Argentina '06 - Livin' The Dream, Bro!

As many of you know, I’ve done a fair bit of traveling in my day – 16 countries spanning five continents, to be exact. Up until this week, I’d never had anything stolen while on the road, except perhaps my dignity of a few occasions. Well, Murphy’s Law must be in full effect, because on consecutive days two valuable possessions were snatched from my possession….

I knew Wednesday would be a crappy day when I locked my keys inside my apartment that morning, and had to wait until 8:30 p.m. for the owner to let me in after he got off work (why my rental company doesn’t keep a spare set a bit puzzling). Well, that afternoon while waiting for a subway, a Catholic schoolgirl came up to me and said the outside compartment of my backpack was open. I took a quick inventory of the contents, and found my Motorola ROKR was missing. It’s my cell phone back home, and I only had it with me because it holds 100 songs – my lone source of portable music on this trip. I think I was robbed while waiting to cross Avendia de Julio – allegedly the widest street in the world – where there was a throng of densly-packed pedestrians at the intersection.

Then, last night, my beloved black velour warm-up jacket – designed by Devoe – was snatched off a hook at an Irish pub downtown. I searched high and low, had a native Spanish speaker ask the bartender if it was turned in, but it was long gone. That was actually a bigger bummer than the cell phone. Fortunately, last night was a warm one and I didn’t freeze out on the streets afterwards.

Besides the two thefts, and staying up late Monday to watch my Oakland Raiders play perhaps the WORST game in NFL history, this has been a decent week. I was at the aforementioned Irish pub because I had joined IBL comrade John at his hostel downtown, and one of the women working there (Carla) led a field trip to see her favorite cover band perform. As is usually the case with group outings from hostels, we were a motley crew – there were two Germans, a San Franciscan who now lives in Paraguay and does English-Japanese translations, a flamboyantly gay Argentine-Dutch guy, Carla’s boyfriend “Nacho” and me, the pork-eating American Jew. The music was Rock en Español, which I couldn’t understand, so instead John and I watched Boca Juniors’ victory over Sao Paolo in the Recopa Sudamericana finals. Viva Boca!

Yesterday afternoon I took an hour-long tour of Teatro Colon, one of the world’s most opulent concert halls and rumored to have near-perfect acoustics. It really was an impressive building, but I’m not sure how many more guided tours I’ll take on this trip; despite being a simpleton, I tend to get the gist of places pretty quickly. On Tuesday, I spent a couple hours at the Buenos Aires Zoo, a trip that produced a few quality photos that will be shared soon.

As far as Spanish class goes, this week I switched from group to individual lessons, and it was definitely the right move. For starters, instead of being at IBL from 10 to 3 every day, I only have two hours of instruction from 3 to 5. In addition, I get a lot more practice conversing and listening to audio, which has been a big problem thus far (they speak too damn fast on the recordings). IBL bounced me around among three different instructors this week (Nadia, Francisco and Natalia) but since they were all extremely competent and patient, I didn’t have a problem with that. I think I finally made some breakthroughs this week, as I can now flow freely between verb tenses and enjoyed some simple-yet-comprehensible conversations with people on the street. I’ve got one more week of classes, and then it’s up to me to further my Español if I so choose.

This week I also made some travel plans. On Sunday I’m gonna take a ferry 45 miles across the Rio de la Plata to Colonia, Uruguay, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. While I’m sure it’s a lovely town, to be honest my main motivation for this daytrip is so that I can check Uruguay off the list of countries I need to visit. I don’t think I’d have another reason to get there otherwise.

The following Sunday, September 24, is the day I’m scheduled to vacate my apartment and begin the actual traveling portion of my trip. That evening I’m flying to Salta, two hours away in the Andean northwest part of the country. I’ve been told it feels like an entirely different world from Europeanized Buenos Aires, and a good base to take trips into the mountains. From Salta I’m bussing south to the cities of Cordoba and Mendoza, will eventually make it to Iguazu Falls in the northeast and then fly home from BA on October 18. This is a big country, and I’ll be taking a lot of looooong bus rides around it, so I may need to invest in an iPod Shuffle or similar device in order to help maintain my sanity.

Oh how I miss thou, Motorola ROKR…Hopefully some teenager in the ghetto is enjoying all the Too $hort and Outkast songs I uploaded!!!

P.S. - Sorry for going link-happy in this post...just seemed like the thing to do!