I have a home

So, I finally found a place to live. If you are willing to pay out your arse, you can easily find somewhere to stay. But if you want to keep a budget, trying to find a place that's the right combination of nice, well-located and cheap can be a bit more challenging.

So after a week of making calls and visiting places, I moved into my new place Saturday. I have a little room in this hostel/boarding house on the edge of the Recoleta neighbourhood. It's this huge, crumbling old house, with three floors, several bathrooms and kitchens, and all kinds of nooks and crannies. The people that live there are a combination of international students staying for a couple of months, and travellers passing through. It's in a great location, close to downtown, the subway, and the chichi upscale neighbourhood of Recoleta, just in case I get an urge to buy some designer shoes. Oh yeah, and it's a short walk to the Teatro Colon, Buenos Aires' beautiful world-famous opera house and concert hall. My room's extremely basic, as are all the facilties, but the place makes up for it in its friendly atmosphere. The owner's this friendly Chilean-American ex-wannabe rockstar from LA who moved here 7 years ago to open the hostel.

I'd just moved my stuff in and was looking forward to a quiet night in, when this group of German guys having a drink on the patio invited me down. They had all studied here in Buenos Aires 4 years ago, one of them having lived in the hostel, and they had organized a reunion, and were going out to meet some of their old classmates and friends. So I tagged along.

They told me stories from back in the day of their wacky exchange student antics: How one of them only used to date girls with names that were also song names - he dated a Cecilia, a Lola, a Macarena and a Roxanne; How they once borrowed ties and suits and tagged along to the family wedding of the Argentinian girl one of them was dating and Grandpa still talks to this day about their crazy dancing styles; And how their time in Buenos Aires conincided with the economic crisis of 2001, and how they got to live first hand one of the most intense moments in modern Argentine history.

After a dinner of meat, meat and more meat, we went out for a drink in this bar called Milion. It's a huge multi-storey mansion that's been converted into a bar and restaurant. There was this interactive art exhibit going on, sponsored by Lucky Strike Cigarettes - (it's not just in Canada where tobacco companies sponsor cultural events.) There were all these installations set up with infrared lights; the tables had been covered with some kind of plastic that absorbed the light, so you could draw, with light, on the table with these pendulums hanging down from the ceiling. There was also this race track set up, the surface made of the same special plastic, and the wheels of the car setup with infrared bulbs, so that wherever the car went, it left this trace of light. Cool! A nice distraction in between Mojito Margaritas (whoever invented this drink is a genius.)

Of course, in typical Argentinian fashion, we left the bar at 2:30am and they all hailed a cab to continue the night out at a dance club. I'm still adjusting to 3am not meaning last call, so I went home.

Tomorrow my classes