Buenos Aires

Two weekends ago was a national holiday in Argentina and everyone got a four day weekend. The reason? There is a presidential election coming up and the current president, in an attempt to gain some popularity votes, gave the entire country a few extra days off. I had considered leaving Buenos Aires for the long weekend, but laziness won out and I stuck around the city and pretty much did a whole lot of nothing.

After a few weeks of long days spent in classrooms getting outside to soak up some late summer/early fall sun seemed like a wonderful idea. A fellow CELTA trainee met me at this massive park area between our apartments. At one end of the park is a botanical garden and a zoo. Then there are typical large, tree dotted, grassy fields one usually finds in a park. Past that there was a large lake (which we determined was man made) encircled by a wide avenue of sorts for people biking, walking, running, and rollerblading.

Rollerblading. In the United States it went out of fashion sometime in the late 90s. Rollerblades were relegated to roller skate rinks and off-season hockey practice. Here in Argentina they are still in vogue. I could not get over how many rollerbladers there were. The park was full of families and couples and I swear that half of them were probably on rollerblades, decked out with knee and elbow pads. There was even a place that you could rent them! The 90s are still alive in Buenos Aires.

In addition to renting rollerblades you could rent peddle boats or row boats and paddle about the lake. We decided to rent a peddle boat, which was mildly entertaining. We tried to run over the geese (they were very slow to get out of the way, Argentinians must not operate peddle boats in the same manner they drive, cause if those geese were pedestrians in this country they would´ve known to move it) and at the end discovered that peddling backwards (and in circles) was much easier and more fun.

The park also had a lovely rose garden, which made me a little nostalgic for Portland. It was really a beautiful and wonderful place. As we were starting to leave we noticed a guy, wearing a fur coat without pants, setting up a stage. He was going through an elaborate miming of smoothing out a circus like mat and we decided to sit down on the hillside, buy an ice cream from a guy selling them from coolers strapped to a bike, and see what the show was all about. It was a treat, really wonderful "street" theater. Underneath the fur coat were various "cave man" outfits, which the performer took off in a strip tease of sorts that would never have been tolerated in an American park with kids in the audience. He mimed strutting like a model and even when he took of the last item pretended that he was naked, before revealing leopard print panties. The conclusion of the show was an acrobatic routine on a rope slung between two poles.

On Saturday night Buenos Aires had a city wide arts festival called Noche en la Vela. There were free events, concerts, and shows all over town. A fellow CELTA trainee, Ollie, and I spent hours wandering around the city taking in different shows and missing plenty of others. We saw a large scale tango band and could see many couples dancing tango in the street. We saw a group of people dancing to Reggatone on a street corner, following the instructions of a gym like instructor. We caught the end of an amazing outdoor concert with an accordian band and energetic music that you couldn´t help but dance to. People were dancing in circles and starting folk dance style chains where you went under arches formed by peoples´arms. We also listened to wonderful tango music in a little cafe that looked like it belonged in turn of the century Italy. It was crowded so we couldn´t see the band at all (if we moved away from the bar to try and get a better look the older Argentinian women would yell at us for blocking their view, even though they couldn´t see the band either). At the very end of the evening we caught the end of an outdoor Argentinian folk concert. It was incredible because it seemed as though everyone in the audience knew the words to the all the songs. The band was cheered on stage for an encore and the crowd went wild when they began the song. All of sudden handkerchiefs appeared out of peoples´ pockets and all over the street and plaza people were dancing an old folk dance that clearly was well known. There were probably 10 couples dancing right by us and there were handkerchiefs fluttering in the air all throughout the crowd. Ollie and I looked at each other in disbelief, where did all of the handkerchiefs come from!?!

I´ve been very bad about blogging lately. I started this post a week ago and even then I was writing about things that had happened a week or so earlier. Today is the end of my Celta course. Yesterday was my last teaching practice. We all just shared a glass of champagne with our Celta tutors and most of us are meeting up for dinner tonight. It feels so odd to know that this is probably the last time I will sit in this computer lab. I will most likely never see these people again. My life has been incredibly structured for the last month. Every morning a subte ride to school, school followed by lesson prep...repeat. Monday I start traveling again. I haven´t touched my backpack in over a month. It feels very odd to be in this position, to know that I´m going to have to figure things out day by day again. If my plans don´t change I have about 2 months of traveling left. When I landed in Peru three months ago five months seemed like forever, it felt too long. When I came to Buenos Aires two months ago I felt as though I had already been on the road for ages, much longer than two months. But now the last month has flown by. It honestly feels as though I just started this course two weeks ago, not five weeks ago. I know that the next two months are going to fly by as well and in the blink of an eye I´ll be on my way back to the United States. Or who knows what.