Read Online Bon Appetempt: A Coming-of-Age Story (with Recipes!) by Amelia Morris - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Amelia Morris
Tags: Autobiography / Women, Biography &, Autobiography / Culinary, Cooking / Essays &, Narratives
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with Mom and Bruce, sneaking glasses of red wine up to my room each night and then having to walk down the street to smoke one measly cigarette only to return and hear my mom shout, from two rooms away, “You smell like smoke!”
Expensive lesson that it was, Costa Rica did teach me one thing: that I was a person who, if going to travel by herself, needed some type of structure—a group or a job or even a family.
So, I applied to an English teaching program at a university in Argentina, which paid a small living stipend and offered free housing with local host families. When I was accepted at a school in Rafaela, Argentina, a medium-size town about a five-hour drive northwest of Buenos Aires, I formulated a plan to go there for the spring semester; while there, I would find out which MFA programs I got into, then, come July, after some traveling through South America, I would return home, pack up my things, and start graduate school in August. I’d applied to schools in New York, California, and England, so I also decided to sell my car, since I wouldn’t need it in any ofthose places. At last, I had a plan
and
, bonus, a sizable savings account.
Before I left, my coworkers at Aladdin’s wanted to buy me a few drinks at the bar just one door down from the restaurant. Matt, who happened to be in town from New York, where he’d been crashing with friends and looking for a job ever since graduation, came as well. We all got along great, though Jessica didn’t seem to understand my relationship with Matt.
“I don’t get it. Why aren’t you dating him?” she asked me while he was in the bathroom.
It was a question I had fielded so many times over the years I could respond without thinking. “We’re just better as friends.”
I arrived in Argentina in the spring of 2004. And as I would soon discover, the country was very much still in recovery from a major economic crisis. I had known nothing about this beforehand but almost every Argentine I spoke to, beginning with the gentleman I sat next to on my flight from Buenos Aires to Rafaela, would bring it up to me in some way.
“Ah, you’re a Yankee,” he said to me after hearing me speak Spanish with my American accent, before launching into an explanation of how their peso used to be equal with the dollar.
“We used to be one to one,” he told me with pride, holding up his two pointer fingers, clearly unhappy with the current exchange rate, which at the time was closer to one to three, as in one dollar equaled three pesos, as in a cup of delicious espresso at the airport cost me just thirty cents.
My host family consisted of the matriarch, Silvia, and herthree sons, Adrian, Fabian, and Hernán, who ranged in age from sixteen to twenty-three. And when I arrived at their humble two-bedroom, two-bathroom house, accompanied by the program director, who had picked me up at the airport, they were in the middle of throwing a big dinner party in my honor. As part of the celebration, they’d invited at least ten of their close friends, so that, after my twenty hours of travel, I got an introduction to the way Argentines greet one another, with a heartfelt hug and cheekbone-crushing kiss, about twelve times in a row.
Any of my friends will tell you that I’m a bad hugger. According to them, I tense up as they approach with arms outstretched, don’t hug back properly, and pull away too soon. So I can only imagine what my Argentine host family thought during this extended meet and greet. But it was a perfect precursor to what was to follow. Because as much as I would try to be my regular, non-hugging, fairly isolated, non-meat-eating self, for the next five months, it was hardly an option.
After meeting everyone, Silvia showed me to my room, which was also her room. They had set up a twin bed for me in the corner. So there went any opportunity to hole myself up and write in my journal for hours on end.
Because of a questionnaire I had filled out as part of the
Expensive lesson that it was, Costa Rica did teach me one thing: that I was a person who, if going to travel by herself, needed some type of structure—a group or a job or even a family.
So, I applied to an English teaching program at a university in Argentina, which paid a small living stipend and offered free housing with local host families. When I was accepted at a school in Rafaela, Argentina, a medium-size town about a five-hour drive northwest of Buenos Aires, I formulated a plan to go there for the spring semester; while there, I would find out which MFA programs I got into, then, come July, after some traveling through South America, I would return home, pack up my things, and start graduate school in August. I’d applied to schools in New York, California, and England, so I also decided to sell my car, since I wouldn’t need it in any ofthose places. At last, I had a plan
and
, bonus, a sizable savings account.
Before I left, my coworkers at Aladdin’s wanted to buy me a few drinks at the bar just one door down from the restaurant. Matt, who happened to be in town from New York, where he’d been crashing with friends and looking for a job ever since graduation, came as well. We all got along great, though Jessica didn’t seem to understand my relationship with Matt.
“I don’t get it. Why aren’t you dating him?” she asked me while he was in the bathroom.
It was a question I had fielded so many times over the years I could respond without thinking. “We’re just better as friends.”
I arrived in Argentina in the spring of 2004. And as I would soon discover, the country was very much still in recovery from a major economic crisis. I had known nothing about this beforehand but almost every Argentine I spoke to, beginning with the gentleman I sat next to on my flight from Buenos Aires to Rafaela, would bring it up to me in some way.
“Ah, you’re a Yankee,” he said to me after hearing me speak Spanish with my American accent, before launching into an explanation of how their peso used to be equal with the dollar.
“We used to be one to one,” he told me with pride, holding up his two pointer fingers, clearly unhappy with the current exchange rate, which at the time was closer to one to three, as in one dollar equaled three pesos, as in a cup of delicious espresso at the airport cost me just thirty cents.
My host family consisted of the matriarch, Silvia, and herthree sons, Adrian, Fabian, and Hernán, who ranged in age from sixteen to twenty-three. And when I arrived at their humble two-bedroom, two-bathroom house, accompanied by the program director, who had picked me up at the airport, they were in the middle of throwing a big dinner party in my honor. As part of the celebration, they’d invited at least ten of their close friends, so that, after my twenty hours of travel, I got an introduction to the way Argentines greet one another, with a heartfelt hug and cheekbone-crushing kiss, about twelve times in a row.
Any of my friends will tell you that I’m a bad hugger. According to them, I tense up as they approach with arms outstretched, don’t hug back properly, and pull away too soon. So I can only imagine what my Argentine host family thought during this extended meet and greet. But it was a perfect precursor to what was to follow. Because as much as I would try to be my regular, non-hugging, fairly isolated, non-meat-eating self, for the next five months, it was hardly an option.
After meeting everyone, Silvia showed me to my room, which was also her room. They had set up a twin bed for me in the corner. So there went any opportunity to hole myself up and write in my journal for hours on end.
Because of a questionnaire I had filled out as part of the
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