Mountain Kingdom

Santiago
Best Cathedral we´ve seen this trip, rivaling the best of Europe.

La Moneda, where Pinochet´s right-wing coup went down and where an agnostic single mother currently runs the country. Nuts, I tell you.

Josh and Kelsey, our native.

Top of the hill near our hostel, Cerro San Cristóbal

Valdivia´s creation

Chile is kind of nuts. Basically, this conquistador named Valdivia went south for a long ways down the western side of the Andes, battling through Inca tribes and other such ilk and finally reaching this huge valley between massive mountains on either side. Santiago is the result of a settlement started here. Sitting on the top of one of the city´s largest hills today at sunset, I was thinking about the ridiculous ego trip this man would get if he were to see the product of his labor. Santiago has about 5.5 million people, and the city sprawls out in every direction to distances way beyond what the eye can see. It is a massive, seething, polluted metropolis. It exudes power and growth.

The reason I say "nuts" is that it shares a huge border with Argentina but is totally different. If Argentina is Eurotrash for the third world, Chile is the land of teenagers in hoodies and sneakers and old men with caps and vests and young women with Patagonia jackets (and this basically is Patagonia, so eat my dust haters. Also, for those of you who sneer at people who wear North Face jackets, be aware that Josh has been freezing here in his humble light jacket while I have been totally comfortable and warm in my North Face, upper middle class "poser" jacket. Also, be aware that I now own a pair of socks with llamas on them). The Catholic Church is intense here, not just an afterthought, but a strong youth culture is breaking barriers and while we were here there was a significant gay rights demonstration.

I´d like to point out that as an International Economite, I love this country. They have FTAs with almost every major Pacific Rim player, and are part of my favorite FTA, the "Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership," which is a serious FTA for serious free traders like New Zealand, Brunei, Singapore, and Chile. They also have Foreign Direct Investment openness protected by their constitution. The result? An economic jugernaut in a continent of laggards.

We´ve been getting a lot done here. We got haircuts (unnecessary for Josh, obviously, but totally necessary for me) and our laundry done (totally necessary for both of us). I made a few calls home, and have finally updated my blog to have pictures on it from earlier (check earlier entries, at least until you see Alex riding a buggee. That shot is priceless). We also changed our plans a bit so that we´re coming home on July 27th, ditching an unnecessary, costly, and totally out of the way excursion to a mosquito infested beach in Northern Peru so that I can have a little time at home in Washington state and Josh can hang out in Jersey a little more before law school.

Another cool thing is that we´ve been hanging out with an actual friend here, a girl from Iowa who is a student here who we met in Buenos Aires. I was a little skeptical at first, after all, we only knew Kelsey three brief days and my desire to fast track the Santiago portion of the trip was being tempered by Josh´s insitence that we spend some time during the weekend here with somebody we actually knew. After all, why would I want to hang out in Santiago, the LA of the Southern Hemisphere, when there were serious mountains around that needed climbing? Unfortunately for my sense of righteousness, she has been a fantastic tour guide and a lot of fun to hang out with. She took us salsa dancing with her school friends last night, and while Josh and I are not made for that sort of thing (to say the least), we had a damn good time.

More than that, Santiago is so...great. Besides the pretty spectacular sunset we saw today (actually, the clouds portion was not in either of our top 300 sunsets of all time, but the lighting over the city and mountains made us feel like we were flying. For some reason there was a soundtrack of gregorian monks, which always adds to such moments. Also, there was a funicular, and I like that word/invention a lot), we also saw a big cathedral and an underground museum. Ok, so there isn´t that much to do here, it´s kind of like San Jose or something, but we really like it. It is comfortable and the food is great and we´re having a nice dose of civilization before we reverse Valdivia´s trek, back into the land of the Inca, the heart of the conquest, the most "open veins" of Latin America, and the mountain adventure.

Chilly?

A word of warning. I loved Valparaiso so much that this post may make you kind of sick.

Josh also really liked this city. Not quite as much as me.

Valparaiso - Santiago

It was only a matter of time before somebody made that joke. Chile is not a warm country in the winter. To make matters worse, our hostel in Valparaiso was unreasonably cold. At one point, Josh and I were watching Live and Let Die while desperately trying to find tools to get warm, including a non-functional electric heater, a black lab named Chico, red wine, and finally our sleeping bags. It was a pretty pathetic Tuesday night, if you can believe it.

