Finland's Mexico

Estonia is Finland's Mexico: dirtier, cheaper, and going there may result in stories that need not leave Estonia.

If you're Finnish, the city of Tallinn in Estonia has a lot going for it: there's a medieval downtown, the city sits on the water, and it's a pleasant two-hour ferry ride away. Despite all the perks, there seems to be one overwhelming draw. Booze.

The only thing Fins love more than drinking coffee is drinking alcohol. They seem to have a particular preference for cider. The Finnish government, in an effort to curb drinking, imposes a 22% tax on alcohol. The Estonian government does not. And Estonia still works on the Kroon system...at least until next year. So people go over and buy crates of alcohol.

A Very Finnish Solstice

Grab your globe. Hold it straight out in front of you and pretend you're the center of the universe...um, the sun. Then tilt the Earth correctly and remember that in June the bottom is tilted away. Now spin it. Can you see Finland the whole time? Exactly.

I arrived last night at around 12am and it felt like 6pm. Woke up at 5am and it felt like 1pm. The city is beautiful and modern. The people alternate between quiet and silent. I'm too jet lagged to put together a cohesive thesis on Finnish life: here are some pictures.

Photography/Filling time between travels

Significant events from the last few months of my life. I was photographed for an article in the Washington Post, and I completed a photo project about a covered bridge in Lancaster County, PA. Links below:

Photo Project

Washington Post Article, Smar is one of my students.

See slide 6.

La Villa Capilla (The Slum Chapel)

Buenos Aires: Where Jesus isn't your only savior

Welcome to La Capilla María Madre del Pueblo in the Bajo Flores slum of Buenos Aires.

My article provides a fairly comprehensive summary of what's happening in Argentina's slums. The church is the only organization that's maintains a consistent presence there. I visited the Bajo Flores villa on July 3, 2009. It's also known as Villa 1-11-14. Back in the day the government numbered the villas, so Bajo Flores is essentially a mega-villa, three in one.

Father Carrara had to meet me at the corner across from a nicer neighborhood and escort me into the villa. Below is a brief podcast of the encounter.

Villa Capilla Podcast

What I hope people understand from the article, the podcast, and the photos from this and the previous post, is how amazingly difficult life is here, and how this difficulty produces amazing acts of compassion and courage.

Maté and Catolicsimo

Walls of la Capilla

Glass bottles decorate la Capilla

Father Gustavo Carrara

Slums of Buenos Aires

One of the most interesting things about Argentina is its cultural confusion. Go back to my first post from Buenos Aires and my immediate impression of the city was its european feel. With a mix of French, Italian, and Spanish architecture, there's little to indicate where BA is located. Looking at the faces of people walking around, one struggles to reach a concrete conclusion. Kirchner, as you might have guessed, isn't an indigenous name, and one of the priests I interviewed was named Jorge Oesterheld.

Day one, sitting in my hotel room in the "micro centro" of the city, I could have been anywhere but Latin America. Day two, my interviews for my first article quickly reminded me where I was. There's a sharp divide between European culture and Latin American culture in Argentina. Nowhere is that divide clearer than in the "villas", or slums, of Buenos Aires.

Here, people look different. Speaking with my contacts confirmed fears about discrimination and de facto segregation. The photos below remind me so much of what I saw outside of Mexico City in 2006: a mash of concrete block houses, farm animals, and dirt streets. The villas are isolated ghettos: places without running water, sewage systems, or much of a police presence. They've grown out of peoples' need to survive. They stretch for miles, and there is little consensus about what needs to be done.

I would have gotten closer, but these aren't places where a 6'2" white guy easily blends in. Many of these photos were take from on overpass. My driver Leo was uncomfortable even stopping and rolling down the window. I had to convince him to let me leave the vehicle for even a few seconds.

Friendship at 30,000 ft.

After I stepped on the plane at Buenos Aires' Ezeiza Ministro Pistarini International Airport, I thought to myself: cultural adventure over. I was quickly reminded that one's cultural adventure never stops, it just changes area codes.

I stowed my backpack and from behind me I heard the words "yo estoy acá". I am here.

For a minute or so that's all he said. As we sat down our eyes followed a beautiful Argentine woman coming directly towards us. Tall, with brown eyes and long hair, she stopped right beside our seats. Looking at the seat numbers she unmercifully chose the row right in front of us. Just out of the corner of my eye, I saw my new neighbor looking at the ceiling of the plane and stretching out his arms as if to say, "Why God? I have so little."

I laughed as he turned to me said the equivalent of "**it happens" in Spanish.

For the next 10 hours Rubén and I chatted about New York, photography, movies, and Argentine Beef. Whenever I doubt the value of travel, I think of people like Rubén Andón.

Check out his work.

Check out his favorite music:

Fabiana Cantilo - El Anillo del Capitán Béto

Fabiana Cantilo - La Bestia Pop

Emiliana Torrini - Me and Armini

Emiliana Torrini - Sunny Road

Leon Gieco - Ve La Luna

Leon Gieco - Al Atardecer

An American in Argentina

Rolling round BA...

Matéando en el campo

In Russia: it's vodka. In Turkey: it's coffee. In England: it's tea. In many places it's a cigarette. It's the way you ritualistically share an experience with another person. By giving, you gain. You share your thoughts, your good humor. The process of lighting, steeping, or stirring becomes an extension of the conversation. In many cultures, participation in this ritual is more important than speaking the language or wearing the dress. A man from Senegal once told me, "you never refuse a cigarette in Africa". In Argentina, you never refuse yerba maté.

Pronounced "sherba matte" in Argentina; it's herbs in cup. Yerba comes from the Spanish "hierba", meaning herb or grass. Maté comes from the Quechua word for cup. You drink it in a wood or metal cup with a metal straw that's called a "bombilla". Not bitter, it tastes like green tea mixed with grass. Not impressed? The magic of yerba maté, in addition to it's stimulating qualities, is in how quickly you begin to associate the taste with new friends.

Over the weekend I jumped into the maté stream. While I'm not sure whether to blame the maté or my new friends, my sleep schedule was ruined. Maté can be steeped many times without loosing its flavor or becoming bitter. As a result, it's an extremely social drink. At dusk, I sat in a small trailer on the edge of a cornfield in Las Flores with Raul, his father, and two other farmers.

After heating the water on a small gas stove, Raul took a beat-up yerba cup and filled it with maté, which looks like grass clipping. He poured the water through the maté and passed it to me. I drank it all and passed it back. He filled it and passed it to his father. His father drank it in one sip and passed it back. Back and forth, we repeated the process until the water was gone.

Rule number one of matéando: don't say thank you. That seems to be a common thing in Argentina. Saying gracias usually elicits: "the heck are you saying thank you for?" I've struggled with it.

As the sky got darker behind old tractors and planting machines, conversation became livelier and more friendly. We spoke of politics and the difference between North and South America. They asked me about farm policy in the U.S., I told them we tend to subsidize farmers. They were agape. More on that in a later post. The social atmosphere broke only once. After several rounds of sharing the same maté through the same bombilla, the group turned to the lone American: "How common is swine flu in the US...?"

The night "Kirchnerismo" fell

Nestor Kirchner, trying to silence critics with a vote.

This weekend saw the expected defeat of Argentina's first family, Nestor and Cristina Kirchner. Below I've prepared a short radio clip reviewing the basics. Also included are shots of the protests outside The Intercontinental Hotel, where the Kirchners awaited election results on Sunday night.

Argentinean Election Summary

El Lechón

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.

Tango Electronico
Bajofondo - Grand Guignol

Cumbia Argentina
El Hijo de la Cumbia - Cumbia de los Barrios

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.