Hello

Welcome to my blog: Querida Roca te quiero, pero…

The blog came out of an idea to write a guide to what it’s like to live in General Roca, Rio Negro, Argentina, from a foreigner’s perspective. Let’s be honest, it’s a pretty freaky place at times, and some of the weirdest shit goes down here.

A lot of what I’ve written seems very critical, but really, please don’t take it badly if you live here. I live here too, and I don’t want to move; I’m phenomenally happy here, and I think Roca’s idiosyncrasies are part of its charm. I’ve tried to be humorous rather than superior.

Also, a lot of the topics I cover are not particular to Roca. They could be applied to Argentina or the whole world. I will try and reflect that in the tag words or formatting or something, probably.

The idea of this blog is to have two sides, a “dark” side for all the weirdness, and a “light” side for all the good stuff. Each side should eventually be bilingual too (any translation volunteers???)

Well, that’s it, I think. Have fun, and remember…it’s just a laugh.

Mobile phones (use of while driving)

Don’t do it. Really. I mean, there are lots of places to pull over while you have your crucial chit-chat with one of the gals from the gym or one of the Friday night lads who’s a bit worried about how much chorizo to buy this week. If someone calls you while you’re out and about in town, or roaring along the Ruta, is there really, truthfully, hand on heart, any reason why you can’t, like the law requires, erm, stop? Or let them leave a message and call them back from the next service station?

Oh, I get it, you’re the reincarnation of Fangio. Of course, silly me…one undisputed motor racing superhero in a nation’s history instantly guarantees unquestionable prowess for all future generations of his people. Only we’re not all Fangio. Fangio’s dead and the only legacy he left us is an expensive brand of petrol. We’re just ordinary people, and, let’s face it, there are probably circus animals that can drive better than the vast majority of us, so let’s not complicate things with add-ons like mobile phones.

But wait, 95% of people believe they drive better than average. Ok, I made that statistic up, but how many of you are sitting there thinking: “Crazy English fool, of course I drive better than average.”

And that’s the point: most of us think we drive better than average, and the rest just laugh like drains as they plough through town oblivious to the trail of destruction and dead kittens they leave in their wake. But statistically we can’t all drive better than average, so half of us are wrong. So to be on the safe side, we should ALL assume that we are in the half that is wrong. It’s not that difficult. Look upon it as a service to the dim-witted clot behind you who is driving like a complete tool and doesn’t realise it, but you, the responsible road user, are wise enough to account for the vanities inherent in the human spirit and modify your behaviour accordingly. You know you CAN drive like Fangio, but you choose to drive like the Pope’s chauffeur, just to allow for the idiots. Beatification, surely, is guaranteed.

Somewhere, incredibly wise and qualified people have done research which shows us that using a phone whilst driving is more or less as stupid as driving while under the influence of alcohol, or defusing a hand grenade whilst masturbating into a bucket of nitroglycerin. If, for whatever reason, you believe that you live in the rarefied atmosphere which exists above the statute books, you are unbelievably dangerous because a) your arrogance transcends laws created by democratically* elected officials and backed up by nationally and internationally verified research, and b) you would clearly by association consider it within acceptable risk parameters to defuse a hand grenade whilst masturbating into a bucket of nitroglycerin. Either way, you’re a threat to humanity, and the only way you should be allowed to share asphalt with the rest of us is in a cage strapped to the back of a crippled donkey.

* – I know, I know, ha ha…”democracy” in Argentina. Es lo que hay.

Consultation meetings that go round in circles

Great, let’s have a consultation about something really important, say, redesigning the country’s entire secondary education system. Brilliant. Three days off work, lots of mate, accreditation, handouts, presentations, activities, one third of the people paying attention and showing how much they know, one third drinking mate and flirting with each other, and one third complaining about what a boring old pile of shit this is.

Day 1: Some sweaty clueless people present the aim of the meeting – to redesign the fuck out of everything because it’s all buggered. Talk about how badly buggered it is, laugh at how badly buggered it is, never at any point contemplate that this roomful of people might just be capable of buggering it even more.

