Mi barrio

     ...as in my hood, mein Kietz... where I'll live for the next 2 months.
No, it's not Palermo Soho! because that's the place to be, right? or where you are supposed to live if you are a defenseless foreigner. It's not San Telmo nor Recoleta either. But I didn't go as crazy as to look for a room in Constitucion (that's the bad area)
       Villa Urquiza is the name, and I loved it immediately. Even if my room is very modest and the house is in a sort of very slow renovation w.i.p., I just wanted to live in this neighborhood. It has a calmness of a small village or rural resort, with broad streets and nice little houses, some of them no taller than the ground-floor, some of them better taken care of than the others, but all very charming and  quite different as style.

 It also has cool street art

and churches

and bigger, busier avenues

  and quirky buildings

and palm-trees

And this is the house I live in:

 with it's patio

the view from the patio

the back yard/garden

 and my room

Work

      yes, work

I am not here to have fun. 

      As I said in my first post, I will be doing an internship till the end of the year, and I am working on Juan Pablo Zaramella's next project, but not just with him. The studio he's regularly working with is the Can-Can Club  and it probably is the best Stop-Motion studio in Argentina. I don't really know, and I'm not going to research, but I want to believe that.  

Excellent people, very hard-working, wisecrackers - constantly making fun of me and my spanish...  but also warm and welcoming.

So this is how the space looks like

and there's Maru

and this is the workshop

and this is Seba (doing some high-finesse thing)

and there's Becho and Maru again
and a lovely vintage kicker table, or metegol - how they call it here

and this is sort of my work-space

and this is what I mostly did for a week or so - mixing colors: plasticine, acrylic, silicone-based..., plasticine again, and again, and again

who am I kidding? this is fun

Food

           I am vegan... or almost, you know : if it's cake, I don't ask what's in it. And as I was telling people I'm coming to South America, everybody was going: ''oh, you poor thing, what will you eat there?'' or ''haha, bet you're gonna come back a meat eater'' and so on...
Well, I must say I am not a big fan of Argentinian specialties: steak is out of the question, but empanadas have no appeal to me either. I don't like Dulce de leche, I don't like Fernet and Mate... I think I can get used to it. I guess I'm left with ice-cream and Medialunas... except not. Cause there are chinese people here! And they don't only make chinese food - they make argentinian vegetarian food!

Like in this small take-away shop near to the studio I'm doing my internship in:

they're really big on corn, pumpkin, carrots, sweet potatoes and spinach 

               I think I could eat a month here every day and not have the same combination twice. Everything is really tasty and healthy - they even have a 'no salt' version for most of stuff. 

Ok, I'm giving veganism up for a while - that would be indeed difficult

 Deserts! I really need to learn how to make the orange-carrot bizcocho

And everything has the same price cause they sell by the kilogram
one lunch sample: about 500gr - 25 Pesos

La Boca

Sunday.
...more tourism...
We went to see the famous/infamous ''La Boca''. All the guides say it's a must see , but also a watch-your-pockets-more-then-the-sights place. Well, nothing happened... except in the taxi when we got there one of the girls realized she'd been given a fake 100 pesos bill at some point.
I don't know why, but this extremely colorful place made me very sad... it felt like a ''has been'', like an old diva who put up all her make-up and is trying to dance the tango in her worn-off shoes...
See for yourselves:

-probably the most photographed tree in town

-probably the same picture you'll see a thousand times if you google '' La Boca''                                                               

-probably the reason this place made me sad. It's a romanian car from the early 70's, a Dacia 1300 and I haven't seen one since the last century... 

Although it could have been a Renault 12 - there was no label

- and this is how the backstage looks 

          Once this checked, we made our way to Feria de San Telmo - an all-sorts market, like the Mauerpark, but way more tourist-oriented... where my hostel mate got rid of her fake bill. Yaay! 

well, call me hard to impress... 

 Hasta luego!

Oktoberfest

...or that's what we thought first...
So, I'm enjoying a bit of tourist life... like today I let myself dragged on a tour of the Casa Rosada (like the Reichstag only smaller and pinker) where we visited the balcony were Madona was. and Ricky Martin. and the Pope

there's Sangeeta - one of my roommates at the hostel and the one responsible for us being there

and when we left there (bored out of our minds), looking for this one fancy café, we passed through this

which we thought it was Oktoberfest... but after reading the signs we sadly came to know that it was only a celebration of the austrian community of BA. I have absolutely nothing against austrians.

We also took a lot of silly touristy pictures of each other. Like this one:

That's Roger from Australia/Peru- another one of my roommates and provider of liquor. 

I promisse I'm not going to wear that hat throughout my whole south-american trip... I just left my sun glasses in Berlin. Funny thing, I'm not enjoying the warmth as much as I thought, I think my body was kinda in a ''winter is coming'' mode and all of a sudden: 30°C! WTF!!! ... I think I'll live 

       About the hostel:  I was afraid I will be the only one over 30 and everybody else will be in their early 20s and partying all the time, but no! It turns out, I might be in the lower half of the age range of the people living here, especially since the top floor was taken by a band and a film crew making a road-trip documentary... Really nice folks, getting along, good vibe... :)