Humo por las calles (Smoke in the streets)

Well, I logged into CNN.com yesterday and discovered that this was one of the "Top Stories" worldwide, so you may have already heard, but the name Buenos Aires, or "good winds'', doesn't really apply to this city right now.

This past week, some farmers in the provinces of Buenos Aires and Entre Rios decided to set fire to their fields, allegedly to clear the fields of weeds, etc, before planting again. The fires got out of control and have now continued to burn for over 4 days, and Buenos Aires is completely overrun with smoke, to the extent that many people put on masks or cover their faces with scarves while walking in the streets. It's caused traffic accidents because it's difficult to see on the highways outside of the city, and a lot of the routes have been shut down because of it. Also, all flights going into the regional airport are being redirected.

The picture included here was taken a few days ago, and the smoke has only gotten worse. It's of 9 de Julio, which is the biggest avenue in the city (I think possibly in the world, as well). In the center of the avenue is the Obelisco, possibly the most well-known monument of Buenos Aires. When I was at 9 de Julio yesterday, the Obelisco was hardly visible.

Anyway, they're saying that the winds are going to change soon and blow the smoke out of the city, but chances are it's going to stay like this for a few days more. Another reason that I'm writing is because there is a lot of speculation (nothing official) that the farmers who set the fires let them get out of control on purpose, in connection to what I wrote about in the post below.

Political Post!

Really the prime time for this post would have been a few weeks ago when all of this was getting started and was really intense and affected my life the most. BUT I was concentrating on the Mendoza/Santiago post then, as well as on working out my schedule and acclimating to all of my classes, etc, so we're going to do it now, instead. Besides, from what I hear, any news of what's been going on down here hasn't hit the waves in the States until recently, so as far as that's concerned, I guess this is actually somewhat timely.

I took a weekend trip to Montevideo in Uruguay a couple weeks ago - as a result of this, I was not only out of the city, but out of the country when things started getting kind of hot and tense in the city. Apparently there were tons of protests right away (Monday and Tuesday, the 24th and 25th of March), but they had been pretty much confined to Plaza de Mayo so far, so there wasn't so much going on in my part of the city. Then on Wednesday, my economics professor brought it up vaguely in class, which was the first time that I had heard anything about it - he didn't say much except that because soy was currently very valuable on the world market, in order to generate more revenue for the government the President (Cristina Kirchner) had raised the export tax on soy. He said that people were angry because in his opinion, what she was doing was taking money from a sector of the population that had earned it and redistributing it as she pleased. For someone who isn't from Argentina and isn't very familiar with the politics, etc, this wasn't enough to get a really good idea of what was happening - especially because before he had said something, I wasn't aware that there was anything going on at all.

After hanging out with my friend Shannon for most of the afternoon, in early evening we ended up in a cafe to have some ice cream. As we were sitting and talking, we eventually noticed that the noise level outside the cafe (we were only maybe a block away from where I live), was steadily rising, until the sound of car horns was constant and impossible to ignore. When we left the cafe and I started walking back to my apartment, people were literally pouring out of the buildings of the area holding things like pots, pans and tea kettles and banging on them rhythmically with forks and spoons. The noise from the car horns were in support of these people on the sidewalks.

I got back to my apartment in time for dinner with my host family. Generally, I'm not a fan of the host family situation - Latin American culture is very big on family, so there seems to always be some function where the entire extended family convenes on the house for lunch/dinner and the gathering lasts all day til more or less 2 in the morning. As an only child who has been living pretty much independently for quite a while, this kind of thing (other things as well) is a little difficult to handle. But, one of the things that I appreciate most about the situation with the host family is that I have a resource when it comes to wanting to know something about the culture or what's going on in general. When I asked, I got a little bit more information than I had from my economics professor. They told me that Kirchner had raised the export tax on soy from 33%, which was already high, to 45% - almost half. In order to protest the fact that nearly half of their potential profit was being taken away from them, the people in the country were going on "strike" - but the word in this case has a bit more of an aggressive connotation.

