Wrapping up Buenos Aires

Hello all… I am about to hit the road again, so I figured I would try to get this thing good and updated before I left the city and all of its conveniences. I wanted to catch up before moving on to new adventures. Hopefully I will get a post in for each new place that I visit from here on out. I have been in Paraguay and Iguazu this week also, but will be posting each of those separately from this. So here goes nothing…

For those of you that don’t know, I moved out of my Recoleta place about three weeks ago and into an apartment in Colegiales. I have two roommates, a guy named Augustin from Buenos Aires, and a girl named Lacy who hails from Atlanta. We also coexist with their cat Oscar, whose interests include chasing invisible stuff, waving at people, and working on his phantom meow (he opens his mouth, but most of the time not much comes out). I have been loving it here… We have a great time playing Three’s Company, and I have finally learned to embrace the Subte (subway). I will certainly miss being able to get anything from ice cream to Mexican food to toilet paper delivered to my door for free.





At the beginning of this month, I got to go see a Pato tournament in Palermo. Pato is a game that was born here in Argentina, the literal translation being duck. It involves a ball encased in a net, horses, and a bunch of crazy people. The name comes from the fact that, originally, a duck was used in place of the ball. Somewhere along the line, someone decided that this was a bad idea… Therefore, I didn’t have to see dead raggedy fowl being hurled about the field. Nuts. Anyways, the details were a bit sketchy for me, so I won’t be able to explain the rules too well. From what I picked up, it is the lovechild of basketball, polo, and (European) football. A goal is scored when the ball is thrown through a net sort of thing at either end of the field. This tournament was particularly interesting, because several teams from all over the world had come to play “horseball” (as the sport is known in English). Not surprisingly, Argentina creamed the opposition… Although I was shocked to see the US win their match, as I had no idea this sport even existed. Oddly enough, our watergirls were Canadian, yet Canada had no team. Hmff. I have decided that being a horseball waterperson wouldn’t be a half bad job.

So that does it for now on the Buenos Aires beat… I will be taking off on a (gasp) 20 hour bus ride to Bariloche on Sunday. As of now, I am trying to get all my internetting and phone calls caught up on before it is back to cybercafes and locutorios for me. Leaving this place is certainly going to be bittersweet… I have had an absolutely wonderful experience here, and I am going to have to drag myself away (after extending my dates almost two months already!). At the same time though, I am ready to see some new places and experience some new things. I have been perusing my trusty old Lonely Planet Shoestring and getting hyped up all the fascinating stuff there is to see. So expect to (hopefully) hear more in the near future.

P.S. Sorry for the terrible writing skills… As my Spanish keeps improving, my English skills have been on a sharp decline. I have a theory that there is only so much room for language in my feeble brain.