also Boca Juniors won the Copa Libertadores on wednesday (which is a pretty big deal if you don't know) everybody went to the obelisco at 2am to celebrate with fireworks and sleeping babies and lots of smiles. it closed down all 312 lanes of avenida 9 de julio with masses of blue and yellow. i don't think i've ever seen that many happy men in my life...drama drama drama in the house. i'm sick of it, you don't even want to know. i need to try to go to sleep before 6am one of these nights. okay, starting now:

"Para todos los sistemas de machos y fachos la mujer es una puta; mueran los sistemas, vivan las putas"
- Mujeres Creando de Bolivia

she's really healthy now! and almost big.

look who i brought home today!!!

she's really really tiny! only 800 grams. can that be possible!










she finally fell asleep under the heater listening to nick drake. i think i might join her. there are a lot of other things happening too, here's a really brif update: 1. i gave myself a really bad haircut with bangs. 2. i think i got a job working during the day on weekends more or less as a hostess in a restaurant in san telmo. 3. free silkscreening workshop starts tuesday. 4. i went to a crazy twelve tribes wedding at their community/farm just outside of the city. i'll tell you stories if you ask, there are a lot...

here are some more pictures of the new house: and i finally got heat in my room!




we have about a hundred balconies:



where lots of pies happen:


living:




soon to be my new kitchen:


routines i sometimes forget are important:


the seed fair:






the view from my little window:


and the huerta:


what i like about living here is that it's a real neighborhood. Before i moved i had never even heard of San Cristobal and none of the foreign kids know where it is but lately every porteño i meet actually lives here too. i don't know it's just really little things that sound silly but make me happy to be here. for example yesterday the wheel came off my bike when i was carrying it downstairs so i was standing on the sidewalk trying to put it back on but i didn't have a wrench and an old man sitting in a donkey drawn cart yelled for his friend to come put the wheel on for me and they came over and fixed it and told me i needed air. and a woman was walking by and i wasn't wearing a coat and she yelled at me to put some clothes on and then saw me twenty minutes later and yelled at me again. and the people who work at the fruit stand below our house know who i am and there's an organic food store down the street with grain and granola and dried fruit and spices but it's just run by this ni
ce old couple who sells everything for really cheap because they want everybody to be able to eat healthy. and i found a free silkscreening workshop that meets for classes every tuesday night but i can go use it any night of the week too and they have hundreds of screens with really good images. and they have a bike co-op. and i made friends with this funny vegan boy from mendoza

yesterday i met up with alyssa, this girl i farmed with in ecaudor who's in bA for a month, and we went to a seed fair in the provincia about an hour away. It was in this giant giant park and i was thinking it'd be cool to be able to talk to people about roof gardening and maybe get some seeds but it turned out it was more of a seed exchange so they weren't really selling stuff. but i started talking to some people from huertas in the province and they were just like, here take what you need and gave me for free a giant bag of seeds that are good to sow in winter/fall. so now i have onions, mint, scallions, beets, carrots, cabbage, lettuce, spinace, acelga, calendula, beans, peas, peanuts, parsley, radishes and a whole bunch of other stuff. and we got a free lunch when we arrived and this lady gave us a big block of cheese that she made yesterday and we got invited to a wedding next saturday! and today there are a whole bunch of workshops like silkscreening, bike fixing, and planting along with art shows and films and music and potluck dinner at this place called la sala. so i am baking an apple carrot cake for that now...

this is my new place: General Urquiza 1590, Capital Federal, 1243, Argentina. It's in San Cristobal/Boedo.











here are a few pictures. my roommates are a little odd but they live downstairs so I don't have to constantly see them.

finally moving

i finally found a new place to live so i think i'm moving in there tomorrow. I'll take pictures when I am moved in and tell more about it then. Its with a couple of argentines, a peruvian, and a french girl or something similar to that combination. And I will live on the roof in a room that they just built with a kitchen and a whole giant roof terrace right outside my door. I think it will be nice and it will be nice to be in a new barrio. In case you've been wondering, here is a map of the neighborhoods of BsAs. Right now I live in Recoleta, a really wealthy commercial busy area. I'm moving to San Cristobal. My classes are in Caballito, which is right in the middle. Most nightlife goes down along the east side in Palermo and San Telmo but pretty much everywhere has something happening until 6am. tonight is Sara's last night here and Anne has already moved so its sort of completely like starting over right now when i move. which is sort of nice.

