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.

L to R: Jan, German; Ali, Parisienne; Unnamed Pole; Micheal, Swiss.

I wrote an exquisitely crafted post yesterday about my trip to a tango concert at a contemporary art museum on Wednesday, the strange Argentine accent, and a few other very interesting things. I accidentally navigated away from the page before hitting post, losing all the brilliance.

~So, let me summarize~

I went to a tango concert with a German, an Austrian, a Pole, a Parisian, and a Swiss (not a show, just tango music in an intimate, dimly lit setting) at which the black-clad musicians and middle-aged man singing emoted gracefully and, I’m sure, thoughtfully, although I wasn’t able to fully appreciate it because my Spanish is not quite that good yet. And then we went to La Poesia for meat plates.

~And~

The Argentine accent is an acquired taste, but a good one. We say our yuh sounds as shuh. So,

“Ella llege a la calle” sounds like “Aysha shaygay a la caushay.”

~Also~

I went running with Ben the Brit, who is a nice guy, today. We will go out for a brewski later on. And it’s already getting mucho calor, even though it’s still technically the middle of winter. The clima is going to be unreasonably, unbearably hot later in my South American adventure.

~Finally~

It’s incredible how quickly one can adapt to a situation. It’s all a state of mind, isn’t it? Thanks to those of you who told me that I might have a little bit of a shock on my arrival, but everything would work out soon enough. That’s exactly how it went. People are kind, and helpful, and lead interesting lives very different from my own. As such, this little trip has turned out to be a good idea. And I’m learning so much Deutsch!

Chau.

Here’s a picture of one of the super touristy bits:

The high points of the trip were:

A] Learning that I could understand at least a little of what Maribel (our troop leader and, yes, my roommate) was saying, enough to follow along a bit and laugh at some of the important parts, and

B] When the little kids walking home from school dressed in doctor coats (the school uniform of the neighborhood, mucho cute) waved and said, “Hola Turistas!” and,

C] Seeing El (la?) Stadia de Bocas Junior. It’s immense. And plopped down in the middle of an admittedly poor area, which makes it seem like the revenue generator for quite a few people. And the hordes of policia outside, ready to tackle the hooligans as they left the match.

Also, yo corro muy rapidmente. A la fin de semana, yo va correr largo.

On to tarea!

Chau, Delaney.