Turning Point

So here's another post, since I've been so MIA on this blog. I've been living in Turning Point Hostel for about three months so I guess it's about time I talked about it. Here's what it looks like from the outside. The painting was done by Anthony from Belgium, who was a roommate of mine for about 2 weeks. His time in "the room" (the special room for volunteers only) saw some great improvements in cleanliness.

 The hostel is full of artwork done by previous guests, and there has been quite a bit of painting going on since I got here. The graffiti in reception was done by a group of artists from Buenos Aires. This is me and my friend Martin from the Misiones provice of Argentina. He worked at the hostel for a while, but has now returned to his hometown. He's the one who introduced me to the $28 peso sandwiches from the place on the corner (way too big for only one person, so that's only $14 per person).

Here's a tree painted by a french woman in the hallway, with Gabriel the maintenance man in the background. Quite a character that one.

The kitchen, with paintings done by Josh from New Zealand.

The famous hip hop legends graffiti along with the hostel guitar, on which Martin attempted to teach me some argentine folklore songs.

I know it's hard to believe for many of you that know me, but I actually made dinner once. Just once, of course. I made jambalaya for anyone who was interested in trying it. The spices were a bit hard to find here, but I made it work with the help of the French guy in the photo, he knows his spices. 

And here's everybody enjoying the jambalaya, in shock about how well it turned out ;)

Quite a story behind this next photo. I was working the night shift (12 to 8am), and all was well until people started getting back from the clubs. Martin showed up (he didn't live at the hostel) and went up to the terraza to have a few more beers with Gabriel. Around 6:30am, Fredy, my colombian roommate, discovered that a toilet in the depository had overflowed, due to too much toilet paper in the pipes. He was on his way to his girlfriend's house so he just said "Gross" and left. I went upstairs to my borracho friends and they just rolled up their pants and got to work cleaning up. We didn't finish until about 8:30...well, they didn't finish I mean, I was in charge of putting out breakfast so it was decided that I should not be involved in that kind of clean up. After a long morning of cleaning, once I got off shift, Martin, Anthony (who had just returned from a night out) and I treated ourselves to a Heineken for breakfast. Maybe that explains the crazy faces.

I had a Turkish roommate for a month, named Yasmin. She plays the peruvian cajon, Fredy plays the flute, and Martin plays the guitar, so there were lots of great jam sessions during that time.

This is one of my current roommates, Josh from South Africa, and Camila from Colombia who is just living in the hostel until she can find an apartment. She's studying teatro here in the UNC, and we've come to be something like best friends. Both of these guys are fantastic, it's been a fun time hanging out with them. 

This is Camila's birthday celebration, with Sole, Martin, Dani (who works the night shifts during the week) and Pablo. We went out that night and had a lot of fun, taking pictures on the old jesuit block at night and bar hopping. 

And that's all I've got for now, folks, hope you enjoyed this mini photo tour of my current home :)

Buenos Aires

Been a while, I know. I'm pretty terrible at keeping up with this thing. I've been working at Turning Point Hostel since February and it has been fantastic. The owners are from Ohio so it's nice to sit around and make fun of/reminisce about the midwest with them. Living and working in a hostel is a great way to make friends, even though most of them have to leave as soon as you really start to hit it off. That's what Facebook is for, I guess. And it helps me get places to stay and people to hang out with on my trips.

Recently I took a solo trip to Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina. "Paris of the south" as some call it. The deals were to good to pass up. I got a train ticket for 96 pesos round trip, that's about $20. It was a long and not very confortable ride (17 hours), but it was worth the difference in price. Buses are about 350 pesos and get there in about 10 hours. I was also able to swing a deal with a hostel there, the owner of my hostel called a friend over there and worked out a deal where volunteers and staff from each hostel can stay at the other for free. So my biggest costs were food and transportation in the city. Not too shabby.

