It is hovering around a hundred degrees this week. Spending Christmas in hot weather is even weirder than spending Christmas alone. Growing up in the Midwest, my brothers and I would complain if there wasn’t at least a foot of snow on the ground on Christmas morning.
Juan’s good friend Albano invited us to spend Christmas with his family. I assumed Christmas meant Christmas, as in December 25th, but Juan told me that here, Christmas meant Christmas Eve. Juan told me we should bring champagne, gifts for the kids, and ice cream.
Buenos Aires’ saving grace in the summertime are its heladerias, or ice cream parlors. You cannot walk two blocks without finding at least one. All of the ice cream places make their ice creams on site. Each store will offer somewhere between a dozen and fifty flavors. You can usually get a single-scoop cone for about a dollar, or three flavors packed into a quarter-kilo Styrofoam cup for three to four dollars. But the most incredible thing about these ice cream places is that they deliver. My first sweaty summer in Buenos Aires, my roommate Saeed introduced me to this phenomenon because he had a crush on the delivery guy. He would call the ice cream place and order us two hand-packed quartos and fifteen minutes later, a handsome guy on a motorcycle would show up with ice cream, waffle cones on the side. I usually got chocolate, mint, and coffee.
I don’t think I’ve ever eaten ice cream on Christmas, so picking up ice cream in one of these heladerias seemed very novel to me. Just before closing time (eight o’clock on Christmas Eve), I stopped by the ice cream store to buy two kilos of ice cream. The place was packed, and I had to wait while the two people in front of me each ordered the same thing—two hand-packed kilogram containers, choosing three flavors to go into each one. The flavors at our closest shop include seven types of chocolate alone, so the selection process can take a while.
We were lucky enough to find a cab pretty easily to our friends’ place across the city. Juan immediately launched into a deep conversation with the driver about Christianity and the social concept of Christmas, and the two chatted happily the whole way there. The driver surprised us by telling us he’s always wanted to visit Palo Alto ever since he watched the Elvis Presley movie Roustabout, which was supposedly filmed there. (According to IMDB, it was filmed not in Palo Alto, but Thousand Oaks.) In the end, we exchanged cards, since the driver has his own website of tales from the road.
At our friends’ house, we sat down to a leisurely dinner at the Argentine hour of ten-thirty. The amount of meat consumed at a typical asado is not what kills me, it’s the hour at which we consume it. I always need to have a pre-game snack, but seeing as the snack is consumed at seven pm, I always end up eating a dinner-sized snack. Gorging is one of my greatest talents, but after the requisite five types of meat, I had to remind myself of the copious amount of ice cream we’d brought.
After dinner, it was time to go to the roof terrace to look for Santa (another thing we would never, ever do at a Midwestern Christmas—imagine how many people would slip on icy rooftops and fall to their deaths on Christmas Eve!) From the rooftop, we could see that most families around us were also having dinner outside, with the patriarchs shirtless and sweating in the summer heat. People were setting off fireworks, and we all took them as indications that Papa Nöel was somewhere in the vicinity. After watching what we were sure was a sleigh pulled by reindeer sprinting across the night sky, we returned to the living room and saw the gift-wrapped evidence that the fat man himself had quietly slipped in while we were up on the roof.
I’d forgotten how quickly kids can tear through a mountain of gifts. After the adults had assembled the first few toys that needed assembling, we had a champagne toast and began to relax. I asked what people would be doing the following day, with all of the presents already opened and everything closed. They said they would go to see other family and eat cold asado—the leftovers from dinner—and just hang out.
We knew it would be impossible to find a taxi, so we hopped a packed bus to get home. As soon as a seat opened up, I sat down and immediately fell asleep, with Juan watching over me. We didn’t get home until four in the morning.
The streets on Christmas Day felt like the day after the Fourth of July—there were drunks stumbling around, and every trash receptacle was overflowing with garbage. The ice cream parlors were the only places open for business—and thank god for that. I went in for more.
I’m sort of on photo-taking hiatus but check out our friend Albano’s beautiful photography for a profound look at Buenos Aires on his photoblog, Flaneur.
jbuhler