Cuidado -- there is nothing of substance in this post. To learn more about our Buenos Aires IP conference, see posts below.

One other caution about those posts -- Movable Type doesn't seem to be permitting me to import special characters. So that headline above? Pretend there's an upside down question mark at the beginning, and a tilde above the "n" in espanol.

Of course, I could have avoided all this by not including Spanish words, but I've been using my time here in Buenos Aires to brush up on my Spanish. I last took a Spanish class in 1988 and I last spoke Spanish in... 1988.

Fortunately, the portenos (residents of Buenos Aires, and put a tilde on that "n" as well) love it when a Norteamericano attempts Spanish, and they don't care how badly you butcher it. (This isn't Paris, folks.) I have been speaking almost entirely in the present tense, I've used the wrong prepositions and pronouns at times, and I used the "familiar" form to a cab driver (I hope he didn't think I was getting fresh, especially since I had just given him a tip he seemed to think was unusually large).

I've enjoyed my feeble attempts with the language, and particularly enjoyed it when the person with whom I'm conversing can actually understand me. Sometimes the locals want to practice their English with me. I had a very long conversation with one local where I spoke only Spanish and she spoke only English; it was long because both of us spent a lot of time struggling for words.

There is one other way I have managed to assimilate with the portenos. Last night I bought a soccer (futbol, with an accent on the "u") jersey for a Buenos Aires team, the Boca Juniors, or Club Atletico Boca Jrs (CABJ). They are hugely popular here (and are consistently very good, I'm told, like the New York Yankees). They play in el barrio de la Boca, a working-class port community heavy with Italian immigrants. I wore the jersey today as I explored the city, and was greeted warmly with shouts of "Arriba Boca!" from cab drivers, waiters and passersby. This is of course one more expression of the graciousness of portenos -- I suspect if one of them were to walk through New York City wearing a Yankees jersey, at best they'd get an obscene gesture from a Mets fan.

posted by Patrick Ross @ 3:43 PM | Digital Americas

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