El Yo Yo, our excellent hostel. That orange gas can heated our hot hot shower, a crucial part of our cold cold days.

Otherwise, I have been about as happy as I possibly can be over the last three days. I can´t contain it whatsoever. At first, Josh was happy for me, then annoyed, and finally pretty well furious to the point where sometimes I just say "man, you know..." and he just says "stop it." I must admit, I´ve been fairly obnoxious in Valparaiso. Now that we´ve arrived in Santiago, I can calm down enough to comment. We´ll do this one in highlight format because, really, there aren´t any lowlights.

On the ground level, it appears that Valparaiso is like any other pretty post-Colonial town...

...but in the hills it´s a different story.

Highlights
Dogs
Unlike Argentina, the portside dogs at Valparaiso could not be classified as "laid back" (Josh´s assailants were notable exceptions). Many of them are clothed, and they chase everything, including cats, each other, pretty women, men carrying huge tanks of gas, us, motor bikes, and cars. Not exactly irregular behavior? Imagine 7 dogs at 11 pm hanging out in the middle of one of the city´s busiest intersections. Each car that approaches is stared down (and I mean a direct face off, like the Tianamen Square protester against the tanks), as if the driver is likely going to change his mind. When the driver cautiously begins to accelerate (not even aggressive drivers want to run over dogs), the pack goes totally wild, following the car in the middle of traffic until it outruns them. We were waiting to meet somebody and saw this repeat 10 times, with more and more dogs joining the party.

Like the Argentines, Valpo dogs wait at traffic lights, but they also clearly have things to do. Some dogs enter buildings, and everybody feeds the dogs including the shop keepers. Some dogs even ride the acensores, the cable cars which make the hilly commute far easier. As dog people, we love it. It´s like leave-a-penny take-a-penny but with dogs. Needless to say, the cats spend all of their lives on rooftops.

The guy with the fife
So here´s this city that hugs the Pacific Ocean. Every house is completely different, with beautiful shades that I didn´t even know existed. The streets are cobble stones, and famous artists have created murals on virtually every wall. Each turn requires a dropped jaw and a photo. The many hills create a ripple of colorful civilization that extends from the sea to the peaks. By all rights, this city should be a huge tourist trap, but it really isn´t. We were virtually alone as foreigners, with a few notable exceptions. Primarily, Valparaiso is a university town, an artist´s town, a Navy town, and a trade town, just as it always has been.

This is a port, first and foremost. The houses go deep into the hills.

Basically forever.

You can use a labrynth of stairs to climb.

You can also take many funiculars (acensores) up to the top of the hills.

Public art is everywhere.

You feel like you´re in a painting.

Some people take it to a whole new level. This is a Roberto Matta painting that Josh is defiling.

We were a little lost today, and we sat down in the shadow of this beautiful blue house. The afternoon was, in the words of Alex, "dead". Some guy, probably our age, came down the street playing (I kid you not) a fife, as if this was some seafaring town in the 18th century. There was no money involved, no vagrancy, just some guy enjoying a silent afternoon by playing music while walking down the street. What kind of place gets away with that sort of thing? Unreal.

The meal
Josh likes meals a lot, but I have a more complex relationship with them. To a large extent, I am a product of my parents in this regard. My mother and her family have instilled in me a natural distrust of overexcessive dining "experiences" (a tradition which my father´s family of well-fed men values highly). While several in my mom´s fam are decent chefs, the reality is that they are highly efficient with their food, extremely rapid in tucking it away, over-enthusiastic about health (who the hell wants whole wheat pasta?!), and in the case of my mother, extremely disdainful of TLC. I largely take after this tradition, but in recent years I´ve been sucked into a dining culture among my DC friends where a premium is placed on going out to eat and enjoying good food. So whether I like it conceptually or not, I can be a sucker for a great meal as well.

This was the case today, big time. Ok, excuse me for a second as I turn on the pretension nitro boost. We´ll put this in itallics for extra pizzaz:
Imagine that you are walking through the silent, cobbled streets of an old, portside city in Chile. The day is cloudy, but unlike most days the overcast holds in what little heat exists in the world so that the temperature remains nothing less than a slight cool. You´ve climbed several flights of stairs through bright, impossibly colored houses and are currently overlooking a street which curves downward so steeply that it disappears from view, yielding only the docks and the tankers and the still ocean, extending forever. A small market sells produce to a few old women in the shadow of a Catholic church, but beyond this the streets are empty. Your friend tells you it´s time to eat, and you easilly agree.

