Self-Defense

The one thing I will not miss about Paris are the Parisian men. Granted, there are creepy and crazy men everywhere you go. But I have never felt so disgusted, violated, or enraged by men anywhere as much as I have in Paris. As a woman in New York, there are very simple and appropriate ways to deal with inappropriate men. If they whistle, you can smile and keep walking, and they will turn back around. If they follow you, you can turn and confront them, make a whopping scene in front of a crowd, and they will flee, embarrassed. If they touch you, you have the absolute right to touch them back, and no doubt whoever is with you will join in. New Yorkers simply do not, will not tolerate violation of any kind, and anyone who thinks they can get away with it will be crudely brought to justice. In Paris, there is no such easy code. Upon our arrival, we were told that, as women in this city, we will have to deal with ridiculous incessant verbal and physical abuse from Parisian men whose reputation notes them to be aggressive, unashamed, and very persistent. Furthermore, we were instructed that the best way to deal with this was to ignore them. It seems Parisian men take the slightest reaction to their abuse as encouragement (whether it be a glare, an elbow in the stomach, or an angry "go to hell!" as well as many worse insults). There is literally nothing to do if you, as a woman, find yourself under siege. In the subway, on the street, in a bar, men can touch you, yell at you, follow you, and the slightest reaction only fuels them on, and then you have an even bigger problem. The only thing to do is pretend it isn't happening, look straight ahead and say nothing. In essence, take it.

Coming from New York, where I've learned to be constantly on the offense--aggressive and angry--and where no one ever refrains from telling you exactly how they feel, this has been quite a challenge. The other night, my friend and I were catching the metro to go out. The platform was plenty crowded and when the subway rolled up, we saw that each car was extremely packed. Knowing it was one of the last subways of the night, we squeezed on anyway to the car that stopped in front of us. Now when the Paris metro is packed, it's packed, people pushing in on each other, slamming full against each other's bodies. No sooner had the door closed that we realized the four or five people standing behind us, around us, practically on top of us, were a group of typical Parisian men who were not going to let an opportunity slip away. One of them leaned his chin over my shoulder and began whispering in my ear. Another did the same to my friend. Using the packed car as an excuse, they leaned heavily against us, slid their hands down our bodies. My first instinct was to turn around and knee them as hard as I could but being taught to take it like a Parisian woman, I said nothing. They began inching closer, on all sides of us, talking, breathing on our necks, touching our hair, our hips, our hands. "Where are you going? What stop?" they asked, their words dripping hot on our shoulders. I began to get angry. I leaned forcefully back hoping to throw them off me, but it only made them smile and continue. The car was packed with other people, other women, who watched and listened in the silence of the train, but did nothing. One young blonde man near us asked quietly and kindly that these men leave us alone. They blew up at him angrily. "Who is this? Your mother? Your sister? Your girlfriend? Do you know her?" They began spitting curses at him. "Am I touching her? Am I raping her? I'm just talking to her." The blonde man looked down at his hands. "She doesn't seem to want to talk..." he said quietly. This only angered them more and after cursing him out for a few more minutes, they turned their attention back to us, and they were even more aggressive. At the next stop, I couldn't take it anymore. I pulled my friend out and we got off the car. I turned around, stared at them, yelled at them, wishing with all my might I could pummel them as hard as I wanted to. We jogged to the next car and got on before the train left the station, and we weren't bothered by them again.

It took me the rest of the night to calm down. This is something I will never understand or accept of Paris. Here, I don't have the right to stand up for myself. I don't have the right to defend myself. This is the 21st century. I am just as much a person as anyone else. Yet a man would never be asked to "take it" the way women in Paris are. A man would never, ever tolerate such disgusting animal abuse. A man would fight back. I wanted to fight back. Since when do I not have the right to fight back? I miss the crazies and creeps of New York. I miss the disgusting guys who catcall safe in their cars or construction sites, but are too afraid to get any closer. I miss the right to get angry, be aggressive, defend myself when someone tries to violate me in any way. If there's anything that would keep me from coming back to Paris, it would be that feeling, that powerlessness I'm forced to swallow, that tolerance I'm expected to exert in the face of vile behavior. I guess at least now I know I have the rage capacity to self-defend myself if I ever needed to. But god, I miss New York.

Berlin's 2009 May Day Riot: Burning DumpstersBefore reading this entry: Google the title of this blog and read any of the news articles that come up. It’s all worth reading.

