Fellow Travelers,

I was planning on going to a ladies polo match yesterday afternoon, but after walking a thousand miles into Palermo, I got a call from kind Anique saying that they had taken the bus there only to find that it had been canceled on account of mud. So I walked around Palermo a bit and enjoyed the nice day. I found an amazing park for running and paddleboating (if I ever decide to take that up as a hobby; a racquetball replacement?), which will come in very handy as I really need to rack up the running miles in the coming weeks.

I ended up walking around for a number of hours and got home pretty exhausted. So I ate lentejas y arroz and joined Ben and some nice Europeans for a drink before heading over to Jan and Juliana’s (remember, the German dentist?) hostel to watch the Brasil/Argentina game. It was, inevitably, a little weird. This game is, I’m told, a pretty big deal here, but all we turistas in the hostel couldn’t really muster up too much national pride for Argentina, and quite a few of us (guiltily) really had no idea what was going on on the screen, anyway. I did manage to make it to Plaza Dorrego to see the last sad few minutes of the game on a huge screen in the middle of all the cafes, and it had a much better atmosphere, even a little heckling from the Brasilianos. We stayed outside for an hour or two and drank some chopps before young Julie (my new Deutsch roommate) and I headed over to Kelly’s (from class) apartment to rendezvous before…

…heading out to a club at 2:30 in the morning!

What!? Seriously. I can’t get over this. It’s how it’s done here. Marcella the Revolutionary said that she’ll go out to a club once or twice a year and she’ll just go to bed early that night and wake up at two or three in the morning to go dancing. Que loco! Anyway, we stayed up really late and had a lot of fun and I saw some surprisingly horrible dancing and at 8:30 the next morning got medialunes and cafe doble with Kelly’s bouncer novio who insisted on correcting our pronunciation obsessively, although other than that he was a really nice guy.

The boliche:

And then, I went to bed and did very very little the next day. El fin.

Y, chau.