hmm i haven't really felt like blogging at all lately but that doesnt mean that everything isnt really nice and inspiring still. being home was really great but i think i saw everyone who reads this so you already know all about it. highlights: spring in the garden at home, eating alfajors with anna, biking with patrick, seeing grandmom, a night with robin and surprisingly maya and julia and even sam levine. a really nice dinner with dah, margot, mark, and thea. and i saw lawrie and duncan and my parents and caroline in brooklyn. and even bard didn't fulfil any of my nightmares. daffodils were out, people were out having fun, i got to see photo shows and the ccs and even a sneak peek at sara katz's senior show. and andy and sarah and you know. i think it will be ok to go back there. but not for 8 months. some things i've been thinking about and doing lately are these: well to start i have been living in my living room for 2 weeks because i rented out my room. first to a german boy stdying here but while i was in the us he moved in for 5 days but my gay canadian roommate was hitting on him so severely and nonstop that he couldn't handle it and moved out. what's extra funny is that he himself was the same with anne and sara and even called sarah a maneater. its all pretty l'auberge espanol, which i guess you have to have a little of when you're a foreign student. anyway now there's a british rugby player corporate lawyer living in anne's room and anne now lives with a 65 year old woman on the 15th floor near campus and a german shopaholic lives in my room. and only to continue the soap opera of azcuenaga 1064 apartment 8a, the german girl and the british guy wake up in the same bed every morning. but the living room is fine. obviously i'm looking for another place but for now i can handle this. plus i am not paying rent. i've been biking a bunch and got my brakes fixed. i kind of helped cook food with the huerta orgazmika to sell at this place called FLA where there was this big concert/party put on by poesia urbana which was totally great and i gave myself blisters from dancing so much. but i'm excited to go back in the day because they have the largest anarchist archives of latin america or something and you can be a member of their library for only one peso a month. plus i found a whole load of talleres and classes like silkscreening and textile and cooking all over the city at community centers that sound neat. lately i've been thinking i would like to make my own soy milk, making kambucha would be fun too, and a zine or some cookbooks. i've been reading this book called "sidewalk" about people who live/sell things on the sidewalk in greenwich village. i've been listening to rapper's delight club and the evens on repeat for a few months. i realized that my tape recorder is not broken and i'm just a moron and the batteries were bad. i want to learn how to crochet. and maybe an instrument, there are tons of free classes here on instruments. and i saw the science of sleep which made me inspired to use my hands more in the creation of where i live. also something neat at the ccs museum was this map project mapping the geography of incarceration, which you should download and read: archleague.org under exhibitions, "architecture and justice." i've been enjoying seeing a lot of argentine art on my own and for class. its hard to take things in in class but i went back to the museo nacional today on my own and walked through and could recognize all the paintings and what decade they were made in. so i guess i'm taking some things in at least. mostly what i do here is have late morning coffees with sara, bike around and talk and listen to music with sean, fail at making good small talk in spanish, daydream in class but still manage to learn a few things, draw with oil pastels on my balcony, and wish i was more involved in life here but then remember that i have 8 more months so it will happen.

look what i bought yesterday!

