Where the streets are made of meat

So Buenos Aires is one cool city. At least the parts of it I have been able to see in the last week, which isn’t much since Peter and I have been working so much. But from what I can tell, I think our 5 and a half months left here is gonna be pretty amazing. First off, the weather is fucking gorgeous. It’s like California, maybe a tad hotter. I totally forgot how great it is to have you face warmed by the sun everyday. Wintertime and gray skies suck. Life is too short for them. Never again. Second of all, it’s fucking cheap to live here. I mean ridiculously cheap. The subway in Berlin, the S Bahn, cost 2.10 Euro for a single trip. This comes out to about $3 with the fucked up value of the US dollar right now. In BA, a single trip on the Subte costs 70 centavos, which comes out to less than 25 cents US, since the currency here is even shittier than the dollar. I bought 3 huge bags of fruit for brekky the other day, and almost laughed when the guy told me 9 Pesos, about $3. A huge 1 liter of Beer costs $1. Our gym, which admittedly is a little ghetto and nothing like the resort gyms back in SLO, is only $17 US per month with no contract or sign up fees. So Peter and I pay ourselves absurd amounts of money, like $50 paychecks, and it lasts us forever. We eat out constantly and window shop like little girls.

Yesterday our new roommates, Yanna and Jorge, took us to Tigre, a suburb of BA. We took a city bus and then a train to get there. It has a huge Vegas style casino, an amusement park, restaurants, shops, a huge market where you can buy anything. It’s on a series of rivers, so you see massive tour boats and speed boats cruising by. The crazy thing is that it’s also a boat cemetery of sorts, so you see massive ship wrecks plowed into the river back where they turn to sludge and fall inwards, and then a dude water-skiing right next to that. Very weird.

But the craziest thing so far about BA is the BBQ. It is everywhere. Just down the street from our house is a massive indoor BBQ shop. The whole restaurant is one big flame pit, and there’s windows on all sides so that the passerby’s can ogle at the scene. There is a massive grill holding hundreds of chickens, flanks, beef hearts, livers, tripe. Then, to the right is a big circular pit where whole pigs are flayed out on crosses like they’re being crucified, with the spit being thrust into the earth so the carcass is vertical, leaning over the fire. The nastiest thing is the blood sausage. They are black as death and full of nothing but blood. I tried one yesterday, but could only stomach a mouthful. It didn’t taste bad, but knowing that I was chewing on congealed cow blood made me want to gag.

We spend the next 3 days in the hole, working hard on the finishing touches on our new website, which I’ll announce here soon. It’s a major achievement and I’m excited to almost be done. More to come!!