Today I am suffering from a hangover (la resaca). Wendy and I took our North American friend out for drinks last night. It was Sally’s 21st birthday. Now, back in my day, and the days of my friends, this was a huge day. Sadly, those days are over. At least I can rest assured that my nieces and nephews are carrying on the torch. Go Danielle & James! My head dully aches and I’m going to my clase de Castellano this afternoon which is already hard enough.
Weird. When I go into the kitchen to put more peanut butter on my apple, and I think about the things that I am going to write, it seems so funny. Then, when I get to my computer and start typing, not so much. Maybe I don’t like typing? I don’t think that’s it. It doesn’t really bother me; in fact, I much prefer it to writing by hand.
We went to this bar, Altoque (at hand) that was recommended by Marí, Wendy’s host mom because she knows the owner. The chalkboard out front listed the happy hour as 2330 to 0030. That right there tells you a couple things about Argentine culture. As luck would have it, and so rarely does it, we were arriving at just about 11:30 pm. This afforded us an opportunity to do something that we rarely do here, go out to bars, and something that we never do, order fondos blancos y tragos (shots & mixed drinks).
The only other time that I ordered a real trago was when we went to the boliche (dance club/meet market) called La Chimere. A little about that; you have to be committed to go because you’re in it for the long haul. You take a “traffic” there at about 2am that brings you back at about 7am. When we got there at 2:30am, (the place was dead because it was still too early) the first order of business was to get drinks. To insure that we were up for the big night ahead, we both ordered Red Bull and Vodkas which they call Speed con Vodka. Fitting. There was some confusion over the drink ordering process (a daily occurrence in my constant struggle to learn the language). I was glad to see that both drinks came with large glasses of water. But wait, where’s the vodka? Oh… That’s not water…
There is really no reason to order tragos here. For one, they’re expensive, but what’s more, they aren’t any good. Look, you can get a whole bottle of tasty wine for the same price or less than a crappy mixed drink. Anyway, it was fun to get a little loopy and help a friend bring in 21 proper like. Apparently on the way home I started carrying a big rock I liked. Luckily there were no mini-parks along the way.