Day 2: What the fuck did we talk about yesterday? Ooh, just a quick recap then. What, no Powerpoint? No, sorry, that’s all tied up being used for pointless email attachments (see Powerpoint as neverending email attachment). So we’ll just draw something incomprehensible on some blue paper like in the good old days.

Day 3: Just to return to our previous point then, it’s all really buggered. So, what do you guys think?
Well, sweaty clueless people at the front, we, the bored people, agree it’s all really buggered. What we thought would be required would be some kind of “unbuggering” policy, perhaps shifting our focus towards “upfuckery” or maybe even a “shafting”. Yes, a good “shafting”.

So the conclusion after three days of earnest thinking is that some more thinking needs to be done, by some other people, far away, along the lines of shifting the emphasis away from buggering the country to shafting the country. Well done. Well done everybody. I think we can all be proud of some real progress.

Lists (in spoken form)

“Nos juntamos con mis amiiiiiiiiiiiiigos, fuimos al canaliiiiiiiiiiiito, tomamos unos maaaaaaaaaaates, fuimos al kioooooooooosko, nos compramos carameeeeeeeeeeeeelos, caminamos hasta el ceeeeeeeeeentro, nos encontramos con mis compañeeeeeeeeeeeeros, nos cagamos de riiiiiiiiiiiisa….”

Ad nauseum, ad infinitum

Live music

Something that Roca does exceptionally well, especially given that it’s quite a small city, is high quality live music. Really high quality. Where I come from we do get visiting bands who rock your tits off, but the domestic talent is not a patch on what you get here.
I don’t hang out in Mal de Amores as much as I used to because I don’t have a hairy chest, too much gold jewelery or a posh car, but the times I have been there and been treated to some top notch jazz (which I normally hate, but when it’s played with passion right in front of you, what can you do?) or some bizarre blues:latin fusion are too many to mention.
Just as Roca seems to foment an inordinate amount of jealous anger, so does it attract, inspire and nurture great musical talent. We’re very lucky to have the INSA here – it’s a tribute to the city, and something to be proud of. We need more good venues, though. I went to Bajo Caracoles last night to see Sad Puppet – fantastic grungy rock and a long, powerhouse performance by a band who really know their shit. The stage was ok and the sound was fat and juicy, so big up to Bajo. There just aren’t enough places like that.
If only we could build on what we have in order to inspire even greater diversity and experimentation among young musicians emulating those at the INSA – and encourage audiences to be less conservative about what they appreciate – I think Roca could become a nationally recognised haven for live music, even internationally. Wow, wouldn’t that be something!

Well done Roca. See, I’m not COMPLETELY negative

Christmas

I should make one thing clear up front: I FUCKING HATE CHRISTMAS. In the UK, at least.

It’s bollocks. I mean, the whole “sharing of happiness” is alright, global togetherness, etc. But when you put that aside – as more and more people do – it’s just a big shopping orgy in the shadow of a table about to collapse under the weight of too much food. Everyone getting their pants in a twist over what to get for whom, all the credit cards maxed out, horrible stress about debt, and all the while all the big retail outlets telling us to spend more because if we don’t, we’re terrible people. And then we eat too much. Fuck that. Frankly I’d rather smear jam on my head and stick it in a wasps’ nest.

BUT…compared to what goes on in England, Christmas in Roca is awesome, at least for miserable bastards like me. Back home, Christmas starts at the end of October. I know, I know, that’s really stupid. It starts with some random advert on television with bells and sleighs and snow and shit, an advert that you know you are going to hate so much by December 24 that it actually makes you vomit up the last residue of last year’s Christmas meal the first time you see it. That’s how deeply, gut-shatteringly dreadful that moment is.

Then some chain of shops, normally the ones that sell mobile phones or games consoles, puts up its Christmas decorations. In November. Then the retarded wax works on TV and radio start reminding you how many shopping days there are left before Christmas, and the awful gnawing anxiety begins. I MUST SHOP. I MUST SHOP.

