um. so, i´m waiting in the rosario bus station. i really don´t love waiting in bus stations. or being in bus stations. or waiting. that´s litotes. on both counts. thanks for teaching me that word back in high school, mrs. diamond. it really doesn´t get enough play, compared to its big bully brother, hyperbole. yeah. can´t you just taste the restlessness??

my bus to jujuy leaves in half an hour. i swore i would find something more interesting/fulfilling/productive to do than enter the glassed in internet booth, but after about 10 minutes of wandering the shops, lugging both big backpacks (why don´t i ever take my own advice and pack light? not to mention what a bitch it´s gonna be when i get my red hot rolling back back from elena in la rioja), i decided that for one and a half pesos, it was worth the stagnant self-critical feeling to be in a non-smoking enclosure where i could put my bags down and distract myself. after all, i´ll have the next 18 hours to read my argentina guide and contemplate what i may have forgotten at romina´s place in my rushed exit as her room/classmate pressured her to get out already to their shared chemical engineering class. actually, all in all, the goodbye was pretty anticlimactic - rushed with romi, and non-existent with pablo (who was off in entre rios on business and wouldn´t be back until too late) and danilo (who wasn´t able to get permission for me to accompany him to the villa today and still wasn´t home from work when i called an hour ago).

okay, yuck. the internet cafe dueño just sprayed a whole bunch of room deodorant right towards me (and no, i am not having one of my hippier moments, thank you very much - in fact, today i not only showered, but also had my hair washed a second time at the hairdresser, where i went for an 8 peso trim) and i cannot breathe. must exit smoke-free, chemical-full air. is that some form of irony? alanis has corrupted my once textbook perfect understanding of that term... hasta luego!!

From the bank of the Rio Parana (or some manzanas away), I write a typical update that maintains my being too busy having experiences to write about them... I will (if all goes according to plan) soon(ish) be on an 18 hour bus ride to the Northwest of Argentina (Jujuy) with plans to slowly descend through Salta, Tucuman, La Rioja, and cross through Mendoza to Chile either by the first week of May or whichever week I change my plane ticket to.

Some quick notes: Elena accompanied me to the bus station Friday and waited there outside the bus waving and making faces at me until the bus left, a good 15 minutes after I was inside. I had upper deck seats at the very front of the bus, so I had a good view... It was a bit sad to be leaving, but I was ready to continue my explorations, and at least Ele and I will (again, if all goes according to plan) be reuniting in La Rioja in a couple/few weeks. I landed into Rosario, Santa Fe on Friday night, about 4 hours after departure, and, after waiting a good hour, was picked up by Pablo and Romina, whom I´d met at la cima (the summit) of Uritorco during my week in Cordoba. We went to pick up Danilo, the 3rd of the trio, at a friend´s place and inevitably got sucked into a half hour sit-down, and eventually made it back to Pablo´s place to dine around 1-2am. Then I had one of those ¨Whoops, did I forget to mention I was vegetarian?¨ moments. However, the potatoes and batatas (sweet potatoes) and salad were incredibly yummy ;)

I´m gonna run now and try to get some last minute menial chores (i.e., finding some food, making some necessary purchases and possibly even getting a hair cut and/or other such services performed upon me) but will leave some speaking/writing notes for later:

¨Red hot valija¨
¨Are your pants on fire?¨
¨Smoking (tobacco) Sucks¨(notice a motif?)
¨What the cat dragged in¨
¨Getting my hands on a guitar - Finally!!¨
¨Not more Pizza!!¨
¨Hospitality Club Correspondence¨
¨Villa development¨
¨Job Hunting on the Go¨

Do you ever get the urge to ask all the smokers in the room to kindly step outside until they´ve finished smoking? That´s how I was feeling last night at Sira, the club we were frequenting... I seem to be suffering from an on-off-on-off total congestion, and I´m not sure if it´s being caused by allergies or smog or what, but I´m hoping it stays as its current state of intermittent sniffles and sneezes. It makes me miss Canadian no-smoking-in-public-places laws and norms. (Btw, title from Portuguese song Ele keeps singing, spelling corrections appreciated!!)

