Four busses in a row and none of them the one you want.

I’m lucky. I’ve got a seat. The stop after I get on leaves the majority of the new passengers standing, holding metal bars, bracing their legs to keep from being knocked over by sudden stops.

A woman has taken the vacant seat across from me. Her wardrobe is a demonstration of understated wealth. Flawless lizard skin boots, a stylish ostrich leather purse and an overcoat all in complimentary shades of brown swaddle a soft, round body I can imagine has enjoyed many an expensive restaurant meal.

Perfectly coifed blond hair has been toned and dyed with the attention to the most minor detail. I study the face. The woman looks very German to me and her eyes are unnaturally wide. Though she’s got plenty of wrinkles, I can tell she’s had some plastic surgery. As I’m looking for telltale signs and scars, I notice her hands are large and as I start to wonder if she’s transgendered, the elderly man in the seat next to her’s lets loose a low, rumbling cough without covering his mouth.

The woman’s head snaps to the right in a gesture of confrontation that goes unnoticed by the man whose bald, liver-spotted scalp bounces in time with the rhythm of his coughing. The woman looks around and catches my eye, her permanently astonished expression exaggerated as her eyebrows go up as if to say, “Are you seeing this?”

All photos: Kate Sedgwick

She digs the salt-free crackers from the pocket of her elegant coat and gets one bite in before the man starts to cough again.

She puts the crackers back in her pocket. Then she attempts to locate the back of the copper, metallic scarf that hangs aside her lapels before abandoning decorum to wrap it around her nose, decorative side down. I see her drop the scarf just in time for another coughing fit and see her replace it, exasperated.

Minutes have gone by – ten or more – and the sick man continues to hack and cough, oblivious to the woman on his left whose posture points to a slow, simmering rage she is barely able to contain and yet she says nothing and it does not seem to occur to her that she could just stand up and distance herself from the man who she clearly believes is contagious with Gripe A.

Finally, near my stop she says to him, “Tapa la boca,” and two full grown women towering over us giggle and murmur “Tapa la boca,” to one another. The woman throws her chin back in a defiant gesture that seems to mean that having said this was a sort of victory for her and as I get up to ring the buzzer, she lunges for my seat which she must deem as being a safe distance from the man and settles her rump into its black naugahyde.

Translation: Gripe A is the Swine Flu.

Tapa la boca means cover your mouth.

Forbidden Vietnamese Plant

Desperate Plant Disguise

One wonders how and why this traveler was so attached to the plant that he or she made this artsy fartsy attempt to disguise its organic nature. Painstakingly wrapped twig by twig, and ornately appointed, the plant was further disguised in a wrapped box.

The smuggler was foiled by an astute officer in Sterling, Virginia in November, 2008 armed with an x-ray machine, and the aluminum ensconced “plant of Vietnamese origin” was confiscated.

Winnie the Pooh Sausage Smuggler

He sure loves his hunny. On his best buddy, that is.

The smuggler of these sausages gets a gold star for irony for packaging a pork product in this Winnie the Pooh puzzle box. Who would think to look for the ground up brethren of Pooh’s BFF Piglet in this shrink wrapped package?

The passenger arriving at Dulles International Airport from Amsterdam in February, 2009 may have been overindulging in a certain other prohibited substance not to have considered the weight discrepancy between two kielbasas and a wafer thin cardboard picture. Ah, sausage smuggler, you defy classification with your nefarious, meat craving ways.

42 Bottles of Love Potion

There’s enough to get every cop on the NYPD kissed here.

A woman arriving from Africa wanted so desperately to keep the magic in her relationship that she attempted to smuggle into the U.S. these 42 bottles of Love potion. That’s what she and her husband waiting Stateside told the Customs and Border Protection officers in Philadelphia who intercepted this package from the couple, who claimed it was for personal use.

CBP reviewed the “potion” and determined it to be “inadmissable,” classifying it as a drug. As of March 2008, the plan was to destroy the liquid. Makes you wonder if they’ll have to go down to 34th and Vine to do it.

Dead Bird Head in a Bar of Soap

You couldn’t call this one a dirty birdie.

Here in the United States, the least loved are flushed while the most loved are generally interred in a shoebox. Perhaps the most infamous dead bird ever, it will surely live on in the memory of the customs officer who discovered it pressed carefully in a bar of black soap.

The Nigerian traveler who arrived in Baltimore by way of London in March, 2009 denied having any animal products, but was discovered by Customs and Border Protection officers to be in possession of “3.6 pounds of beef, three pounds of chicken bullion, one star fruit and the soap-encased bird,” and summarily charged $300.00. You’ve got to wonder what happened to it in the end, but the funeral procession likely surmounted the excitement of the final farewell.

All Photos courtesy of Customs and Border Protection

I made the decision to quit smoking days before I boarded to boat for Uruguay to renew my tourist visa. A couple kilometers from shore, the smog that shrouds the city is a visible line. The city is a pint of Guiness, sky of foam, city of stout.

View of Buenos Aires from Rio de la Plata

In Buenos Aires it’s invisible. Above it’s blue, the eye not perceptive enough to pick up on the color of the tainted air so obvious from Rio de la Plata.

This is the last day of smoking for me. I’ve made up my mind to change a lifetime habit in a city where it would be easy to justify it. What difference could it possibly make to a set of lungs exposed daily to a smog so thick it obscures buildings in broad daylight?

