recently

dude i've been gone for a year! the past weeks have been really nice, here's what's happening a little.
back in june it was aneta's bday and me and this old man named mario made 20 pizza doughs and then only about 20 people came to her party and spoke esperanto all night playing with balloons so we have had pizzas coming out of our ears.





i made these ones for sean's birthday last tuesday. which was a really funny party that we had here too and all these people from a hiphop collective here in the city came and freestyled for us all night.







and it snowed! man it was so fun! we ventured out into the cold that night and had a snowball fight with some neighborhood kids and ran around for a couple of hours and i am now really sick but igual it was really special for it to have happened. except for all the homeless people who died and the fact that it's snowing here means climate change is pretty real. everything feels pretty real lately.







and i redid my room and have a place to hang things and an art corner and some more space.




and the huerta! it really sucks and the government has been trying to turn it into a park and bulldoze it. turning a functioning growing community garden into a fenced in "green space" seems pretty ridiculous but I guess its always like that. so we've been having some demonstrations in front of the Jefaturia but mostly just still going and having all sorts of music and food and workshops. sometimes i feel really uncomfortable there not really being part of the scene but also i'm meeting them and still i think its my favorite part of bs as. this was today:

my friend Fede singing made up songs



composting.



Facu and Erny with my bike in the elevator


.and they were the best. the one on the left is who taught me silkscreening.




really good saxophone



no place is safe from an impromptu moshpit when vegan argentines are around.



and my plans right now are looking like this: hang out here for the rest of july, finish this class on the marques de sade, start going to some free classes that the university of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo offer and try not to freeze. patrick comes the second week of august. i can't wait. and then niki and sean and jess all leave. but i've been hanging out with this new boy named Orlando from Bogota and today i met this girl who studies art and wants to hang out and i'm getting to know the huerta kids more so i won't be totally alone. then in september i take all my final exams and finish up with school here. then erny and me are gonna go to Mendoza and visit Niki and the go to this farm there where i'm planning on staying at least a month. then i guess come back and enjoy spring and summer here and then december 22nd i come home!

its snowing! for the first time in 89 years

this is the Twelve Tribes wedding that went to a while ago. I wish i had written about it then because now i forget.

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.