it had me in tears.

something a favourite professor of mine (Jeremy King, otherwise known as El Rey by his Spanish Linguistics students) once posted que me tuvo cagándome de risa:

The highlight of the LASSO conference (from a talk on linguistic strategies in literature):

"Y las salesgirls porteñas una bola de snobs and I know I'll have to take a size 3 (can you imagine a country donde the largest size is a THREE????) por 'y...el tema del busto', as they delicately put it here and F***, ni que fueran tan y tan BIG, sólo que estas washed-out faux blonde social X-ray lollipops no tienen, directamente, tetas."

I can only imagine that talk as playful. sparkly, even.

but it must be said, in due seriousness, that porteña salesgirls are actually incredibly snotty, most especially the ones at the little "cueva musical" shops along the peatonal downtown, suffering all day as they do the ceaseless playing of Gotan Project's "La Revancha del Tango", a delightful little electronica petit mal of several tango standards.

I should think that listening to the words "el capitalismo foráneo" repeated ad nauseam over some gauzy beats found in a shoebox portishead left out by the kerb would probably make anyone surrounded in their work by tourists feel less than pleasant towards ignorant foreigners whose deepest knowledge of inventive tango interpretations is astor piazolla. but given the average age of the porteña shopgirls I saw, they'd have been far more likely in the club after hours popping it to kelis (it was 2006, let's be clear) or playing pool to cumbia villera (that, on the other hand, may approach eternal), and may conceivably have never heard yo-yo ma's celloriffic take on their national cultural heritage. lucky situation, that; a good number of porteños in general were convinced that chinese people were taking over, as evidenced by their ownership of virtually every small supermarket and buffet restaurant, and might've violently resented such a flagrant incursion.

now, never having had to buy feminine attire in Buenos Aires, I cannot speak to the disposition of dress-shop attendants. I can and do favourably speak of the nice ladies in the feria in parque centenario who will gladly sell you a nice woolen overcoat for a very reasonable price, even before the customary price negotiations. they also do not fit the description given above in even the slightest, at least, not that of faux blonde lollipops. yo-yo ma, tampoco.