Dissecting the impulses one by one: I congratulate myself for completing a task, I smoke. I finish dinner, I smoke. I go outside, I smoke. I’m frustrated, I just woke up, I need something to do with my hands, I smoke.

Is it a choice? In the end, if I develop lung cancer from my dependency on Buenos Aires, I might have to admit that it was worth it. The advantages to choosing this city would at least give me something to look back on fondly when compared to huddling outside on a freezing winter day among a stinking pack of exiled smokers or the emotionally bereft imagery of curled, yellow extinguished butts in a filthy ashtray.

Here, there’s a beauty to the small things and the details of this lung damaging environment that wrap me in nostalgia even as I walk through the streets. I miss it and want it and I’m still here.

Goodbye, cigarettes. I’ll miss you, but this is about priorities.

Tourist telltale sign # 452: being a totally disconnected spectator. Photo: Jon Feinstein

Tuesday I was stuck on a bus for four hours. I say ’stuck’ because there was an American guy behind me yammering away at a very gracious Argentinean woman. I was embarrassed to be from the United States.

Offense #1

“My friends back home would not have been able to stand that. All that Spanish for two hours. No way. They woulda said, ‘I’m outta here,’ and took off after twenty minutes. No way. No. None of those guys back home coulda put up with that. . not that I’m complaining or anything.”

If you don’t know what’s wrong with what the prick said, maybe you should leave international travel for those who do.

First of all – not complaining? Oh yes he was, and in the most insipid way possible, by claiming not to be. The woman he was speaking to was kindly speaking his language on a national holiday that I’m sure she would have enjoyed spending in another way. His statement did more than point out his lack of interest in her language. It revealed his contempt for it.

At the same time he was congratulating himself for “putting up with” two hours of Spanish, he was revealing himself to be someone so dull he couldn’t be bothered to find anything interesting about other people who did not speak English based on their gestures, personalities or expressions.

He revealed himself to be someone who feels he should be catered to, translated for, and that any experience that isn’t set up explicitly for him to enjoy is a situation to be endured rather than appreciated.

He expected to be praised for this. He repeated this snippet of masturbatory self congratulation at least three times and he never got an agreement out of the woman. She was graciously trying to let it pass without comment. But that wasn’t good enough. He just had to be patted on the back, and much like spanking it to soft core porn, the experience of trying to satisfy himself was leaving something to be desired.

Offense # 2

A guy from California related the following story to me. By way of background, there is dog shit all over the sidewalks here in Buenos Aires. It’s not uncommon at all to see a genteel looking fellow walking his schnauzer, calmly watching the dog dump a load in the middle of the sidewalk and continue on his way.

People from here complain about it, sure. They also generally know how to avoid it. Back to the guy from California. Here’s what he had to say:

“The other day I saw a woman pick up her dog’s shit. I went up to her and I said, ‘Thank you! Thank you! It’s great that you picked that up! Good job!’”

Can you guess what’s wrong with this?

It’s so patronizing it almost makes me ill.

It implies he has some kind of stake in the city. The guy was here for three months and will probably never be back. It implies that he knows better than the majority of the people here how best to behave.

If I were that woman and some whacked out hippie came up to me with his Yanqui accent and said that, I’d probably be leaving my dog’s turds on the sidewalk from that day forward.

Offense # 3

My third tale comes from a blog of an acquaintance from Australia.

There is a lot of trash on the street in Buenos Aires. Some of this has to do with the fact that there are people who pick the trash (cartoneros) who pull recyclables out of the waste of the masses, leaving a swath of loose garbage in their wake. Also, people litter. That’s the city. It’s a dirty city and I like dirty cities, but not this son of a bitch.

His story went something like this:

He saw a woman throw a candy bar wrapper on the sidewalk. He picked it up and handed it back to her and told her that she’d dropped it, pointing out a nearby trash can.

This guy’s Spanish is rudimentary at best. The anti-litter-bug decided to make a correction. In so doing, he insulted a citizen, and made an ass of himself.

Here’s what his behavior said:

• I come from a superior culture that knows better.
• I’m going to instruct you in the ways of my superior culture.
• I find the appearance of your city distasteful and rather than leave, I will take my mild aggression out on someone I can identify as a culprit, and that’s you.

He was so satisfied with himself that given time for reflection, he chose to display his rude and arrogant behavior in a public forum. In this way he flaunted his shitty attitude and feeling of superiority while insulting Buenos Aires as being filthy at the same time.

Lessons learned / How not to be an obnoxious tourist

Here’s the thing. If you’re going to travel, please, please, pretty please keep in mind you are a guest. Here are some lessons from the offenses above:

Lesson 1: Don’t fish for compliments for putting up with another culture.

You are a visitor. The people who have allowed you into their country aren’t props in some little game you have in your mind. You are lucky to be there. Appreciate it and let people know you do.

Lesson 2: Make an attempt to learn the language.

Lesson 3: Be humble. Your country sucks, too.

If someone came to your country as a foreigner and all they did was bitch and complain, taking short breaks to brag about what a trooper they were for sticking it out or putting up with the way things were, you might be nice to their face, but you’d be thinking, “Why don’t you just go home if you hate it so much, you putrid bastard?”

The best way to behave, at least until you’ve gotten your bearings, is as if you are in the house of your friend’s parents. Be on your best behavior. Clean up after yourself. Mind your manners. Ask before taking. Listen when spoken to. Apologize if you do not understand. Treat the people with respect.

Photos Kate Sedgwick (unless otherwise noted)