I emerged from my Adalbertstrasse apartment to the street around 4pm, and started walking south. After two blocks, I encountered a wooden hobbyhorse which prevented cars from entering the street. Music started echoing from the buildings to my ears, and a couple blocks more led me directly to the epicenter (or beginning of the epicenter?) of an outrageous, drunken, German festival. Beer stands and grills lined the streets, leftist punks and neonazis screaming at each other about how their respective extreme sides of the political spectrum were the only way to help end the economic crisis. It was easy to imagine, based on their appearances, that all of them were and would remain unemployed. Stages, like the “Antifacista Stage” played host to colorful musical acts, and listeners donning their finest Che Guevara t-shirts, responded with violent dancing.

Upon finally reaching the center of my beloved Kreutzberg, the intersection of Oranienstrasse and Adalbertstrasse, the crowd was too dense to even turn around. I kept pushing and shoving until I reached an alley that I recognized could lead me to a park which would probably be less crowded than the streets and offered me an alternative route back home. It took seeming hours to swim against the undertow of the crowd and make it through the alley and to the park, where I met some friends and sat down to catch my breath. It was so fun, but not the type of thing that I can personally handle feeling trapped in. We headed back to our apartments and agreed we would go out later for a drink.

When “later” was finally decided upon, we headed out of the apartments, the same route I had followed earlier that day. I was surprised to see that the hobbyhorses were still up and now guarded by a line of policemen. They let us pass through without issue, but when I reached the couple of blocks down I had reached before, I realized that this was the wrong route to take. The loudness of drunkards peacefully protesting and accidently dropping a bottle or two was now replaced by the loudness of drunkards attacking police officers and each other, casting bottles and stones. Before we even reached the intersection of Oranienstrasse, a teargas bomb went off and police retreated and even started to vomit, needing to quickly lift their face masks. So, needless to say, my “fight or flight” response kicked in, and I’m no fighter. When we started heading back to the hobbyhorses and our apartments, like many others, we were forcefully shepherded by the line of policemen that stood there and told we had to continue down. So, dodging bottles and coughing out poisonous gas, we went down. Fires in the middle of the streets raged, and gangs of police officers continued to press crowds in any direction they could possibly push them. People kept getting carried away, half of them by stretchers, the other half by police. It was no longer the fun, labor day festival it was.

I got a call from some friends that made it to a restaurant where the situation was apparently less extreme. They explained to me a route that would lead me to them. I turned down the street they guided me to, and immediately heard a huge bang from behind me. The crowd all started running down the street, away from the bang, and I ran too. I still have no idea what happened, but by the time I stopped running, I had made it far away enough from the riots for my sanity to partially return to me. I started laughing and laughing when I saw my friends, I didn’t know what else to do besides tell them how happy I was to not have been hit by a bottle or incapacited in any other way, and how much it meant to me that they were there, also in safety. When the restaurant staff came out to say that they were concerned the riots were moving in our direction, we finished our beers and headed home as quickly as possible.

Would I have done it again? Yeah, but only to tell this story and say that I survived the most intense riot that the 2008-2009 economic crisis has (thusfar) had to offer.

As weeks go by, I am stunned at how safe and comfortable I feel at Prague.

I definitely feel that weather has something to do with it.

As soon as the sun started to come out, everything seemed safer and happier.

One day, riding the tram to school, I started chatting with some guy. He asked me where I was from, what I was studying and if I liked Prague. Honestly, I was taken aback because usually the tram ride to and back to school is usually just me looking out the window in silence. It was refreshing to talk to someone and express my affection for Prague.

Nonetheless, the tram ride to school got me thinking. How do Czech people view Americans? Is the answer really that obvious? I’d like to think otherwise.