Lunch is the big meal of the day, so the decision is fairly important, but with little debate it´s decided to stop into a tiny hole in the wall place. After all, it´s right there, and Lonely Planet has been decidedly mixed in the accuracy of its reviews. You´re seated by a waitress who is so pretty and who has a smile and quiet laugh that is so perfect that all you can do is grin like a fool when she talks to you. As the only customers, you get percect, uninterupted service. Unfortunately, the cute waitress speaks so quickly that it is impossible to understand her. The hostess interjects, and explains for about five minutes all of the options on the menu. Everything sounds amazing, but you are feeling mellow and get the Menu del Dia, which has an appetizer, an entre, and dessert. Everything is fine.

The food comes, a cream of cauliflower soup, then a pork chop with corn pone and a subtle honey sauce, and finally a baked apple with a sorbet. Everything is presented beautifully, like a gourmet magazine. Everything tastes amazing. Old men connected with Buena Vista Social Club sing from the speakers. The walls are covered in paintings.

So it´s all basically perfect, but then this guy comes in. He is wearing one of those beanies that really are only appropriate while skiing or if your name is Jack Johnson. Then he starts talking to you, first about your food, then about your trip. Normally, this would be a real "oh, come on dude, I´m trying to enjoy my meal here, let´s save the chit chat." Remember though that today is a mellow day. Who doesn´t have time for their fellow man on a day like today?

We are presented this unreal food. (Ok, at this point I´m pretty well sick of writing in this crummy second person present tense, and really, it´s not appropriate for the rest of story). Anyway, this guy´s name was Shaahin. He was an Iranian who had left as a kid following the 1979 revolution, and he lived in LA doing documentary film and writing. He was currently traveling and writing while in the middle of a project on the paranormal. After he told us this last detail, he asked us what we thought. We told him. He proceeded to tell us who we were in great detail, including our spiritual beliefs, our relationship with technology, our intellectual approach to the world, our style of travel, and our status as friends. He was largely incorrect, but quite affable. Everything this man said was in complete earnest.

Here is a snippet of conversation.
Shaahin: "So what did you study?"
Me: "Economics, basically."
Shaahin: "Really? Like what."
Me: "International economics, like trade and foreign direct inv..."
Shaahin: "That´s great, like business."
Me: "Well, actually I work for the government."
Shaahin: "Oh like the CIA, FBI, kind of thing"
Me: "No, more like economic analysis"
Shaahin: "Oh, you work for the Justice Department?"
Josh: "Have you ever heard of the U.S. Trade Representative?"
Shaahin: "Yeah, yeah."
Josh: "He works for an agency that works directly underneath that."
Shaahin: "Oh, ok so like the Attorney General. Great."

And that´s just the small talk. We got into religion and nationalism. Every question of his was followed by a follow up. At one point he asked if I wanted a picture of my food. He got up and started framing and composing photographs as if my face and my dessert were part of a fashion photo op (yes, I have now had a documentary filmmaker take photographs of me eating). Josh and I were at first taken aback, but actually it was quite an acceptable experience.

There´s a lot more to say about this guy, but if you are interested in a taste of his worldview, I recommend going to his blog to read about his travels and his work with the paranormal. It´s not awful, although the post "Love in the time of swine flu" is a little off the deep end of normal.
http://www.thebigmyth.blogspot.com/
Josh and I did not reveal that we had a blog to this man. We enjoyed meeting him, but are not sure we would enjoy him in any more doses.

If you survived this far into this post, you´re a real sport. I must insist that you go to Valparaiso. You too will need to write this much, and you´ll probably feel as incomplete in your description as I do now.

In a fourth life (after my second life as a mountain store owner/husband of fat, happy wife and a third life as a sedentary, conversant food-eater in New York), I would stay here forever.

Seasoned Traveler

Mendoza! Nice place.

Josh was really happy here.

And why not?

This is me showing off my passport at Los Libertadores, before my humiliation.

Daamn.

This road was nuts.

I mean nuts.

Welcome to Chile!

