Puerto Madero con los companeros de piso, The Argentina Independent, Pidgeon of the Night and Ah Dios Mio...The Wax Budda!

The calm before the storm. Perfect metaphor. With all the insane upheavals, crazy changes and loco happenings in the past two weeks, the weekend just gone was lovely and calm and I am starting to really feel at home here with Ale and Pablo, my lovely Argentine flatmates. On Sunday, it was their day off and so we all went for a lovely brisk walk down through San Telmo to Puerto Madero, which is the newest of the barrios in Buenos Aires. It is similar to the London Docklands in its modern architecture, but in true Buenos Aires fashion, this neighbourhood was no exception to the rule here that the barrios keep the best of their European counterparts and get rid of the crap. For example, as aforementioned, San Telmo is like Paris without the Parisians. Puerto Madero is like Canary Wharf but without the filthy bankers and stock brokers selling their souls to the capitalist machine.

Puerto Madero

Puerto Madero is built on fake land and the government has also created an ecological reserve, where you can see all these brightly coloured birds flying over the marshland, hunting for their prey. Puerto Madero is full of great restaurants and riverside apartments as this is where Buenos Aires greets the Rio de la Plata, which flows into the South Atlantic. Across the River Plate by about an hour is Colonia, a beautiful town in Uruguay, which I'd like to visit soon. Three hours across the river is the Uruguayan capital Montevideo, which is meant to be a brilliant trip to do - as some of you may be aware, after ninety days of being in Argentina, my tourist visa shall be  null and void and I will quickly drift into the status of illegal immigrant that many of you have coined for me over the years. This will be solved by a quick journey to Uruguay. I imagine it to be a similar journey to Calais, France. But Calais is in France. Obviously Montevideo is a lot cooler.

Yo en Puerto Madero

Anyway...more about Puerto Madero. Across the bridge and away from the port that takes you to Uruguay, there is a lovely green space and the expensive, chic cafes and restaurants fade into something more Argentine. Asado stalls with cumbia flowing from speakers along the boarders of the nature reserve. Asado is amazing. I love it. It's basically BBQ, but it does warrant its own name and shouldn't be translated as such because this is meat cooked in quantities far more massive and to a better standard than can ever be sampled in Britain. I mean, let's be honest, and the Notts people will know what I mean when I mention this, do you really enjoy that burger you eat outside Rock City at 3am? I remember one such incident with one of those burgers that caused a lovely young man to vomit.You need to be drunk to buy from those kind of places. And drunker to not know what you're eating to prevent the CHUNDER.
Here in Argentina though, food from the stalls is absolutely amazing. I had Choripan, which (obviously for the linguists) is Chorizo in bread (pan) and my housemates had these huge steak sandwiches. Que rico!

Pablo and Alejandra, My flatmates :) 

Trust me to spend so much time talking about food. Needless to say I am going to return to Britain in February as a ball of fat. But it's okay. Fat people are happier.

Sunday night, I met two of the girls on the internship, Rachael and Sarah. Rachael has just graduated from UCL in anthropology and has spent 6 weeks brushing up on her Spanish in Guatemala, which sounds absolutely amazing - she really has got some interesting stories to tell. Sarah also went to Nottingham so was instantly a winner in my books. She's got a very infectious sense of humour, studied English and graduated in 2008. Since graduation she has done some Journalistic training in London and travelled to South America and so her Spanish is pretty awesome. We consumed two bottles of red wine and got to know each other a bit better which was lovely until the waiter had to ask us to leave as they were closing the bar. I promise we aren't disruptive drunks. I pray that my boss hasn't stumbled across this blog....

The following day at midday, I started work! All the interns met outside the office on Calle Chile like a united force before braving the fear of meeting our boss. Before meeting Kristie (my boss) I met Roz, who is a lovely girl from Illinois who has moved to BA permanently to be with her boyfriend who is Argentine and Helen who studied Literature and International Relations at Sussex and is in BA getting some journalistic experience.

We all made our way upstairs to this amazing space which is the home of The Argentina Independent and met Kristie who immediately made us feel at home and introduced us to some members of the permanent team that we'll be working with. The office is amazing - think barn conversion in the space of a flat. It has these amazing stained glass windows and beautiful balconies that let in so much light. It's a great work space. Kristie told us a lot more about the paper and how it works and what we are going to be doing the next few weeks. Over the first week, we're going to be learning more about Argentine politics, including the Military Dictatorship from 1976-83, under which many leftist activists, trade unionists and students were disappeared by the government, the economic crisis of 2001-2, when the Argentine markets collapsed and more current politics such as the current president, Kirchner who is waging war with newspapers Clarin and La Nacion at the moment. It's all very interesting!
The second week, Kristie explained is going to be spent training us in writing styles, getting used to the style guide of the newspaper and learning how to research effectively for new stories. She also told us about the opportunities of travel that we have - the newspaper has a calender of all these different festivals and fiestas across South America that need reviewing. From Oktoberfests in Salta to Gypsy fiestas in Neuquen, there is alot to sink our teeth into. Also, Apparently the newspaper belongs to a network of radio stations that transmit local, first hand news reports to each other. The newspaper offers its translation services to the network for the ability to use the information that the network transmits for its own coverage. So, once a week, I'll be doing a lot of translation practice, which is absolutely perfect for me in terms of getting some Spanish practice.

Plaza Dorrego in San Telmo

After our first meeting, the other interns and I went to Plaza Dorrego for some lunch. And I was the only one who really ended up eating. Bad times. And the fat boy comes out. After eating, drinking, chatting, being attacked by a swarm of pidgeons, we agreed to meet later for some dinner.

Hannah and I went to meet Sarah and Rachael in Palermo and we ate in Plaza Serrano and then went onto have desert and a bottle of vino in this Mexican Restaurant. Much fun was had, including Sarah asking me to wait a second because she wanted to buy a wax budda. Alas the shop was closed. They sell some crazy crap out here.

Today I ventured to Calle Florida to go and buy myself a dictaphone for my interviews after Sarah and Rachael both swore by them. Note to self. Google translate is the devil. I know I have Spanish to degree level but I didn't know the word for dictaphone. I went with 'dictafono' after using google translate and thought linguistically that this made sense. But no. Want to know the word for dictaphone in Spanish? Grabador Periodista. Which translates loosely back to English as Journalist's recorder. I mean COME ON! Why say it in two words when you can say it one? Difficult Argentines.

 I am destined to fail. I feel that my first article will be about obviously the lack of shower caps in Buenos Aires as mentioned previously. The second will be on a gringo's failings of Argentine Spanish. Rivetting reading.

If any of you want to keep up with the paper, the website is http://www.argentinaindependent.com/

Bueno chicos, nos vemos!

xxx