Anyway, I finally hopped on the Twitter bandwagon a few months ago (follow me @arieltarmino) and I’m going to be blogging for the Public Allies Snapshot Blog, an initiative that brings together Allies from across the country as well as writing some entries for the PEN/ Faulkner Writers in Schools blog. The way I see it, I’m already all over the Internet. Why not update this blog every once in a while with such riveting revelations as what I made for dinner last night, what I like to watch on television and what I am currently reading?

I have a master plan for this blog that is a little ambitious, but will hopefully be realized in the coming weeks. You’ll just have to wait to see if these new media pipe dreams ever come true. But, in the mean time, consider this blog a work in progress. You can check out my brand new “About Me” tab. Or, you can read my old entries for a retrospective look at a few days in the life of a student studying abroad in Argentina.

Also, if you happen to be one of my friends who dutifully kept their own study abroad blogs that fateful fall semester of 2009, I encourage you to get back in the game. I will read your blog. We can link to each other! It’ll be fun!

This will certainly be my last blog entry from Buenos Aires as I am leaving in a little over six hours. In the meantime, I have to finish packing, get myself to the airport and say a proper goodbye to the city where I’ve spent the last four months.

It was surreal coming here and it’s surreal to leave. Just as, back in August, I couldn’t believe that I’d be spending such a long time in a foreign country, I can’t believe now that I’m going to go back to the U.S. and just continue my life like none of this ever happened. I’d like to think that this semester changed me (for the best), but it’s hard to evaluate now when I have one foot in Plaza San Martín and the other in my family room watching “How the Grinch Stole Christmas”.

I’ll do at least one more entry when I’m back in Philly and have more time to reflect on What My Semester Abroad Meant To Me and other capital-letter questions like that. Until then: chau Buenos Aires, nos vemos cuando nos veamos!

Recently, due to the aforementioned heat, I’ve started taking buses instead of the Subte to class. I’m still a Subte girl at heart — it’s so fast and modern (except for the wooden cars on Line A…) and I know all of the lines by heart. However, the heat and humidity have turned all of the Subte cars into muggy, crowded nightmares where everyone is coughing and spreading diseases. It’s literally like an underground middle school locker room.

For a while I was terrified to take a bus. The bus system here is extensive to the point that it’s intimidating. There is a bus that goes literally everywhere in the entire city and even some that venture into the Province. In order to navigate the bus systems, you have to buy a “Guia T,” which shows all of the bus lines in all of Buenos Aires, collectively known as colectivos.

The Guia T is great because you can look in any quadrant in any part of the city and see all of the buses that pass through the area. But it’s not so good because it doesn’t tell you exactly where the bus stops or which direction the bus is going in. Most streets in Buenos Aires are one way, so it’s generally not so hard to make an educated guess as to where a given bus is going to end up, but you never really know what’s going to happen.

Take today, for example, I was attempting to get home from class during the beginning of rush hour. The bus I normally take was completely full, so I walked down the street and found a different bus headed in the same direction. Using my (flawed) logic, I decided that because the numbers were close to each other (106, 108), because the buses resembled each other, and because they were headed in the same direction, they were probably going to the same place. Twenty minutes later, I was stuck in Once during the height of rush hour, taking a different bus back. But, I stood on the wrong side of the street, got on the wrong bus and ended up in Constitución. The train station in Constitución happens to be connected to the train station in Retiro by a Subte line. So, I ultimately ended up taking Subte home.

It ended up taking me over an hour to get home when it’s normally a fifteen minute bus ride. And I ended up paying three times as much as I normally would. But I don’t blame the bus system. I’ve had some of my best times on colectivos. My very first bus ride, I saw an old lady shoving a cat in a bag. Just last week, I saw two babies get in a fight when one baby (with an enormous head) head-butted a nearby baby and then kicked it with no intervention from either mother. I could literally not make something like that up.

So, everytime I prepare myself to ride a bus, I may feel a strange mix of terror and amazement (really, the most bizarre people take public transportation) but at least I’m riding around with all of the weird-os above ground…

Every time I have half a mind to write something on here, I talk myself out of it and watch the new episode of Gossip Girl featuring Lady Gaga (a little disappointing, to be honest) instead. But just to give my loyal readers some sign of cyber-life, I’m going to whine/write about some of the things going on in lovely Buenos Aires.

Yesterday there was some big commotion in Plaza San Martín, which is a block away from my house. Several streets were blocked off and I had to go the long way to the Subte station. Why, you ask? Well, it took me a while to figure it out, but apparently the president of Israel was here and visited the Palace of San Martín. The dead giveaway: Israeli flags along all of the streets.

In other news the weather here is terrible. Like, the worst weather imaginable. Today it was like 80 degrees AND 80% humidity AND raining. And the week doesn’t look much better. People say that Buenos Aires is unbearably humid in January and February, their peak summer months. I can’t even imagine what it’s going to be like in December. Ugh.

