It will come as no surprise to you that my Spanish needs a little improvement should I really get the most out of the year here in Buenos Aires.

It did, however, come as a big surprise to me.

Friday night Ana and I enjoyed our first opportunity to go out without the kids. We left Isa and Sof with Antonia, our housekeeper who speaks no English. Isa, understandably, was nervous about this because “She doesn’t understand what I say.”

Now Antonia is a godsend. She shows up at our house and quietly starts taking care of things that we weren’t even really aware needed taking care. Then, without anyone even hinting at being hungry, she prepares an amazing dinner with whatever we happen to have in the house. And if we don’t happen to have anything, she tells us she needs to go grocery shopping for us. Of course, you might be thinking “Why would a Stay-at-home Dad need someone to do these things for you?” But if you are thinking this, then you are a) not a stay at home mom, b) do not appreciate your wife if she is a stay at home mom, and/or c) living in Leave It To Beaver. In which case, please bring me back some cheese cake, because I understand that Eddie Haskell makes the best cheese cake.

Anyway, back to Isa. Well, Isa, if you need water, say agua, and if you need the bathroom say baňo, and other than that you should be sleeping anyway. Isa could understand Antonia, but I wasn’t really concerned that Isa would wake up and smell smoke and not be able to communicate it with Antonia. (Although, an apartment a few blocks away blew up on Saturday from a gas leak….)

So Ana’s best friend in BA is Flor, and Flor and her brother Ro are in a band together, so we went to see them play. (Flor and Ro wrote and played a tango at our wedding.) The band is three guys on acoustic guitar (they each had their own guitar - they weren’t all sharing one guitar), and Flor singing. Their music is a modern tango, and she sings with a passionate bluesy style that could be compared to Janis Joplin. “Could be compared to” is an interesting phrase. Technically, she “could be compared to” Alanis Morriset, Billie Holliday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Peggy Lee. However, the comparison might sound like this: Flor and Peggy Lee are both female singers.

(For those who now need to google Peggy Lee, just suffice it to say that she was like Christina Aguillera or Brittany Spears back in the day. Only talented.)

Enough digression. Flor is in a band, the band has a CD, we have the CD, and I like it very much. I have listened to it a lot with Isa, and when it comes on, she will tell me “Daddy, this music is Tango.” (The only other music she recognizes is Bob Marley, and Bobby Darin, so I think Flor is in good company. Interestingly, Isa never compares Flor to Peggy Lee.)

So we are excited to see Flor and Ro and to hear them play live. Now Flor tells us the address but either doesn’t know the name of the place or doesn’t tell Ana – I don’t know which. When we get there, I’m convinced it’s actually because it doesn’t have a name. The address, though, is awesome: Pringles 753. (For some reason, here they have the name of the street first, and then the number.) So we go to Pringles 753, and walk in the door of a fairly non-descript place. (I’m sad to report that I saw no Pringles on Calle Pringles.) Inside, the place is like a bomb shelter - the walls are cinderblock – and not like when you were in elementary school, because those walls were cinderblock but painted with a nice glossy yellow that didn’t really match anything. These walls are actually bare cinderblock. And there enough seats in the place for like 35 people. Apparently 35 of Flor’s closest friends who showed up before us. It has this very art house feel to it, like straight out of the Beat movement. I’m half expecting Alan Ginsburg to stand up and start saying “I saw the best of my generation destroyed by debauchery” or whatever it was that caused the demise of the best of his generation. Certainly it wasn’t debauchery…. So we walk into this Beat bar and the bouncer – or this gentleman who appeared to be a bouncer – tells us it’s 5 pesos each. Whatever, I pay him 10 pesos for the two of us. Now there are no seats left so we stand next to the bar and I am using my American approach to getting us a beer. (Aside here – getting “us” a beer in Argentina is not the same. A beer in most places is actually a liter. So I’m not kidding when I say I bought “us” a beer – and it was only $2.) The American approach we all know well – for guys, you stand at the bar and try to get the bartender’s attention without actually leaning over the bar and yelling “HEY BARKEEP!” When there is only one or two other people at the bar, this approach will work very well in a bar in the US, as the bartender is acutely attuned into his or her patrons and aware that his or her tips are contingent upon the number of beverage he or she serves. For ladies, it usually involves a low-cut blouse, flirting, or getting some guy to yell “HEY BARKEEP!”

Yeah – not so much here. The bartender apparently is friends with everyone, and doesn’t work for tips, so unless I basically kiss the guy on the cheek, I’m just standing there looking like an idiot. Pucker up! Oh – and since people don’t drink that much here, if a bartender were working for tips, he’d starve.

Anyway, while all of this non-serving of alcohol is going on, Ana and I are starting to notice a few people coming in after us, talking to the would-be bouncer, and apparently not paying to get in. Now I’m thinking it was either the stupid tax or the American fee. Then I notice that at the end of the bar you can see into the kitchen. Where there is a cat walking around on the counter. Note to self: Don’t eat on Pringles St.

Back to my Spanish. So the show starts, and Flor is singing a very passionate series of songs. The second song is actually one of my favorites, so I’m stoked. After about the fourth song, I remember thinking that it’s funny I understand specific lines, but not really the whole context, and yet I still really like the music. And then the fifth song, Flor is very sincerely and passionately singing about some horrible experience in love, when all of the sudden, and quite unexpectedly, the audience starts laughing. Apparently, the best comparison to Flor is not Peggy Lee, Janis Joplin, nor Ella, but ARLO GUTHRIE!!! OK, so maybe it’s just this song that’s filled with irony.

Oh no, it keeps going. Several songs. D’oh.

And then we meet Maria. After the show, Flor introduces us to her friend Maria. Ana and I talked in the cab on the way home where I discovered I had had a very different conversation than I believed. Here’s what I understood from the conversation:

- Maria knows Flor because she used to date Alexis, Flor’s husband. I think it is odd, but I don’t say anything. She owns two apartments that she rents out, and lives with her mother. She used to work for Central as a consultant, and spent a lot of time in the US working on AT&T. We commiserate over long hours, travel for work, and taking laptops on vacation. She’s an economist, and just finished her thesis for her PhD. I gather that she used to work for or had a friend who worked for an airline, because she knows all about the benefits of working for an airline. Her family is Irish and she told me her family heritage.

Here’s what Ana understood (ie, what was actually said):

- Maria knows Flor because her ex-boyfriend is Alexis’ best friend. (Makes a little more sense now, doesn’t it?) She owns the house in which her ex-boyfriend lives (he owns half) and she wants to sell it to buy an apartment, but right now she is renting with a friend. (Not exactly the real estate baroness I imagined.) She used to work for ACCENTURE! This is quite embarrassing because we talked about this a lot and I kept thinking “What the hell is Central???) and has been to the US a lot for AT&T and other clients. She does have her PhD in Economics, and just finished writing someone else’s thesis for them. She got paid to write someone else’s PhD thesis…. She currently is a flight attendant for an airline because even though she has a PhD in Econ, she makes more money as a flight attendant than she would for Accenture or in Econ. And she’s Irish. Or rather, she’s as Irish as I am, in that she’s Argentine, but – oh hell, you get it.

Yeah – I was close. What’s great is you know how when people are talking about something you aren’t interested in and sometimes you sort of think about other things while the conversation covers areas you don’t care about? (For husbands – like when your wife and her friends talk about haircuts. For wives – like when your husbands talk. For all of my friends – like when I talk about soccer.) Well, I have to focus and try to get the conversation; because it may turn out they are talking about something completely different than I believe, only I think they are talking about haircuts.