kellita the señorita the ibby dibby dow: Starting Early

I've been getting schooled by Argentine night life. At first I couldn't make it late enough. Then I learned to start taking naps. I do mirror-facing pump up exercises before leaving the house every night. Slowly, I'm getting adjusted. Still, we haven't had a proper Argentine late night for a while. So the plan on Saturday called for an asado at Chiang and Anina's place, followed by a wicked late night of dancing.

Saturday afternoon, as I was mentally preparing myself to "man up" for the evening I received a call from Nells informing me that someone else "booked" the parilla at our proposed 9pm start time, and asking could I be there by 5 to make a group trip to the grocery store while the sun was still shining. Ay, dios. There went my siesta plan.

So I hopped in the shower, picked up Nells, Derek, and Anina and headed to the grocery store for all the necessaries. After patiently waiting in the painstaking line (a patience we've all cultivated well here), and a dropped bottle of carefully selected cheap wine, the boys got to it on the state-of-the-art rooftop parilla while us girls broke out the Fernet and rearranged the furniture. It was a full-group effort, and by 8pm we were ready to eat, already a little toasty.

The Argentine asado is one of my favorite things about living here. It's to die for. Meat overload at its best. And we didn't waste any time. By 9pm we had eaten everything in sight, falling into slumped over Fernet and meat induced comas. I know it was 9pm because I made it a point to be the night's time-keeper. When you begin an all-night dance party hopeful evening at 5pm, it tends to be somewhat long. Sitting around the table staring at each other it dawned on everyone that we still had at least 4.5 hours to kill before hitting the town. Naps were out of the question as everyone knows the quickest way to end a good start to a night is to pretend you're going to wake up later and continue it.

So what to do in this situation? Obviously, the only logical answer was to break out the old-school college drinking games. Cause that's a way to stay alert for sure. But when you're in good company like we were, 5 hours passes like 5 seconds, and next thing we knew we were out of booze, and ready to rock. We took a detour to our friend Jacinto's house who was having an impromptu get-together. This may have been the wrong decision because during this intermediary stop we lost Chiang and Anina to the meat coma police. But Derek, Nells and I were determined that the night would not end without some serious shaking of our tail feathers.

Luckily Jacinto was with us, and after a failed stop at a hostel party where the music wasn't loud enough, our newly formed fearless fouresome found our way to the Roxy. And if there was a reward for the Roxy Rockstars, we would have won it. With the help of a badass DJ, we finally made that dance action happen. And when we left at 5am we had earned ourselves a great day of sleeping, and the oh so famous lost Sunday.

And after rising at 4pm on Sunday, Nells and Derek stopped by and we ended the weekend right with deliciously greasy all too cheesy pizza.