In related news, there are about 7,000 mosquitoes in my room and I am currently terrified of getting Dengue fever. So far I’ve managed to keep myself off of WebMd in order to avoid obsessively checking symptoms, but I’m sure that the pattern of welts up and down my arms are not a good sign.

There is no air conditioning here either. At school, it never works; at my house, it doesn’t exist; in Subte, it’s 100 degrees. I never realized how much of a wimp I was until this season began. Worst. Spring. Ever.

It’s making me very, very excited for North American December in exactly a month!

P.S. If you want to see more photos from my trip here’s a link!

1) Midterms ate up the entire first week of October.

2) Emily and I took a 10-day trip West — across Argentina and into Chile.

3) I’ve had a cold, computer problems, tons of work, had to wash my hair, etc.

Long story short, I promise that this week I will give you all a substantial update about my vacation and all of the crazy things that have happened to me since being back in Buenos Aires.  The best I can offer right now is a link to the photos that I’m finally putting up on Facebook.  It’s been a while, but they’re worth the wait.  I guess.

So, at the beginning of the week, I was still in the midst of the six week slump and was super disgruntled about the whole Clarín thing, which I wrote about in my last post.  I countered my bad news by not doing any homework over the weekend and catching up on tons and tons of American T.V.  Right now, I’m watching twelve shows regularly this season, which I will detail in another post.  Anyway, as a result of my laziness and general bad mood, I found myself with a ton of work and midterms steadily approaching.

This week flew by.  Really, the entire month of September flew by.  It seems like yesterday was my one-month anniversary and, in just about a week, I will have been here for two months.  In my experience, this second month has been the hardest.  The first month was full of so much excitement and discovery in my new surroundings.  I used to stop on the street and actually think about how lucky I am to be able to live in such an amazing city (and then, you know, I would be run down by a motorcyclist).  But the second month, everything kind of stops.  I got stuck in my routines, I stopped making such fast progress in speaking and I started to feel like I had been in Buenos Aires forever.  I know, deep down inside, that I’ve come a long way from the person who had no idea what an alimento was in August, but I still have a sinking feeling that I’m still that same study abroad student that I was in September.

But today was a lot of fun.  In the morning we took a tour of teatro San Martín, which is this state-sponsored theater on Avenida Corrientes.  Right now Teatro Colon, Buenos Aires’ largest and most famous theater is closed for renovations (and, apparently has been for three years due to political problems).  So, San Martín is standing in as the go-to place for great, cheap theater tickets.  Because the theater is state sponsored, everything is more affordable  — even a main-stage production of Medea starring a very well-known Argentinean actress is only $40 AR ($10 US).  We got to see all three of the stages — an amphitheater, the mainstage and the black box theater — and all of the behind-the-scenes stuff like sets and lighting and makeup.

In the afternoon, my history class took a field trip to Palermo to talk about writers in the city.  We sat in a café and talked about Borges and then we walked down to the spot where his house used to be.  The original building has been pulled down, but there’s a plaque to commemorate his childhood home as well as several other buildings on the street that were around while he was living there.  Tomorrow we’re going back to Palermo again for our Tango class and I’ll bring my camera so that I can finally post some more pictures here.  I know, I know, two classes, two field trips — my life is so hard.  But, someone’s gotta do it!

Below are 4 pictures, numbered 1-4.  Two are from Clarín, one is from La Nación a fairly conservative newspaper that caters to public opinion and one is from La Razón. If you learned anything from my last post you’ll know which ones are which.  If not, at least you get to see some pictures of Cristina.

#1

#2

#3

#4

As you mull over your answers, also consider whether or not we would be scrutinizing Cristina’s image so much if she were a man.  In some ways it’s so sad that, finally, there’s a woman as the president of a Latin American country and instead of talking about her accomplishments, we’re talking about her face lifts and her clothes.  It’s exactly the same thing that we saw in the last election with Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin — their appearances often overshadowed anything else.  But putting that pseudo-feminism aside, it is kind of interesting to see how different papers convey very different images of Cristina and how these despictions help them further her image.  This kind of manipulation would be much more difficult if Cristina were a man (although, according to Clarín, she might be).

Now, for the answers:

1 and 3 are from Clarín: note the dumbfounded expression in #1 and the creepy backlighting in #3.  #1 screams: I’m a puppet for my husband Nestor Kirchner! Look, I don’t even have any idea what’s going on here!! While #3 screams: I’m pure evil and know exactly how to take you down! Muahaha!

2 is from La Nación right after Kirchner’s election. Note the photoshopping and general glossiness.  I guess public opinion was on her side back then.

4 is from La Razón.  They clearly have less of a photoshopping budget (maybe Cristina can tax some railroad workers or something for funding) so this shot looks a little less radiant than #2.  But she’s still kind of glowing and she looks both intelligent and capable.  Plus, those uplifted eyes make her look like a visionary.

