'lets get out of here and go for a walk'

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EVENING

After today's excitement I decided that from now on I would adopt the pacifist Bolivian attitude of doing nothing and waiting for an act of God or the Gods to decide my fate and send me in a specific direction. This way I wouldn't have to look for adventure, it would come to me as easily as it did yesterday in the form of the presidents' speech. One week ago I had dreamed of spending the unadventurous last week of my trip on a beach with palm trees reading my Swedish crime novel about a girl who went missing, relaxing knowing that it hadn’t happened to me. I had survived South America. I was here. I was alive, well and fit to face the UK. This was my big dream.

At 8pm my adventure was sealed in Martin’s seemingly harmless words ‘Lets get out of here and go for a walk’

I was more than happy to go for a walk. I love walking! I went looking for a coffee to wake me up. All the coffee machines had been turned off in our neighbourhood so we walked to the next neighbourhood to find one. We heard a carnival and joined it for a bit, which lead us to the main square where lots of couples were dancing tango and the rest of the people were sitting around on tables around the Plaza eating and drinking. We did the same, watched the tango starring several dances at different rhythms mainly danced by young people. It was beautiful and took me back to my days at university when I did a few classes in tango. Another dance was the zamba which was performed with handkerchiefs. We then found a concert which had just ended, in a very bohemian part of town. People were eating hot dogs, standing around in the grounds of a squat house (used as an old art gallery for underground art) where clearly people had been having a good time, eating, drinking and smoking. We ordered chorizo sandwiches and headed back to the hostel to crack open the wine. I went to my room to invite Elizabeth to drink wine but she was asleep, still jet-lagged from flying from Australia and wanting to get a good nights' sleep before the first day of her Spanish course tomorrow.

We headed up to the roof to look for more social life as by this time it was only about 11pm -early in Argentina. To my delight we found another person sitting on top of the roof with an interesting story to tell. He was a Russian guy who had spent two weeks on a boat travelling from Brazil to Peru. He was keen to tell us about his adventures at sea after travelling with all Brazilians when he didn’t speak a word of Portuguese. He also told us about his time in the dangerous Favelas in Mexico. In return for these intriguing stories we offered him some of our wine after us having both apologised for our countries' governments having imposed such tough sanctions on Putin’s Russia. After hearing how it had affected this guy in economic terms I realised how lucky Europeans are to be able to make savings in a stable currency.

Then, a French guy, an unsavoury character, joined us. After getting drunk he turned into a not so nice character and was quite rude to me because I wouldn’t get my money from my bedroom to buy him a drink. In retaliation I told him the truth about his country, a truth that no Frenchman wants to hear and worse, in French

‘Don’t speak to me like that, you are just speaking to me like that because France can’t win as many wars as England can.’

This left him sulking and he went off to his room. The Russian guy, after having been consoled and reassured by us both that he should go to bed, and that he needn't worry about the Russian rouble, it would stabilise itself in the morning’ ,I decided at about 6am it was time for me to find a hammock and study the stars. I was fast asleep within no time. I was too exhausted to even look at the stars.

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