"Es difícil, dijo, no ser feliz en Buenos Aires, que es la mezcla perfecta de París y Berlín." When I came across this sentence I knew I had to buy the book... (It's by Roberto Bolaño and contains some really good short stories). That was when I spent the afternoon hanging out in that book shop con cafe in Palermo, chatting with Nestor, the owner, and John, the young American working there. We talked about a lot - literature, life, cities... as you would on a lazy afternoon. I guess Nestor had adopted John, who was working for him for a few months, to give him the opportunity to read a lot, to think about what he wants in life and what to do next. And that was, what John was doing. I only got to know them through Mattheo, the guy who now lives in "my" room at Veronicas, who had taken me to the book shop to meet his friends there.
Hard to believe I had only 24 hours in Buenos Aires. And hard to believe how much I felt at home immediately again! I even bumped into acquaintances in Palermo - Trixi, Paula and Christian, the latter university colleagues from Berlin who had been living near Tokyo for the last years - until a few weeks ago that is, the former I had met two years ago at a gig of Veronica in Buenos Aires. Small world.

Since Friday last week I am back to Buenos Aires and enjoy city life and a social environment. I am staying with a friend of a friend of mine who happenes to have a room to let. This accomodation turns out to be the greatest luxury in all my traveling so far! Not only do I have my own room with wardrobe, bookshelf, and a little table, but also my own bathroom! And, even better, a grand roof terrace right next to my room!

But all this is topped by the joy of sharing the house with Veronica who is truly amiable and very patiently puts up with my shaky Spanish. This brings me to the subject of language classes which I started taking again last Monday. What a pleasure! But very exhausting, too. Besides school - four hours a day - and homework, I did not do that much during the week, except maybe the odd conversation with Veronica. Being an actor and singer, she invited me to a gig she gave last Sunday in a bar in Palermo, which was truly great. She has an impressive voice and sings a repertoire of Latin-American folk songs.

Even more impressive was the gathering in our house last night. Veronica had invited a group of friends for dinner, many of them musicians and singers themselves. What a special bunch of people! We ate and chatted on the terrace and then someone brought out the guitar and some percussion instruments around midnight... Without even a single repetition and without a break we kept singing Latin-American songs until way past five in the morning!!! Well, I should really not include myself here - as some of you may know, I am musically rather challenged. But I did help out a little with the percussion. All sorts of genres were brushed; sambas, boleros, well-known Argentinan songs, as well as songs from all over South and Central America, even compositions of some of the people present, and - of course - many Tangos. I felt quite embarrassed for not even knowing a single German song. Unfortunately we do no have a culture of meeting up with friends and spending whole nights singing. Before five nobody left. And after many people had gone around then, we kept chatting with the few remaining souls. I hit my pillow a little before eight in the morning, the time I normally get up and ready for school. What a night! Certainly a highlight of all my time so far in South America.

Time for an update. I have been really busy lately, no time to write even a few lines. But if I do not do it now, it will be much later. As mentioned, Buenos Aires is a fab place. I have been attending Spanish classes since last week, so there was little time left to explore the city.

I have been meeting heaps of people, among them Ian, a Canadian, who works as expedition leader on tours to Antarctica. One night I went out together with him and a few more people who work on his expedition ship. Who knows, they might employ me as expedition photographer?! Probably not, but hey, who knows. If I could lecture on geophysics, I would have gotten an asignement straight away. I might try and catch up with him in Ushuaia, as his ship has already left Buenos Aires on Tuesday.

The Spanish school is really great, the teachers are all highly motivated and very friendly, most of them about my age. And where else would you be greeted by your teachers with besos every morning?! Last week I took six hours of lessons, four in a mini-group (three people), and two individual. This was actually too intensive! So I changed the schedule to just four hours of group classes a day. At least now I can do something besides attending class (e.g. writing this). The other students are a great mix of people, we go out frequently together for all sorts of activities. Last weekend we went to a very professional Tango Show in the Centro Cultural Borges, which was truly impressive (see a few pictures in the photos section).

On Sunday we contrasted this experience with a visit to the football stadion. We went to see the match Boca vs River Plate (the two major clubs of Buenos Aires), which was a real experience. Unfortunately I was afraid to take my bulky camera, but I still hope to get a few pictures from Elise, an other student. The atmosphere was truly exciting, heaps of shouting and singing - already an hour before the game started! When the teams finally entered the stadion, you would believe the whole place would explode!! For 90 minutes nobody would stay on their seats... And it certainly did improve my Spanish ("burro", "hijo de puta" etc.). They were in fact almost celebrating carnival - drums, trumpets, all sorts of instruments and banners... They actually had to clean up the field >before< the game had started to remove all the litter. And later on, during the break, again, of course. Especially the Boca fans were incredible. They just did not stop singing and shouting, not even long after the game had ended. The actual match was a little boring, actually.

Then there are so many art exhibitions on all the time. Have been to a few, yesterday to one with drawings and prints by Dalí, earlier the contemporary Latin American Art. Yesterday we went with the whole school to a photography exhibition, which was partly interesting (photographs of painted bodies - cuerpos pintados). If I can muster enough energy, I will later go to an other photography exhibition of young photographers from Buenos Aires. It just means I will have to cross this crazy city twice... But tonight is an other music/tango show and for the weekend I will go on a short trip to Colonia and Montevideo in Uruguay together with four or five of other students. My plan is to do the Spanish classes for at least one more week, maybe two.

(All pictures by Elise, the Melbournian chica in the middle of the group picture in the stadion.)

Hello everyone! After the surprise farewell committee had assembled at the airport (thank you Volker and Matthias!) a fairly uneventful trip evolved. Maybe I just did not notice much, since I slept like a baby after the two glasses of champaign I had so early in the morning. I was surprised, however, that Iberia would only sell overpriced sandwiches on the three-hour flight to Madrid and that, on the 12 hour flight Madrid-Buenos Aires, they would serve just lunch and a snack! More impressive was the drinking ability of many of the Spanish and Argentinian guys on the long flight. The highlight certainly was when one of them even lit a cigar at some stage. I have never seen so many heads turning in a plane...

With one of the chaps who certainly belonged to the top group as far as boozing up in no time was concerned - he happened to sit in the seat row behind me - I had my first real conversation in Spanish. Sort of. I have no real idea what it was about, actually. But he kept shaking the half empty wine bottle in front of my face and was really friendly. Later, he switched over to just burping and snoring.

And then Buenos Aires. I believe many books have already been written on the driving habits of the Argentinians, so I will keep my comments brief. But I am impressed! First I noticed, that nobody seems to really care about switching on the lights when driving at night, not even on the motorways. That said, many cars certainly do not even have a single functional light source anymore. I have never seen so many obviously totally crashed cars actually driving! This is clearly a miracle I will have to investigate a little more. Then I was pleasantly surprised about the paintings of the streets - in Europe we tend to call them lane markings. Here, they clearly serve only decorative purposes. And then I came to realize for the first time that you really do not need any more then about 5 cm distance between cars while driving, not even when going at 120 kilometers an hour... The taxi driver gave perfect proof for that. He was a very skilled also at managing to squeeze his vehicle into impossibly narrow-seeming spaces between other cars and elegantly taking over on the right-hand side wherever possible. Whow!

Today, I spent a couple of hours walking about. And yes Buenos Aires is big. Very big. And very crowded. Berlin seems a rather provincial town compared to this (not to speak of Dresden). And I do have to improve my Spanish. I am very grateful that all the folks I met were happy to have conversations with me in my non-existing Spanish, but it sure is frustrating if you can not even communicate the most basic things...

And it is a beautiful city.