Cordoba - Mendoza - Los Libertadores - Valparaiso

Part of the reason that Josh and I were supposed to be good at traveling together is that he would add sanity and prudence and I would add adventure and experience. I have to admit, however, that I have been a little disappointed. Josh has proven to be quite capable. In many towns, he has mastered the layout of the city before I have, and he sometimes is even able to pick up phrases in Spanish before I can (although I attribute that mostly to my hearing). That said, I still have a certain degree of, oh, I don´t know, seasoned travel knowledge. Today, for example, I had to instruct Josh that you always, always need your passport on your person when crossing an international border. I got to shake my head knowingly as he embarassingly asked the bus porter to reach to the back of the luggage compartment to get his backpack so that he could pull out his documents.

Sure enough, we did need our passports on the bus with us. Apparently the customs station between Mendoza, Argentina and Santiago, Chile is in the middle of the Andes. When I say middle of the Andes, I don´t mean the general region of the Andes. I don´t even mean foothills. I mean the top of a pass, with snow whisping over the peaks surrounding us. We were asked to step out of the bus to deal with customs. Despite our frozen surroundings, I mocked Josh for being cold.

After about 20 minutes of standing around, we were approached by the customs officer who asked for our customs form. Josh produced his easily enough. I did not, so I ran back in the bus to get it. It was nowhere to be found. Running back, I sheepishly admitted that it was gone. The customs official exasperatedly produced a new one. Old ladies on our bus looked at me like I was an idiot. I fumbled for a pen. Unfortunately, the altitude had caused my pen to explode. The ink dripped all over the new form in huge, shameful droplets. In a panic, I got a new pen from Josh (a bic that had survived the trip), and began filling out the soiled form. As the blue ink of the old pen smeared everywhere, the customs official looked on bemused. Finally, after it had become apparent that I had caused an irredeemable he asked me to fill out a third copy of the same form. The old ladies were visibly annoyed. Josh was visibly quite pleased. I was very happy for him.

I would be remiss to not describe the bus ride beyond my own sense of shame. The ride to the border was dramatic, with vast, arid flood planes and massive brown rocks that had fallen from increasingly large mountains. It was the trip back down out of the mountains that was truly shocking, however. I´m a person who has seen a lot of mountains, including the North Cascades, Canadian Rockies, and the Swiss Alps. The Andes are serious. These were not pretty, verdant, or uplifting mountains. Albert Bierstadt could never have painted these. They were dark, snow covered, dominating peaks, yielding little forgiveness as our bus took sharp switchback after switchback, passing trucks that were taking it too slowly for our drivers to tolerate. Josh and I were totally enraptured, and more than a little blown away.

For me, these mountains were so beautiful that it hurt. I´ve had that feeling several times here in South America. One of the problems with a trip like this is that you never really get to experience the full essence of the people and places you interact with. The insanely beautiful women in Buenos Aires, the solitude of living in the Mendoza wine country, the total stillness of a Cordoba afternoon, and these mountains: these are all things I have gotten to taste but not fully understand. It´s this part of traveling that is so fantastic and so painful at the same time.

* I changed the setting on the blog so that anybody can comment. I don´t know why it wasn´t always like this. It gets lonely out here sometimes, and I appreciate any and all comments a lot. Miss you all!

Hospital

Buenos Aires - Cordoba

My travel insurance representative, a friendly guy named Todd, recommended that I go to the Hospital Privado during my brief stay in Cordoba, just to make sure I didn´t have the H1N1. Based on the extradordinarily high fever that I had had on Saturday, and the pain in the kidneys that might be the result of an alcohol-induced infection, I decided take a trip.

Leaving Josh to discover the city´s pretty cathedrals and cafes, I took a cheap cab into the suburbs. Todd had told me to go the ER for direct care. After walking in the hospital, I realized that I had no idea how to say "Emergency Room", nor "insurance", "kidney infection", or a host of other medical terms. I walked in a daze past throngs of unhappy Argentines looking for care, just like any hospital or clinic. Unlike, any hospital in the U.S. or Europe, however, this place had pealing paint, dust all over the floor, and dingy lights. The Argentine hospital brand of unhappy patient has an extra dose of angry.