The few Czech people I’ve encountered all expressed desire to one day visit New York. However, on the other hand, many Czech people find Americans to be…superfluous? I just mention that because I talked to a girl who said that Americans are obsessed with celebrities and Britney Spears. True. But I think that’s only a small sphere of interest. So then, what can Americans do to change this perception to Europeans? Honestly, I don’t know and really don’t care. I find Europeans to be different and superfluous in their own realm of interest. So I don’t think its fair to judge Americans to be more materialistic than other countries. I love Europe, but I’m ready to go back to New York. In my opinion, New York embraces all cultures, and thrives on diversity. Whereas, Europe definitely lacks diversity. I may be wrong. But that is only my opinion.

film poster: Man and Wife (Matt Cimber 1969) This morning I woke up, opened my Mac and was shocked when I noticed the date. Aside from the very obvious connotation of Friday the 13th, this day was particularly alarming to me since it meant that I had been “living” in Buenos Aires for over a month already. I wondered how this could be possible when it seems like I’ve only just arrived—and I can hardly say my Spanish has improved much. I realized that of all the immersion goals I set for myself—learning the language, befriending the locals, establishing a routine in the city—I’ve actually accomplished very little. I recall very clearly my naïve assumption that in a month’s time my language abilities would be near fluency, and that I’d have a whole social network of amigos Argentinos. However, as of now I’ve made only one real friend here from the city, and the fact that my language skills are still lagging both enhances and inhibits the time we spend together. Fortunately—or perhaps unfortunately—for me, my new amigo, Fernando, speaks English fairly well. However, I frequently find myself overestimating his abilities. He will say something in broken (yet charming) English, I’ll piece it together so that it makes sense to me, and respond assuming he’s retaining everything I’m saying. The two of us often find ourselves having a grand old time, laughing with each other in the midst of some witty repartee—only to discover thirty minutes later that we’ve been talking about entirely separate things. One thing we’ve learned is that there is a direct ratio between the number of drinks we have and our ability to speak each other’s language. The difference is quite astounding actually. As the night goes on, I find that these “misunderstandings” between us are less frequent, that I’m more able to understand him when he speaks quickly un Spanish, and more able to respond myself—with the excessive use of gesticulations and facial expressions of course. It may also be that at that point in the night our misunderstandings are less frustrating, and more…humorous. But I tend to think that I’m rather partial towards those silly moments at all times, in all mental states, when the only things you can do is laugh, and forget about trying to clarify the problem. I like to look at our language “issue” as more of a blessing than a barrier. When Fernando pronounces English words with his funny little accent or asks me questions like, “what are these things moo-feens?” at the café with regard to the common American breakfast pastry, I can’t help but love him.

I think all disparities in culture can be alleviated with a good laugh. Just last night, the two of us went to the MALBA museum to see the first in the series of historical pornography films playing there at midnight. We knew of the show from some friends who were supposed to meet us there, but of course they were late and got locked out of the museum. Fernando and I sat in the theatre not knowing what to expect. All of a sudden an instructional video on marital intercourse from 1969, called Man and Wife, comes on. After 15 minutes of whispering jokes into each others ears over the lunacy of our situation, as a Ben Stein type spoke over a couple fornicating in a variety of different positions, we decided to leave. The rest of the night involved comical allusions to the monotonous “howevers” and awkward sex scenes in the film, and of course much laughter.

It took a moment to realize he was talking to me. I had mistaken his hoarse English for Czech. As I turned to face the voice, he repeated himself and formulated his words again, “Yellow is the color of jealousy”. I stopped, looked at the yellow mug in my hand, and at the man whose tattered gray garments matched that of his face and hair. Before I could stop myself, I responded. “Not happiness?” His pupils lifted and through the beginnings of a grin, he replied, “No, not happiness. Do you speak English?” “Yes” I answered, shocked to be hearing the question while standing among ceramic bowls and mugs in Prague’s Tesco department store. I looked him in the eye as he pushed more words through his (now obvious) smile, “You let me practice my talkative English with you? “ I nodded, looked at my mug, and reiterated our earlier exchange, “Yellow is the color of jealousy? Not happiness?” “No. Not happiness. Not in the Czech Republic. Jealousy is yellow. Yellow is the color of sickness and jealously is an illness. You speak English very well. I am jealous.” We laughed and I assured him that his English was far better than my less than minimal Czech. He replied, “Czech is not useful. I know it because I live here, the rest of the world does not know it and they are fine. I learn English, because it is useful everywhere. Don’t learn Czech, only we are stubborn and speak it. Czechs are old fashioned. I have been to every European country and English is spoken, not Czech. ” I told him I hoped to learn Czech while visiting Prague. He replied, ”If you like. But thank you for letting me practice my English, I hope to speak it like you one day”. He reached over me, seized a yellow mug resting on the shelf above my head, smiled, and with a slight nod sauntered down the utensil aisle. My yellow mug, originally chosen for its sun-like qualities in this dimly lit city, now seemed less appropriate than I originally thought. I placed it back onto the shelf and started to scan for perhaps a more optimistic color. Overwhelmed by the florescent lighting, unfamiliar price tags, and the hum of unrecognizable Czech, I paused and grabbed the mug again.

