Here in Argentina, if you want to join a gym for any length of time, they make you get a physical from a doctor.

Up until today, we had avoided this by signing up for short stints at the gimnasio, and then moving on to a new workout place every few months (this was easy to do given that we’ve lived in 4 different apartments).

Most recently, we had joined the tennis club where the girls take lessons because they had a gym facility as well. We gave that up after a month though, because the weight lifting and cardio equipment was soooooo bad. (It was too expensive to maintain just for tennis.) Not happy with any of our local options, we decided to return to the Always Club in Palermo, because it presented the best cost to benefit ratio of any of the gyms we have frequented.

That was our fatal mistake. Returning to the same facility we had used before apparently triggered their “take a physical” requirements.

So this Wednesday morning, we went to see the doctor (who was an asshole). What a waste of time. He asked us about 6 questions, took our blood pressure, and then gave us each an ECG — yes, a resting electrocardiogram. Which, as I understand it, is pretty useless. But, he was shocked that neither of us had ever had one for screening purposes. I explained that they generally weren’t used unless a person had heart problems or was experiencing symptoms related to heart disease.

On the bright side, the office for visiting said doctor was upstairs at the gym, so we could pop in before a workout. Still, I found the whole thing to be ridiculous — just a stupid bureaucratic hoop to jump through.

Observations:

• It is a blend of behind-the-scenes and concert film genres and it worked well.
• It was riveting to see him, and everyone else, at work…it was clear that Michael was very skilled at the business of entertainment. There were a lot of musician references about how unusual it was to work with a pop singer who knew their stuff! (A sad commentary on the state of the music industry, of course.)
• He has really big, rather masculine hands. Given how emaciated he was at that point in his life, I expected thin effeminate hands…
• There is a 24 year old Australian-Greek guitarist who solos with MJ for two songs during the movie and she was really rocking! Her name is Orianthi Panagaris, and she can fly on the strings and smack hard on some chewing gum at the same time. How does she do it?
• My heart broke for everyone who was in the show and never got to actually perform; and frankly, I feel he let them all down. I’m pleased there was a movie so their hard work can be rewarded and recognized.
• Costume-makers discussed plans to create clothes for the show that would involve a meld of textile and technology, the likes of which had yet to be made. Unfortunately, we never got to see any of them!
• The cattle call for the dancers’ auditions was crazy. A blessing to all artists who put themselves out there for rejection time and again.
• And lastly, I came away saddened that the aspects of his life that made him such a talented entertainer (a pushy and abusive stage father and a childhood spent honing his craft) are the very things that led him to hate himself (evident in his body and facial dysmorphia) and hastened his death. You get the sense that the only place he was truly home was on stage.

Tom and I have been very surprised at the groundswell of interest in Michael Jackson that has arisen amongst the elementary-aged kids at the Zs’ school since his death. In fact, this Halloween, there were gloved-hand costumes in class.

These newly minted Argentine fans practice a wide array of his dance moves together. They love all of the man’s music: his later work, the Jackson 5 and his early solo stuff. They bring lyrics to school and memorize them, even if they don’t know the tune. They ask questions like, “Which name is cooler, MJ or Michael Jackson?” They look up all of his old videos on You Tube. They invent their own variations on the moonwalk.

To be honest, if Zoe doesn’t stop singing I’ll Be There, well, let’s just say we might have to use some duct tape! And, of course, this obsession means we are going to see This is It! tomorrow. Zoe has heard from her classmates that it’s really great… .

When we have a yen for something American in Buenos Aires, here are some of our standbys:

American Breakfast. First, go to a butcher or a deli and ask for panceta, it will cook up reasonably close to what we would consider to be bacon. Next, a trip to the Jumbo is in order so that you can spend an absolute fortune on some real maple syrup. (When Tom purchased it there, the check out clerk scanned it, looked at the price and then studied the bottle closely, trying to figure out why the stupid gringo was willing to pay a zillion dollars for the small bottle of mysterious liquid!) Stop at the frutería and buy some tropical fruit, pictured here we have mango and pineapple! Lastly, cook up some eggs and french toast/pancakes and stuff yourself silly.

Pork Chops and Apple Sauce. You can get Granny Smith Apples throughout the year here. Buy a bunch, peel and core them, and then pop ‘em in a big pot. Since the manzanas are often pretty bland, be willing to throw in some lemon juice, a smidge of sugar, and some cinnamon to liven them up a bit. Pork chops are almost always available at the Avicar chain of butcher shops.

Chicken Pot Pie and Beef Stew. Comfort food, baby. Pretty much anything you need to make these dishes is available at the grocery store. The weather is getting a tad warm for beef stew, but when it cools off again, keep it in your back pocket. Add some frozen peas for a little green! Also, the cut you want for the stew meat is from the aguja roast. In terms of the pot pie, we’ve found that even without any measuring cups, the biscuit dough is pretty forgiving. Just go for it! (Read a previous post on chicken pot pie.)

