Weekend Report - 04.25.2010

This past weekend was a lot of fun. I already told you about Reggaeton Night on Friday. Well, on Saturday I spent most of the afternoon studying, but that evening I went with some buddies to a birthday party. The girl hosting the party was from Italy, and pretty much everyone there was from Europe or different parts of Latin America. I enjoyed this crowd a good bit more than the last ex-pat party I attended several weeks ago. That last ex-pay party was part of the inspiration for my very first blog post - see "Gringo".

Anyway, on Saturday I started out the evening with my friends, Felix and Sebastian. That is Felix on the left in the picture. He is a buddy from my Maritime Law class at the UBA. Felix is a great guy and lots of fun to hang out with; however, I do not think he will be be helping me out a whole lot in preparing for exams because he doesn't show up at class half the time. I've also seen his handwriting, which is complete sh*t. I'll be much better off studying with a nice girl - a strategy I have discussed in a previous post.

Sebastian is the guy squeezed in between me and the skeptical-looking girl with big hair in the picture above. Sebastian is one of Felix's best friends, and we hit it off pretty well when we all went out together a couple weeks ago. Sebastian is one of those guys who seems to know everybody. For example, in Buenos Aires the stores stop selling alcohol at 11:00 p.m., but Sebastian always seems to be on a first-name basis with the owner of the Kiosks. He generally walks in and exchanges some jokes and banter with whomever is working, and then they go ahead and sell us

Part 3 - Stuck in Panama City at 4:00 a.m. with no Wallet, Money or Identification

This is a story from just a couple months ago. I was in Panama and had gone out for the evening with a friend of mine. We had dinner, then went for some drinks, then went to an apartment in Paitilla where several of the her friends were having a little party. Well, at about 3:00 a.m., we left in a taxi. The taxi dropped her off at her house in El Dorado, and then the taxi driver was going to take me to my buddy Ben's apartment where I was staying for the night. I was about half-way to Ben's place when I realized I didn't have my wallet.

I had the wallet earlier in the night when we went for dinner and drinks, so I thought it must have fallen out of my pocket back in the Paitilla apartment. I asked the taxi driver to take me back to to the party. Well, the wallet wasn't there. I now had 2 immediate problems: First, I didn't know how I was going to get back to Ben's apartment, because I didn't have money for a taxi. That leads to the second problem - I had a taxi driver waiting for me downstairs who expected to be paid for driving the girl home and then taking me all the way back to the Paitilla party.

I asked the people at the party if someone could "loan" me a few dollars to pay the taxi driver. I managed to find one guy who gave me $5. I went downstairs and asked the taxi driver how much I owed him - $8 he says. My reply was, "Well, all I have is $5." The taxi driver called me an "awebao" (read "dumbass") and squealed his tires as he sped away. It is interesting how squealing your tires is an international way of saying "I feel very angry with you". Anyway, as the taxi sped away, I knew that one of my problems was now gone.

Then I started trying to think of how I could get back to Ben's apartment, which was several miles away.

Weekend Report - 03.28.2010

It has been a fun wknd. On Friday I got some work done and signed up for the classes I am taking this semester. That night my friend Analia invited me to a birthday dinner for one of her friends. It was a little bit of an older crowd - most of them in their thirties. Of course we ate a lot of beef and went through several bottles of wine. Beef is a staple here in Argentina, and you eat a lot of it wherever you go.

After dinner, we went to a salsa bar called Cuba Mía. This place was great. When we arrived around 1 a.m. there were all these couples dancing salsa. These folks really knew how to dance, so it was cool watching them. Apparently my friend Analia has taken some salsa classes, and she got out there a couple times. She was really, really good.

At around 2:30 they started playing more diverse music. There wasn't a D.J., but there was always someone up there singing and leading the music. I recorded some video with my cell phone, but I do not have the cable to connect the phone to my computer. So instead I have included the YouTube video above of one of the songs they sang. My ex-girlfriend had this song in her head for months after she came back from Cuba last year. Great song - listen to it! I also drank Fernet, which is definitely an acquired taste...

On Saturday, I spent most of the afternoon at my buddy Francisco's place. I have recorded a couple of my Arbitration classes, and Francisco offered to listen to them with me and help me with anything I didn't understand. Unfortunately,