veranito

It’s suddenly warm out! It was just winter last week and now it’s crazy hot and sweaty outside. I think I have seasonal whiplash. I was inside, doors closed, heat on, wearing several sweaters just a few days ago and now it’s shorts weather, I’ve got all the windows open and I’ve even been trying to go out and work on the terrace in the afternoons. The jasmine vines out there are blooming like mad and the smell is intoxicating. A friend told us that there’s a name for this early hot weather, it comes every year and it’s called “El Veranito de San Juan.” It’s like “Indian Summer” but the opposite. After El Veranito de San Juan, there’ll be crazy rain storms on or about August 30th (“Tormentas de Santa Rosa“) and then it’ll get cold again before it becomes spring/summer for real.

Anyway, the beautiful weather is making me feel SO HAPPY and excited about life and a bit manic! I’m also a little stressed with a lot of work, but I took the morning off on Saturday to get chores done and do fun springy stuff. Woke up at 8:00 am!! on a Saturday! and we hopped on our bikes and rode to Chacarita, where we stopped at our new favorite bakery and got some crusty bread plus some amazing almond croissants and pain-au-chocolat. Next stop, El Galpon, where we drank a cup of coffee and a big glass of orange-raspberry juice on the front bench, basking in the warm and glorious sunshine… then headed inside to stock up on farm-fresh veggies, cheese, eggs, smoked ham, etc! Laden down with beautiful produce, we raced back home and dropped off the groceries, picked up the dogs and took them over to the vet for bathing (yes, our vet washes dogs!) … then headed over to Av. Santa Fe to search for some kind of improvised compost container. We’ve been wanting to do composting on our terrace for ever, but we’ve never had a good container. Now that it’s warm out, we’ve bought a few plants and we’re starting to trick out our garden for the coming summer! We settled on a big blue plastic laundry hamper which is kind of ugly but it was the cheapest thing we could think of. I hope it’ll work! Came back home, picked up the soft, clean dogs and spent a few happy hours on the terrace planting stuff! We now have tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, peppers, rosemary, thyme, lavender, cilantro, and some lovely flowers underway in our container garden.

We drank mint iced tea and listened to stories and songs from Townes Van Zandt while planting and digging around in the dirt. Dogs rolled in dirt to get all the “clean” off. Ate some tasty snacks and sandwiches with our plunder from the farmer’s market. Good times.

winter at home

it’s cold here! while all my northern-hemisphere friends are hooting and hollering about their sweaty carefree summers, we’re bundled up in sweaters, hovering over the gas heater and staying indoors, snuggling with the pups to keep warm. we did a ton of traveling during the summer and fall, and now we’ve used up all of our vacation time and travel budget so we’ll be at home for the rest of the year, and right now it feels nice to be at home, nesting and working in the studio and knitting up a storm. I’m trying to knit a blanket to keep me warm on the couch, hopefully I might even finish it before summer comes! aside from knitting and watching tons of movies, these are fun things we’ve been up to recently:

• using my handsome new red silicone(!) mini-muffin tins to bake cupcakes and muffins. apple-carrot-chocolate chip muffins were the best so far.

• discovered a cute place called La Castorera right around the corner from our house (thank you Dirk for bringing us there), it’s an upstairs space with a nice old-time vibe in the bar and they have bands and music and project movies on Wednesdays, I hope we’ll be back there again soon.

• started yoga classes. they’re small classes with a nice teacher named Ines who lives in our neighborhood. we use a lot of equipment: pillows and nylon straps and wood blocks and stuff. in that aspect it’s different from any other yoga classes I’ve taken before, but we also did lots of normal yoga stuff. seems great so far, I love being in a small class and getting more personal instruction.

• had a fun dinner with Annie & Matt and friends at a cute and very informal “closed-door restaurant” in Almagro called “Donde Me Trajiste” (where have you brought me?). The food was really not exciting but the whole experience is fun, it’s like being invited to dinner at a friend’s house, the hosts serve you dinner in their own home. It’s a pretty, historic PH house with a bit of a hippie onda, and they perform live music for you while you eat. The “house band” did some fun tango music and later a solo artist played some traditional Argentine folklorico music. Also they served us a delicious mystery cocktail which had pear and basil in it, appropriately called “Que le pusiste?” (what did you put in it?) because they wouldn’t reveal what else was in it.

