 minutes from the nearest town. To get to that town from the farmhouse, first you have to drive three kilometers on the farm, just to get to the road – yes, their driveway is 3 kilometers long. Then you drive about 20 kilometers on a dirt road, and another 15 or so on a small highway. The farm itself is 250 hectares, I think, so about 1 square mile. In other words, it’s absolutely massive. Since Patricio’s dad is getting older (he’s in his early 60s, I believe), the farm is mostly run by his 20-year-old brother and one farmhand, who lives in a cabin on the farm. (I assume they also have seasonal workers for the summer harvest.) The family owns about 15 horses, dozens of cattle, a slew of sheep, and an adorable tamed calf named Berta, who’s basically the family dog. Besides the animals, they also grow crops in the fields and have orchards where they grow all kinds of fruit, which Patricio’s mom uses to make (and sell) homemade jams.

Speaking of Patricio’s mom - her name is Marianne - you can’t imagine how much she spoiled us (and her own family, by the way) over the course of the weekend. We had both lunch and dinner with the entire family every day, and for the most part Marianne made typical Argentine meals – a real treat for Anna and me. At the same time, Patricio’s dad’s side of the family is very English by heritage – the house is basically an early 1900’s English farmhouse, built by the family several generations ago – so one of the family’s most important traditions is having a daily, English-style afternoon tea around 5:00 or 6:00 p.m. (Dinner in Argentina is usually eaten between 9:00 and 10:00 p.m., just like in Spain, so a late-afternoon snack is typical for most Argentines anyway – but it has a distinctly English feel in Patri’s family.) Marianne makes a mean pot of tea for everyone share, but that’s only the beginning: we also had homemade loaves of bread, homemade jams from the farm, and even homemade dulce de leche (milk jam), a really common (and delicious) dessert in Argentina that’s somewhere between frosting and the caramel you find on a caramel apple. Un-be-lie-va-ble. I probably gained about 45 pounds over the course of the weekend...but I’m okay with that.

Besides stuffing ourselves with Argentine food and sweets, we also went horseback riding Saturday, Sunday and Monday; herded the cattle on horseback; climbed to the top of a windmill on the farm; milked the cows; fed Berta, whose closest thing to a mom is Patri’s brother Andrés; walked through the massive fields; climbed trees; drank mate (pronounced mah-tay), an Argentine tea you drink from a communal mug; watched the sun set over a lake out on the farm; sat by the fire at night, reading or watching movies with the family; looked at the stars, without the slightest hint of interference from city lights; and basked in the general amazingness of the weekend.

Needless to say, by the end of the weekend the last thing I wanted to do was leave the countryside and come back to the chaos of the city. But I decided that there would only be one chance to see the celebrations of Argentina’s bicentennial. And because Patri and his family were staying in the countryside until Tuesday night, on Monday night I took an overnight bus back to Buenos Aires on my own. I arrived in BA at 6:00 Tuesday morning, slept until about noon, and headed downtown to see the celebrations. I wandered around on my own for a while, checking out the exhibits that filled Plaza San Martín, the main plaza downtown. To showcase the diversity of natural wonders, human demographics, and typical foods and customs you find throughout the different parts of Argentina, each of the 23 provinces had its own exhibit to show off its own unique culture.

After wandering around for a while, I met up with Andrea, Romina, and Santi, three friends I know through work (Andrea and Romina are professor’s assistants at the institute I’m working at) and who I’ve been spending a lot of time with. (I go out to dinner with them regularly, and a few weeks ago the four of us went to a massive zoo about an hour outside of Buenos Aires.) We were planning to watch the massive parade together on Tuesday night, but downtown was so chaotic and packed with people - some estimates said there were as many as three million people sprawled throughout the city center watching the parade – that we decided to retreat from the center, get dinner in a quieter area, and watch the parade on TV. It was sad to miss seeing the parade in person, but it was so crowded downtown that we actually saw more of it on TV than most people saw in person. It was also worth it not to get trampled by the crowds – or get stuck downtown for hours, since the subways were absolutely mobbed afterwards. Despite missing the parade, it was definitely worth coming back from the countryside early to be around for the celebrations. Happy 200th, Argentina.