Then greetings cards start arriving from horribly efficient people you genuinely haven’t thought about since the last time they sent you a card. Little cards with snowmen and angels on them, or terribly humorous depictions of a fat Santa getting his belt snagged on a satellite dish while Rudolph defecates in the eggnog. And all of these cards come from charity shops, as if buying them there somehow eradicates the awful wastefulness of sending hundreds of cards out to people who never think of you.

Of course, you haven’t sent any cards. You NEVER send any cards, but the fact that everyone else does just makes you look like a bastard. A thoughtless, disorganised, tightfisted, misanthropic bastard.

So there you are, you “happy” little consumer, swamped by a deluge of adverts, decorations and cards, and the clock is ticking. You haven’t got any money, and you haven’t done what organised, intelligent people do which is to buy everything online in October.

My family also issues Christmas lists. I hate Christmas lists. I’ve been nagged and harried to issue a Christmas list at the end of November every year since the age of four. It’s traumatic. All year I have a brain full of great ideas for things that people can buy me. Then “List Season” arrives and I can’t think of anything. So I ask for guitar strings and film for my camera. Or some obscure CD that no one can ever find. Everyone else’s list is the product of profound thought, with something for every budget and subdivided into “Christmas” and “Birthday” for those who celebrate both occasions close together. Lists are particularly evil because a) you know what you’re getting in advance (not even Jesus knew what he was getting in advance, and he was the Messiah) and b) by the time you’ve opened the majority of your presents, you’re desperately trying to work out which of the remaining ones is the ONE thing you really wanted. Judging by the size and shape of them, it’s none of them, and each one you open brings with it a little gulp of disappointment followed by a wave of shame for having been so ungrateful.

I’m the world’s worst present buyer. I’m really crap. This is partly because I leave everything until December 24 (I’m living proof that those October Christmas adverts don’t work) so by the time I get to the shops I need to buy nine squillion presents on a budget of £6 and most of the good stuff has gone. So I enter the realm of “Fuck it, that’ll do” shopping, where “That” is a book on origami for the person who wanted the limited edition DVD of The Wizard of Oz. I’ve bought books I thought were funny but were in fact shit. I once bought my mum a ring in a cardboard Fabergé egg. And the less said about the enamel mate I bought for my wife for our first Christmas in Argentina, the better. Let’s just say that my whole present buying experience is conducted through a mist of panic-induced sweat. I’m a partially-sighted shopper. I’m probably eligible for incapacity benefits, now I think of it.

So Christmas in the UK is a frenzy. Two-and-a-half months of desperate, feverish consumerism in tones of gold, green and red, acted out to an interminable soundtrack of Christmas “hits”. Seriously, every shop, boutique, record store and shopping mall you go into has got the same CD playing on continuous loop: Cliff Richard, Slade, Jonah Louie, Nat King Cole, John Lennon et al, all “rocking around the Christmas tree” and kissing under the mistletoe and eating figgy pudding while the rest of us fight to the death over the last Zhu Zhu pet hamster in existence.

But that’s England. And possibly some other countries. So I thank my lucky stars I live in Roca, where it kind of starts thinking about happening in the middle of December. The supermarkets go a bit Christmas mad, but no one pays any attention. By the time my birthday comes, with a week to go, there are some very modest decorations going up and the queues are starting to build up in shops, but nothing dreadful. Pan dulce stocks increase at an alarming rate, and Turrón makes a reappearance on the shelves. Then suddenly, at about midday on the 24th, everyone goes Christmas mental, buys EVERYTHING in about 12 minutes (already wrapped up by the kind shopkeeper), goes home, eats lots, sets off some fireworks, opens presents – ALL of which are a surprise and half of which get changed without anyone taking offence – and the whole thing’s over by midday on the 25th.

Paradise.

