Phone home

On June 21st, Argentina's Lionel Messi managed to squeeze one goal into the net in the final minutes of the game, advancing in the world cup in a game against a very defense oriented Iranian team. The game seemed to last forever. We were watching it in an apartment with some friends, the tension slowly escalating as the minutes drained away. Argentina won and the whole town, ourselves included, converged on the town center. Flags were waving, horns were blowing, the air was full of both relief and excitement about the game.

As the celebration continued, more and more people were packing into the town square. They would break out into songs and chants, people were so happy, things were on fire. Occasionally, a writhing, swirling, churning mass of people would start to pulse and spread from the middle of the crowd outward, devouring all who got in it's path. Eventually, one of these cesspools of mob mentality reached to the outer part of the crowd in which we were standing. In the middle of the chaos, I saw a guy reaching for my love. I wasn't sure if he was trying to feel her or trying to take things out of her pockets, but neither option sounded like a good time to me. As soon as I managed to push him off of her, I felt someone else pushing against me. I pushed him back until he left as well, at which point I realized that my phone was gone. I was also drenched in coca cola.

Perhaps I was an easy target for a thief because
I was temporarily deafened by a guy with
 two plastic trumpets.

I was phone less. Disconnected. Inconvenienced. Liberated.

Did I miss my phone? Sure, I'm a modern guy, and I'm used to having that convenience available to me. I missed being able to tickle every curiosity with a web search. I missed having the ability to know my exact location instantly. I missed having a camera conveniently available to me every second of the day. All very convenient things in a new place.

I couldn't get in touch with anyone. No text messages, Facebook IMs, email, phone calls or status updates. It was suddenly very difficult to brag about what I was doing at any given moment of the day. It was impossible to know where everyone else was.

The two previous paragraphs surely sound like complaints, but they are most definitely not. This criminal who had forced himself up against me and reached into my pocket to take what was mine had freed me from an addiction. I was finally free from living a life with so many things being at my fingertips so easily. I was free to stop caring about how many people liked or commented on my posts, who messaged me, where my friends were, who was looking for me, the list goes on. For the first time in a long time, I was forced to live in the moment. If I was stuck waiting for someone, I would be forced to confront my thoughts, to entertain myself, to steel my nerves and just be patient in waiting for something. I had to find my own way around this new city, using my instincts, without relying on a map. I was forced to actually be on time for things, instead of just texting someone and saying I would be late.

I was amazed at how much I enjoyed my time lacking a phone. It was like there was a whole world happening around me, and I had finally been unplugged from the matrix and could see it yet again. I could taste food, have conversations with real people, and see the things happening around me on the streets.

I've since bought a new phone. Phones in Argentina are crazy expensive due to some import taxes imposed by Argentina's government. I bought a phone in the states via craigslist and had it brought here by a friend who was coming down here (Thanks Laura!) but later realized that phones from certain companies don't work on the networks down here. So now I have a phone that doesn't work. I basically just have a small camera in my pocket now. Am I disappointed by that? Maybe... but maybe not.

I'm not creeped out easily... but...

I've been in Argentina for almost two months now, and my spanish is slowly improving. It's a bit frustrating, honestly. In the hopes of speeding things up, I have been taking classes at a small school in the city, which often has get togethers, parties, food, or outings to different places. Today I was sitting in class and Sophie, one of the girls who works at the front desk in the school, came in to the class to ask if anyone wanted to go see a cemetery in town. Everyone in the class was pretty disinterested, but she said there was some interesting architecture there so I decided I would give it a shot.

I returned to the school at 3pm to meet with everyone who wanted to go to the cemetery, but nobody was gathered there at all. Sophie was there and I asked her if we were going or not and she said yes, we should just wait a while and see who else shows up. after about 15 minutes, three Brazilian students of the school came and we were off. We hopped onto a city bus and it was packed to the gills. It was so full that the bus driver refused to stop for people waiting on the sidewalk. When he drove directly past a group of people, one man started chasing us down the street. This is a fairly intense thing to do, but people in the states need to realize that the streets, the traffic and sidewalks down here are about a thousand times as chaotic as anything we have back home. This guy runs through traffic until we finally stop at a red light and he jumps in front of the bus. He's yelling, the driver's yelling, back and forth for minutes on end. The light turns green and the man is still standing in front of the bus, cars behind us are honking, and the driver is threatening to call the police. The man isn't backing down. He needs to get on that bus. Finally the driver lets him on and we're moving again.

