When I was in middle school, one of the coolest kids around was Chris. He was starting point guard on the basketball team, a team every middle school boy tried out for three times. He smoked, he talked about girls a lot. Somehow, I became friends with him.
When we got to high school, he started on the varsity team. For our entire freshman year, every time we saw each other, he'd open his palm to slap hands and slide into a fresh thumb-war grip. The whole 3 seconds it took for us to complete this salute and move on to class was both the coolest and the most awkward part of my day. Cool, for obvious reasons; awkward, because the handshake was as foreign to me as Tango dancing.
Here is Argentina, I feel that way almost daily. Over the weekend I went to Las Flores, four hours outside Buenos Aires. My buddy Raul was going home to vote. Unlike the US, Argentineans aren't allowed to absentee vote, and there's a penalty for not voting. It's part of the reason turnout for Sunday's elections was around 75%. Voting in Argentina therefore becomes a type of homecoming. Despite there being a ban on alcohol and social gatherings ahead of the elections, Raul mentioned there'd be a lechón: a party with a suckling pig as the centerpiece. This presented me with perfect opportunity to practice feeling awkward/cool.
Las Flores in winter isn't the most lively of towns. Most people are farmers; cattle and soy are the money-makers. The streets are lined with well-pruned trees and the houses look like converted general stores, which strangely, some of them are.
The lechón was at one of these general store/casas. Closing in on 11pm, the night streets were empty and the night air felt like Christmas. Walking towards the casa, the pumping cumbia sound could be heard outside and broke the police-enforced, pre-election silence. Inside, the house looked like an abandoned warehouse: neon painting on the walls, black lights, smoke everywhere, liter bottles of Quilmes beer. Within minutes I had met and kissed all of Raul's friends and second-hand smoked a cigarette and a half. I'll post on Argentine slang later. For now, I'll just say it was a quilombo. So much fun.
What I didn't realize was how men greet each other in Argentina's interior. In the cities, it's a tennis match handshake. In the campo, it's a kiss on the left cheek. And Raul had a lot of friends. As Raul put it later, "puro huevo". When they found out my birthday was Sunday, more kissing.
The music was a combination of cumbia and electronic tango. Find some examples above. Without a firm grasp of the Argentine accent or the slang, I was often reduced to nodding or changing the subject. Fortunately, the pig showed up. No utensils, just grab a bun and dig in; imagine 20 drunk Argentineans unencumbered by the possibility of offending any judicious Argentinean women.
The conversation swayed from women, to futbol, to Obama, and back to women. We made fun of the guy who owned the house. Everyone called him "el blanco", the white guy. It was his birthday, too. For some reason his friends tried to make signs for him in English. We laughed deep drunk laughs at misspelled signs that read "The Withe Bar" (where do you put the H?) and "Happy Berth Day."
We danced and drank into the night. I never got used to the accent or the kissing, perhaps I never will. No matter, for a whole night I felt the awkward/cool of attempted cultural integration. Eventually we ran out of beer and the cumbia rhythm slowed.
Saturday night shares little in common with my high school days, with one glaring exception. The cool almost always outweighs the awkward. As it was with my baller friend Chris, these moments are always the best of the trip.
