After walking for 12 hours you can eat anything
and not feel guilty... Or so I keep telling myself.
After all walking is a good fat burning exercise.
But like with any sport – walking is a sport I keep telling myself – the risk
of injury exists. Last night I discovered that I suffered from a couple of
walking related injuries. I had a bleeding toe, which has happened to me
before. But it's the second injury that has me more concerned as I've never had
it before. I had burns on the inner part of my thighs. My right and left thighs
shouldn't be rubbing against each other as I walk. Does anyone know what the
official medical term for ‘inner thigh fat burns' is?
But Porteños – the proper name for Buenos Airesans – warn you about walking certain
streets.
I mentioned in my previous post the purse
clutch of streetwalkers. The defensive walking style of people goes beyond that
to avoiding eye-contact at all costs and having headsets on which is the
universal do not disturb sign. Of course, this never works on a plane as the
person next to you will always poke you and ask you something even if you have
your headset on and your eyeset off. Then again spending over ten hours
conjoined to a person on a transatlantic flight is more intimacy than the
average married couple has. So poking rights are full earned…I guess.
One would expect from this walking
behavior–particularly among women– that there is a culture of piropos, which is common in other parts of
the continent and the world. But that isn’t the case from what I’ve seen. A piropo is basically poeticized
sexual harassment, or a street pick-up line that has a solid success rate
of Zero percent. That’s not to be confused with your average pick-up line,
which has a success rate that hovers around Zero.
Naturally, I strayed from the ‘safe’ zone on
my walk. Paranoia by definition exaggerates the dangers. Before arriving in
Buenos Aires I was in Venezuela. In most cities there people auto-sentence
themselves to life-in-prison. They allow themselves daily yard time, where distrusting
interaction with others takes place before they rush back behind their
electrified bars.
With weather being largely constant, the
substitute filler in daily conversations is the police blotter. But when asked
if anyone had personally been assaulted, out of tens of people I met only one
was directly robbed. He was flaunting 2 iPhones at the time, because while the
two models were numerically equal, one model was superior to the other
alphabetically as it had an extra letter. If you ask me, the robber let him off
easy by just robbing him.
“Nobody rides motorcycles
because they would shoot you off of it and ride away,” is a line often repeated
by the paranoid. I cannot verify whether that incident actually happened or if
it’s just chupacabric lore, but I can attest that I saw many somebodies riding
motorcycles.
Back in Buenos Aires–where
the weather is anything but constant, and the only “Buenos” Aires today are
coming out of wall units as the temperature and humidity level play a game of
reverse limbo–; streets are full of walkers and commuters waiting in lines for
buses or disappearing into sidewalk holes that lead to the subte. People are moving with a purpose without making eye contact
with each other.
There’s also a high number of
cafes, bars, restaurants and ice cream shops lining up the same streets. There,
people are always sitting not making eye contact with other sitters and of
course not with walkers. Millions of sitters and walkers coexist without
looking at each other. Do they know of each other’s existence? Do walkers ever
sit, and sitters ever walk? I’m not sure. What I do know is that there is a
third group, which goes naturally unnoticed by both sitters and walkers.
They are called “gente en
situacion de calle,” literally people in a street situation. They seem to be
mostly adult males, but I saw some sidewalks that were housing entire families.
I don’t know the numbers, but this wall on the intersection of Scalabrini and
Santa Fe tells the story
of Pechito.
I will take this opportunity
to vent.
Who the fuck painted over the
mural of Ali Abdallah in Hamra? Was it a local militiaman that was afraid a
portrait of a dead homeless guy might make the nearby portraits of his smirking
militia lord look bad? Was it a mercenary for million-dollar apartments’ owners
whose homes hover above Ras Beirut but want nothing to do with its streets? Was
it the Lebanese state burying its crime under a coat of its only UN-approved
weapon?
Anyway… Where were we?
Streets…
Life happens at street level.
You can take a giant electric saw and pass it just above the tallest tree of any city and it wouldn’t lose its essence. Above that height, all you have are
fat layers.
Street vending can be a bit
aggressive here, but give me a street vendor over a telemarketer any time. At
least, when he shoves a notepad and a pen in my face as I sit in a café, he
knows I might need his product. I cannot imagine that under any circumstances I
would entertain the idea of buying the Michel Aoun encyclopedia, much less when
the telemarketer doesn’t understand the concept of the ludicrous roaming fees
Lebanese mobile operators charge.
Also, how can you blame a
street vendor for his/her over excitement when the street is full of carriers
of the virus called map?
Street maps are tools of
oppression. What are guided city tours if not brain washing exercises? What’s
the point of visiting a city if you are going to take the same picture and have
the same memory everybody else had?
When the immigration officer at
the airport asked me if I was a tourist I said “Noooo” before begrudgingly
accepting that label. I wish I had access to the photo he snapped of me,
because that would be the only chance for me to see what I look like when I’m
begrudging. Anyway, it’s been a couple of days, and I’m still reaching for that
“Kick Me!” sign on my back that I’m convinced the dude stuck on me as he
stamped my passport.
I maybe a tourist but I will
not carry a map. I just walk and I seem to always walk in a straight line
towards the water. Animals are built in to gravitate towards water. They in
turn build settlements around the water.
Music also happens on the
street level. So, again I leave you with some street music.
Seriously though, here’s clip
that combines street music and street vending.
As I mentioned earlier,
Buenos Aires is invaded by Brazilian tourists. So naturally, opportunistic
porteño beatniks provide the background music for Brazilian tourists – who are
hated by locals for being “too happy” – to dance in the streets of Buenos Aires.
This scene is completed by the priceless "what kind of street music is
this!?” look on haughty Argentinian passers-by.
But hey, whether they like it
or not, and just like in football… economically Argentina is Brazil’s little
bitch or as diplomats call it “a strategic ally.”
