She wanted me to write something about Buenos Aires.
That's all she asked of me, and a part of me wishes she'd been a bit more specific because I don't know exactly what to write. The best I can do is tell you what Buenos Aires is to me. For that, I need to say why I'm here. I came here to write. I always go places to write - I went to write in Paris and I went to write in Bali - but never about where I am, more of where I've been. I went to Paris to write about traveling around Europe. I went to Bali to write about living in Paris, and I came here to write about winter. Not here, but in California. That was the plan.
Let me say this: I don't think I leave my home to travel anymore. I did that once, after university, I backpacked around Europe, the same old that everyone does. Trains and backpacks and a handful of days in each city. I don't do that anymore. Everyone travels. There's nothing really truly unique about it, not that I'm trying to find something unique, it's just not what I want. I don't want to sight-see, I've done that, and I've seen that, and I wanted to see something new. I want to know what it's like to live in a city that's not my own. I want somewhere new to become routine. I stayed in Paris for two months, and Bali too, and I've been here in Buenos Aires for fifty days. Sure, I know a pair of months is hardly enough to call a place home, but it's all I can afford for myself, I don't have a lot of money, and what I've learned from flying to these different places is that it takes about a month for a city to become routine. To feel comfortable. I guess I do it all for the backdrop now.
So what is Buenos Aires. To me, a man from Los Angeles with no spanish tongue? I can certainly say with authority in my mind that it's marvelous. It's Paris with a twist and more grit. It's a sprawl, sprawling enough so that one needs to get a solid hold on the bus system to really know it, so it's kind of like LA too, but with a different passion and landscape and much more color and flowering and decoration (I really do enjoy the look of the buses here), and a sense of the past that I always love to see in a city. The old buildings and the bronze in the parks. San Telmo and Retiro and Recoleta, and even parts of Palermo. Clogged sidewalks and subways like New York. Brickwork and stone like London. In short, Buenos Aires is every city in the world, and at the same time its own little crystalline gemstone. The skyscape of tall skinny buildings, flats stacked on flats next to nothing, and then nothing, and then another stack. A good view of the city makes the eyes dance more than any city I know, and it's immediately recognizable and wonderful and makes me never want to sit still, but always be on the move, on my feet, exploring. I'm a walker, and this city's made for it, and I love it.
Through the weekend markets, past the midnight milongas, all of it, and the colors and graffiti and, my god, the beautiful women that breathe life into the city concrete and the thick humid air. There's something about Argentine girls that, more than anything else, make me wish desperately that I spoke even passable spanish so that I could talk to them. I wish I knew tango so that I could dance with them at night and hold them close. They've got more fire than Parisians, more spark, like a wild flame, burst of fireworks compared to a cold french cigarette. Women made for bright love and smoldering passion in a certain disparity not unlike my own. We're akin, me and this city, and there's a feeling in me that I must return one day. Under any pretext or context or circumstance, and with a solid grasp of the Spanish language. If not for the women, at least for the meat cooked over hot coals. Take a metaphor out of that for me please. Something beautiful and sexual. Like this city.
