A new awkward adventure

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 haven´t totally figured out yet here, so I suppose that´s 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 well as sort of a fair type of thing with traditional food, etc. It was recommended to me by a website which was recommended to me by someone who seems pretty "cool" in the more strict sense of the word, so I decided it would be a good evening option- the fact that the concerts were free didn´t hurt either, I suppose. Mas allá de ese, though, I was really just sort of interested and curious about Bossa Nova music, and my very limited impression of it was highly positive.

So the awkwardness started with my attempt to obtain change for the bus ride there. Here there is for some reason an awful shortage of monedas (small denominations of money that come in coin form). And when one takes the bus, one can only pay with them. So I decided to tomar un café, and get some monedas that way. But, as has happened a few times in the past, the woman tricked me by asking for a little bit more money in order that she could give me all my change in paper denominations. The trick worked because I just agreed, without thinking or calculating too much. So then I went across the street and purchased some granola bars, but the same thing happened. I suppose it has to do with getting flustered in trying to quickly comprehend peoples´ quick talk, without being too slow and awkward. In wanting for things to flow smoothly, I guess I just become to quick to agree with whatever people propose. So the guy got me to purchase a 50 centavo piece of candy along with my granola bars, thus thwarting my intentions once again. I´ve got to say, if I didn´t already have a fair bit of sympathy for people in the U.S. trying to get by with limited language abilities, frustrating experiences such as this would definitely endow me with it.

So I´ll stop getting bogged down in the whole moneda thing. Finally I purchased some tissues and was firm in my choice of payment, forcing the shopkeeper to yield to me the desired 1 peso coin. So I was off, via the 95, to el Centro Cultural del Sur, in one of the many regions of the city with which I´m totally unfamiliar. I arrived at about 6 to find about 8 booths, most of which had not yet been fully set up. 4 of them sold food or alcoholic beverages, 2 souvenirs, and two were just sort of informative. So basically after 3 minutes I had exhausted the place´s exploratory possibilities. This left me with about 177 minutes to kill before the music started, at 9. Normally this would not be such a big deal, but it happened to be frigid outside, and after an extremely interesting 30 minute walk through the fairly inhospitable and totally unfamiliar neighborhood, I was kind of dying to go someplace warm. If there had been a lot of interesting things to see at the festival, I could probably have distracted myself well enough, though it was pretty much entirely outside. But not only was this not the case, there were maybe 10 other visitors wandering around, and it was horribly uncomfortable to just stand around there.

So not knowing what to do, and severely cursing myself for my seemingly unconquerable inability to wait to go out until the proper time of night, I made maybe two or so more rounds through the booths, killing about ten more minutes. I did try some pretty interesting sweet foods which I couldn´t really describe to you at this point. The cultural center also had a pretty cool semi-indoor art exhibit. But despite all of this, I seemed unable to make a significant dent in the vast chasm of time (yes, the delightful mixed metaphor is deliberate) that loomed before me. After futilely trying to read outside on a bench in the increasingly colder dusk, I seriously considered forgetting about it, and going home. But the problem was, I had told Raquel not to make dinner for me that night, as I had expected to eat at the festival (the only vaguely dinner-like food they had was hot dogs). More than that, though, I was kind of expecting my australian friend fred to meet me there at some point, and our only way of communicating is by e-mail. So I felt stuck, even though by 7 I could plausibly have claimed I though he had decided not to come (as it turns out, he had). My conscience and my still sincere desire to hear the bossa nova music wouldn´t let me go. So I caved, and decided to eat dinner at a restaurant, though as a rule I generally don´t eat at restaurants alone.

I´ll just say that this was a very good idea, especially once I could convince myself to stop being stupid and thinking about the paltry amount of money I was spending. The only really interesting thing about the restaurant other than it´s function in saving the evening was the waiter. He seemed pretty surly, with his brusque movements and his habit of responding to everything I said with a "¿Que?" and a look that seemed to express the deepest possible contempt. But curiously enough, at the end as I was paying he asked where I was from, and though we still parted on awkward terms, I can´t help but wonder if I made an error in assuming that what might have been just a characteristic attitude of his had anything at all to do with me.

So the evening went pretty much entirely uphill from there. I got back just a few minutes before the music started, and was able to easily pass the time by trying (and enjoying throughly) a mojito, which the extremely generous (and, in my humble opinion, extremely skilled) bartender let me have for just the ten pesos I had left in my pocket, rather than the normal price of fifteen. This put me in quite appropriate spirits for the musical entertainment that followed, which made me want to go to brazil or a tropical island, or speak portugese, or just be brazilian, or something of the sort. So despite the fact that I couldn´t feel many of my extremities for the cold, the evening ended quite amiably: a nice guy helped direct me to the bus stop, and I arrive home at the healthy hour of 12, without the slightest bit of guilt about not being up to see the sunrise.

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