Arriving in Buenos Aires was exciting for a multitude of reasons...
a. it´s Buenos Aires
b. a lot of people I´ve met traveling are currently here which means I have an immediate posse
c. I get to stay with La Pati in Recoleta
d. Jane is coming to visit next week
e. it´s Buenos Aires and I have been dreaming about it for a loooong time. I was in love with it like I was in love with Spain long before I visited.
...but one of the most exciting reasons was this guy:
you might not recognize him for 2 reasons...
1. you don´t know him
2. he has gained some weight, having learned how to enjoy food and meals again, shed some stress, and is adjusting to a life without advertising for the time being
Jerome left his job as an ECD at Wieden a few months ago to embark on a 6-month journey around the world. By chance, our itineraries matched up in Buenos Aires. I was so excited to get to see a really good friend who knows me well along the way. On Saturday afternoon he came to my posh Recoleta apartment that isn´t by any means mine, and we jumped up and down and hugged and talked excitedly about the fact that we´re both in Buenos Aires, don´t have jobs, and have absolutely no clue what we´re going to do with our lives.
We quickly set out to explore the city, Jerome schooling me on the ways of BsAs from his 3 days of experience, and me educating him on the ways of solo travel. After buying a pair of fake Ray Bans, which I´ve been looking for since a disasterous and expensive sunglasses mistake in Sao Paulo, we headed to Palermo to have an epic Argentine parilla-style lunch at Don Julio. We spent a good three hours at lunch. It was like we couldn´t tell each other everything fast enough, and we never ran out of good stuff to talk about. Mostly we laughed a lot, and Jerome admitted he had been nervous to see me.
Why would he be nervous to see me? My sentiments exactly. Before Jerome left his apartment that afternoon, his friend told him that seeing me was like a window into his traveling future. Either it would be a sign that life on the road is good, or it would be me giving him a desperate hug and bursting into tears because it´s so horrible. He was relieved to see a tanned and energetic me greet him at the door, jumping up and down with excitement. Thing is, Jerome is a window into the me that has developed in the last 5 months, too. Though I´ve met new people on this trip, skyped with some peeps, and reunited with some travel buddies, no one who really KNOWS me has seen me (except in my pictures on my incredibly interesting and witty blog of course). I don´t feel that different. But hearing his reaction to the relaxed, good energied me was positive. He told me that while I´ve always been a somewhat laid back and energetic person who always got along with people, blah, blah, blah, there were often times in my days at Wieden when I had an underlying anger or frustration in my demeanor. He told me I was just emanating positive energy and happiness, and that he was happy that I was happy. I was happy that he was happy that I was happy, too. I´m never going back to ¨real life¨.
After lunch I used my Spanish skills to buy him some Malaria pills for the Amazon though we´re convinced the pill side affects would kill him before the Malaria We parted ways and made plans to meet up for the evening.
On the days before my arrival in BsAs, we had been figuring out plans via Facebook messages since I am old school now and don´t have a phone (Jerome´s iPhone will keep him less lost than me over the next months). Probably the best plan idea he sent was the following..
We should try to do an all night dance party by the way. You in??
Am I in? Who am I? Of course I´m in. I´m a dance party conneseiur. I couldn´t have thought of a better plan myself. We decided to meet up with my friends, Portlanders Nelle and Derek, and head out in search of said dance party. All of this obviously after I took a nap so I could hang for a Buenos Aires late night. After some Fernet and Coke at their place, which tastes like someone ashed cigarettes in your mouth, we found ourselves standing in Palermo perusing the clubs. That´s something I never thought I´d say. Well, both those things, but that I was actively looking to go to a club. I despise all the ¨club¨ experiences I´ve ever had in New York. So pretensious. So dressed up. So dumb. But clubs are the way to dancing here, so I´m into clubs I guess.
We chose the club with the most people outside, figuring it was better than the one next door with no one, and waited our turn to be let past the velvet rope. The club was called Wet, which Jerome had to explain to me because it was arranged like this, and I couldn´t put it all together...
W
ET
I credit that to Jerome´s closer proximity to the real world. It´s not because I´m dumb or something.
Anyway, the first floor of the joint was less than inspiring, blasting slower-paced cumbia music. But we had been droning on and on about a dance party, and damn it, we were going to dance. And dance we did when we discovered the cooler, less crowded, electronic music pumping second floor. Who would have thought I would ever get excited about electronic music? But I was, and man did we dance. We danced like no one was watching. We danced like it was going out of style. We danced until the cows came home. However you want to say it, we went crazy dancing, sweating and flailing all over the place. And we were free. And we laughed. And then it was 6am and we were exhausted.
I am so excited for Jerome and his journey. I´m so excited for me and my continued journey. I can´t wait to meet up with him when we´re both back stateside (not that I want to wish that time to go too quickly) and share more stories about our travels, and to see where we both end up at the end of it, assuming we both end up stateside.
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| derek, nelle, jerome, me danced out |
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| my sweet new $5 ¨Ray Bans¨ |
