Overseas Briefing Dancing your pain away

Author: Dina Magaril

Getting robbed at gunpoint is some awful story you hear happen to one in a million people, but unfortunately, I was left to experience this first hand my first Friday night in Buenos Aires. After trying to get over the lack of feminist response in this city - I'm referring to the constant cat-calling and pick up lines thrown at women the moment they step out the door - I was recently faced with the other, much uglier side of a masochistic culture.

This past Friday night, at around 4 in the morning whenb I was just two blocks from the house where I am staying, I was approached by two young men, shown a gun, forced to give up my purse and had two necklaces ripped off my neck. My lack of comprehension of street slang did not help the situation, as my assaulters took my inability to understand what was asked as my refusal to cooperate and earned me a smack in the head with the butt of a gun. As I lay behind the car where I was robbed I promised myself that in the future I would only take taxis home after 11 p.m.

But Buenos Aires is a city you cannot stay mad at for long. The day after my assault and robbery, my host family took me to the festival of Albahaca (basil) commemorating the end of Carnivale.

It may not match the wild stories people bring back from Rio, but this festival had an energy that was comparable to any large Latin American fiesta. Tables lined with cervezas by the liter surrounded the stage, where a singer belted out traditional indigenous songs. After a short break, the tables were moved and the real party began. Men and women adorned themselves - and innocent bystanders - with bags of flour and others sprayed shaving cream into the air. Though the shaving cream seemed to be someone's ingenious idea, the throwing of flour is a tradition practiced to commemorate the end of Carnivale.

The crowd formed mamba lines, and people danced their flour soaked selves around the tables. Once the band struck a familiar note, the women lined up to one side, the men to the other, to participate in a dance that involved a lot of snapping and hip-shaking and whose name I cannot remember.

Not wanting to refuse the old man who asked me if I quiere bailar, I tried my hand at improvisation and snapped it up with the rest of them. Needless to say, after a few more liters I was really getting the hang of it.

At around 6 a.m., after witnessing my first Argentine sunrise, tired and covered in shaving cream, we took a bus home which, to my surprise, was packed with high school students returning from their wild night out. Also of note, girls below the age of consent in Buenos Aires sure do not dress accordingly - they don outfits I have only previously seen in Christina Aguilera videos.

As I collapsed into bed, only a few blocks from my mugging, I could not seem to reconcile the variety of events I had experienced in just one weekend. But at 6 a.m., with a hangover canceling out the beating I took the night before, it's hard to rationalize anything, except that I sure was ready to give this city another chance.