Tucuman

so I'm coming home in an hour and a half! but i have a little time now and i wanted to write about tucuman, where i went for Easter week. because it was crazy. this is what i wrote when I got back from it: this weekend was a pretty big adventure. like adventure adventure. it makes everything i've done so far not even seem remotely adventurous. it began on wednesday night when after not sleeping for a week i threw a pair of pants, 2 shirts, and my sleeping bag in my backpack and took the 18 hour night bus to Tucuman to see Gonzalo but i didn't sleep then either because i was talking to a woman from Buenos Aires who lives in my neighborhood. so its been literally a week without hardly sleeping and i'm imagining a weekend relaxing with his family or whatever for easter but i get there and he tells me he's organized for us to go camping with some friends for a few days. which i think sounds great until we get to his friends house to plan when we're leaving and what we need and they start talking about where we'll go. and gonzalo asks if we can go to siambon. and his friend says, yeah but it will be about an extra 8 hour hike! an extra 8 hours! that means we're already planning on doing at least 8 hours! and i don't have any shoes or anything. but whatever! so we go. and meet his friends on the bus and they are old! like could have been my dads! and we got off the bus and the first thing we did was cross a river up to our waists! and i only had one pair of paints! and then we crossed the river 28 more times! but holy shit it was fun. so it was me and four boys, or i guess they were pretty legitamately men. fording rivers, camping in mountains, having mate with mountain people, talking about neitsche. etc. man it was beautiful and so great to be out of the city and in nature. i was super weird and withdrawn and just in myself and the landscape but it was really relaxing and pretty much the craziest thing i've ever done in terms of outdoors excursions. and the mountain people who's fields we camped in were really interesting and totally matriarchal and had lived remote in the mountains for generations and generations. i was generally too tired by the end of the day to ever talk to them but it was sick to show up at someone's house in the middle of the mountains after walking without seeing anyone for 8 hours and go into a hut and sit with a bunch of women cooking over a fire and drink mate with them. we spent a bunch of freeeezing nights shaking with cold and not sleeping at all so never sleeping until the sun came up and wasting half the day afterwards trying to wake up. but that is never a problem for me. and we swam in the river and just drank water right from it (and i don't have parasites!) and man i don't even know what to say. it was probably the most bizarre weekend of my life talking about che and philosophy and religion and sufjan stevens and having lucid dreams and life discussions and being the only girl and only non argentine, non spanish speaker, the weakest, the youngest, the only one not from tucuman, the only one not super into outdoors activities and hiking. i don't even know, but they took care of me and i felt sort of like the daughter/princess but it was good and they were impressed that i made it and we had fun. then the last night we set out too late so we had to cross the river up to our waists at night 8 times. and a rock fell on my foot and i was wearing gonzalo's mom's shoes which were way too big and there were lots of rocks in them and they hurt a lot but i ignored it until we finally got back and found a campsite and i turned on the lights and what i thought was mud all over my feet was actually blood. eeeew. gross! i don't even know. walking in the clouds and i found a giant snake! and on the last day i found out that gonzalo's friends really were old. one was 38 and one was 21 in 1992 when for six years he rode on bike all through south america and the usa and canada. one was 22 and gonzalo is 28 so it wasn't like everyone was super old, but when would i have ever thought i would be camping with dudes who were 18 years older than me. that's weird. but that is just what happens when you are out of the us i guess. so that's tucuman in breif. i didn't take too many pictures but here are a few.

tucuman tucuman tucuman! i'm excited. and look, even though i quit so it doesn't really matter, one of the websites that i reviewed was really happy with my review:
March 26, 2007.
"Killer Startups posts a review of Kumquat; without having spoken to us, they seem to have nailed the concept pretty much dead-on (we begin to think we may actually be communicating)"

oh yeah, and i quit that lame internet job. what was i thinking? i need a job where i am out in the city and speaking spanish not spending my days on the internet writing in english. (but if you want to read funny reviews of websites that i wrote you can go to killerstartups.com!) so i have 10 resumes in spanish and next week when i get back i am going to go pass them out and find something to do.

I'm going to Tucuman in the north on wednesday to visit my friend Gonzalo for a week! I met him in ecuador and we travelled in colombia and he makes documentaries and is coming to live in buenos aires soon but right now i get to visit him and his family in Tucuman for easter and go camping in the mountains! Also I am most likely coming home to maryland for a week. what! holy shit, no way! i know. probably the 21st of april to the 30th. so you have to come see me. because also most likely i am not coming home again until christmas. as in staying here for another semester and graduating one semester late from bard. yeah, kind of a big decision. but really not so big. haven't i known i was going to decide that forever? being here for only four months just makes no sense among a million other reasons that i can tell you if you ask me. so those are the big pieces of news. also exciting: i found 10 gold beautiful picture frames in the trash last night that i am excited to make art in. today i went to a giant design/fashion expo at the convention center kind of by accident but it was entertaining. and i had indian food for the first time in months and i randomly met a bard graduate who lives here in buenos aires!

i love buenos aires so much right now. where else could you have a horrible headache and be overwhelmingly tired but still happily stay up until 4 in the morning without even realizing it was happening? one of my other colombian friends had some people over tonight so i said i was exhausted but would make an appearance since he lives on my same street 8 blocks away. so i got there and what were they making? arepas! which i ate every morning on the beach in colombia with ola and have been missing. and the people here are just soo nice. i didn't know anyone there except juan but they all sat and talked with me as if i was their main friend and the reason they were having a party. and every slang word they used they stopped and explained exactly what it meant and why they say it. so we sat speaking mangled spanish all night sucking on wads of coca leaves brewing in our cheeks to keep us awake. and then i left and walked home and ran into a group of wasted kids who gave me fernet branker and walked me to my apartment and endearingly called me a mother fucking asshole so they could show off thier mastery of english curse words and invite me to their birthday parties. buenos aires, en serio, te encanta.