Suntory “Please buy me” the moped thought to herself as she noticed 3 foreign boys struggling to bargain in Mandarin with a local merchant. Minutes of haggling seemed like hours as the shop owner refused to budge. An exasperated sigh could be heard as the merchant handed over the keys for 2,350 yuan, the equivalent of roughly $350. Each of the three boys bought a moped that day. There are now 16 students from NYU's study abroad program in Shanghai that have mopeds. Victor rode away from the shop with his two friends. It was the first time he had ever been on a moped. A Shanghai street wasn't exactly the safest place to start. Pedestrians struggle with hundreds of mopeds and bicycles on a busy street on any given day. “Suntory” he thought to himself as he looked down at the silver and blue paint covering cheap plastic. Suntory joined Aurora and The Red Baron in Jin Du Yuan's garage that night. It was her first night in a new home. Night darkened as she wondered why Victor locked her back wheel. “Have I done something wrong?” she asked the other mopeds. Jin Du Yuan's security guard could be heard scoffing under his breath each time a student would ride by on a moped. The average salary in Shanghai hovers around 5,000 yuan a month, or roughly $700. A college student spending half the average salary on a toy was absurd to the security guard. It clearly showed the socio-economic contrast between native workers in Shanghai and students from America's New York University. Victor rode Suntory to school every morning with the other students that had mopeds. He couldn't help but think the lot of them looked like an awkward non-violent gang in training. Still he kept th e plastic wrap around the lights and new leather seat. “When it falls off it falls off” he would answer when his friends asked. Spring in Shanghai came with a heavy rain season. A particularly slick night brought Victor and Suntory's first accident. A slight turn on a wet sewer cover ended with Victor, a friend, and Suntory skidding across a busy Shanghai street. It has now rained for 14 straight days. Suntory has been locked up along with the other mopeds for many days now.

It has been nineteen days since my last blog post. I have nothing to write about except the night culture. It is consuming me. It is Sunday, and I feel injured from the weekend, an accumulation of tiny, insignificant pains acquired over the past three days. My throat is sore, my voice raspy, from breathing inhaling the second and first hand smoke. My heels and pinky toes are blistered from wet leather on bare skin. My legs are scattered with miscellaneous, penny-sized bruises. My head is heavy. My eyes sting from sleeplessness. A solitary cigarette burn, pink and bubbled, on my forearm. And I'm 300 pesos poorer.

I am having fun here in the way I recognize it as dangerous, self-destructive. The alien jolt of environment change has taken me to the kind of careless place I haven't experience since high school. The second week of class, I haven't read a thing, and I'm not worried. It would be easier to do homework at Disneyworld. At the same time I question how much of the city I am seeing. There is only one side of a city at three in the morning and it's seen through drunk eyes. There is only one side of the city at dawn. At the same time this is the culture, I just haven't learned the game yet

I have been thinking about how it's also a city of hustlers, how everyone seems to have some less legitimate form of making money. My host mother, for example, does not seem to have a job; she has three exchange students staying with her at a time and serves hot dog in some form four times a week. When I first moved in she tried to make me share my room with another girl, but I put up a fight. In some ways it makes the city less accessible; two people in the program were mugged last weekend and I won't be surprised to hear about two more this weekend. But attempting to crack it or navigate feels like even more of an accomplishment.

How to travel around BA Public transportation around Buenos Aires is a really overwhelming expeirence even for those who are able to comfortaably work their way around cities like New York, Madrid or Paris. Buenos Aires is massive, their public transportation system? not so much. Here, everyone relies on what are called collectivos. Collectivos are buses here in Buenos Aires that are much more extensive than say, the subway system which only has five lines and . The thing with collectivos are that since there is so many of them, it's difficult to know which one you should take, which side of the street you should be on to catch said collectivo or which stop you need to get off of to get to your destination. There's a guide to the collectivo system called "the Guia-T" which is supposed to help you figure out the collectivos with ease, but all they do is confuse me so much more. I always walk around with my guia t with the intent of that day being the day that I will master the collectivo. But this day has never come. After getting hopelessly lost several times, once which forced me to arrive 45 minutes late to class and numerously getting off at the wrong stops, I've developed insecurities when it comes to riding the busses here. I'm seriously intimidated by them. Instead, I get around using my two feet, cabs and the subte to school. I have it set in my mind that I won't keep this up next week because I feel as if I'm missing out on a more authentic experience of city life here by opting out of riding the collectivos. I love the whistling sound that the collectivos make when riding down the street. I remember the first time I heard it, I thought someone was cat-calling me or something.