• had a great bike-riding Saturday, rode over to Chacarita and bought tons of fresh veggies & super awesome cheeses at the organic farmer’s market El Galpon and then took a break at home, warmed up and did a bit of knitting, then biked over to MALBA, the modern art museum, and looked at the art. Mike had never been to MALBA before! they had a good exhibit of Argentine art from the 1990′s, I liked a lot of the work although it did seem weird (given the title of the show) that most of the pieces I liked were made in 2003-2008. Had submarinos (hot milk with a bar of chocolate: you drop the chocolate in and mix it up until it turns into hot chocolate) and pain-au-chocolat and a game of cards in the museum cafe. Perplexingly, a museum guard knocked on the glass wall and scolded us for playing cards in the museum cafe! wtf? we ignored him and kept playing until our submarinos were gone and biked back home, then cooked a delicious pot of hot & sour soup with our farmers-market veggies.

• knitting and more knitting. i made this hat for a craft swap, and now i am working on a slightly-more-subdued version of this blanket (using solid-colored blocks rather than striped blocks, if that makes any sense). I’ll upload a picture soon.

• I’ve been making some new designs for wedding invitations. I’ve gotten lots of inquiries about custom work for weddings, but I find that mostly people like to “shop” from a variety of available options, rather than inventing something totally new from scratch. So I’m putting together a repertoire of wedding invitations, I’ll keep adding more as I have time.

• starting a new website/blog to post pattern and textile designs. This is still in the idea phase, and it’s a collaborative project with my friend Julia. the idea is we’ll both post pattern/textile designs, sketches, etc. For years I’ve been wanting to assemble/develop a real portfolio of textile and repeat designs so hopefully this will be an incentive to start pulling them together and developing more work in this vein. I’ll post a link as soon as we have something to share!

