The Maid Didn't Come Today!

Horrors! The maid usually comes on Thursday and I come home to find clean sheets on the bed, fresh towels, and everything clean and smelling so fresh I have to open the windows. She didn't come today. I wonder what happened.

Today we had class with Martin. Martin is an interesting guy. He's from Uruguay and apparently had to travel all the way back from Uruguay, 13 hours by bus, to teach us on Tuesday and Thursday. Do they not have enough teachers in Buenos Aires? I must have missed something.

He looks like a little revolutionary, and he definitely is an intellectual. Get him started on anything and he'll tell you more than you want to know. In true revolutionary/intellectual fashion, he has longish, curly hair, and a scraggly beard.

When I got to class (late because I tried a different restaurant and had to wait 15 minutes to get the check), Nancy was asking him about vocabulary words out of context that she had seen, heard, or read. Oooooh, that really bugs me. It seems like such an inefficient way to learn, especially if the words are not that common. I hate it when my students want to know the meaning of every word (they don't ask, they just use their electronic dictionaries and translate everything), and it was even more annoying to have a classmate using class time to find out the meanings of words that I did not have access to and didn't have the context from which they came.

Even worse, as Martin does not seem capable of giving a straight, short answer to any question, each explanation took quite a bit of time. Somehow, I was able to interject something that steered Martin on to another course, and Nancy ran out of words and we moved on.

The rest of the class was ok. Cynthia talks way too much about China, and I think even Martin today was kind of blown away by her 20 minute response to a question he asked about her city. Well, maybe it wasn't 20 minutes, but it was so long, he didn't bother to ask me about my city (Nancy had already answered the question). It's ok, with only 3 people in the class now, I'm able to get more floor time, and since I've been stuck on this thing with Borges, I have been able to get a little interaction, even though I didn't get to talk about how beautiful San Francisco is.

So, I recounted for Martin everything I've been thinking about Borges lately, from the exam on Friday, to my checking on the internet and finding out that he spoke out against the Peron dictatorship, but I couldn't find anything that he said against the more recent dictatorship that was responsible for the deaths of over 30,000 people.

Martin said Borges was strongly anti-Peron. Apparently there was a little feud between them. Borges was in charge of the national library, and Peron made the head librarian (whatever his post was) also in charge of doing something very menial, like counting chickens at the state fair (not that exactly, but something similar) - Borges quit his job. I'll have to research that to see if I got that close.

Anyway, Martin said that Borges never spoke out against the recent dictatorship, but did reach a point where he felt he should have, and had meetings with the Madres and eventually came out publicly in apology. He was friends with Pinochet though and accepted an award from him, and for that he was snubbed by the Nobel Prize committee.

I have still not been convinced that he was not an asshole, and after reading a poem of his the other day, I'm not terribly impressed by his greatness. Hey, Argentines never recognized him as a great writer, and even today, his image seems to be more common in tourist spots than anywhere else.

After class I went to see a movie at a nearby cinema called "Fotografias". I had no idea what it was about, but I like photographs, and it was an Argentine film, and for 7 pesos (a little over 2 dollars), I figured I could take a chance. Turned out it was 10 pesos (a little over 3 dollars).

It was a very interesting film, and even though I dozed off a bit early on, I understood most of the story.

It was a documentary about a guy whose father gave him a box of photographs, and it started him on a journey to find out more about his mother, who was from India and married an Argentine and moved to Buenos Aires.

The filmmaker went to the pampas and to Patagonia on his quest and eventually went to India, where he was reunited with his mother's family who he had met only once, when they went to India when he was 11.

It was really interesting because he said he thought his mother was the only Hindu in Argentina, but he found out there was another, and that is why he went to Patagonia - not to meet the one other Hindu, but to meet a guy who was a follower of him. I was thinking about all of the Indians in California now, and that I haven't seen any here, even though lots of Chinese are coming here. I wonder what that is all about.

After I got out of the theater, I walked home. It was very warm. I started getting very hungry and started to feel weak. Even though I just finished dinner, I still feel weak. Larry wanted me to go to a restaurant with him and his friend John tonight where everybody starts singing along with the singer, but I am still feeling wiped out from this flu and am going to plant myself on the sofa and watch Latin American Idol and go to bed early.