We get off the bus 15 or 20 minutes later in a slightly sketchy, semi run down neighborhood. We start walking away from the main avenue and things are getting worse by the block. A few blocks later, we arrive at a park with what looks like an old church in it. It is not a church, but rather an entrance to the cemetery. Outside are old ladies selling flowers, and small gifts people can bring for their dead loved ones.

A wall containing the bodies of
less wealthy people.

We walk in through the front door and down a long hallway filled with immaculate tile work and sunlight shining off of the clean white walls. The hallway opened up into the cemetery, which was nothing like I expected, nothing like what we are used to seeing in the states. There were no gravestones at all, but rather there is a small city of mausoleums, of varying ages, styles and levels of disrepair. Naturally, I whipped out my camera and started taking photos. Almost instantly, a police officer appeared and started yelling at me to stop taking photos, all in spanish of course. I put my camera away and kept walking. This place was pretty incredible though, and I wasn't about to just not take any photos at all.

Broken window full of
spider webs

As soon as we ducked down one of the side alleyways, I looked around to make sure nobody was watching and started shooting more photos. We continued sneaking around on the side streets for fifteen or twenty minutes shooting photos sneakily. Many of the mausoleums had wrought iron on the doorways,  with glass behind. Many of the glass windows were broken out, and you could reach in and touch the coffins inside if you really wanted to, and if you didn't mind getting covered in spiderwebs. I settled for merely looking inside at the dusty coffins, wondering what the contents looked like.

As we continued my fascination caused me to forget about the fact that we were supposed to be sneaky, and I was shooting photos freely. All the way down at the other end of the alleyway appeared the groundskeepers of the cemetery, yelling at me to stop taking photos. One of them was a short disfigured man with snaggle teeth and walking with a crutch, the other was a huge brute of a man with bad breath and a shirt covered in cobwebs. The brute chased us down and started yelling at me in spanish. He was threatening to call the police and have me arrested or have me thrown out of the cemetery if I didn't delete the photos I had taken. Sophie started talking to him and had the brilliant idea of pretending that I only spoke english, and didn't understand a word of what he was saying. I put on my best dumb face and started saying a bunch of stuff in my most 'Merican voice, even throwing a bit of Texas in there just for icing on the cake. I'm not sure if he actually believed it, or if the guy was so lonely and depressed after spending his whole life in the cemetery that he would let my infractions slide if it allowed him to gain some friends. Regardless of the reason, it worked. I offered to delete my photos, and he said it was alright if I kept them. Sophie kept smooth talking him and he warmed up to us even more, eventually offering to give us a secret tour of the place.

The tour started out with the basics. We saw tombs of famous people, rich people, hated politicians. We saw the oldest and newest mausoleums, and learned a bit about the maintenance of the place. Throughout the tour he kept telling me he liked me and kept calling me gringo. Okay. I managed to sneak a few photos with my phone during the tour. Not ideal, but better than nothing. We learned that the maintenance of each mausoleum is the responsibility of the families of the dead, and naturally, some of them cannot afford the costs of maintenance. This is when things got really interesting. He started telling us that there were a lot of people who would do witchcraft in the cemetery. He showed us a mausoleum with a dead rooster in it, with strange writing scribbled on it and a bag full of who knows what. Another had dead chunks of a cow and some burnt up candles, arranged in some dark ritual. He walked right into the mausoleum and grabbed the bones and gave them to his dog. One of the mausoleums had it's door cracked open, and our guide pushed it open just enough to see inside. What lay there was a small coffin, 2 and a half feet long, empty, open on the floor. A practitioner of some sort of twisted black magic had stolen the corpse of a baby and left the coffin open on the floor for all to see.

Just when I thought the tour couldn't get any weirder, we came to our grand finale. Never in my life have I seen anything like it. One of the oldest mausoleums in the whole place had fallen into a state of serious disrepair. The windows were broken and the weeds had grown high around us. He pointed into the broken window and told us to look. One by one we put our faces to the window and saw. Someone had been buried in a cheap coffin made of tin, and over time the coffin had fallen, and the thin sheet of metal had decayed to reveal it's contents. Staring up at the web covered ceiling for eternity was the grim rotting face of this poor soul. The crypt keeper claimed that the coffin had simply fallen and opened, but it's pretty obvious from looking that someone has pried back the lid. There's no saying what exactly these people intended to do once they got it open, and whether or not they succeeded.