Chinese Dumplings. Okay, not exactly American, but we like to make big batches of these from scratch and put a bunch in the freezer for later when we’re craving a little ethnic food for lunch. (These are so amazing when you make them yourself.) You can buy the wrappers, Napa cabbage, and items for the dipping sauce in Barrio Chino. The hurdle here can be finding ground pork. We’ve discovered that many butchers only have one grinder in house, which they generally reserve for carne exclusively. To make your own chicken or pork picada, we recommend buying a small food processor, or an immersion blender with the food processor attachment. (I wrote about how important the blender and attachments have been in our lives here. If you are going to be living in Argentina for a while, buy one!) Pictured above are some pot stickers ready for freezing!

Chocolate Cream Pie. One of the beautiful features of this yummy dessert is that all of the ingredients are easy to find; in fact, you could probably find them all at a maxikiosco or a chino. The crust for this classic North American confection is literally just mashed Oreos and melted butter. (We put the Oreos in a Ziploc and let the kids beat the crap out of them until they are crumbs.) After that, you only need make a simple chocolate custard. Lastly, whip up a few cups of the delicious heavy cream available in Baires. The total ingredient list is butter, cornstarch, eggs, milk/cream, sugar, chocolate, vanilla, Oreos and a pinch of salt. Also, we were able to find a glass tart (pie) pan at the Coto grocery store.

Chocolate Cookies. Do you notice a theme here? Dulce de leche reins supreme in Argentina, and it’s good, don’t get me wrong. But, sometimes, we crave rich chocolate, which is harder to find. Aside from the aforementioned incredibly rich chocloate cream pie, we like making these uber chocolate cookies when the mood strikes. (We bought our cocoa powder at the spice and condiment store, El Viejo Molino on Soldado de la Independencia 1193.) You can also get parchment paper at the Coto (you can tell we spend a lot of time there)! The biggest challenge with these gems is not eating them all in one day. (Does it count against you if you just eat cookies and milk but nothing else for a 24 hour period?)

My new favorite museum in Buenos Aires is the Museo de Armas de la Nación. The kids adored it. It’s not too big. What’s not to love?

I encourage you to take a walk through this historic building laid out like a rabbit warren, each room containing its own treasures. You will be treated to a mix of very old guns (handguns and shotguns), historic knives and swords, ancient spear replicas, cannons, Gatling guns, suits of armor, a life-size diorama of traditional Japanese warriors, collections of toy soldiers, and, yes, even a gas mask designed for a war horse.

One of the things that struck me while perusing these killing artifacts was the shift in personalization that happened upon the advent of mass production. Older swords and guns were often heavily decorated, and one could tell, treasured by their owners. Their import to survival reflected in their painstakingly beautiful adornments.

Modern weapons, by contrast, seemed cold and plain.

I also wondered about the difference between curved swords and straight swords — what were the advantages and disadvantages of both? From what I can tell, it seems that the curved blades were used by cavalry men and were good for slashing motions. Infantrymen, on the other hand, were issued straight swords so they could impale their enemies with a thrusting motion in hand-to-hand combat.

Apparently impaling is difficult with a curved sword. Who knew?

Pictured above is a Gatling gun that was used in the Revolución del Parque in 1890.

[Chess guru Tom chimes in with this report.]

Ordinarily, I like to sleep in on Saturday mornings, but today, Zoe’s chess teacher had other plans for me.

Once every month or so, he volunteers at a junior chess tournament, and he encourages all of his students to participate. Which is awesome, especially since Zoe enjoys the competition. The problem is that on this particular Saturday, we needed to leave the confines of Capital Federal, and travel to the town of Temperley, a suburb located about half an hour south of the city border.

The easiest way to get there would have been to take a taxi all the way to Colegio Alemán (the school hosting the tournament this month), but that would have been rather expensive, and not very adventurous. The alternative was to take the train.

As my family knows a little too well by now, when I’m traveling somewhere for the first time, I like to leave early. So, that meant that even though the tournament started at 10:30 am, we left the house at 8:20 am.

You know, in case something goes wrong.

We found a taxi driver to take us to Estación Constitución (pictured below), and he quickly sized me up as a clueless foreigner, and warned me never to let go of my bag because the station was a dangerous place. I didn’t understand everything he was saying, but Zoe was able to fill in a lot of language gaps for me. In fact, he was so charmed by Zoe’s ability to act as a Spanish-English translator, that he gave her an alfajor. (My Castellano obviously didn’t make the cut, so no cookie for me!)