the strange and the familiar

Milanesa
Originally uploaded by elizajanecurtis

En Argentina, hay algunas cosas diferente de los Estados Unidos. It’s pretty comfortable for a North American here. Aside from the language thing, Buenos Aires isn’t very different from living in the US. I think that the Argentinians have a slightly different relationship with their country’s institutional corruption. So far the most apparent evidence of this is the postal service. I haven’t received any mail yet, though my mom says she’s mailed me 3 envelopes. Anecdotally, everyone I’ve met has a story about mail that has been opened, pilfered, stolen, lost, held for ransom at the central post office (until the recipient bribes a postal worker to release it), or just disappeared. Aside from the corruption issue, I think this is a symptom of the local economy and the incredibly steep import tariffs on everything.
On the other side, Mike gets health insurance from his job and I GET TO BE ON HIS PLAN TOO! I haven’t tried to use it yet, but it is allegedly some of the best health insurance / health care in the world. I can’t wait to get sick so I can try it out!
Other things that are strange to me:
-MATE. This tastes like creosote and makes me have to poop, but I keep trying it anyway, because I like the accoutrements. It seems like a really appealing local custom.
-FRESH-SQUEEZED ORANGE JUICE. US$1. everywhere. holy awesome.
-GRAPEFRUIT-FLAVOR EVERYTHING. from soda to gatorade to chewing gum, I like it!
-ICE CREAM. It’s pretty different. It’s stickier and meltier and creamier and has SO MUCH flavoring it makes your lips pucker and sometimes obscures the delicious creaminess. Usually a cone comes with at least 2 different flavors and a bowl comes with at least 3. My favorite so far is Dulce de Leche with Brownie Chunks.
-DULCE DE LECHE. Argentinians are not afraid of sticky, gooey sweetness. Usually I’m not either, but I’m startled by the ubiquity of this caramelly stuff. You can get Oreos with Dulce de Leche filling or Dulce de Leche flavored schnapps. Any dessert in any restaurant is guaranteed to come with at least one ginormous mouthful of this gloopy sweetness, either displayed proudly on top (with powdered sugar too!) or hidden deep inside to get you when you don’t expect it.
-SWEETNESS. aside from the dulce de leche, things here tend to be sweet. such as sushi and sashimi with some kind of sweet glaze? I like lunas con jamon y queso, a ham & cheese croissant with sweet glaze. But sometimes already-sweet desserts are served with crunchy granulated sugar on top. I read about a syrup-drenched Thai dinner that tasted like dessert. And pastries! they are SWEET! i think that’s the way pastries should be. maybe not sushi though.
-ARTIFICIAL SWEETNESS. WTF?! this is hard for me to avoid since I am not familiar with the brands and words to avoid. They will put Sucralose in practically EVERYTHING, from soda to yogurt to fruitcake. blech!!!!
-NO SPICINESS!!! they don’t do it here. bring your own hot sauce.
-MANTECOL. It’s like halvah, but with peanuts instead of sesame seeds. I have considered trying to make a sandwich out of this, because they do not have peanut butter here.
-WINE. MMMMMMMM good.
-JACARANDA BLOSSOMS. every park is full of huge bright purple trees! pretty. they scatter their leaves all over the ground and it’s so cute when Emmy frolics in the fields of purple.
-DOGS. I had no idea there was a place in the world where everyone has a dog! They’re very well-behaved. They sleep under tables at sidewalk cafes and wander the sidewalks without leashes and sniff each others butts with cool detachment. Everyone is quite used to dogs here. It’s nice to take the dogs for a walk without getting undeserved dirty (or terrified) glares from dog-phobic bypassers. There is at least one veterinarian on every block here! You can’t spit without hitting a shop that sells dog food, dog toys, and dog beds. There’s also this crazy dog-walking scene, where one guy will be trotting down the street holding 40 leashes with 40 dogs trotting along beside him. On the down side, there’s dog poo *everywhere* so watch your step.
-TANGO. I don’t know anything about Tango, but they love it here! They say that every tango song is about some kind of heartbreak, whether it’s horse-racing or ladies. Last night we went to see this “rockstar” tango orchestra in a converted warehouse, with a dozen hairy hipsters playing raucous violin, accordion, bass, piano, etc. I loved it. They sounded like the Dirty Three but even more dramatic and bombastic. People were dancing and they looked like they were floating on air and spinning around without even trying. I had originally thought of Tango as an old-people thing, but it was super fun to see this youth-culture-Tango scene. Also, I realized how much I love accordion music. The more accordions, the better.
-THUNDERSTORMS. The best way to wrap up a 98 degree day is with a hair-raising, apocalyptic thunderstorm. It’s very tropical. I have never seen such awesome and terrifying storms with so much lightning, thunder and torrential rain. they last for hours and hours and really scare the dogs.
-KEYS. they all look cool. see picture.
-DESIGN. this is an incredibly beautiful city. architecturally, there’s lots of old French style, and fantastic art-nouveau, and lots of very 70′s-looking white geometric high-rise towers with varying degrees of kitschy style. Palermo Soho is full of little design shops, lots of young, start-up designers selling hand-sewn goods ranging from incredibly cute to sophisticated. More on this later, I won’t go into it all now.
-MULLETS. ladies here are looking good, and they have almost as many “sho-lo” haircuts as in Barcelona. I can’t wait for my hair to grow out so I can get one too.
-SEXISM. the international language of leering is easy to understand and hard to avoid. I’ve heard nasty stories from other women here but it hasn’t got under my skin yet. I think the common attitude is that a man’s desire is a compliment to a woman, and she ought to enjoy it whether she likes it or not.
-BLACK-FACE PASTRIES. holy crap. this is a very white city, and they don’t have the same kind of racial history or taboos as the USA. hence, cookies in EVERY BAKERY decorated like 1920′s-era black-face caricatures complete with fat pink lips and bulgy white eyeballs. Also, I have seen the same motif painted in the logo of the “Harlem” bakeshop and delicatessen.
I hear that it is not easy to be black here.

I can’t comment too much yet about porteños and their habits, because I’m still conversing with the locals at a nursery-school level. Pretty much everyone has been incredibly nice to me considering my handicap. Some people speak a lot of English, but for the most part you need some Spanish to get around here. I’ve talked most with taxi drivers, who are consistently kind and patient and chatty and willing to endure 20-minute conversations in level-one Spanish!