My first week back in Buenos Aires can only be defined by contrasts: jobs requiring extreme creativity and innovation and then jobs requiring brute strength and will power, nights spent on calm and directed tours of the city and then nights spent jumping around and getting soaked. Most importantly though, I was so thankful to return to sleeping in an actual bed, cooking my own food, working in an office, and even traveling via crappy BA public transport (never has a BA bus been SEVEN hours late and forced me to wait in a cold bus station until 6AM for it to arrived from one hour away!).
First order of business: our Mediapila catalog. So one thing I really love about the level of economic development in Buenos Aires is that some companies are so small that they haven’t yet started uber-specialization. Ironic considering that when I tell people I’m a Political Science major, they ask, “No, what’s your career path?” as if I’m supposed to know already. But this lack of uber-specialization allows two teenage interns from the United States to work on an incredible variety of projects: translating business documents, conversing with women while we stamp and fold t-shirts, developing an accounting and inventory system for an ad campaign, moving boxes from a warehouse, and even creating our own catalog.
When I say “creating” our own catalog, I literally mean that Ollie and I were every force behind that catalog. We met with store owners to select which products to use, modeled the products being used (Ollie has some pretty Blue Steel-esque shots), photographed and photoshopped our pictures, designed the actual layout of the catalog, and even decided what to name each product. Apparently a Bolso Europeo (“European Bag”) and a Billetera Americana (“American Wallet”) will sell better than just a plain “Bag” and “Wallet,” so of course that’s what they’re called. So basically on Tuesday and Wednesday, we took turns modeling and photographing the products; Ollie modeled products like the soccer shoes bag and the European shoulder bag while I took on purses and binders and American wallets. On Thursday while Ollie returned the products to the owners, I photoshopped the pictures and designed the catalog, finding a way to put my newspaper layout skills to good use. And this time, Jose loved the catalog and sent it to potential clients within about an hour!
Friday was a slightly different day, literally consisting of moving boxes full of t-shirts (those ten thousand Carrefour bibs we stamped our first week here) from a room in a warehouse to outside the warehouse, then from outside the warehouse onto a truck, then after an hour long drive into somewhere dodgy, unloading those boxes into another warehouse, then driving back to the Mediapila office and emptying more boxes out, and finally breaking down the empty boxes to store them. I think you would call that “manual labor.” But next week we’re tackling how to develop online sales channels for Mediapila, from Ebay-esque marketplaces to designing a page on Mediapila’s website.
In other news, this week was particularly exciting because of a visit from Morehead alum Ken Smith ’84, who had brought his niece Lane and her friend Megan to Buenos Aires on a graduation trip. On Sunday night, we went over to his apartment in Palermo and then to the amazingly hip and trendy Sucre restaurant in Belgrano for dinner. On Tuesday evening we took another BA Free Tour with Ken and the girls to see the more cultural and aristocratic side of the city, which basically means I was craving the incredible real estate, the famous restaurants, and most of all, the chic stores like Louis Vuitton and Cartier. And then there was Friday night, which featured one fun party after another: the show Fuerza Bruta, the bar Buller (most delicious chocolate milkshake ever), the tango joint La Viruta, and the boliche (nightclub) Chic.
So I had been told that Fuerza Bruta was similar to Cirque du Soleil (which I had fallen asleep during in Las Vegas, so I wasn’t tooooooo excited), but when I walked into Centro Cultural de Recoleta and saw a warehouse room full of people standing, no chairs, and heard techno music, I knew I was in for an experience. I won’t ruin the show for anyone who wants to see it (I’d definitely recommend it and it’s coming to Chicago, Miami, and New York), but basically some highlights include dancers bellyflopping on a plexi-glass screen filled with water that’s a foot above your head, getting blocks of confetti smashed over your head by the cast (Ken Smith’s reaction to this was by far the most priceless moment of my trip), and raving in a mosh pit with one rather attractive dancer until you got soaked from the rain falling from above (and then getting invited to the after party). Basically it was an amazingly fun night.