I´ll spare you the details of the many conversations I had leading to my seeing a doctor, but let´s just say they involved several receptionists who simply made me panic due to their total unwillingness to slow down. I believe I was told by one woman that I would be "faxed to the emergency guard," to which I believe I responded "ok, but my company man said that I´m worth 100 percent." While this was happening, an angry youth stood to my side, tapping the glass of the reception window menancingly with a splint on his fingers. It´s times like this that I reach in my pocket and make sure my passport is still there.

Once I eventually reached the ER, and determined that these people simply wouldn´t accept my insurance, I was given a mask and told to pay at another counter and then wait. And so I did. The humiliation of waiting for a doctor in a mask is not so intense if you´re one of many masked invalids. If you´re the only person in an entire hospital wearing a mask, the world looks at you like you´re scum on Earth. I had several people make quite clear to me that the seat next to them was occupied, although clearly nobody was sitting there. Even standing, old ladies slunked away from me and children stared menacingly. I eventually realized that despite the constant coughing that I had heard in the hostel, on the street, in buses, on subways, I was the only one in this country who had admitted that he had the flu.

This became even more apparent once I was finally admitted. Doctors and nurses communicated with me by just putting their head through the door. Those who did come all the way into the room were covered from hand to foot in garb, like I was an alien in the movie Independence Day. "Dr. Frank", my principal doctor, asked me a billion questions, as did an authoritative "infectologist" who simply told me upon entering the room "Don´t be afraid."

Swine flu, or "N1H1" as they call it here, is tested and taken seriously not based on symptoms (as these are too similar to the regular flu), but based on a number of factors about the patients recent past. Because I had been in New York, they decided to do a number of tests on me. Of course, I was not made aware of this decision. Things just started happening to me. A girl came in, opened a needle out of a package (yes, I made sure it was packaged like in America), and took some blood. Then, even while I was still bleeding and bandaging myself(!), I was ushered back into the reception room where the same people who had given me dirty looks now saw me in a lot more garb, and out again into a room where I was shoved into what looked like a giant dart board (this turned out to be an X-Ray). I was then told to wait in my original room. This lasted forever. The janitor, who didn´t realize that I was a biotoxic hazzard, even came in and started mopping around my feet before a nurse came in and grabbed him, pulling him out and smiling nervously at me before slamming the door. Finally, a guy came in to get a swab of my nose and throat, and I was told that I could pay for the x-ray and blood work and leave after they got the results from the tests.

About an hour later, I was told that I did not have anything other than a flu. Unfortunately, they didn´t know what flu I had. My swab samples had been sent to the Ministry of Health to be analyzed, and I would receive notification in a few days telling me whether or not I had the swine flu. In the meantime, they asked for my phone number and place of lodging so that they could check up on me. I was told not to leave Cordoba, as I could get others sick on the bus. I left 4 hours after I arrived, dazed, a little nervous, and still wearing my mask. Needless to say, I had a hard time getting a cab.

Now, if you were to ask me, "Dylan, are hospitals in Argentina as nice as those in America?", my answer would be "No." But I did get an ER visit, blood work, and an x-ray for $15.

Epilogue
2 days later, Josh and I have exhausted what to do in Cordoba. We are making a break for Mendoza tonight, whatever the authorities say. If you don´t hear from me, it means we´ve been quarantined by the Argentine Ministry of Health.

Haha, actually, it´s not that adventurous. The doctors have called daily, but I have been feeling a lot better and they agreed that I could leave today. We all agree that I probably don´t have the swine flu, and if I did, it´s a wussy flu. In a few days I´ll be drinking wine in the sunshine and smoking a big, fat cuban cigar.

Extras:

Cordoba is pretty, if not beautiful. This is a burned up Cathedral.

The Argentine authorities have been notorious in their time for detainment. This is a cell for political prisoners during the pre-Falkland War period. Some things just don´t change.

This sunny spot was not an awful place to recover from the swine flu!

Folks and the Flu

Buenos Aires

I´m going to miss this view from our balcony at Hostel Estoril.

The first leg of our trip, the part in Buenos Aires, was dominated by Argentines and Argentina. We soaked up the cafe culture, explored different barrios, and spoke a lot of Casteshhhano. We went to clubs and tried to talk to Argentines, with varying degrees of success. We did not have any success with chicas, much to Alex´s chagrin.

