…when you’re a Brit living in Argentina:
1. Get a decent mug of tea.
And by “decent” I mean bog standard, no nonsense, dunk yer biscuit, drink it morning, noon and night tea. You can get good tea here, but it’s bloody expensive, posh stuff for pretentious nobheads and doesn’t come in a perforated pyramid like what it should. The affordable stuff – bags or leaves – makes watery, piss-weak, grey tea, and I don’t mean Earl Grey, I mean unspeakable stuff you wouldn’t serve to a dying plumber.
On a related note…
2. Convince people that England doesn’t simply grind to a halt at 5pm for everyone to drink tea and eat little fairy cakes.
For some reason this legend persists, that five o’clock tea is an enduring tradition in the UK, and that all activity halts in order to observe the ritual. I know people who have been frankly offended not to have witnessed the practice with their own eyes when on a visit to London, like a nationwide changing of the guard. HOW DARE YOU NOT ALL DRINK TEA AT FIVE PM ON THE DOT LIKE I HAVE BEEN LED TO BELIEVE BY THE TELLY, YOU UTTER, UTTER BASTARDS?
3. Correctly pronounce the name “Pueyrredón”.
This criollo hero and politician has streets and subway stations named in his honour, and if you live in the Palermo area of Buenos Aires, chances are you’re going to have to pronounce the unpronouncable at some point, possibly even with disturbing frequency.
It goes something like /pweh-rrrrrrrrrrrrreh-‘don/ and is fucking impossible to say until you’ve lived here and practised it for nine months. Similar problems are to be had, in my experience, with “ferrocarríl” (railway), the correct, flapped ‘r’ in “Pedro” and “Ricardo“, and the tongue-mangling “otorrinolaringólogo” (ear, nose and throat specialist).
4. Serve “mate“.
Mate /’mah-teh/ is the Argentinian equivalent of tea, in that it is consumed at every opportunity by almost everyone.
It is a bitter herbal brew made from a variety of plant leaves – generally yerba, but people come up with all sorts of bastardisations – and served communally in a gourd-like vessel with a metal or bamboo straw. The water has to be the perfect temperature (70 to 80 degrees) and cannot be boiled and allowed to cool down because that’s like licking tin. There is mysticism and ritual to be observed, from tapping the dust off the ground up yerba leaves to passing the gourd round the group of embibers in exactly the same order every time. If you say “Thank you” it means you don’t want any more, so try not to be grateful when it comes your way. Any mistakes in the process and the yerba will refuse to yield a satisfying brew. It’s almost like it knows you fucked up somewhere. Apparently in the fickle, sentient world of yerba, being British is a flaw, so in the 11 years and I have been here – and hundreds of attempts later – I have only made two decent brews of mate, both of which I assume were achieved by sneaking up on it while it was having a siesta.
5. Make jokes.
Many’s the time I’ve been in company and made a play on words or pointed out some irony or other with a gratified chuckle only to have conversation stop and the metaphorical needle fly off whatever record’s currently playing in the imaginary jukebox of my mind. A collective sense of humour is one of the factors that most differentiates nations, and, without wishing to come across as a mirthless waxwork, it’s an area best trodden with care.
British humour, with all its dryness, sarcasm and satirising, could not be further removed from the the fast-talking, gurning slapstick that goes down well here, where Mr Bean is a cherished wit and Benny Hill is looked upon as one of the only decent things to come out of the British Isles after the railways.
6. Engage in any typically Argentinian activity without someone telling you you’re doing it wrong.
“You don’t wanna do it like that; you wanna do it like this.” Every. Single. Time.
7. Explain the difference between England, Great Britain and the UK in a way that won’t make people think everything you just said is ridiculous.
Try it; it’s absurd. Especially in the case of my children, where one is English and British, and the other British but not English.
When schools teach that the Falklands/Malvinas war was against the English it gets my goat (I assume because I just want to share the blame with the rest of the Union). Oddly – or infuriatingly – enough, this little nugget of misinformation is on the curriculum of a great many schools here, so not only were the teachers taught it but they are now passing it on too.
On a related note – I’m often asked by people here if I ever get any grief over those specific little islands in the South Atlantic, and I have to say it’s a resounding “No”. It’s almost as if the majority of people couldn’t give a shit, which is nice.
8. Be a cricket fan.
Oh the questions I have fielded (see what I did there?) about the perplexing intricacies of the great game! Leg before wicket; boundaries; eleven players against two at any one time; a FIVE-day game that results in a draw; TEA … I can completely understand the incredulous looks and the subsequent mockery. It’s almost impossible to explain without sounding like you’re pining for the Empire, and besides that, it’s a bit like the word “kitchen” – the more you say it, the more preposterous and alien it sounds. The conclusion I’ve reached is that cricket is not learned but absorbed, much like the wildly popular Argentinian card game truco, which has equally unfathomable regulations without the bother of being interrupted by the weather.
9. Get what you want in an iron monger’s.
Sometimes it’s hard enough getting the specific grommet you’re after when you are using your own language. I assume that’s why DIY superstores are so popular, so you can just wander around numbly until you stumble upon the aisle that contains what you want and you don’t have to try to explain it to a long-suffering shop assistant using words like “thingy”, “wossname” and “oojamaflip”.
So imagine it in another language. Even after more than a decade I still find myself stringing together sentences with almost no useful nouns, just an endless, baffling train of “The thing that goes on the doo-dah that hangs on the back of the thingamyjig”. This is just one of the reasons I only ever go to one iron monger’s, a place of trust where I can splutter incoherently and they somehow patiently divine what I’m after.