We’ll begin with the confusion. Recently the government passed a new media law, ostensibly to break up the enormous Clarín media monopoly and to open the market to smaller competitors. (Clarín is the name of a daily newspaper here. It also is an enormous media conglomerate owning everything from paper-making plants to Internet service providers.) Critics of the law claim the government is trying to buy a stake in media-related industry so that they can have more control and use media outlets as purveyors of Kirchner-related propaganda for Cristina’s re-election campaign.

And, now for the betrayal. I started reading Clarín because I had heard that it was fairly liberal and (mostly) because it was cheaper than the other leading dailies, La Nación and Página Doce. But the more I hear about Clarín and its inner-workings, the more I’m beginning to feel like a clueless, manipulated media consumer.

For example, the coverage of this new media law in Clarín has been completely brutal. The law is replacing a defunct and largely ignored media law passed during the military dictatorship in the late 1970s, which was rife with censorship clauses and limitations on new media sources. But Clarín claims that this new law is the government’s sneaky way of trying to control what can and cannot be written in newspapers. Which is kind of true — they want everything that is published in newspapers to be the truth.

While that may not sound like too much to ask, dishonesty in the press is a huge problem here. Early in Cristina’s term, as she was making her appointments, Clarín speculated that a certain appointment was more a result of the appointee’s friendship with the Kirchners than of her qualifications (she was a camerawoman appointed to an anti-Corruption task force). It’s completely fine for a publication to be suspicious of a government official and I also think it’s okay to use a critical tone toward that government official. But this story contains thinly-veiled allegations of Cristina having a more-than-platonic relationship with this woman as well as allusions to Cristina’s masculinity, a recurring theme in Clarín stories.

On the other side, La Razon, a free newspaper that’s handed out in the Subte Stations that basically amounts to pro-government propaganda, published a puff piece accusing the owner of Clarín illegally adopted two children of disappeared people (people who had been imprisoned and killed during the military dictatorship) and calling for her daughters to have a DNA test. The Kirchner dynasty is currently working on legislation to compel citizens suspected of being missing children of desaparecidos to submit to mandatory DNA testing.

And this war has brought about all kinds of hidden alliances. For example, the DNA testing legislation made the Madres, an enormously influential and famous organization comprised of mothers of desaparecidos, side with the Kirchners. Meaning, they side with them on everything. During one of their weekly demonstrations in Plaza de Mayo (they still gather there every Thursday as they have since 1978) the Madres protested oligarchies in the countryside. This appears to have absolutely nothing to do with anything, but a little background reading reveals a recently-passed piece of legislation placing enormous taxes on farmers with large holdings in the country. The government claims that this law is just trying to give smaller farmers a chance to compete (sound farmiliar?) while Clarín said Cristina is going to use the money from the tax to run her re-election campaign. What I believe? I have no idea.

But I do know that I’m not a huge Cristina fan. Maybe I’ve been brainwashed by adjectives like “boorish” “power-hungry” and “meddlesome” that pepper the Clarín articles I read on an almost-daily basis. Maybe it the fact that the terms of the law — giving the government control of 1/3 of broadcast licenses, restriction of the number of licenses that any media group can hold — actually kind of sound a little like something a dictatorship might do to limit the influence of an especially critical media conglomerate. Also, Cristina pushed the law through Congress so that it could be voted on before her party loses majority (Oh, btw, most of her party members were voted out two months ago but their term doesn’t end until the end of this year, which is why both this law and that law approving the increased tax for farmers made it through). And, just to send a little massage to Clarín — you know, just in case they didn’t already know that the Kirchners had it in for them — she sent 200 tax inspectors to the Clarín Group’s headquarters. Just to check things out.

The moral of the story is that you really can’t take everything you read in a newspaper at face value. Even now, when I like to think I know enough of the backstory to read Clarín intelligently, there are still so many more facets to this issue. I’ll probably never understand it fully. But, if you’re curious about the Argentine media meltdown, here’s a youtube video that sums up pretty much everything I’ve been trying to say in two minutes. Added bonus: You get to see Cristina in all of her mummy-like glory.

After six weeks here, five of which have been spent in classes, I’m starting to become set in my ways. I no longer experiment with methods of transportation (I think that by this point I’ve walked, taken the bus and taken the Subte to almost all of my “usual” destinations). I know when I have time to do work, when I have time to stop and have a cup of coffee and when I have time to take a nap. Sometimes life feels so normal here that I forget I’m even in Buenos Aires.

As a result, I’ve become a lot less motivated. Only a few weeks ago, I was ahead in all of my work and was so stir-crazy in Buenos Aires that I decided to go to Lujan. This past weekend, I caught up on all of the fall TV premiers from last week (this probably warrants its own post later) and basically only left my apartment to go on a walk to Plaza de Mayo and to go to bars at night. So, now I’m paying for my laziness in the form of never-ending ensayos and a pending 15-page midterm paper and it sucks.

But this weekend Emily and I are planning to go to Montevideo, which should be fun. And I just bought a new bag of ginger-flavored mate. Hopefully next entry will be a little more upbeat!