El CLUBE!

The weekend has come and gone and once again I´ve managed to go crazy, meet a bunch of random people and come stumbling home at a solid 8 in the morning. Want to hear about it?

Futbol futbol futbol!!! That´s what I´ve been doing here in Argentina. I´ve been watching every game with a certain zest and excitement that one only gets every four years. (You see, the world cup only occurs once every four years and for that reason one can only get this excited when it arrives. Now if the cup happened every year, or annually, it would be different, but since it isn´t I have to appreciate this type of fun only once every four years. Get it?)

My day pretty much just flows with the world cup schedule. I usually wake up at about 11 to the sounds of cheering from those who are already in the spirit. I watch the fist game on the couch in my hostel until about 1 pm every day. Then I have about two and a half hours to do something until the next game starts.

On Saturday, I was following my usual pattern which lead to a little walking tour with a new hostel friend from Australia. We walked all over the city and went to my favorite destination so far, the Ateneo book store. It is a giant book store made inside an old theater. Very cool. After that, we picked a semi run down restaurant to have some mid day pizza and even more mid day glasses of wine. Well, she had chocolate milk and I had a couple of huge 75 cent glasses of wine.

She had to leave to meet friends so I worked my way back through the city stopping once and a while to have a wine and keep up with the game. That took me all of 2 hours and when I finally began my B line to the crib the rain kicked in and I was forced to walk soakingly to my little crash pad.

At this point I thought it was going to be a regular movie on the couch and crash night, but I was mistaken. I decided to check out the party floor on the top to see what was happening and to my surprise...it was happening.

Now at this point it might be interesting to know that for the first couple of days here I was being a bit of an anti-social dud. A bit unlike myself, I´ll agree, but nonetheless I was spending more of my time sleeping or laying on the couch instead of actually being friendly or talking to anyone. So, when I showed up on Saturday with a bit of wine in the belly and my usual butterfly like attitude, most were more than surprised.

After a couple more glasses of wine and beer the decision was made to head to the Clubes as they call it. Our group was quite large which meant that the inevitable decision of where to go was going to be nearly impossible.

We found our first club and entered only to find out that half the group had said ¨Screw this¨ and left for some other place. I tried to get into it, but it was clear that the others were also dissatisfied. The music seemed about a half tempo too slow and it was really enjoyable watching all the locals try to compensate for the fact that the DJ had a serious hearing disorder. There seemed to be a lot more people crashing into each other and no one was able to find his/her rythm. It was a no brainer that we needed to step things up.

At this point I was on fire or ¨in the groove¨ and I was ready for any kind of party they could throw at me. After an intriguing conversation with the taxi driver about the beef in Argentina we arrived to the new club. Our second of the evening.

This next part is sort of a wild blur of events. The highlights for me where taking random pictures with all sorts of people, having some massive dance offs with the locals and one serious dance off that led to us being in a circle trading off moves and then agreeing that we both rocked and doing our own synchronized dance together, and of course...getting several different high rolling Argentines to buy me drinks even though I had my own money in my pockets. You gotta do what you gotta do.

After that my Spanish was zooming and I no longer wanted to be around those who wouldn´t speak it to me. While walking with my hostel friends back to the.....that´s right, the hostel, I met some local Argentines by initiating a very inviting, ¨HEY! ¿QUE PASA AMIIIIIIGGGGGOOOOOOO?¨

Some how we got to talking and I ditched the others and we were off to find another beer. Unfortunately though, we were a bit too stupid to realize that no one was going to have beer at 630 in the morning. Of course that did not stop us and we made a long journey all throughout Buenos Aires.

In the end we decided to settle on some footlong hotdogs sold by a Bolivian woman in a kiosk in the middle of a dark street. The ideal way to eat your breakfast. It was fun to team up with the Bolivian in making fun of Argentinian accents.

After some hugs and some goodbyes I was walking off towards the rising sun and my rock soft bunk bed when I heard my new friends shout, ¨You´re the coolest American evvvveeeerrrrrrr!¨ And with those kind words in my head I found my way to the hostel and drifted off to dream land until 430 in the afternoon the next day. A pretty good night over all and a great way to finally start my trip.