Following our very local and very slow trip around Uruguay´s Rio de la Plata coast, we came back to Buenos Aires. This was a far different experience, to be honest. We spent most of our time with Americans and Brits and Australians, especially one girl named Kelsey who was pretty cool but for some reason seemed to dominate our social lives these last few days (see Josh´s blog). For some reason we decided to see the first Tango show we saw advertised on the street, and the result was marginal food, photo ops with tango dancers, and a leggy old woman belting out songs. Man, that sucked. The hostel was much fuller, so Alex was in seventh heaven, directing night life and flirting with several individuals who we only knew by Alex´s favorite moniker for certain available women, "Chub Chubs."

We spent two nights on pub crawls. For those of you who have never done a pub crawl, imagine 6 Canadian guys screaming every 5 minutes a chant that goes "Who wants to rock the party? We want to rock the party!" Imagine an unapproachable gaggle of girls in D.C. accompanied by their British, Canadian, Australian, and Swedish equivalents. Imagine stupid amounts of liquor and beer. As a rule, I like to avoid things like this, but the other guys seemed to like it and, to be honest, I didn´t mind a little dose of fratty Americana nor the company of a girl from San Francisco on the first night.

On the second night, things were much different. Alex was insistant upon a mad search for this friend of a person he had met in a party once on Foggy Bottom, and Josh and I were in the mood for a much more chillaxed evening. We ended up going bowling with two Americans way off the tourist map. It was a good time, and I got a chance to practice the Carlson Curve as they call it. Our "quiet night" ended up lasting until 4 am. Sheesh.

The last night was hell on earth. Whether it was a bit too much partying or too much exposure to sick people (it seemed like everybody in the city had a cough), I got something fierce. I paid for the pub crawl, but I ended up leaving after the first bar. Besides the discomfort of fever and debilitating pain, I also had to deal with three roommates arriving at different times in the night. The last, Alex, arrived following a phone call to my cell which woke up everybody, and came with a girl from Chicago. Apparently everybody else slept through the humpidillos. I had to leave the room.

Anyway, I´m low on the clock here at this internet cafe, so I´ll leave this post by saying that I loved BsAs, even if there was a certain degree of kitsch, poverty, and illness attached. I´m eager to get some fresher air though, so vamos a Cordoba!

Details

Montevideo - Buenos Aires

Montevideo has world class architecture, although it is a little rough around the edges.



This is about what I expected from South America.


Not this.



Needless to say, I fit the bill of the Partido Obrero. This sign reads "To complete the National Project, the protagonists must be workers!!





I ordered an orange juice (right) with my breakfast. Josh ordered a breakfast that came with orange juice (left). And yes, that is a classic Josh laugh attack.



While I'd love to digress about taking a buggee around the backroads of an old, colonial town in Uruguay, or describe exactly how I ended up on a pub crawl which terminated with Alex throwing his underwear at me in drunken rage, I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge some of the details that have made this trip a delightful romp, a sea of confusion, and an exhausting lesson.

1. The Chilean National Team Fight Song

"Vamos! Vamos Chilenos! Vamos a ganar alguna vez mas!!" And I think it repeats. Who knows. We heard this song blasting from a soccer video game this guy was playing in our hostel in Tigre, a suburb of Buenos Aires. Ostensibly this kid was a Chilean soccer player, but to me this seemed unlikely. I only saw him play computer games and video games, glancing furtively around every so often. At night he blasted Reggaeton from his headphones, perpetuating my hatred-of-the-ages for public, terrible music. In general, I also hate sports video games, but this one was way too loud and was severely disruptive to my Rummy game. Alex, who was reading 1984, didn't seem phased. Josh, who is a big fan of sports games, apparently loved it. He has been singing the Chilean fight song ever since, except he only knows the first two phrases so it is both incomplete and laced with Josh's affected style of singing. Now it's in my head too, so every once in a while one of us will start singing it, and then the other, and then Alex will look around embarassed, and then we'll stop.

2. Chris (alex guesses this name is spelt without an H)

Chris is a very nice haircuttress from the Flemish part of Belgium. She wears her hair extremely short (shorter than Alex but longer than Josh), is taller than all of us, is a bit prissy and also a bit eccentric, and has an ambiguous sexuality. In fairness, the only evidence of this last detail is that none of us were interested in her, although she was pretty, and she was clearly uninterested in any of us, although we are clearly eligible, strapping men. We had several awkward and unceremonious departures from her - in Montevideo's bus depot, in a marketplace, after a boat ride. Every time, however, she shows up again just as suddenly, at the Red Hostel, at a tour of a theater, and who knows, maybe some other place. It's a weird dynamic. She never laughs at our jokes, although she frequently laughs at us. She doesn't say anything, except sometimes she's dancing around or gibbering something excitedly. None of us are particularly sad to see her go, but all of us generally enjoyed her company.

