6. Nitty-gritty

Rainbow of Plaza ItaliaIt takes me a solid fifteen minutes to get to school every day. It would be just walk leisurely and look at everything around me, if I didn’t have to keep my eyes fixed on the ground and watch out for dog crap the entire way there. While, as I have mentioned in an earlier post, the dogs in Buenos Aires are much more behaved than in the states, there are much more lenient rules regarding their behavior, and owners have no impetus (aka the huge fines in NYC) to clean up after their animal.
I have however, noticed an extreme sense of pride in shop owners and superintendents. Every morning these individuals can be seen hunched over with a scrub brush and hose in hand washing the sidewalks in front of their buildings. The upside of this morning ritual is that, if I time it just right, I can walk to school just after everyone has finished their scrubbing routine, thus every now and then avoiding the large piles of dog remains that normally crowd the curb.

MARGERY: Margery showing off one of her designs in her workshop.There are so many things about Ghana that make me want to scream. Sometimes I think too many. But then I remind myself how much fun I am having and all the things I still have to look forward to. Let me begin with two lists. The first will detail all the things I am disliking/hating here in Ghana and the second will have a more positive tone.
Dislikes:
1. Rice. I am SICK of rice. Fried rice, jollof rice, white rice, rice with curry, rice with tomato sauce, rice rice rice rice! I think I’m turning into a grain of rice.
2. Humidity. The Harmattan is beginning to blow, signaling the end of the rainy season and the beginning of the dry season. Dry shmy. I’m still drowning in my own sweat and it’s getting worse as the temperatures rise. I’ve given up any plans to work on a tan.
3. The Ghanaian mating ritual. Oh yes, the young Ghanaian men are bad. In fact, it’s not only the young ones. I should have kept track of the number of marriage proposals I’ve had so far. I now truly understand the meaning of the words Sexual Harassment. I cannot even impress upon you all how incredibly vexing Ghanaian men with a mission can be…maybe one day you’ll find out for yourselves.

San Martin the Liberator
I live with a family in a very exclusive part of Buenos Aires called Retiro. The family consists of a older mother and her youngest son Ivan, sometimes her middle son Nicolas stays here some nights. My apartment is on the first floor and it has a small tiled backyard, but because its on the first floor there is very little sunlight and I can never tell what time of day it is. Out of everyone in the program I am the farthest away from our center. Every morning I scrounge for ninety centavos for the bus ride to school. If I get up early enough I can get a seat on the bus. If not, I’m stuck standing for part or all of the half hour ride.
Living this far away isn’t so bad though. Much of Buenos Aires is unsafe to walk around at night, but in Retiro you can without much worry. huge tree in plaza san martinI live half a block away from the Plaza San Martin a beautiful plaza with an enormous magnolia tree and the plaza has so much the feel of Paris to it that regularly filming crews will pass it off as the European city in their commercials. Many days I will go to the plaza to write or draw and people watch. The weather here is still pretty cold some days so sometimes it is hard to stay outside.

home sweet homeIn Florence I am living with one of my best friends from NYU in a double. Aside from the overly friendly neighbors/workers from the bar/café next door and the common Italian men attempting to capture your attention, I ended up on a quaint, yet typical, Florentine side street. We were lucky enough to have a few sorority sisters that have studied in Florence and recommended Via Ricasoli. Our bedroom is the perfect size, as well as our private bathroom. Via Ricasoli 38 is definitely one of the best housing options considering its great location. We are down the block from the Duomo and the Academia, as well as the bus stop to school at San Marco. Although, the bus comes basically whenever it wants and the schedule changes almost every day, I cannot be happier living in close proximity. However, it does take about fifteen to twenty minutes to travel on the extremely hot and crowded bus up to Villa La Pietra. Villa Ullivi is where most of the classes are held. The absolute worstttt and probably the only thing someone should be complaining about in Florence, is the dreaded hill and walk from La Pietra to Ullivi. The cost of relatively everything in Florence is what you would expect from a city: expensive yet affordable if you know where to go, how to save money, and what to buy. The local euro store is a gem; it has all of the basics you would ever need for your kitchen, bathroom, toiletries, drinks, and even holidays! I am usually only in Florence Sunday night or Monday morning through either Thursday night or Friday night. It is very common here to go out during the week since most people travel during the week. Also, my friends and I have found “our place” for dinner; it is a restaurant that offers free drinks, almost any kind, to students with their meals. It is amazing!

