Week One: Buenos Aires
I've been on the ground for pretty much exactly a week now, staying with paisleychick and kragen. They live in a charming and rustic old apartment in the San Telmo district, with lots of space, balconies over a lively café-infused street, a huge back patio, accessible rooftop, and two cats. The only thing I don't like about it is the plumbing: sometimes the hot water doesn't work, and sometimes the cold water doesn't work, and this has changed mid-shower a couple of times.
I've been somewhat of a homebody since I got here. It's been good to have time to catch up on a lot of things I meant to do before leaving San Francisco: scanning important documents, organising future legs of my trip, backing stuff up, tying off a lot of loose ends, and so on, and a lot of sleep. So if you really want to read my impressions of Buenos Aires, you might want to refer to some of my entries in January 2008, the first time I was here.
All good, but I was pretty tense for a couple of days as I arranged moving stuff from my old place in San Francisco proper to storage at hypatia156's place. But in the end I had many friends come through, despite the short notice. Big thanks to triskel, riseorbleed, kineticphoenix, whimsywanderer, Kealani, and of course hypatia156, and the extra helper or two that she brought along. Special thanks to Mead and gypsika for coming during the week to properly pack things I didn't have time to, and thanks, too, to jellysash for getting a couple of items out of the way earlier in the week. I also appreciate everyone who expressed interest, even if they couldn't help out in the end. I'm fortunate to have you all, and hope to return the favour some time.
I have done some wandering around while I've been here. I'm staying less than a kilometre from the marshlands that celerypie and I visited when I met her here; I didn't realise at that time that there was a nature reserve right behind those, and I regretted not seeing much nature in South America! (I'm sure I'll see plenty when cyan_blue comes to visit me in Peru!) It also turns out that the market that celerypie and I went to is right around the corner from where I'm staying, as is the hostel that mavisgrizltits stayed at last time, when we missed each other by just a couple of weeks. kragen showed me a few nice parks, and I've stumbled across a couple of interesting squares, most of them with FaceBook URLs at the gate.
One interesting event I did take part in was a giant pillow fight. I missed the Valentines Day one in San Francisco this year (I thought it got rained out) so I gleefully tagged along to paisleychick's photo shoot of the event. Some of my favourite shots are below:
kragen and me waiting for a bus to the event
The fight's on!
Quite a frenzy!
These chickas don't muck around! I don't think nasu_dengaku goggles idea would've worked here, either!
kragen cops it.
Hoorah!
Ankle-deep in fluff, feathers and foam!
I know paisleychick would appreciate it if you 'Liked' her home page on FaceBook.