My Lunch With Pablo (action figures sold separately)

So a funny thing happened today, I was sitting having lunch talking with my student when the guy at the table behind him all of a sudden fell to the floor- his chair broke right in half! And his whole table started clapping and gave him a round of applause. I was dying- I have never seen anything like it before! It was hilarious. Pablo, my student, just smiled, shook his head, and said “There you go, only in Buenos Aires.”

He also gave me a short history of the politics here. There is a race for a seat in the Senate going on right now, so I have been loosly following it and was asking him if he was going to vote and who he would vote for. First of all, he told me about the last time he voted. A strange thing happened, he said, because the person in front of him was a transvestite. He was a giant man dressed up as a woman. So Pablo looked around and wondered if he was in the right line- because in Argentina men and women line up in different lines to vote. Crazy!

Anyway so the main people who are running for seats in Capital Federal are two women, Cristina Fernandez del Kirchner, the wife of the current president, who is actually from the province of Santa Cruz and built her political party there, and Hilda “Chiche” Duhalde,who is from Cap. Fed. and is the wife of the interim president who backed Kirchner for the permanent job. Kirchner, the president, is now speaking against Duhalde, though they are both from the party. In fact they are all part of the same party. People believe that just by saying you are a Peronist you are more popular, but what is means to be a Peronist is actually very different depending on who you are. Pretty loco. Another of the front runners is an entrepreneur who owns the popular futbol team La Boca Juniors. As a side note, both groups are under investigation for buying votes by way of cash, electrical equipment, shoes and soccer cleats. They really know how to get to the hearts of their constituents, I guess.

Pablo also told me about the immediate time in 2001 when the economy crashed. Apparently the president at the time was facing such strife and antagonism that he one day got into a helicopter and just flew home. Classic. In the following two weeks they had a total of 4 presidents before Kirchner was oficially appointed to finish the term until 2007 when he will no doubt run again. This, I believe, explains why there is so much animosity toward the president from people here. They all speak of the corruption of the government and lament the fact that there is no immediate upturn for their economy in sight. It's sad, really. So in turn, to protest, instead of inserting their ballots, they put slices of salami in their ballot envelopes. Power to the people!