Indicators (auto)

Ooh look, pretty little orange lights on the side of my car. Aren’t they just the funniest thing you ever saw? I wonder what they’re for. Let’s test them. WOW!! They even make a humorous noise: “Tic-toc-tic-toc-tic-toc.” That’s literally the most entertaining thing I’ve seen today. What can they be for? Too orange to be useful, unless they’re fruit or vitamins. Not bright enough to illuminate anything. They only work intermittently anyway, so what’s the use of that?

Fuck it, they must be a mistake. I know, I’ll just pretend they don’t exist and NEVER USE THEM. After all, I know better than countless generations of master car designers, etc etc.

But the truth of the matter is, as every single reader is doubtless agreeing, they’re bastard useful. So why don’t more people use them, I wonder?

Fernet

Hard to know where to put this one, because I drink it and I like it, and I’ve had some great times with friends while in the company of Fernet.
But there’s a very old secondhand bookshop in my home city called the Scientific Anglian. Extraordinary place; it has a tree growing out of the upstairs window. Anyway, if you took that bookshop, with all its very ancient, musty contents and its very ancient, musty owner in his slightly kinky rubber raincoat and passed it all through a distillery, you would get Fernet. Fernet Branca smells like old books suspended in alcohol. And we drink gallons of it. Weird place, Argentina.

The Escuela Superior de Idiomas (ESI)

You know what I’m talking about.

Drains

I quote our mayor, Carlos Soria, September 1, 2007: “We’re not going to waste money restoring the drainage system of Roca for the three days of rain we have every year.”
That’s a big plate of sun-baked horse manure right there. In fact, it’s a good example of a politician saying, more or less: “Mnuh…it’s really hard work to do that, so here’s a made up shouty statistic to make all the loonies fuck off and stop asking me to do stuff. Oooh look, there are some trees I haven’t cut down.”

Surely even the city’s least observant citizen could work out, with the aid of little more than a chart and an upturned hat, that it rains a good deal more than three days a year in Roca.

In fact, here, the Portal Patagonico states that Roca’s precipitation varies between 170mm and 3800mm annually. So with that falling, according to Mayor Soria, in just three days, we could expect storms to dump almost 1.3m of rain in a day in a bad year. Holy fucking Moses, talk about biblical! Surely our mayor should be funding the construction of, I don’t know, a municipal ark, instead of more waterside promenades.

So what with Old Testament levels of precipitation falling on a town the founding fathers saw fit to build at the outflow of one of Patagonia’s larger rain gullies, and a mayor who would rather plunge his head into molten gold than deal with regular flooding, I think it’s safe to say we are, in the quiet words of the Virgin Mary, fucked.
I suggest those citizens who are tired of driving to work through rivers, or cycling to work with brown stripes up their arses, gather outside town hall and throw balloons filled with shitty rainwater at Mayor Soria until he scrapes his own asphalt off the city’s newly resurfaced streets and personally investigates the possibility of getting its drainage system restored. A. S. A. Fucking. P.

Dogs (stray)

Round ‘em up, put ‘em in a field and sterilize the bastards.

There you go, nice and simple, problem solved.

And before you get all “furious-animal-lover-wants-to-protect-the-poor-little-puppy-wuppies”, adopt half a dozen of the unloved, unwanted, flea-bitten, diseased, thieving, murderous gang rapists. Put your compassion where your mouth is and stop pretending that leaving them roaming the streets fornicating at random and howling at the moon is actually doing them a favour. They’re lame, cancerous puppy factories with ticks bigger than my gonads. They’re half-starved muck spreaders who scare my children witless on their way to the supermarket and make a godless racket every time a siren goes off. What use do they serve society, and how humane are we being in letting them proliferate?
And I insist, unless you are providing a home for some of them, unless you are a regular donor of money or food to the APA, unless you subsidise your local vet so the street animals can receive some proper treatment – all your arguments against sterilising every dog without a collar and an identifiable owner are about as relevant as a condom machine in a nunnery.