Sittin' in the park

We are making home of a park in “El Centro” for the afternoon. The Hilton suite (as we called it) was super nice the week it lasted, but understandably Clara wanted her room back, so we are currently vagabonds. Vagabonds, what a scary word for me to associate myself with! Haha, it’s a new side of traveling that I am not very familiar with. I just realized today that this is most likely our first day of travelling place to place, with no real “home” for the four weeks or so, until we arrive in Santiago, Chile. Wow! AA tells me to relax and go with the flow – I’ll get used to it. So that is what I will do, but just so the world knows, I am not very comfortable with this. We have all our stuff with us now – two big bags and a backpack. It doesn’t exactly make for easy travel when you have to lug around all this crap, but it’s definitely adventurous. It was funny the other night when we were moving to our last place. We had left our old apartment around 6 and were planning to meet Clara at 7 at her casa. We were debating – do we take a cab or do we walk about 1 mile to the subte (sub) and take that there. We decided to walk until we got tired and then decide. Well, AA ended up carrying the three main, heavy bags (I guess I tired quickly), while I carried the two grocery bags full of leftover food. Anyways, we end up making it to the subte, but the darn thing is SOOO crowded between 5:00 and 8:00, it’s nearly impossible for just the two of us with no luggage to get on, much less both of us and all the bags. So, after humoring ourselves and waiting for a few more subs to see if they were less crowded, we ended up taking a cab.



This morning we had luck with the subte – it’s not that crowded at noon, and so here we are now sitting in the park with our stuff and waiting for our Spanish class to start. AA is jammin’ away on the harmonica, and I am busy people watching. The birds, the dogs, the people, the traffic, the homeless, it’s all so amusing! But what has been most amusing are these two boys – probably 15ish. When we got here they had this 2 liter soda plastic bottle, about ½ full, and they were maybe 40 yards apart from each other, tossing the bottle. Although they did not try to catch the bottle, they simply threw it high in the air and then let it fall to the ground. They were so happy to play this game.



Then the bottle burst open, so they took to a new game. The new game involved throwing rocks instead of the soda at each other. This time I believe the object was to actually hit the other person with a rock. That game grew old, so next they turned to throwing the rocks at trees. They competitively tested who had the better aim. And finally, when that no longer held their attention they just decided to wrestle each other.



This all was very amusing to me. They seem so content. But my question – why aren’t those boys in school right now?

We will update you on our vagabond life as soon as we have something new to tell you. We are hoping to finally have success with couchsurfing for a few nights. Tonight we will stay with Guido and his girlfriend. He seems very nice and he said he would make us dinner – pizza – for dinner when he gets home at 9pm. What a nice guy! We also may stay a night or two at this hostel we checked out yesterday. It is in San Telmo and seems like it would be fun for a few nights. Alright, well I guess it is officially pancho time. We are on a mission to find “super panchos” for lunch – jumbo hot dogs with little fried goodies on the top… YUM!



Top of the terrace