EPTIf you choose to humor me and read the whole thing, as I hope you will, feel free to leave whatever criticism you want.
I took a weekend trip to Mendoza, a town on the western border of Argentina, a couple weeks ago to explore a little and watch a couple soccer matches.
After almost two months in Buenos Aires I was getting a little anxious. The many stereotypes of Argentines generally tend to apply more to the porteños than the rest, and contain varying amounts of truth. In my admittedly limited experience, the buonairense have proven to be at once assertively caring and tender as well as sometimes upsettingly apathetic and rude.
The people who I know and interact with often act as if they’ve known me since I was a pibe and have been correspondingly welcoming. Those who I don’t know, e.g. supermarket clerks, the women at the Laundromat, and most other people seem to instantly recognize me as a foreigner and apply the appropriate amount of disdain.
Here I’d like to clarify that, though I was born and raised in the states, my parents are Peruvian and I’m a native Spanish speaker. This doesn’t mean I’m completely accent-less, but it does mean I don’t sound like a gringo (or shankee, as they say here).
It isn’t as though this attitude is in anyway unique to Buenos Aires, obviously it’s characteristic of most major cities the world over. Still I have to say I’ve been affected by it, and sometimes feel guilty about the most insignificant things.
Trying to break a hundred peso bill almost becomes a moral dilemma when faced with the reality that no matter where you go the cashier will meet you with a glare. In the first couple weeks I ended up spending 20-30 more pesos on groceries just to make change and not feel like a pariah. Similarly, there’s paranoia when it comes to the supply of coins that leads to hoarding and inevitable shortage, making it impossible to ask for change without feeling like a beggar.
I suppose this is a sign of how accustomed I’ve become to the comfortable Midwestern way of life: too expectant of that traditional and ever-present, albeit often empty, courtesy.
So the trip to Mendoza was a welcome diversion, an opportunity to see the Argentine countryside and get an idea of life in the provinces. There are many ways to get to Mendoza from Buenos Aires, but I chose to take a bus. Flying would’ve been a couple hundred bucks more and, with the miasma of volcanic ash that’s been floating around cancelling flights for the last couple months, it wasn’t worth the risk.
By bus, it’s 15-16 hours to Mendoza, and the journey cuts across the middle of the country. Most of the area in between is agricultural, and looks about the same as farmland anywhere.
![[image loading]](http://a4.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc6/261487_1876144825436_1295670348_31665170_8263890_n.jpg)
I left at night, so it was hard to see much, but as the sun rose in the morning the horizon seemed infinite. The land extended for miles on either side of the road, and the bus was a dinghy lost in the sea of mixing winter shades of brown, yellow, grey and white with interspersed islands of green and enormous ombú trees.
It all blurred past for hours, and the length of the trip felt right, like it would be somehow cheating to skip it all for a two-hour flight.
Another thing that’s often lost in the sterile, climate-controlled cabins of airplanes is the interaction with other people. When you’re sitting next to someone for 15 hours it’s hard to avoid at least a little conversation.
The double-decker bus that took me to Mendoza had a two-seat wide column on either side of the aisle, and my row was empty. About an hour in, the man behind me got a call and started talking about the Peruvian national team’s lineup for the upcoming game against Mexico, detailing the substitutions and changes in formation that had been made. I had a ticket to go to that game, so after the man hung up, I started talking to him.
It turned out that he was a Peruvian journalist named Christian who had been living and working in Buenos Aires for the last few years and was going to Mendoza to cover the game. We talked about the team at first, and then about all the things that Peruvian expats miss about their home.
Now I’m not from Peru, I wasn’t born there and I’ve never lived there, but being the son of immigrants, I’ve gone every summer since I was a baby and I have a lot of fond childhood memories from there. We talked about the food, the people and the music, and ate together when the bus stopped for dinner.
I hadn’t taken my computer or a book for the trip, so my options as far as entertainment went consisted of watching pirated versions of Shutter Island and some Adam Sandler movie, or sleep. Opting for the latter, I woke up with the sunrise, and the Andes mountains in the distance…
Thanks for reading! :3
-Elgran