Apparently Monet painted rue Montorgueil In terms of the nitty-gritty, here’s how gritty it gets: I live next to a street full of prostitutes. If you walk along rue Saint-Denis as early as eight in the morning, almost every doorway, all the alleys off it, are full of women in short skirts, v-neck sweaters, and high, high heels. Who needs a hooker this early? I don’t know, but they’re there all day (and presumably night, although I haven’t ventured to look). The funny thing is, all the hookers are old. They kind of look like they got facelifts and collagen in their lips but didn’t want to commit to Botox or full-on surgery. This is important to recognize, because the French have a different attitude toward age than Americans. All the prostitutes I’ve seen in the States have boob jobs. Here, they just have boobs.

Although I'm very behind with my entries, I'm going to start by posting this one on time, and make up the old ones as soon as I can. Right now, the balls of my feet are a little sweaty because I'm wearing little sneakers without socks--finally did my laundry today. Doing your laundry here, for most people, means having it done for you for very cheap. Do-it-yourself laundromats are rare, so all of us international students enjoy the luxury of picking up fresh-smelling, clean, folded laundry for the equivalent of about $7 US. In terms of money here, things are without a doubt cheaper, but not absurdly different, as I would imagine they'd be in sites such as Shanghai or the one in Ghana (is it in Accra?) The nominal exchange rate is a few decimal points above 3 Argentine pesos to the US dollar, and I'd say the actual exchange rate, in terms of the things I spend money on, usually ends up being about 2 or 2.5 pesos to the dollar. I imagine this is different for every North American here, because we all buy different things. This is my personal average, excluding, hmmm, things like public transit, events and wine or other alcohol. Wine is especially cheap, but that has to do with the fact that most of the wine here is actually from this country, not from far away.

French Bar painting by Henri Toulouse de Lautrec

One of the less glamorous parts of Parisian nightlife is trying to get home. Depending on the day of the week, the metro closes between 12:30 and 2:00 am. It doesn’t reopen again until 6 am. Cabs are essentially nonexistent. As far as I can tell, the French people stay out until six. I don’t have that kind of stamina.

Somewhere in the space between trying to leave the bar/club/party before the last metro home and trying to convince ourselves that we can make it till 6 am, my friends and I almost invariably end up resolving to find a cab, usually between 3 and 4 am. This strategy has about a 50% rate of failure. This no-cab-in-sight scenario leads to the let’s-start-walking-in-the-direction-of-home-until-we-see-one scenario. The latter scenario has a 100% failure rate. It’s Paris’ Law of Late Night Cabs: if a cab is not successfully hailed within a 3-block radius of the departure location, no cab shall be successfully hailed for the remainder of the evening.

Crap. Now what? Well… I guess we’ll just have to walk home…

deathofmaratThere are a lot of details to juggle when you move to a foreign country. Before you even arrive, the visa process is an enormous hassle. If anything, however, the beauracratic gauntlet demanded by the French embassy prepares you for life abroad. Once in France, even the simplest tasks assume monumental proportions. The language barrier is a constant problem, complicating even the simplest transactions. But, more subtly, the cultural disconnect between the French and American sensibilities can be a cause for some frustration. Everything here has less of a sense of urgency, which I often find wonderful when lingering over a cup of coffee, but which can be a slight cause for concern when you find yourself without electricity, or in some other crisis. Thus, much of the first few weeks you arrive in Paris are spent waiting in lines, setting up bank accounts, registering for a carte de sejour, getting the internet in working order, and everything in between.