Yesterday, Ele and I stayed in the city and went to Recoleta Cemetary (where all the people whose names name the street currently reside, as Ele puts it) and the artesania market outside it, then to el Caminito, a touristy area of Buenos Aires where the immigrants all first arrived and settled so many years ago. We walked through the colourful streets and some little shops and an artist´s studio and even got pulled into a tango dance in front of a restaurant (I´m still officially very, very bad!). We then went out to grab a bite and, after deciding that the first restaurant we went into seemed a bit sketchy (under the shared assumption that if the tables look dirty, the kitchen´s probably dirtier), settled on a cleaner place and ate lots of Ravioli. When I get home, I hope summer´s there so I can start biking around again - I´m gonna need a very active lifestyle to compensate for my nearly all-carb diet here!!

Ooh, we´re going to go now, more later!!

It´s been almost a week since I´ve been back in Buenos Aires, and I think I´ll be ready to hit the road again real soon. I´ve been staying with Ele and Marta and spending most of my time hanging out with one or both of them. A combination of stimulus overload/culture shock (after getting back to the city from the beautiful tranquility of Cordoba), cigarette smoke and general smog seems to be taking its toll on my system; I´m feeling tired/spacey a lot, especially during the early day, and basically dreaming away days that would better be spent exploring new and interesting places and getting trigger happy. At least I haven´t caught whatever bug´s been terrorizing Ele for the last few days (yet?!). She´s been waking up early to go to work, but Marta usually sleeps in late and awakens to turn on the TV, so I´ve been falling into that pattern with her. The death of the Pope (aka the Papa, homonymously the potato) is still a number one news story, but is starting to get ebbed out by other local and global disasters.

Last night Ele and I met Quentin at La Viruta Tango and I took my first class. Needless to say, I´m not very good, but neither were most of the other ¨principiantes,¨ and it was really fun anyways. I kept getting in trouble for not letting my partner lead me, since I remembered the steps and often my partners didn´t, but as our instructor kept stressing, Tango is a machista dance, and you´ve just gotta accept that. I´d love to learn with someone who actually knows what they´re doing, and is very very very patient....

Apparently the head instructor (there were about 8 of them, split off for different levels of instruction) is one of the best Tango dancers in Argentina, and was the one to teach Madonna for Evita. The place was surprisingly chill, with most people dressed relatively casually given the reputation Argentina, Buenos Aires and Tango collectively share for dressed-to-the-tees-ness. It was set up sorta like a community hall (actually, it is the basement of the Armenian Cultural centre, so that makes sense) with full bar and restaurant service, chairs and tables set up around the empty (crowded) dance space in the middle. With all the recent dance club fire phobia in BsAs, I know the set-up made Paula nervous when she and Ele went the last time, but I was more worried about not . Entrance, including the lesson, was 6 pesos (just under $3 Canadian) and a full 3-course vegetarian meal (I guess enough foreigners go to make it worthwhile to cater to our ¨special needs¨ - as evidenced by the amount of partners I had who spoke better English than Spanish) $11 pesos.

Ele will be getting off work soon and I think we´re gonna try to go to the hairdresser and while we´re there try to map out some escape route for me, looking into the possibilities of a pre-west weekend jaunt together to Uruguay and that of our meeting up for a weekend with Gaby and Chris, a couple we met in Cordoba, in... um... I forget what it´s called, but where Gabriel lives, closer to Chile. Chad, an American photographer I met up with for dinner a couple nights back, left me a guide book, so I now have hard-copy access to official tourist info, for better or worse. I also want to look into Hospitality Club hosts in the area, to see if I can have some experiences staying with locals during my voyage. So many places that would be awesome to see, so little time...

Another time I wanna write more about the unfairness of cost of living here, as per how easy it is for foreigners to come down here and live so well with the cost of our currency being worth so many Argentine pesos, while the labour situation down here sucks so much for locals. University-educated experienced employees here can earn less than $400 Canadian per month for full-time skilled labour, and the ¨black market¨ and ¨take-it-or-leave-it¨ attitudes are prolific, even in well known established organisations. For example, someone I know was recently given the "generous" offer of staying on at their current place of employment and working for less than half their normal salary (under $200 Canadian) if they want starting next month or not, but either way their options aren´t looking so good.

It makes me mad, and want to do something to help, but I don´t know what. Normally accepted standards like minimum wage and basic standard of living laws, not to mention Employment Insurance and Social Security nets like we have up north, seem like a joke or a fantasy here. I haven´t been doing much research into the current situation of the post-crisis takeovers of factories and businesses by workers (documented in ¨The Take¨ by Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis that aired on CBC the week I left Canada), but it seems the general labour situation isn´t exactly thriving.

Anyways, more thoughts later, for now gonna run back to the apartment and see what´s on tap for tonight! Che, I´m out!