My Second Home

The perspective of time is very interesting in your life especially when you are living in a foreign country.  We were in Ecuador for three months and now I have been in Argentina now for almost seven months.  It takes many lifetimes to truly understand, but in this life I am beginning to understand how making a commitment for a certain amount of time to a particular thing really matters.  I have been here now long enough in Argentina to understand what life is about here and how I can officially in my mind now call this place my second home.

I have been taken care of by everyone who I have met.  From my friends at the place I hang out during the day, to the shop keepers in my little barrio, and especially my family in my home that I have been living in now since the day I arrived.

It is funny how life works out sometimes.  You get lucky a lot of tiimes in life, and surely you make your luck as well.  But those days back in New Mexico before coming down to Argentina who would have thought that the place I found to live initially would be the place I stayed the whole time I was in Argentina.

Seven months is a good amount of time.  There are thresholds in life about time, amounts of time where once you pass the mark, you can say it it was ten years or ten months.  Enough time to know.

One of the things that I have been extremely satisfied with in Buenos Aires is the climate.  It is a lovely climate.  I guess you can call it Mediterranean.  Having lived in California twice for over six years, four years in the Bay Area and two years in LA, I can honestly say that the climate in Buenos Aires is similar to California.  And it makes sense.  California is around 35 degrees north and Buenos Aires is around 35 degrees south.  This climate is very different from Ecuador.  In Ecuador during the months of January, February and March it rained almost every day.  Here in Buenos Aires during the spring, summer, and beginning of autumn the hot sticky days in December and January follow into February and March with more rain and cooler days.  This is of course a function of the moisture as well, as the autumn approaches the amount of rain falling from the sky slightly increases.

But during the hot summer months the occasional rains are a blessing in cooling off the big city.  Recenlty I have done some interesting things.  I am venturing out a bit more from BA into the country side and on to some smaller towns in the surrounding areas.  Last week I went to La Plata with some nice friends who showed me around the smaller city.  La Plata is about one and one half hours on the train from BA.  If you are eating ice cream on the ride, it seems a lot quicker, especially in the company of friends who make you laugh a lot.

La Plata is on the river as well.  It is just further south from BA.  The train ride starts in BA and ends in La Plata, so you literally take the whole line in, and go from beginning to end.  La Plata is home to one of the largest catolica cathedrals in South America.  Its consruction began in 1884 and over one hundred years later it was finally coming to completion.  Building big churches today is no easy feat, and one hundred years, mas o menos is a good amount of time for working on a project.  We had the opportunity to go up in the towers of the cathedral and take in the magnificent views of the surrounding area.  We were high above the pampa, or flat land that surrounds Buenos Aires.  La Plata is the capital of the province of Buenos Aires and Capital Federal which is the heart of the city of Buenos Aires is the capital of Argentina.

La Plata is known as the city of diagonals.  There are diagonal streets all over the town and the names of the streets are numbers and now real names.  So La Plata is unique in several different ways.

I also took a train ride out of town another day to a smaller village of Pilar.   It is also on another train line and the line begins at Retiro, the main train station in BA and ends in the small town of Pilar.  I was fortunate enough to ride the train all the way in both directions.  I was surprised however to learn after arriving in Pilar and spending the afternoon there that upon returning to the train station that the train had broken down.  So in my mind there was no way to return to Buenos Aires, and I did not know the other busses and where they went.  Depending on one means of transportation to get you somewhere is not always a great idea, especially when you decided to hardly take any money with you.  So, if I did decide to spend the night there it would have been possibly kind of chilly.  Luckily eventually the return train showed up, and whisked me back home to Buenos Aires.  We passed by plenty of stations on the way home without stopping as I suppose the driver wanted to get back home, so he could keep the trains running on time.  As far as the people that had to get off at all of the stops we passed by, I guess they get back on the train and go in the other direction, or decide to take a bus back home.