Drugstore Gaucho

The Concert has come and gone! Total success, ladies and gentleman I'd like to thank you all for your hard work. As you may know, the reggae band which I found with the sweat of my brow and natural good looks and talent, had their first concert with yours truly. Ironically located in the bar in which I first saw them. It was a symbolic revisit and triumph. Only two months ago I went to this bar with passing friend Paul McGuire where we navigated the new (to us) social dynamic of a bar. We lucked out and spotted someone we knew and sat with them and I thanked the lord that Paul was not as fond of the portenho habit of selling beer by the liter as everyone else I knew. We sat there sucking on our cervezas chicas and attempted conversation in the whirlwind of bar noise. We failed at that and I even managed to spill a large glass of beer on Paul that I offered to get him in return for the glass of the bilgy joy juice known as Quilmes that he gave me. Miraculously, a girl there asked fo...

I rode the 65 back to my place with a smile. I was full of good pizza, melodies and memories. I arrived at Maykel´s place an hour even later than the hour late time I was supposed to arrive. Rehearsal started at 7, my class ended at seven. It takes an hour on bus to get to his neighborhood. Apparently, it takes an hour to walk back from school, grab my trombone, maintain my relationship with the doorman and find a collectivo. I navigated the crowd on the collectivo with no small bit of skill, snagging a corner to secure my trombone and a wall to lean myself against. I watched as guitarists darted artfully through the crowd with their lighter, infinitely more popular instrument strapped to their back. The man with the trombone stares down the irritation that the human-sized space of his instrument generates. After much direction-peddling and street sign-searching, I get off the bus and ubicated, as they say here. I found my way through Boedo, Maykel´s neighboorhood. I´d been once before...

Let's take a little moment to describe the concept of traffic and hora pico in Buenos Aires. Hora pico translates about into peak hour and it refers to when the public transit herer starts to get a little yucky. And by a little yucky I mean it would be nice if a polite Japanese man in white gloves helped press people into the car because it would hurt less than having a 30 yr old, sweaty argentine throw himself into the mob in hopes of compressing the crowd to a size that allows him in the traincar. But when is hora pico? Well, contrary to the singular nature of the name, there is a multiplicity of hora picos. Let's look at this logically. The first hora pico would be in the morning, because everyone has to get to work pretty much at the same time, so one hora pico at the beginning of the work day. I've heard that came be from about 6-8 (notice how hora pico is more than an hour). And, then, naturally, everyone gets out at the same time too, so there is another hora pico (t...

I had a conversation with my friend Conner Hinderks yesterday. He has recently come back to the US from a lengthy stay in Japan and is totally psyched about the world. Projecting my own experience on to him, I think that he must be totally blown away my Japan and its culture and looking forward to digging into the culture of another country. He asked me what I knew about teaching English and the like somewhere in South America. Hold your horses, Conner. Pará. I, too, was excited for inter-cultural experience here on scale that I knew in Japan. Te lo doy corto, I haven't got it. I came to Buenos Aires looking for an experience like I had in Japan. Something that would blow my mind for six months. I wanted items as ordinary as vending machines to confound my expectations. I raise a logical question. If one expects his expectations to be violated, and they're not, does that mean his expectations have been in some way violated? More than amusing, that sums up my experience in cultu...

My shoes might look like one of these. And by the way, the middle one is not deformed, thats what it looks like before they decide a size and cut it down. This is what a shoe shop looks like. Messy, eh? The view of... some plaza near the plaza de mayo which is not the plazo de Mayo. It's beautiful except... It's totally encased in fence. So there is this really lovely plaza that is clearly designed for pedestrian traffic. Bums sleep against the fence, I like to think out of spite. Naturally, the only reason the plaza is beautiful is because of the fence. If thee were not a fence, it would be covered in poorly executed scrawlfitti. And would look nothing like this van. Which is what good graffiti often looks like in this city. My readership is almost entirely girls. Therefore, I will use this next picture to boost comments as you will almost certainly have to make your appreciation of the subject of this next photo know. Scroll down and proceed with the involuntary cooing. Yes....

Well, it does. Seriously, having finally given up on stealing a consistent signal from my neighbors I head to where I believe there is a decent internet cafe to find out that they have neither microphones nor cameras, so I head out for another and discover that the USB extension the computers are provided with actually prevents usage of USB´s unless you bring some sort of adaptive unit. So, this post will be without pictures, maybe I will add them at a later date. It will also be without structure as pictures usually remind me what I was going to talk about. So let´s begin. Uh. I´m sick again! Hooray. With luck, this could turn out to be like a weekly thing! What excitement! I don´t wanna go to the doctor as I just went and it didn´t seem to help me that much. Grah. So, aside from contracting disease, what have I been up to? Well, yesterday I went to buy tango shoes! And here would be a picture if such a thing were possible. And, surprise, surprise, there were none in my size! But here...