He dropped us off at the station, we got tickets and hopped on the next train, all without getting mugged. After a pleasant ride to Temperley, we walked a few blocks to the school…

…and, realized we were an hour early.

The chess tournament was a little tough for Zoe this go around. She had her first experience playing with chess clocks, which takes some getting used to. Plus, they have a rule here that if you make three illegal moves, you immediately forfeit the game. (You get to correct the illegal move, but each is a strike against you.) Zoe’s opponents kept putting her in check, but not actually saying “check” (a common chess courtesy), so when Zoe wouldn’t realize her King was imperiled and move some other piece, they would chalk up another illegal move on the scorecard.

After the event, hopped up on the requisite carbs and adrenalin, we managed to negotiate our way home using a train/subway/walking combo — the tournament may not have gone according to plan, but the traveling couldn’t have been smoother!

We arrived at Iguazú in one piece around 5:00 pm on a Friday, when we pulled into the Sheraton, which we selected because it is right smack dab in the middle of the park (you can see the top of the falls and walk the trails from the lobby). No doubt the hotel is an architectural eyesore, but the interior is fine and its smallish size makes it very easy to negotiate.

After checking in, the power blinked out just as we made our way to the elevator with our bags. The poor folks stuck in the ascensor began banging away from the inside since they couldn’t leave their box-like confines. We figure the electricity goes out fairly frequently, because no hotel staff members felt the need to comfort their trapped guests.

I finally couldn’t take it anymore and marched to the lift to explain through the metal doors, in Spanish, that the power was kaput and that the hotel was attempting to get them out as soon as possible (although there was really no evidence to support that statement). Then, I practically forced a Sheraton employee to go talk to them.

We made a mental note to ourselves at that point to avoid the elevator!

By 5:45 pm, we were ensconced in our room. We looked out from our balcony, but could hardly see the falls through all the rain and mist. That’s when I declared, “screw it, we’re here…let’s go.”

We set out on the trails, even though there were signs posted everywhere saying the park was closed from 6:00 pm to 8:00 am. So there we were, just before closing on a rainy Friday, in one of the most majestic spots on the globe…and we had the park to ourselves!! It was exhilarating to run solo along the steel walkways that are perched atop the lips of the falls with the raging waters crashing all around us.

In fact, it was so intense, Zoe was a little shaken after our first pass through the park.

Later, we found out why. The normal flow rate is about 1,500 cubic meters per second, but while we were there, the chocolate brown water was moving at a clip of about 11,000 cubic meters per second. Intense is right.

To get to the falls of Iguazú, we reunited with our friend Mario Andretti, I mean Ariel, and took off over the treacherous clay roads tucked into our 4 x 4 yet again. (It had been raining before our trip, so the passage seemed a little bumpier than our way into Iberá.) Everyone heaved a big sigh of relief when we hit a two lane paved highway after about 2 hours.

Sadly, that relief lasted for a mere moment, because Mario immediately began passing people like a crazy man.

As we were driving, we noticed rather large mounds of dirt everywhere; it was as if oversized moles had been at work in the fields surrounding our passage way. Turns out, they were termite mounds and boy were they prolific. For some reason, we found their being ubiquitous to be rather creepy, so we tried not to think about it too much.

Three hours into the trip, we took a break for some lunch and a tour of las ruinas de San Ignacio Miní, a mission built by the Jesuits and the Guaraní dating from the late 1600s.

At lunch, we talked with Ariel a bit more about Iberá and tourism to the area. He said that about 70% of the visitors are from Europe and 30% are from Argentina. Us Norte Americanos are not well represented, apparently. He did note that they have seen a downward impact on visitor levels from the global recession.

The visit to the Mission was pretty dramatic. As you can see here, there is little left, but what remains shows you the impact of the clay red sandstone used to build the front of the church. Walking through the buildings and the central plaza, you can still get a sense of the grand scale of the community. The priests’ living quarters, which weren’t large, had lovely stone floors, huge windows and a door out to a generous terrace — it must have been truly stunning. (A partial picture below.)

Also, off the terrace was the largest “cactus tree” I’ve ever seen, which is pictured below as well. (A note on the pix, they present very washed out as thumbnails — click on them to really see the richness and detail of the construction.)

Anyhow, I am sitting in Ariel’s truck as I write this on the last leg of our drive, hoping we will make it to Iguazú alive — it is pouring rain, the terrain has become quite hilly and visibility is rapidly deteriorating. Unfortunately, bad driving conditions have not stopped the aggressive driving nature of our conductor. *sigh*

I believe I may have left indentations of my fingers in the Z’s legs as I clutched with fear during the near-accident we were just involved in as Mario passed yet another car.

I think it’s time to close my computer.

(Tom thought my blogging in the back seat was so funny, he took a picture of that as well!)