I got there on a Thursday and after taking a nice long nap (sleep was near impossible on the train), I went to the Plaza de Mayo (the main square, also home to the Casa Rosada, the house of the presidenta) to meet up with a friend I had met during my first weekend working at the hostel. We wandered around the centro a bit, then grabbed a couple cans of beer and strolled over to Puerto Madero, a fancy part of town where the Puente de la Mujer (bridge of the woman) is found. See the first two photos below.

The next day I went exploring with a Swiss girl I met at the hostel I was staying at. We took the subway to Palermo, another fancy schmancy neighborhood, with lots of hip cafés and plazas. We went to the Julio Cortázar plaza where they had an artesanal fair going on, then had some smoothies at a café overlooking the plaza. From there we went to the botanical garden and walked around for a bit before heading home. Photos 3 and 4.

Saturday during the day I went exploring on my own. I decided to walk from my hostel, located near San Telmo, to Recoleta, about 30, 40 blocks away. I stopped at a few places along the way, including El Ateneo bookstore, a bookstore that is located inside an old theater and includes a café on the stage. Everything of course was way overpriced, sort of like barnes and noble, it was just a place to go browse for a while. Books are actually really cheap in Buenos Aires and it's common to exchange books at the stands they have set up in all the plazas. From there, I arrived at Recoleta to meet up with a friend from Córdoba who just happened to be in Baires leading around a tour group. Once he got the group to the airport he had a few hours to kill before his bus left so we met up and had a few artesanal beers and went to the feria they have on the weekends in Recoleta. We shopped around for gifts but didn't find anything so we just found a spot in the grass to sit and listen to some jazz music. And before leaving we walked to some bridge to take a couple of tourist shots. Photos 5, 6 and 7.

Saturday night I went to a club in San Telmo, one of the traditional colonial neighborhoods of Baires, with two sisters who had stayed at my hostel. Good time, nothing special. San Telmo is probably my favorite área in Buenos Aires.

I love San Telmo so much that I returned on Sunday to their arts and antiques fair, where I wound up letting the music guide me, in the sense that I had no direction, I just followed the sounds of music. Lots of street tango groups, dancers, folk musicians, and finally I wound up wandering into a cultural center that was half jail museum, half future site of the Mercedes Sosa cultural foundation. Meat. After that I met up with another friend from my first weekend at the hostel, I went to her apartment for mate and alfajores and afterwards we walked around the fair again and found some cool graffiti. Photos 8-12.

And finally, on my last day, I returned to San Telmo for a nice café and breakfast, then went to Parque Rivadavia, where I exchanged a book for my colombian roommate here in Córdoba. Then back to San Telmo with the Swiss girl and that was that. It was time for another 17 hour train ride. The rest of the photos are from that last day.

So now I'm back in Córdoba, but not for much longer. I'm leaving at the end of next week to go to Santiago de Chile where I will catch a flight to Bogotá on the 15th. I'll be in Colombia for a month, then back to Córdoba. There will definitely be some more blog posts coming soon.

New place

Hola fans, it's been a while since I last wrote, my bad. Still in Córdoba, but yesterday I moved out of my friend's house and into a hostel. I still haven't found a paying job, but at least now I will have something to do during the day and I won't feel like I'm bothering anyone. The idea is that I'll be working 3 days a week in exchange for accomodation and some other benefits. And in my free time I'll have to find something a little more lucrative. The place is called Turning Point Hostel (like them on Facebook if you feel so inclined.

