http://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/Mathias/ Travel adventures in journals and photos from Mathias en-us Tue, 08 Dec 2009 14:26:05 +0000 Tue, 08 Dec 2009 14:26:05 +0000 So lately its been obscenely hot especially for november northerners think of it as may. Consequently Ive been devoting a lot of my ridiculous excess of free time to shady parks and ice cream. Considering that its pouring rain today and theres been a lightning storm going on since last night at about 1230 it strikes me as a good time to reflect on all the parks that is rather than try http://www.travelblog.org/South-America/Argentina/Buenos-Aires/Buenos-Aires/blog-350027.html Irsquom feeling a bizarre mixture of things right now. Today I had sort of an insane excess of energy from the bizarre circumstance of my having slept almost the recommended 8hours three nights in a row. Perhaps itrsquos because I didnrsquot exercise I donrsquot know but I found this energy translated into a sort of ldquologorreardquo a term I only use because itrsquos coming acr http://www.travelblog.org/South-America/Argentina/Buenos-Aires/Buenos-Aires/blog-348873.html You may or may not have noticed that I havenrsquot written now in over a week. This is behavior that really canrsquot continue if I hope to reach my goal of 1000 views before all this is over wersquore at about 750 right now. I suppose if I donrsquot I could just keep writing after I get back about my life back at Reed which is even more absurd than all this I assure you. And Irsquod http://www.travelblog.org/South-America/Argentina/Buenos-Aires/blog-346240.html Aspects of this place Im fed up withThoughts in the Mendoza bus stationNote Just because something ends up on this list doesnt mean I dont accept that there039s a logical explanation for its existence nor that I condemn the people who manifest it. Nevertheless it gets on my nerves and Id rather not have to experience it. I dont know perhaps the fact that it frustrates me so much demo http://www.travelblog.org/South-America/Argentina/Mendoza/blog-342004.html I guess I ought to write about my trip to mendoza before it gets superceded by my occupation with more current events as it has already to some extent. The thing about this trip was that I did a pretty bad job of it that is to say I didnrsquot do many of the things that one is ldquosupposedrdquo to do when one goes to the places to which I went. But a pesar de todo I still managed to ha http://www.travelblog.org/South-America/Argentina/Mendoza/blog-342003.html So Uruguay this weekend is one of those experiences where there's too much to say and I know if I try to give an account from beginning to end I'll get hung up on certain parts and I'll never get through. But here goes anyway. So the first omen of how this trip was to go took place on board the ferry when the nice lady let me have a cup of coffee for free because she couldn't change the 100 pes http://www.travelblog.org/South-America/Uruguay/blog-338867.html Hey so one might consider this as sort of a followup to my last entry I suppose. Lots of things have happened since some of them cool. First of all I don't know if I mentioned it then but at that point I thought I had defeated my sleep issues by deciding not to take sudafed in the evenings but that has pretty much flown out the window. At least I think. It all depends on whether or not I got a http://www.travelblog.org/South-America/Argentina/Buenos-Aires/blog-337655.html So just the other day I finished my spanish class and passed with flying colors of course thus inaugurating a new etapa of my time here. With classes only on Monday and Tuesday now and no other commitments but rowing and yoga I find myself faced once again with extremely copious quantities of free time which if not filled properly risk becoming the anxietyridden abysses of idleness into whi http://www.travelblog.org/South-America/Argentina/Buenos-Aires/Buenos-Aires/blog-335909.html JujuyI donrsquot know how to do justice to this experience. Before I didnrsquot really have expectations I mean obviously I knew certain things about the place that people had told me that it was beautiful remote very indigenous very different from Buenos Aires. But I didnrsquot have expectations in the sense of images experiences I was anticipating. I knew the trip was comiong but http://www.travelblog.org/South-America/Argentina/Jujuy/blog-334273.html Well I suppose it would be fitting to talk about this weekend. I spent a large chunk of it outside of the city and now that I think about it this was the first time Irsquove left since Iguaz which now that I think about it was only a month ago. Lots of sudden realizations here. Thatrsquos all of course as long as you donrsquot count the few minutes that I spent on the other side of aveni