Well, another week has drifted by and well it has been quite a week! This episode of our lives is going to be kept to text as I am writing against the clock, and the clock is winning!! As some of you may have heard it has been quite a week for Argentina with a new pope of Argentine origin and del Potro beating Djokovic in the tennis (thanks for that information dad)! *phew* However, and please sit down for this, another significant occurrence has happened while people have been distracted.
The local Subte (subway) has gone up to 3 pesos and 50 centavos!! I know!! This is making a subway trip about 50 pence by the Queen’s mint and around 70 cents by the reckoning of the the northerners!! So that may not seem much at face value, but when you consider this is a 40% increase that maybe quite significant to the average person, and force people to walk or to risk their lives on the buses! However, now that god is obviously smiling on the people of Argentina through his new messenger, things can only get better.
I’d like to save my comments on Francisco to a minimum until I have had a chance to do more research and to have the opportunity to see what he gets up to over the next few days. Initial reports suggest that he does not display a range of possible corruptions that may strike men of a similar position. I think that this has been a big initial thumbs up, and really seems to be a great way to endear you into the hearts and minds of common folk, like me! However, there may be all sorts of horrors waiting to surface, so please give me a few weeks! We did stay up a little later than normal on Monday evening to go and see the gathering at Plaza de Mayo, as people from all over the city had gathered to pay their respects. We left around 22:30, and the nuns were still rocking out. I fell asleep to the sound of live God rock happening quite a few blocks away! The atmosphere was pretty fun and I am sure that the trade in novelty Pope trinkets went through the roof as well as food sales, if the venders present were anything to go by.
Over the weekend last we had a couple of social arrangements. Initially we were to meet up with Fernando, who own the company Jardín Orgánico to whom we have become relatively dependent on with our weekly food ordering. They deliver 3 times a week in this area and we usually do at least 2 orders to maximise the freshness of the foods that we get! Anyhow, after an email I sent about being a little disappointed with one of the green peppers that we received having died and gone to the dead pepper place possibly a few days before it had been sent to us, an email conversation ensued. Anyhow, we arranged a meet up at the Buenos Aries market, which is a monthly market in town that pulls together arrange of artesanal products and some hard to find items like black garlic! His company have a stall there and so a plan was hatched to meet up. It turns out that Fernando does a lot of import, and he also spends quite a bit of time in Holland! He claimed to enjoy some aspects of the British sensibilities, or possible lack of, and so we were off to a good start. Anyhow, we have arranged a further meeting with him to see if we can offer him assistance with his website in exchange for food! I will keep you posted.
After this meeting we had planned to meet up with Emilia, the girl that we met at Vita, and who has since left waitressing and got a job as a check in person at the local airport. This job pays significantly more and to which she seems to love by first impressions. Anyhow, we stopped off en-route at the organic restaurant Bio. This was on the way to our meet up at another restaurant – Buenos Aires Verde, but I wanted to get some food and we had a little time to kill before the expected meet up! I ordered some vegetables wrapped in nori, and Sara went for her favourite apple crumble with vegan ice cream. After a bit of confusion Sara ended up having a coconut dessert followed by the apple crumble! I accompanied my food with a chocolate shake made with almond milk. We then went to meet up at the designated meeting point! Emilia arrived about 10 minutes after we got there, and told us that she had only had 2 hours sleep as she started her fist shift at the airport that morning. However she was a real trooper and 2 of her friends arrived and we had some very funny chats and heard some very amusing stories. We ended up chatting for way beyond our normal bedtime, then waited for a death bus and got back to our apartment at around 3am. Emilia and her friend continued onwards for a night of clubbing. I am sure that we probably could have done it should we have wanted to! Yeah, yeah!! However, bed seemed too inviting to pass up!
With regards to work we have still been assisting Kara, who runs a business called Cocina Verde here, with some testing that she wants to do with her site. I have been toying around with some Google stuff that allows me to measure engagement on websites, so I set up a page that she requested and in exchange she has provided the food for Sara (as mentioned in the previous post). Sara has been pretty pleased with the offerings, and probably grateful to avoid the nearly guaranteed chances of food poisoning and possible death at my hand and her fork! We will see what happens in the future with her business and our participation in it.
At the gym, I have become quite friendly, as is sometimes my way, with a guy called Nicholas, although I am sure that it probably has some funky Spanish spelling. He works there and so I get to chat with him pretty frequently. I discovered that he has competed in an Ironman competition, which is very high on my to do list of activities to get done before I die!! He said that he competed in the 2009 Brazilian Ironman and completed in around 14 and a half hours!! He would like to another one but he said that it is difficult to find the time for training due to his work and his study. He has been studying for 6 years so far and has to pay for everything as he does not come from this area. He comes from the south, which is associated to the Welsh for some reason, and they also have the same links to their attraction to sheep! I’ll let your imagination fill in the blanks if you’re not British and do not already understand the relationship between a Welshman and his sheep! 🙂 I was speaking to him and he told me that for a PT session he will earn about 30 pesos per hour, which is about £3.90 by Cameron’s rates, and $5.90 if your forefathers arrived on the Mayflower!! So that being the case, when I asked about his studies and how long it may take to complete, he said it depends how many courses he can afford in any given, and it can take many more years still!! Fortunately for him, at the age of 28 he still has a good few years in him to get it sorted!
Next post I will expand more on the dietary happenings, the meetings with Pablo; our long lost running neighbour, and the joy of bulk food purchasing! Why on earth would you want to read anything else! 🙂
Speak soon people and hope that a ray of sun (albeit the weak English version) shines in your heart!!