So not much exciting stuff going on, just hanging out. The other day some friends and I missed being robbed by mere seconds. That was kinda exciting, not necessarily in a good way. We had been watching the superclasico (River plate va boca juniors) and during halftime we went out to buy food and drinks. We dropped the coke bottles to exchange at a kiosk right next to my friend's apartment and walked a few blocks to get some empanadas. We waited there for a few minutes then started back towards the apt when my friend said we should stop at a different kiosk to buy some ice, since the other one never had any. So we spent a few seconds in there and finally went to pick up the coke. When we walked in, there was nobody in sight. "Hola?" We called out, and finally a door opened and a girl and 2 guys came out. The girl was crying and the guys trying to calm her down. What happened? "We've just been robbed", they told us. "What?? Was it a tall guy in a hat with a white jacket??", asked my friend, and I looked at him incredulously...WTF how did he know that? Then our other friend said that she had seen him too, and they both thought he looked suspicious, so suspicious that they didn't even want to say it out loud. I hadn't seen him at all...I had noticed that there was an uncomfortable silence, but there was a particularly fat street dog that apparently had captured my attention. Oops. So back to my point, if we hadn't bought that bag of ice, we would have been forced to lock ourselves in the bathroom along with those guys. Phew. Fortunately we were fine, nobody was hurt, and oh, River Plate won. (That's a good thing).

Other than that, I don't have any more interesting anecdotes. Here are some photos:

The first 5 are from my trip to cosquin, a city in the sierras. We went during the weekend of one of the biggest traditional folk festivals in the country. One is from a peña, a gathering with live music and traditional folk dances. Pretty cool.
Then there's a photo of the day it rained and my street became a river.
Then me getting a rasta (dreadlock) in the paseo de las artes, a weekend open air artesanal fair.
Followed by pictures of eliza the dog, from my friend's house, i'll miss her.
And finally photos of some graffiti here in the hostel.

Cordoba Update

Hola amigos,

Still in Cordoba, I'll be here for a while yet. Job search is going slow, but let's be real, that's just my own laziness. Hopefully something comes up soon = hopefully I force myself to actually do some job searching soon.

So what have I been up to if I haven't been working? Not much of note, really. Just hanging out, drinking mate, chatting, etc. Last Friday I went around taking pictures with some friends, and we wound up wandering into the Museo de la Memoria - Museum of Memory. It used to be a clandestine detention center, which is really quite shocking to think about since it's literally right next to one of the city's biggest plazas. Here are some photos taken there:

Some of the cells, as you can see, not a lot of room

Leaving the museum is a strange feeling, after seeing what kind of place it was, seeing the faces and names of people imprisoned there...it's weird to just walk right back out into the plaza, where the sun is shining and people are going about their business. Nowadays it's just a museum, but it still retains a somber aura, and going back out into the sun and normal life is almost...offensive. The noise and light of the outside is kind of a shock. Imagine what that would have been like after spending days, weeks, months, years instead of just 30 minutes.

Anyways, after that, I went home and got ready to go see the symphonic orchestra of Cordoba's end of season show with Juli. We both dozed off a couple times, but it was a very good concert. The last two pieces were my favorites, one by Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-lobos and the other by a Cuban composer whose name now escapes me. The theater was beautiful, it's right downtown next to the shopping mall Patio Olmos. Teatro del Libertador San Martin. 

We called it an early night after that because we had to get up early to catch a bus to Villa Dolores, a city in the Sierras where a large part of Juli's family lives. We spent Christmas there with her cousins. It's a beautiful place, right there in the mountains. Most days it was pretty hot. The day before Christmas eve we went to the river, to a place called Baño de los Dioses:

On Christmas eve, in 100 degree weather, we had to go to the centro to buy things for dinner and gifts. Apparently people leave things til the last minute here. Lack of snow and cold makes things easier I suppose. A dip in the pool was necessary, as was a nap. Then we got to work on the fruit salad, finished, I skyped with the fam, and we ate. A LOT. Pizza a la matambre and lots of different kinds of salads. Then dessert. Then all of a sudden the weather changed and a strong wind storm blew through and cooled things off. We kept moving the tables back and forth between the yard and the quincho, and finally had to settle on staying in the quincho. The wind was crazy. 

And then, Christmas day came and went, we had another big meal with another part of the family out in the campo. And now I'm back in Cordoba and I need to buckle down and find something to do with my days.

Hasta luego.