Buenos Aires

For at least the next two weeks I´ll continue to have limited access to the interwebs, so unfortunately these posts will be infrequent (sorry Dad). I got back a few days ago from a day and a half trip into the capital, which was fun. The two hour train ride into the city costs $2 in pesos, which is about 50 cents! Wow. The first thing I noticed about Buenos Aires, after wandering around for half an hour thinking I was in the city center, is that it´s really pretty ugly outside of a few key areas. There are cracked streets, old abandoned buildings and people who look at you with an unmistakably suspicous eye. I guess this is true of pretty much any city, but it´s a bit disconcerting when you´re meandering around like an idiot, pulling out your giant yellow map of the city every 5 minutes. I eventually figured out where I was, but my next task proved more challenging: figuring out how the colectivos, their main form of public transportation, are organized. You can buy a Guia "T" that puts the city on a grid and tells you which bus busses stop where (or rather, whether or not they stop somewhere in the 6x6 block area within a single grid section), but there are no actual routes outlined anywhere, and there´s no way that I found to tell if the bus is heading towards or away from your destination. I ended up abandoning that chaotic mess and walking towards the micocentro, a nicer part of the city, which was only a 20 minute walk or so. I found a very nice hostel with free internet, a tv in the basement in a nice lounge and complementary breakfast. A dorm bed was only about $15 US. After wandering around the city a bit, which, although certainly as European in feel as they say, isn´t much to look at outside of a few select areas. Of course, any other major city I´ve visited in Latin America can´t hold a candle to BA aesthetically, but it´s still nothing to write home about. What is worthy of note is everyone´s schedule: I was early to dinner at 10, and by the time I was ready for bed at 12, people were just starting to pour drinks in anticipation of going out. Nonetheless, the same people I saw starting their night at midnight were up serving breakfast the next day before 9. Impressive. I spent another day wandering around a cool crafts market in a northern part of the city before heading home. Although it was pretty uneventful, it was good to get a feel for the city, to get away from my farm, and to have converstations in english!! I met some very cool people, including an Irish couple who, after losing their jobs, had pooled all their money and spent the last five months traveling around South America. They didn´t speak a word of spanish, and their accents were so thick that I had trouble understanding them...I don´t know how they managed to communicate anything to a non-native english speaker, but they got by. They also gave me some great advice about the places I´m headed to, which they´ve already visited. And they managed to get me thinking about taking a 17 hour bus ride up north to see Igazu Falls before my good friend Gustavus Warfield Stingefield Hobbs V arrives and we head to northern Patagonia. I think I may. I also met a couple from New Zeland who have been hopping around different cities in SA, teaching english and learning spanish. Apparently there´s enough demand for native english speakers that you don´t even have to be certified in any way to get a job, and you can hold it for just a month! Just a degree from some university and you´re set. Great idea! I guess there are lots of ways to travel cheap and long.

Farm is going well...I´m beginning to see improvements in the vegetable garden in which I work, which is nice--to be able to really notice your progress. Speaking of progress, my spanish still sucks. Ugh. I also may kill the 17-year-old son of my host mother, who I´m convinced is actually a 6-year-old in a lazy, sloppy, unclean teenager´s body. He´s an irreverent little turd to his mother, who is a saint. And he constantly returns my ipod with big gobs of earwax and hair on the ear buds. Gross. So yeah, that´s my life right now. How are you?