All in a week’s travel: Public transit, economics, wine and women

I have recently arrived in Buenos Aires, but I got to do some traveling beforehand. Here are… I have recently arrived in Buenos Aires, but I got to do some traveling beforehand. Here are some of my experiences:

“How is your public transit?” I asked the people of New Orleans

“It sucks,” they replied.

“It looks pretty fun, though,” I said and pointed toward one of the city buses. In New Orleans, some of the buses are driven by the ’80s sitcom character ALF and riders throw beads at pedestrians. It’s so slow, though!

After New Orleans, I decided to visit the city with even better transit, so I headed to New York to bum around like some subterranean for a week.

In the Bible, God prevents a human plan to build a tower to heaven by afflicting the workers with different languages.

The plan seems like something that would work out until you experience New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is more complicated than a tower and runs smoothly without any two riders or workers speaking the same language.

Between subway rides, I slept on the couch of my friend Ross, an indie musician who lives in Queens.

When you read economics textbooks, there’s always a part at the beginning that asks, “What the heck do economists agree on?” The answer is always rent control, and they agree it is a bad idea.

So as an econ kid, I was star-struck to find that Ross sublets his apartment illegally from his feudalist neighbor, who claimed the place some time back and now charges subletters much more than the regulated rent that he pays the landlord.

Just think: Like star-crossed lovers, supply and demand stretched yearning and trembling palms, one toward the other, o’er a crevace flooded with tears. I was asleep on a couch in that crevace.

Ross’ roommate is a bartender at a wine bar in Manhattan. We dropped in one night, and the roommate let us drink the wine at the bottom of the bottles. It’s a good use of resources, but it makes you look like an alcoholic, since you’re bent over a little table crowded with empty bottles. Sitting on a plush couch, sipping French wine with an indie musician and an NYU sociology major and even a painter, with the four of us bathed in crimson from the bar’s neon sign, I couldn’t help but feel like a poet. I wrote this poem: So much depends upon a red wine bottle glazed with rain water beside the white people.

From New York City, I flew down to Buenos Aires to study abroad. The airplane ride was a good slice of everything awesome about Latin culture. I sat in the middle, with two kids to my right whose mother wound up sitting farther back.

The kids went crazy, slamming their tray tables down like diving boards. The American lady in front of us turned around several times and said, “stop,” in English. Even though she spoke very slowly and with a lot of enunciation to make it clear that the “s” and “t” were both bringing something to the table, somehow this plan failed on the little Argentine rascals.

Half the folks on the plane were getting tipsy on wine, so there were wine caps rolling all over the place.

I snatched up a handful off the floor and started playing that street game where you hide a $20 bill under a cup and mix the cups around, except with wine caps and a piece of cucumber instead of money. This was a raging success with the kids and they freaked out so hard that they fell asleep in 20 minutes.

The sister slept on the floor, with her head in the aisle, but no one thought anything of it, and the stewardesses just stepped over her little head like you would a dead pigeon. Later, when I went to the bathroom, I realized you could just go make yourself drinks at will, including wine, and that everyone but me was obliging. Now I’ve arrived in Buenos Aires and am acclimating to the city and culture. So far I have mainly observed that Argentine women are very attractive, and that they love fashion.

My neighborhood is crowded with women’s fashion boutiques. At first I was confused: Where do you buy groceries here?

Then I noticed the women are so thin that groceries are rarely a concern, and then I discovered that the men mainly eat women’s clothing.

Because of the fashion and architecture, they call Buenos Aires the Paris of South America, but really it’s more like New York. Paris is full of the French, but both New York and Buenos Aires are full of Hispanic people.

On the other hand, New Yorkers are very humble about their language skills, while the Parisians and Porte’ntilde;os – people from Buenos Aires – love to belittle your real world practice time by answering questions in English.

A word to the cool: When answering in a language that you didn’t speak growing up, never use the phrase “in contrast.” It gives away that you’re a jackass. E-mail Lewis at ljl10@pitt.edu