It would be much easier to blog if everything here wasn't so fun. I might have spare time to spend on the computer.
Sunday night I found myself at a long table having a tri-lingual conversation with people from England, Ireland, France, Australia, New Zealand, Peru, Brazil, and Argentina. The social life in our new hostel is much more lively, and since Kacie has been feeling sick, I've been spending a lot of time socializing with the other people staying there. I especially like the night staff, David from Peru and Rudá from Brazil; they're pretty low-key guys, and have to be up all night.
One of my fellow youth leaders in Salem is from Argentina, and on Monday we took the ''tur de Christian.'' We started relatively early in the morning (early for us, around noon) and took the subway across town to see the Lagos de Palermo, a huge city park with a ton of interconnected lakes. From there we made our way back the way we came, winding through the plazas that were on nearly every block. We made our way through the cemetery where Eva Peron, 'Evita', is buried. We saw some neat sights.
In the La Recoleta neighborhood we couldn't find our destination and stopped on a bench to look at our map. An adolescent approached us and asked if he could have some money. When he wouldn't go away, we got up to leave. As we were walking away, we heard a female voice behind us shouting ''Chicas!'' We could hear this person running after us and were speeding up as inconspicuously as possible, but the shouter caught up to us. It turns out it was not another gyspy, but rather a middle-class woman who was walking her dog and had seen the interaction with the adolescent. She warned us to be careful, and pointed out certain neighborhoods where we shouldn't go. We've made a sort of list of who is safe to talk to and who isn't. Couples are usually safe, but not gyspy couples. Groups of school children, especially in uniform, are safe, so long as they aren't gypsy school children. People at work are usually okay, so long as they aren't a gyspy. We have now added 'people walking their dog,' but of course, only if they are not a gypsy.
I wear a watch every day that I bought on one of the first days in Viña before I had my phone to tell time. It has been losing time with increasing persistance. Before I left Chile, Jose Manuel set it forward 20 minutes for me, but it has since been off by as much as three hours. Kacie and I are good travel companions because we both like going at a leisurely pace without an itinerary. Vacations are for relaxing, so we mostly just do what we feel like doing. I keep wearing the watch because I think it's funny, but I like that my watch doesn't tell time. It's more appropriate for our style.
At any given point in the day, between Kacie and I there is usually less than one of us who is aware of and/or focused on where we are going. Today we got on a ferry for Uruguay, and we're going to be spending a couple of nights in Montevideo. We slept on the ride in, and someone had to wake us when we arrived in the port. We kind of stumbled off the boat, and were not entirely sure where we were. Kacie asked someone and he kind of looked us up and down and was like 'Colonia... Uruguay...' This was not our final destination so we made a kind of difficult effort to figure out why we were not in Montevideo. We slept through almost our entire bus connection, which is a shame because Uruguay is quite beautiful. The greenery and aged buildings were a welcome change after Buenos Aires.
Our hostel for tonight is much quieter than the one in B.A., and I'm going to have to wake Kacie up from a nap if I want to do anything tonight. We're considering this the vaction from our vacation, so I'm not sure she's going to want to get up.
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