Between my classes (like History of Argentine Political Processes) and just being here for a few months now, I've begun to learn that there is a very pronounced difference in Argentina between Buenos Aires and all of the people of the interior. The porteños (residents of B.A.) tend to that they're something separate, as if Buenos Aires is a country unto itself. It's true that it's very different - Buenos Aires is a developed city with a largely service-based economy, while the rest of the country is still largely agrarian. As a result of this and the fact that the seat of the government is in Buenos Aires, there has been historically a continuous tension between the capital and the interior, with people from the interior often feeling like they're being ignored by the government in favor of the porteños.

So, instead of trying to get the government to focus on just their problems, the country (campo) made their problem the problem of the porteños as well. Their "strike" consisted of forming a blockade of shipping - they took control of the main shipping routes and essentially stopped the flow of a lot of food into the city. Thus, now the newly-raised export tax was a problem in Buenos Aires as well, meaning it was also a more immediate problem for the government. Thus the pots and pans - if the strike were to continue, the porteños would run out of food to cook.

Protests continued for that whole week and into the next one at a fairly high level of intensity. As foreigners, the university advised us to stay away from Plaza de Mayo and other government centers, which were the focal points of the action. One day the university even shut itself down in the afternoon because it didn't want it's students to be obligated to walk to their classes (USAL is made up of various buildings strewn through the center of the city). It was easy to see why the protests were so intense - a couple days after talking with my host family, things such as beef and milk became nearly impossible to find in grocery stores and restaurants (big problem here - they eat very little besides meat).

Things are a lot quieter now - the government opened up negotiations 2 weeks ago, which doesn't necessarily mean the tax will change, but it was enough that now there is food in the grocery stores. Protests still go on - on Mondays, I have to walk past Congress to get from one class to the other, and last week I went a little out of the way to avoid a loud march that was going on - but the protests aren't nearly at the level where they were in the first couple weeks. Anyway, the entire process was something interesting to see.

Mate: What I am sure will be one of my most lasting Argentine souvenirs...

I thought this would be a good time to post about one of the more striking cultural habits of the Argentine people (and other South Americans as well, of course). Last weekend was my birthday, and so on Friday night, a bunch of my friends here took me out to dinner in San Telmo. Dinner was fantastic, but this post is about the tradition surrounding one of my gifts - my very own mate.

Based on my mother's reaction when I told her that my friends bought me a mate for my birthday, it's probably worth mentioning that you have to pronounce the word the Spanish way, with two separate syllables (thus, "mah-tay"). Mate is one of the things most typical of Argentina - mate is a drink similar to tea, and a mate is also the unique sort of cup that you drink it out of. It was the cup that was given to me as the gift.

The mate cups can be made out of various materials - wood, clay, metal..I've even seen some out of glass. But the most typical (and most Argentines would tell you the best) mates are made from calabasa, or gourds. The gourds are hollowed out and dried, and the outside is usually decorated in some way. The drink itself, like I said, is similar to tea, but without any sort of bag. It's made from filtering hot water through dried yerba leaves. You prepare it (this is the abbreviated/basic version - there are a thousand ways that people prepare their mate based on personal taste) by almost filling your mate cup with the dried yerba, inserting and burying the end of a straw (bombilla), filling the gourd with hot water, and drinking. The bombilla is specially made - it's closed on one end and works in one of various ways to strain the water so that you're not drinking the leaves.

As a tea drinker to begin with, I guess I was kind of naturally inclined to like the mate, but the most appealing thing about the drink is the social custom that it represents. It would seem as though the drink is as often shared as it is drank solo. Long conversations crop up around drinking a full thermos' worth of mate, and and there are enough social and courtesy rules to go along with the sharing of the mate to fill a book, it seems. Basically, it provides an excuse to relax and hang out with people, which of course I love. And now that I have my own (thank you Lennart, Peter, and Cami) it's something that I can bring home with me :)