It was an incredible weekend.

Here's a taste of the weekend in the countryside:

I'm second from the right, next to Patricio.

Watching the sun set over the lake.

Anna, Patricio, Lucila, and me.

Education, education, education

It's been a while! The last couple of weeks have gone well. At work I've been doing tons of presentations and class discussions on education in the United States. I've become completely accustomed to visiting a new class prepared to talk about Martin Luther King, or home life and types of housing in the U.S., or any other topic the professors ask me to prepare - and spending the entire class talking about education. Every student I'll have here is a future (or current) teacher, so they're fascinated to learn anything and everything about how education works in another culture. On the one hand I get a lot of questions about my own educational background, about the system of public vs. private vs. charter schools, and about what it takes to get certified as a teacher in the U.S. But I've also gotten to talk quite a bit about my experience (substitute) teaching in Holyoke and Springfield - which I find much more interesting than my own comfortable suburban education and background. Without fail, at the slightest mention of the fact that I worked at an alternative behavioral school in Holyoke, I'm bombarded with questions about the school, the students, how special ed and behavior management programs work, and so on. It's been an infallible spark to an interesting class discussion, and I've learned a lot from my students about special ed and integration programs here in Buenos Aires.

I've also learned a lot about teaching and education here in general. Most English teachers here don't have a stable, full-time position at one specific school, like language teachers do in the U.S. The majority of English teachers work at at least two schools - sometimes more - and many teach at schools during the day, and then give private classes at night. One of the professors at the institute I'm working at told me the English teachers have a running joke: they call themselves "taxi teachers," because they often have to hurry off to teach at another school as soon as their morning or afternoon classes are over. So the schedule isn't regular, like an 8:00 to 3:00 teaching job in the U.S., and some teachers can have 10- or 12-hour work days a couple times a week. Anyone with teaching experience knows that by the end of a six- or seven-hour work day, teachers are normally drained, both mentally and physically. Imagine having to hurry off to your next teaching job, and staying there until 8:00 or 9:00 p.m. This is a whole other level of "overworked and underpaid."

How underpaid? I couldn't really tell you what an "average" teaching salary is here, but I can say that in most cases, I made more money working as an uncertified, non-contract substitute teacher in Holyoke than most teachers make working at two schools here. Factors like the cost of living complicate a simple comparison, but still, overworked and underpaid rings true without a doubt.

Another interesting difference is that most of the students at my teacher-training college are already teaching, before having graduated. Public colleges and universities are free here - something that's unheard of in the U.S. but common in several countries in Western Europe (France, Scotland, Denmark, and others). Still, the phenomenon of studying full-time without working more than 10 hours a week (as in the U.S.) is extremely uncommon here; students have to find substantial work to pay for their living expenses while in college. So a lot of the students at teacher-training colleges are already teaching, but need to complete their degrees to become certified/qualified to continue. I have a friend who's a third-year student at my institute: his name is Ignacio, and in addition to his studies, he works at no less than three schools, teaching English to kids anywhere from 7 to 14 years old. Pretty incredible, if you ask me.

This coming week should be another interesting one for discussing education. On Monday I'm visiting a course whose professor assigned his class a short article about education (especially higher education) in the U.S. It's entitled, subtly enough, "Learning to be Stupid in the Culture of Cash." Here are a couple of the highlights: the author writes about the "impotence of American education to produce brains equipped with the bare necessities for democratic survival: analyzing and asking questions." Fair enough - but she loses me at "Let me put it succinctly: I don't think serious education is possible in America." A little overstated? Nah, couldn't be. In any case, I'm glad the professor assigned the article, because it will make for a really interesting discussion.

I'll post again soon about what else I've been up to, besides living and breathing education. I hope everyone is doing well back home. Happy May!