http://www.travelblog.org/South-America/Argentina/Buenos-Aires/Tigre/blog-328978.html So right now I'm in the midst of one of those situations where you feel like a given segment of time has passed at lightning speed but at the same time like it lasted 20 times longer than it actually did. The particular segment of time in question currently is the past week. I'm not going to be able to talk about all of it and I might give certain things attention disproportionate to their inter http://www.travelblog.org/South-America/Argentina/Buenos-Aires/Buenos-Aires/blog-326103.html So this has been a pretty odd week. Ive started to feel like a real student to some extent as I finally have a couple of essays to write and more importantly an endless supply of psychology reading on which to catch up. The latter is due to the fact that I only just this past week obtained my id for la UCA and hence have just now been able to get my textbooks. And of course because there are http://www.travelblog.org/South-America/Argentina/Buenos-Aires/Buenos-Aires/blog-322834.html So not long after writing that entry yesterday I had a pretty interesting and novel experience. Going out in the evenings seems to be something I havent totally figured out yet here so I suppose thats why it continues to be a pretty prolific source of them.So this particular evening I decided to go to this Brazilian Bossa Nova festival where supposedly there were going to be free concerts as w http://www.travelblog.org/South-America/Argentina/Buenos-Aires/blog-320577.html So I've noticed a bit of a drop in readership recently. That's sensible enough considering that my frequency of entries has decreased a fair bit as well. That's fairly easy to explain it has to do with the increasingly routinized nature of my life here as the title indicates things have stabilized a bit. It used to be that pretty much every day had to be filled in some novel way usually endin http://www.travelblog.org/South-America/Argentina/Buenos-Aires/Buenos-Aires/blog-320191.html Transcribed from my notebook originally written 824. So although at the time of writing this I still have at least a sixteen hour bus ride to Buenos Aires ahead of me I feel justified nonetheless in pronouncing it to have been an incredibly good weekend. Setting out from B.A. last Thursday at 930 pm I came determined to sleep fully on the bus something I have never been able to do in such si http://www.travelblog.org/South-America/Argentina/Misiones/blog-316566.html Hey so some cool things have developed. First of all I went to una doctora muy amable today and she prescribed me something to deal with this ridiculous tos I've had since the day before I left. And I have absolute trust in this doctor such that I now firmly believe that my days of coughing rather than sleeping are finally over. Not that I've been doing so bad. Last night I had virtually no sl http://www.travelblog.org/South-America/Argentina/Buenos-Aires/Buenos-Aires/blog-314038.html Como se va ustedes Im doing pretty well I suppose. Ive just finished all of my classes for the week although in a couple weeks Ill have spanish class as well on wednesdays and thursdays and although Im not particularly happy about I suppose the reason Im not happy about it is cause for happiness the classes were all pretty cool. Yesterday at 12 I went to my first FLACSO class which is http://www.travelblog.org/South-America/Argentina/Buenos-Aires/Buenos-Aires/blog-311323.html Hey. So the title of this entry just translates to ...has nothing to do with... except the verb that's used ver means to see rather than to do. It's just an expression that I find kind of funny because it's used in exactly the same way as the english equivalent but it just strikes me as odd that they use that particular verb. So that's that.Anyway yesterday was pretty good. From today http://www.travelblog.org/South-America/Argentina/Buenos-Aires/Buenos-Aires/blog-309550.html Today was the first entirely sunny day since I've been here. It was the first time I saw the sun set. It was also the coldest 1 degree C at about 9 am. It's been a pretty satisfying weekend though I haven't exactly been taking advantage of the famed Buenos Aires nightlife. I sort of did on friday. I set out after dinner at about 11 for a party organized by the Buenos Aires Pub Crawl specific http://www.travelblog.org/South-America/Argentina/blog-308020.html So it's about to be my one week anniversary here and I don't really believe it. It seems to have been significantly more time. I think I might have already gone through most of the stages of culture shock. After writing my last entry on sunday I went two nights with virtually no sleep due to a combination of factors that included a bad cough and the fact that there was tons of city light enteri http://www.travelblog.org/South-America/Argentina/Buenos-Aires/blog-306553.html