Featured Post: Brandon & Tyler

Tyler and I have been in Buenos Aires for 5 days now (Blake just went home yesterday) and have 3 weeks left here. It is a great city, pop. 13 million (country is 41, and the next largest city has 1.5, so BA totally dominates). Interestingly though we have so far spent more time outside BA since we traveled in Patagonia for 10 days, which has few cities/towns (largest one we were in was about 100,000) and is very rural. You can drive for hours without seeing any sign of civilization and be amazed by the vastness of the open spaces and changing landscapes from the coast to barren plains to colorful forests, stunning snow-capped mountains, emerald lakes and massive glaciers. Party life is incredible, Spanish-style in that you get to a club at 1am and it’s not even a third full. Two nights ago we got home at 8am from a club and today we got back at 6am from a house party where people thought Tyler looked like Philip Seymour Hoffman haha. I have to say I have found people here to be extremely welcoming. Surprisingly, I should really say the guys are much more welcoming than the girls who I’ve found to be sorta odd (like grungy outfits and really eccentric personalities or hot but sorta stuck up - will keep working in this area haha).

I had the best 4th of July I think I’ve ever had.

After sleeping from 7am-3pm, Tyler and I headed to a party hosted by Democrats Abroad with free food and music downtown, but our friends who had tried to get in called us a few minutes before we were gonna show up and told us that the event had been canceled due to swine flu concerns (It’s crazy here, there is apparently a pandemic and a national emergency has been declared; supermarkets warn people of standing in line at the registers a meter apart and movie theaters are selling only half of their seating capacities so there can be an empty seat between each person haha). Anyway, we were pretty upset about missing out on hot dogs and bbq and were starving so we walked to the nearest McDonald’s (surprisingly they love it here, you’re never too far away from one, in fact there’s one by our apt from which you can see another MD’s a few blocks down) and figured that was a pretty good way of celebrating 4th of July (it was also one of the nicest MD’s I’ve been to, they even have a waitress from whom you can order desserts). We then googled 4th of July celebrations in BA and found a bbq at a bar with cheap beers but when we got there it hadn’t opened yet so we went to a bar/cafe across the street where it happened to be happy hour and starting drinking then (6pm). We then went back to the bbq place and spent all of our food/drink tickets on drinks, including soco shots.

We had signed up for the 4th of July pub crawl and that started at 10 so we went to the meeting bar and for less than $15 you got open bar till 11:30 and free burgers and hot dogs and even a hilarious t-shirt featuring Obama drinking. It was about 130 Americans and we migrated to 2 bars before settling on the final bar/club with like 300 other partiers (we also got free shots along the way). 13 hours and 6 bars after starting to drink, we got home at 7am. I love this city, but my body is in pain now from this past week…