October 9

Sigh, it´s raining again. They tell me it´s not normally like this and that I´m here in the wrong season. But the fact is, I´m tired of having wet shoes all the time.

Friday night after dance I went to the other side of the city to have mexican food with Lauren, William, and an argentine friend of Lauren´s. The place looked awesome! It was called Frida Kahlo and it was all mexican looking inside. Just being there made me happy. The food was... just about as disappointing as I expected though it is apparently the best mexican food restaurant in the city. So I guess mexican food is not a good plan while I´m here. oh well. It was fun, but I was tired from a long week and my spanish wasn´t working so I didn´t say much all night. I went home fairly early so I could get up in the morning and study.

So on Saturday I woke up and tried to study though my headache, sore throat, and tired body. It kindof worked. But I was reminding myself of Tyler when I would get distracted for hours at a time by the philosophical questions in my head about the meaning of life and the role of love... seriously I stared at the ceiling a lot on Saturday. anyway, at about 6 I traversed to Laurens house where she fed me some tarta and some alfajore (a rather indescribable sweet) before going to the Night of the Museums. I can´t remember if I discribed this last time but it´s a night in which all the museums in Bs.As. stay open until midnight and you can go to them for free. Also there are busses that run from all the museums to the others that you can take for free. We started on a cool, old looking ship in the river thats crew were all in sailor suits and had a brass band and singer on the upper deck. It was fun in a kindof Titanic feeling sort of way (in a good way). Then we went to the Tango museum. It was okay. The performer was singing, not dancing. Then Patricio (my argentine friend) showed up. I hadn´t seen him in mucho tiempo. We all proceeded to a big cultural center to look at a bunch of different kinds of art. There was the performance art of the the girl in the blue dress who ran around the crowd. Then there was the childrens paintings on huge rolls of brown paper; the woman in the doorway who looked like the clown from Saw (very creepy); the room full of large canvases with different brightly colored circles on them which were apparently representing the 'supremacy of color'; the room with all the poorly taken photos of the towers on meat plants and cemetarys (we spent a lot of time in this room because we didn´t get it); and the room on the top floor with the pretty acrilic painting of people and a great use of orange. From there we returned to the center of town and Puerto Madero to see the final concert and to eat some hamburgers. Unfortuantely it was getting cold and I had neglected to bring a coat. The music was fun enough but we left after the first ten minutes of the drum group because apparently there´s only so much drumming that we can take. It was all good and fun. We left early enough. I was ready to go to bed. Unfortunately that part of the plan didn´t work out. It took us an hour and a half to find a taxi. It was rediculous. If I hadn´t been worried about being robbed or kidnapped I would have walked the some 30 blocks home. But finally we did find one, by some worldly magic.

Sunday morning I did much the same thing as Saturday morning with much tiredness and feeling like I was getting a cold. Then I started out to the house of the Pakistani man (Shahzad) in my spanish class for food. It was one of the most stressful moments since I´ve been here because I didn´t have any phone credit to call neither him nor Christina who was also going but didn´t know the directions. I looked everywhere but everything was closed or didn´t have any cards. By that time I was late and feeling horrible because it is Ramadan and I didn´t want to make Shahzad wait to eat after fasting all day. Finally I found a phone card and everything worked out... though almost 40 minutes late, but Shahzad had already eaten so I didn´t feel too horrible. I found a new love: Pakistani food. It was delicious! And we talked about many things in the world, including the current state of Pakistan and the differences of culture. He played us some Indian music too! We did most of the talking in english because he speaks really good english and we all speak rather poor spanish. It was great. We talked and ate for almost 4 hours before walking Christina home and to my bus stop. Shahzad and I talked about how relationships between people of the opposite sex differ between my culture and his. It was really refreshing to just strait up say what kind of relationship you were interested in having with someone from just about the very beginning of the friendship. It was imortant too because our cultures are so different. But we found out that we are basically looking for the same thing: good friends. And that my definition is essentially the same as his. It´s really too bad that the political situation is so bad in the middle east these days because after meeting Shahzad, hearing his stories, tasting his food, and listening to his music, I would really like to travel there. Hopefully someday soon the world will get over all this silliness and killing each other and I can travel to visit my friends around the world.

Monday: I had my International Relations midterm. It went very badly. And my leg injury had actually gotten worse instead of better so I didn´t participate in all of my dance class. The good thing was that I finally got to talk to my parents for a while and even see my love on webcam! It made for an excellent evening, despite the rain.

Reading Katiana´s blog makes me feel like I just had a really long conversation with her, and reading the New York Times makes me feel like I know so much about what´s going on in the world. Writing this reminds me of good things. Now I am happier.