3. No Americans

Very few, anyway. Has its goods and its bads.

4. Quadruple cheese burger.

Did I mention this already? It comes from Burger King, there are four patties. Josh and I have set a rule that we will not eat fast food until out of BsAs, but Alex is getting to the point where he is basically rabid about wanting one.

5. The cities

Alex is incessantly searching for the nice parts of town. The towns we have been to have fantastic architecture, with cupolas and intricate masonry, art decco and brilliant tiles. These are cities that grew into the most fashionable, most ritzy places in the world around the turn of the 19th century. Following years of tweed-coated populism, political warfare, and overall economic tomfoolery, the glory of these cities descended, and so did the upkeep of barrios. Like all guidebooks say, there has been a "renaissance" of restoration, and so forth, but clearly a lot of neighborhoods are just messed up. Alex has not been happy with this, calling Montevideo's old town a "disgrace" and saying that Buenos Aires is in fact not the "Paris of the South."

Every once in a while, we walk through a neighborhood that has been beautifully upkept. Western designer brands line the walks. This is the case with Calle Florida in Buenos Aires, a place that Josh likens to New Jersey and Alex thinks is more cosmopolitan than any neighborhood in the U.S. Hanging out there today, I tried to fit what we've seen in Buenos Aires into a homogenous, urban mold. "It's like any city. Take New York," I expounded, as if my few minutes in each neighborhood made me understand the way this world worked. "Calle Florida is 5th Avenue. Corrientes is Broadway. San Telmo is SoHo, and Palermo is Greenwich Village. La Boca is like Harlem, I guess, full of history but dangerous." It's easier to understand a new city if you think you've seen it before.

I've scoffed every time that Alex has complained, but these are not New York, and not even the "Paris of the South." These are rough cities, cities that don't really look like they're on the move. Amidst the glitz of the shopping district, back alleys contain women and toddlers sifting through trash. Cranes do not cover the skyline, and streets seem to remain in a state of permanent construction. A gang of young men go through a garbage heap on a street corner, and following a brief discussion, a cop moves on his way. Some jerk named "Fitzgerald Kennedy" walks with you for several blocks before being told sternly that we are not interested in his bar. During a blackout, some guy pisses on Congress.

At the same time, these are lovely, old, and character-filled cities. Mothers still march on the Plaza de Mayo every Thursday. The young woman in business heels on the street smiles at you quickly before crossing the impossible intersection. Standing on the balcony of my hostel room, I can see all the way to the Pink House and the Rio de la Plata delta, and the tapered glow of ten thousand warm lights. It's pretty beautiful.

Epilogue:

Alex finally got his quadruple stacker.

The Year with No Summer

Buenos Aires - Tigre - Colonia del Uruguay - Montevideo

Tigre, a suburb of Buenos Aires along the Parana River delta.

Totally loved this building. I would love to have a party with top hats and canes here.

Colonia del Uruguay was beautiful.

That is a plant growing out of that car.

Alex insisted on getting a buggy.

Badasses.

But we also had a golfcart.

"Dude, I'll bet this place is totally awesome in the summer," or how about "Man, I guess that's why they call it the off season," or finally "this place is dead." Sometimes I want to strangle Alex and his never-ending quest to find the ideal nightlife. I'll admit it though, this trip has been cold, and at times desolate. We have walked into bars in prime vacation spots, like Colonia del Sacramento, that look like they have the capacity to hold 200 people where we have been the entire party of customers. Our hostels have not been raging, but some have been filled with some rather curious characters.

The truth is, I don't feel the way I did touring around Europe in the summer. I didn't come here for the same trip I had last time, however, and there are many things that make this trip even better than that one. First of all, it's great to have company. Sure, Josh and Alex are bigger into food than I am and are more prone to take taxis. Josh insists on using the porteño Castellano, which infuriates me so much because it gives him an excuse to apply an Italian accent to Spanish. Alex is, as always, driven by a need to spread his seed to all parts of the world, leading to complaints about being in beautiful, if tiny towns. Without a doubt, though, they're great travellers, and we have been on the same page on almost all fronts, both in terms of practical matters and fun matters.