10. Get a haircut at a barber shop.
Never tried it; I don’t dare. If I’m not capable of asking for a flange with any degree of clarity, I can only imagine the disaster that would unfold if I tried to describe a new barnet. I’ve been clipping my own hair since I moved here, and I don’t plan to stop any time before baldness takes over for good.
11. Browse in a shop.
Short of the aforementioned DIY superstores (which aren’t really suited to pleasurable browsing) it’s impossible to go into a shop here without being pounced on by a needy attendant forcefeeding you unsolicited help. I don’t know about you, but once I’ve dragged myself off the sofa long enough to get to a shop, I like to enjoy a few minutes drifting around perusing the establishment’s wares. Having someone demand to know what I’m after before the door has shut behind me is as unsettling as being spoken to while I’m doing a poo.
Even worse, a lot of small outlets now keep almost all their stock out the back, presumably as an understandable theft deterrent, meaning you’ve got no chance of avoiding the sort of human interaction most Brits shudder at. The upside to this is that Argentinians, in recognition of the fact that they are terrible at queueing, have come to depend heavily on a number system – you grab a little ticket from a bright red dispenser as you go in, and wait to be called. It’s very efficient, unless, like me, it takes you five years to learn the system; five years of going into shops and forgetting to get a ticket, only remembering when the assistant shouts a number, by which time eight people have come in after you and taken numbers THAT WERE RIGHTLY YOURS.
12. Express a preference for any given Argentinian football team.
In a country where roughly 96 percent of the population are either rabid River fans or rabid Boca fans, I thought I was being very clever in limiting the number of people I alienated by choosing neither one. But football is as football does, and for almost every team in “La A” there seems to be a rivalry more violent than the last. What the fans of the smaller clubs lack in numbers they make up for in passion. So while I may have sidestepped one massive landmine by being neither a bostero (Boca fan) nor gallina (River fan), there’s always one Gimnasia (La Plata) supporter willing to take me to task for my (lukewarm) allegiance to Estudiantes.
The question “¿De qué equipo sos?” (What team do you support?) is a loaded one, with the interrogator expecting me to choose one or other of the famous Buenos Aires rivals. It’s often refreshing to see this expression when I give my made up, evasive answer – most people are instantly disarmed since they were expecting either to hurl insults at me or to embrace me like a brother. But every once in a while it’ll be the wrong answer, and I’ll get ripped to shreds by a rogue Gimnasia fan eraged by my affiliation with the wealthy, “corrupt” club, like the treacherous Englishman that I am.
It’s interesting to note that outside the country Boca:River is the best-known Argentinian derby. It shouldn’t be; if you want drama between neighbours you should head over to Rosario, where fans of Newell’s Old Boys lock horns (and fists and knives and broken bottles) with their counterparts from Rosario Central whilst their teams do bloody battle on the pitch. It’s a legendary, century-old rivalry that makes the Canaries / Tractor Boys feud look like a family picnic at Blickling.
13. Get someone’s phone number.
Argentinians are very good with numbers. Their mental arithmetic is fast, and I’m not just talking about the seven times table. Sometimes it’s like being at a conference of coked up quantities surveyors. They probably dream in pi.
Complex numbers are, if you ask me, among the harder elements of second language acquisition, especially if they come in unfamiliar patterns. Like phone numbers; English people tend to reel them off numeral by numeral, with the occasional “dubble” and the switch of “oh” for “zero”. Here they come in batches of three: “seis cuarenta y cinco” (645) for example, which is not how my brain works at all. One person can rattle off their phone number to another at a blistering rate of knots, and the recipient will be able to remember it in its entirety and store it in their contacts while I’m still picturing the first set of digits. Yet another field where everything has to be repeated to me slowly, three times, like I’m a dotty grandfather everyone has to be at great pains not to murder out of sheer frustration.
14. Drive.
It’s not that I can’t drive, it’s just that my way of driving – ordered, regimented, obedient to the point of neurosis – is largely speaking painfully incompatible with the way a lot of people drive here. Turn signals? Nope. Right of way? Nah. Speed limits? Fuck ’em. Texting whilst driving? Ooooh yeah! Anticipate obstacles? No way, baby – it’s the last minute swerve for me. Fuck you, I wanna be over there NOW!
I’m not saying my way is better, though you can bet your brake pads I think it while I’m driving around. It’s madness here, and the only way to manage it is to assume that everyone around you is on the point of doing something catastophically impulsive.
The situation is not helped by the large volumes of ambulatory street furniture, by which I mean stray dogs, cyclists and mopeds riding against the traffic, and jaywalkers. Teenagers particularly seem to have developed a heightened sense of whether a motorist has seen them or not, allowing them to dawdle excruciatingly as they cross the street safe in the knowledge that, short of vehicular homicide, there’s very little you can do about it.
15. Follow the news.
Like that person who started watching Emmerdale just last week, I have absolutely no idea what is going on. I know it’s the usual diet of war, death, famine, rape, kidnappings, robbery and scandal, peppered with caricature celebrities aching for a spat to get five more minutes in the limelight, but picking up on who’s responsible for what and how readily I should believe them / sympathise is another matter.
The terrible price of the information superhighway is that the still small voice of calm and reason gets drowned out by squawking cranks and 24-hour rolling Twittershit. It’s bad enough when you can make sense of the torrent of words being hurled at you like a squadron of narcissistic parrots; it’s 100 times worse when you struggle to pick up on the nuance. I grew up with UK politics, spin, gossip and gutter journalism; it’s as much a part of my DNA as rain stopped play. But despite my best efforts to blend in, here I’m like a child at the shopping mall who got separated from his parents and now all these big, scary, loud people are looming over me telling me what to think. I want my mum. And Moira Stuart. At least with Moira you knew where you stood.
No word for gravy 