Josh says I should blog more, he's right... or, Week 1

lit | beautiful losers - leonard cohen
paint | torres garcia
music | jaime roos

I've decided I will blog once a week minimum. I feel this is very ambitious, given the beautiful sunshine, cheap beer, and vibrant city life swirling around me (jealous?). Today may be a shorter entry, as this damn computer in the hostel makes a squuuuueaking noise every time you press a key on the keyboard. I feel I'm annoying every single person around me. Hopefully they understand.

First and foremost, what we've done (since we're largely playing this by ear). So far: half a week in Buenos Aires, a ferry ride across the river to Uruguay, one night in Colonia, and now we come to the end of a half week in Montevideo. We've had one day of torrential rain sandwiched by near constant 30 degree weather. I'm now ridiculously tanned, thanks to the beaches of Uruguay.

Despite a near constant run of injuries to Adrian (his ear is blocked and sore, he has a blister on his foot, and he split his toe on a Montevidean pier... to mum: Adrian sends many thanks for the very thorough first aid kit) we've quite literally had a horseshoe up our collective asses. Buenos Aires was spectacular, and when we return we're still very torn between two neighborhoods in which to rent an appartment: the more bohemian, real, but somewhat isolated San Telmo, or the more refined, connected, but vaguely sterile Palermo. The good news is that we've actually met people living in both neighborhoods through various random hostel connections, so wherever we wind up we'll be hooked into a community there, which I think is the most important thing. However, we likely won't be back in Buenos Aires for another half week, as from here we now head north to Iguazu Falls before coming back down. Since our hostel was in Palermo last time, we're gonna grab a hostel in San Telmo this time and get to know the area a bit more, then make our decision. Otherwise our time in Buenos Aires was largely spent meandering the streets at leisure, hanging out in some incredible parks (the one in San Telmo was so cool, nice forest with this crazy mix of locals playing chess, a little amphitheatre, and an almost surreal, greek-templish looking gazebo) and then partying with the hostelers at night. We've also taken to playing checkers most nights over our first beer, to which I'm happy to report Adrian looses quite regularily (though he seems to have the advantage at Shithead (a card game)).

As for Uruguay, our first stop in Colonia was very cool, a former port town that used to house a great many pirates and is a UNESCO world heritage site, but really only interesting for an afternoon. We walked the lovely cobbled streets, snapped a few photos, but wound up heading off the next morning to Montevideo.

Our time in Montevideo has been stellar, but since this is running on, I'll summarize the highlights via a cultural lense. We saw the constructivist Torres Garcia's works today in a great little gallery, my favourites were his various portraits of big figures in Western culture, such as Socrates, Velazquez, Dostoyevsky etc., they were very contorted and swirled with absolute personal involvement with them, mirroring the way an artist interacts with their works personally, which I thought was fantastic. As for music, Adrian and I were lucky enough to be chilling yesterday afternoon on one of the city beaches in Montevideo when we noticed that they'd blocked off traffic on a major road behind the beach and had started constructing a massive stage on the beach's edge. So in broken spanish I convered with a very friendly Uruguayan roadie (I was so suprised, North American roadies always seem surly) and discovered a band called Jaime Roos was playing a free concert at the beach at 930. So Adrian and I made the effort to come back to catch the show, to find about 8 to 10 thousand people gathered on the beach to watch what is apparently a huge band that has been around and stupid popular for 20 years close down the series of summer carnival concerts that have been going every weekend for the past 2 months. The crowd was incredible, the energy ridiculously contagious, and we found ourselves dancing on the beach to what I would say sounded like the latin version of a pop-jam band (imagine Dave Matthews had been born in Montevideo). Great show and those moments when you took a second, looked around you at the ocean of a crowd and got a sense of what you were experiencing were priceless.

I'll end with what I've been reading on the beaches... I just finished up Cohen's Beautiful Losers, a great Canadian novel that I think EVERYONE should read. The treatment and confounding/combining of spirituality, sexuality, and enlightenment is stunning and you'll have moments where you'll find yourself stupefied by the beauty of the imagery and prose, or ridiculously stunned and personally challenged by what you're reading. A great achievement. I've now begun another epic (I've been in that mood lately, having read sheppard's ha! and pynchon's gravity's rainbow) and have begun reading James Joyce's Ulysses. I'm only 30 pages in and I'm already enraptured by the prose, plus it helps that I'm coupling my reading with the TTC lectures on the book, almost as if I'm back in Uni taking a course, only lying on the beach while doing so. Mmmmm.

All the best to everyone, look for a new posting in a week's time (you can set your watches to it! assuming you're ok with your watch sometimes being late and a little rambling at times). Also, I'd like to put a shout out to all the new e-friends I seem to have on facebook. I promise I'll get round to writing on everyone's walls to say hello, though you'll have to forgive if I'm a little new to the proper etiquette of it all. Ciao!