Haircut

Plotnik's hair got really long during this trip, but he had it cut off yesterday morning, with Ducknik watching and taking pictures, a few hours before they had to get in the cab to leave Argentina and return home. In the neighborhood of Caballito, where they were staying, there is a very old-school barber shop, like Plotnik remembers from when he was a child -- the strange alcohols in the glass jars, the razors with the sharpening strop hanging off the ancient chair, and above all the conversation. Plot hadn't had a haircut like this since Mexico City forty years ago and he was determined to go do it again.



For 35 pesos ($8) he found out everything there is to know about the barber's home province of Chaco, and the incompetent Argentinian government. AND, he looks positively Cesar Romero at this moment.



Or at least he did, before the 24 hour misery of three international flights. Right now, in the middle of the last leg, he looks and feels more like Shemp, the third Stooge.

A twelve hour plane trip is 'way worse than a twelve hour bus ride. On the bus, the drivers can't last more than two hours without taking a three or four cigarette break, so you get to stretch. The seats are 'way more comfortable and you can look out the window and see the world zoom by. You stop in small towns and see the way things really are.

A twelve hour international plane trip is an exercise in discomfort mixed with institutionalized indifference. And it's at least sixteen hours or more -- the two hours in advance at the airport and the wait to pick up baggage and clear customs. And we're not talking about the two and a half hour flight before and the five hour flight after. When you stagger off those planes you feel like a three day old empanada.

And something always happens at the airport to remind you you're home.

For Plotnik at 6am this morning, that something was First World Security at the Toronto Airport. He and Duck took buses and trains and five flights on four different airlines in South America and never had to take off their shoes, never had to remove the computer from the backpack, never had to worry about liquids, never had to take the coins or extra camera battery out of their pocket before going through the metal detector. Or the bottle of water.

In Toronto Plot and Duck went through it all, and then some, and it's worse after twelve miserable hours on a stuffed airplane with babies crying and people all around you coughing up lungs and livers.

This leg, the last leg, is taking forever. They're over America now. The prospect is not all that exciting.

It's going to be good to be home, but not right away. Places you travel to are so much more lax, the way of life in the rest of the world so much slower and easier, the people far more knowledgeable about the affairs of the planet, as a general rule, than Americans. They speak your language if you don't speak theirs, which, if you're American, you probably don't.

Plot and Duck learned about Chile and Argentina from cab drivers -- who tend to speak so fast even Plotnik can only get a percentage of what they're saying. They will tell you the truth, if you ask them the right way, from their perspective -- the point of view of people living on the ground.

It's never fair to call the people of one or another country friendly or unfriendly. In every country most people are helpful and a few are assholes. In both complicated cities -- Buenos Aires and Santiago -- the moment Plotnik brought out his map a stranger would be at his side, offering him directions.

The problem was the same problem as in Maine, or in Istanbul -- the directions were usually incompetent. But everyone meant well.

Reading the guidebooks about Buenos Aires before they left Saint Plotniko, Plot feared he was heading into chaos -- pickpockets, thieves, lying cab drivers, murderous neighborhoods, every step only one unsteady moment from certain disaster. Everybody had a horror story.

What a pile of poop. Yes, the stories were true, yes a few neighborhoods looked pretty damned dicey, but would you go into East Oakland at 2am waving a camera? That's what the French tourist staying at Casa Giorgio did -- speaking no Spanish, he and his girl friend wandered into the worst part of La Boca in the middle of the night and -- sure enough, somebody put a gun to his head and stole his passport and his money. And his camera.

Yes, he was unlucky, but he also was an idiot. Of course, this kind of thing can happen anywhere. Plot and Duck could get mugged at SFO in a few hours. It's not too likely.

Buenos Aires at night is also the most exciting place Plotnik has ever been. People who read this fearmongering stuff in guidebooks are likely to miss the best part of a glorious city -- tango milongas and the streets filled with people talking with their hands and spouting their national poetry and eating steaks with their fingers.

Two nights before Plot and Duck left Caballito, they went to a local parilla (grill) for dinner, at around 10pm. Two women walked in and sat down at the table next to them. Plot heard the first woman asking the waiter about dietetic things -- how much oil is in that and can you leave the potatoes out of the salad? It was like being home.

Then they ordered. The waiter brought then a hugendous platter of beef ribs-- three double-cut slabs, cut into five or six pieces each, on a sizzling platter. They proceeded to pick that beef up with their hands, bone by bone, as Annie Lamott might have said, and demolish it all. While they ate, they talked, waving the bones like batons conducting their own private orchestra.

Trust me, it has been a month of Tuesdays since you've seen two women eat that much beef in a restaurant and have such a great time doing it.

This is the way the Argentines seem to be. Chileans are better off, and are probably more confident about their futures and therefore better planners, but Argentines are alive. They don't leave any meat on any bone.