Secondly, I really feel like a baddass. My Spanish is far better than I thought it was, and I'm learning a lot every day. While cold has been an issue, I've become entirely used to the idea of it being winter and like layering up every day, enjoying hot showers when they come as well as fireplaces and the rare heated restaurant, and cannot wait to buy one of those big hairy sweaters so that I can embarass Josh. Lastly, I like the kinds of things we're doing. In order to cross into Uruguay, we got up at 6 in the morning to catch a small river vessel which brought us through a mist covered bayou of the Parana River. The boat deposited us somewhere in Uruguay where we had to catch a large car that was generously labeled a bus, where we squeezed in with a bunch of other passengers and talked about nothing with two 60-year-old brothers who happened to be the sons of a previous ambassador to the U.S. and had lived in Bethesda. That's the kind of thing I live for. Quality, when pulled out of humble circumstances, is all the more gratifying.

Communist Soccer

Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires is in the midst of regional elections, and grafiti is everywhere. One slogan that seems to be just about everywhere is something that reads "Que la crisis la paguen las capitalistas", which basically translates to "so that the crisis is paid for by the capitalists." Nice. This isn't my opinion blog, so I won't go too nuts here explaining why I have no sympathy for this cause, but let's just say that this is a type of red that might not even find an audience in France or Sweden. We saw a lot of this in La Boca.

La Boca ("the Mouth") is a neighborhood that gets its name from the mouth of the Parana River, the giant body of water which will take us hours to cross later by Ferry. The neighborhood also receives its name from the area's function as a mouth of the city, taking in the many immigrants who came to Buenos Aires around the turn of the last century. We went here looking for rows of brightly painted houses and perhaps an idea of the historical, dockland culture which helped produce cultural staples such as the Tango and the obsession with soccer.

Boca Juniors, one of the city's major football clubs, is an excellent example of this neighborhood's attitude. Started by Italian immigrants and taking its name from a tradition started by British railway workers, the clubs is seen widely as the working class team of the city. Although the team has won as many international titles as AC Milan, it operates out of a play-dough colored, fairly ramshackle stadium that looks like it could be the setting of some post-Colonial tale featuring fiery Catholic monks, Mexican banditos, or Nacho Libre. I can't help to compare it against Real Madrid's Bernabeu stadium, with its floodlights and Death Star-like dominance over one of that city's main streets. Boca's stadium, on the other hand, emerges like a humble blue and yellow neighbor out of the cobbled streets, crumbling houses, and abandoned train tracks of the barrio. In order to emphasize the solidarity with the workers of the city, huge murals of comrades charging with righteous, proletariat rage in the team colors dominate the sides of buildings.

With any working class neighborhood, the rich feel a little bit uneasy. Since we are without a doubt considered rich here, we felt antsy. I insisted that we take the bus there, and the bus driver (knowing that we wanted to go to this neighborhood) dropped us off way too early, assuring us that we just had to walk three blocks to get to the stadium. While this seemed technically possible, it turned out to be practically infeasible. Alex and Josh were by no means pleased with me when I suggested we follow the drivers directions by going through a street filled with garbage roadblocks, roving dogs, kids listing aimlessly on bikes, shadowy characters hovering around porches, and busted up cars. Even I thought this was way to sketchy, and we instead decided to brave streets patrolled by old women washing their sidewalks and children going to school. Even these streets, however, had heavily barred shops, and at one point Josh and I both noted that a guy in front of us made a gesture to somebody directly behind us. I made a point of turning around and giving that guy a good stare, just to make sure he didn't mess with the Masta and friends. Eventually, however, the friendly stadium emerged, cops began appearing, and a clearly delineated tourist zone beckoned cheasily.

We took a taxi back to the upscale neighborhood and ordered huge steaks. It's taken a little while for Josh and Alex to trust me with the helm again.


La Boca in pictures

This is where the bus driver dropped us off.

Typical.

Although the stadium is a beacon of safety, Josh was still not pleased with me. Alex was still refusing to stand for a picture.

Boca Juniors stadium.

That crane in the background was used to load immigrants into Argentina.

One of the neighborhood toughs...

...and some of the nicer residents.

As you can see, we survived.