Buenos Aires Strikes Again

It was interesting coming back to BA from Montevideo. Arriving at Hostel Estoril felt vaguely like coming home, and Buenos Aires is definitely a city that makes you feel comfortable. There's a cafe up the block that we've already been to at least 4 or 5 times; the wait staff recognizes us and we're as much regulars as we'll be anywhere on this continent.

Thursday night we went on a massive pub crawl with a bunch of other foreigners into the neighborhood of Palermo Viejo. We went to three bars and a nightclub. As testimony to our skill at navigating cities, the three of us had actually already been to one of the bars (where Dylan hit on the old woman) and the nightclub (Club Araoz). Porteños if I ever saw them, we are. Pub crawls are exercizes in pacing yourself, and we did very well. We got very drunk, met a ton of people, and then Dylan and I left Alex to his own devices again when we went home at 5 while he stayed out til the sun came up .

We had brought along a new friend, Kelsey, who we met at the hostel. She's 27, Iowan (Iowanese?), exceedingly cute, and about two inches too tall. Nevertheless, she's been awesome company and the two of us actually wound up having dinner Friday night. I'm a big fan. She's been claiming incessently - at first in earnest, subsequently as a means of infuriating me and Dylan - that the food in Chile is terrible, and in fact the cuisine revolves solely around hotdogs and hamburgers. She's been studying in Santiago for three weeks, and claims to have never met a Chileno who mentioned any type of seafood as a part of their diet. Dylan and I are due to arrive in Santiago for a three night stay on June 25. We will meet up with Kelsey and we will have seafood and it will be delicious and Kelsey will be wrong.

Friday night we saw a tango show. Except it was horrible. Well, I'm too harsh. The dancing was good, and the singing was fine, but we made the obvious and very embarrassing error of just going to whatever place caught our eye on our street. Touristy is wholly insufficient to convey just how tacky and corny this show was. Kelsey, I think, got the closest by calling it "a huge ball of cheese." Everything from the lights and the announcer to the forced audience participation was so obviously designed to satisfy gringos' stereotypical expectations. We were intensely disappointed with ourselves, more so after we had to endure the entire production without an opportunity to leave after we foolishly chose to sit right next to the stage (I believe my words at the beginning were "What great seats!"). Upside is that I now have a ridiculous picture of myself "dancing" with a tango dancer.

Then we went bowling, which was hilarious. It was Dylan, me, Kelsey, and Erez and Madi, who were friends of friends of Kelsey's. In front of these people, Dylan rolled what may have been the two most amusing games of bowling I've ever been a party to. His first three frames yielded a total of five points. He threw several gutterballs in succession on multiple occasions, with many rolls sent on such bizarre trajectories that they barely made it five feet down the lane before slamming into the edge. Those of you who have played Wii Bowling may be familiar with an annoying thing that happens sometimes when you let go of the ball too early: the ball drops to the floor with a thud during your backswing (before bringing the ball forward to release it, that is). Yep, Dylan did that too, causing all of us and four lanes of strangers next to us to break into uncontrolled hysteria. Final scores? A 43 and a 55. For the record, my amazing 105 was good enough for the win on the second game.

Last night, after having some amazing pizza from El Cuartito, which we ate on a urine-stained ledge in a nearby park, we went out for another Pub Crawl, this one in San Telmo. The bars we went to were actually pretty awesome places, but the vibe was just not there for me. Dylan left after the first bar, feeling sick (he's now recovering from a fever). I left after the third bar, feeling bored (or unsatisfied with any of the non-Kelsey options... you choose). And Alex left from the club, with a girl in tow, and proceeded to bring her back to the hostel for a two-hour makeout session in the bed under mine which I miraculously slept through all of.

Alex leaves us today, which means we can stop spending so much money. Dylan and I are in BA until tomorrow morning, when we head west to an as-yet undetermined location.