1.5 months till the end

I took a six-hour overnight bus on Sunday to Tandil, a small town in the Southern Sierras - the oldest mountains in the Pampas. I spent all day hiking, walking, meandering, drinking tea, and reading (The Source, still.) I really like this town. It's small but not tiny (100,000 people) and feels really neighborhoody. Only 7 or 8 high-rises in the whole place. The general aura really reminded me of Jackson Hole. While it's built around tourism (mostly porteños taking weekend trips to escape the city,) it remains completely open all four seasons, so it seems much more down-to-earth, and well, real. Also, it's famous for its cheese, so I am automatically in love. I hiked in a nature reserve that was filled with llamas, horses, deer, and an unidentified deer-like creature that prances like Mandy. Then, on one end of the town is a peak that has been turned into the religious portion of the city. I went all out and took the 1km "walk of Jesus" to the top where I strolled through a lovely pine forest, passing mediocre cement sculptures of Jesus carrying his cross on the way up. At the top is, I kid you not, a 30 foot crucifix that looks over the town - you can see it from almost every street. Overall, this is a definite recommended weekend trip, and relatively close to the city.
Sadly my batteries were mysteriously uncharged I have no pictorial evidence of my time there. No evidence besides my bus ticket and my brain.

The weather here, as I said earlier, is getting colder. I'm wearing my fall clothes, but the second it hit 60 degrees (F,) the porteños all started wearing their fluffiest winter coats, gloves, and hats. I feel silly walking outside in my tshirt amongst all these bundled up psychos with grossly distorted tactile sensory capacities.

I went last week to La Rural, a huge convention center in a trendy part of the city. It was holding the annual event ArteBA, which celebrates all of the up-and-coming Argentinian contemporary visual artists (all medium.) I really enjoyed a lot of work and derived particular pleasure from the pieces that only Argentines (and me!) could understand. For example, poor children often go through subway cars passing out sheets of glitter stickers, hoping that someone will buy them for $1 peso each (about 30 cents USD.) Somehow all of these kids offer the same stickers - Barbie, Little Mermaid, Looney Tunes, etc. One artist at the contemporary art fair made designs using only these stickers as a medium. Ordinarily I wouldn't give these pieces a second glance ("how dumb, a tree made out of Barbie's face,") but after living here I can understand how important the process was of the artist's collecting her materials, etc. Anyway, the art show was awesome. I think I spent three or four hours walking around and only got to see like 2/3 of the exhibit work.