Dulce de Leche

When I first arrived in Buenos Aires, I scoured the shelves of the supermarkets for one of my favorite foods—peanut butter. I knew it would be difficult to find peanut butter here as it was the same when I visited Europe, but I was still a bit surprised that it simply wasn’t available, anywhere. Fortunately, before my cravings really kicked in, I found that my addiction to peanut butter could be easily replaced by a different but equally delicious high calorie spread—dulce de leche. Meaning “milk candy” in English, dulce de leche is a milk-based syrup that tastes something like caramel. I have cooked it before at home, and it requires hours of simmering milk, sugar, and vanilla. Although it takes a while to prepare, it’s definitely worthwhile. I love the rich flavor of dulce de leche, I could easily eat a jar of it like soup. Dulce de leche is immensely popular here in Buenos Aires; it is SO popular here, that I have decided to dedicate this entire blog post to its popularity...

My first Buenos Aires dulce de leche encounter occurred on my first night in the city. I opened up the refrigerator at my home stay to find a jar of dulce de leche, and my host mom, peering over my shoulder, told me that it was my jar. She eats the syrup with anything from bread and crackers to fruit and sweets. I easily adapted to this routine…every morning I eat my toast with dulce de leche, and every evening I eat bananas with dulce de leche.

If you walk into any Buenos Aires pastry shop, you will find that dulce de leche is is a key ingredient in cookies, pastries, and candies. It is the city’s primary ice cream flavor, and it is also an ingredient in Argentina’s national cookie—the alfajore. In the supermarkets of the city, dulce de leche occupies the same amount of shelf space as nut-butters or jams do in the United States of America. Not only is it available by the jar, but it is also a flavor used for milk and pudding. They even sell individually wrapped cubes and tablets of the sugary treat at 24 hour kiosks, supermarkets, and pharmacies.

When I asked my host mom why dulce de leche is so popular here she said: “I don’t know why we eat it all the time! All I know is that when I was born, my mother gave me dulce de leche. Maybe it’s because it’s made with milk and we have so many cows here…we eat a lot of meat here, and we use the milk for dulce de leche”.

Barrio Tango: A piano, a fan, and records on the wallAbout once a week it will pour in Buenos Aires. It is a characteristic of the weather in this small part of Argentina which as a whole is experiencing its worst drought in fifty years. The sun is blocked out by a white sky which filters the light so that patches of the city may be more lit up than others but the light is flat and dull, though in a way that makes plants look better than buildings which seem more drab in the cool air. Last night it was raining as hard as I have seen it here and I went out at around this time (2 am) to San Telmo, the neighborhood that everyone says looks more European than most parts of the city. I had been to a market there before and can attest to the difference but at night I didn’t see it. All I saw were dark streets punctuated by yellow lamps diffusing their glow through the downpour. I pulled up to a very nondescript location and tried to find the address my friend had texted. It was a scratched up black door in what was the front of a building but what I remember as a brick wall.

Inside was a tango school—of course closed now but not very busy during the days either, I was told—where people were dancing and drinking. From the door I walked through a brick-walled hallway with no ceiling and saw practice rooms on my right. There was dancing and drinking going on in the furthest room and I mainly moved between there and the largest practice room the entrance of which was lit up with a pink spot light. Inside there were chairs, a few records on the wall, a mirror at ground level, and a piano. Whenever someone would enter the pink hue that the spotlight threw on the piano would disappear for a second and then return. As the rain continued to rinse the city my friends along with Argentine musicians and artists listened to tango, milonga, and more that I can’t place.

It was a great night and I hope I’ll remember it but certain things may grow fuzzy. The conversations, the look of the place, the smell, the sound. I didn’t bring a camera here so I can’t take pictures, but in the age of facebook the issue of the photographic experience is not so much the feeling one gets from having a picture as it is about the feeling they get from taking one. My friend brought his camera along and I’ve added one of his pictures here. I like the idea of posting pictures other people took because it shows how they wanted to remember a moment that we both experienced but in different ways. So that is it.