a dancing, spanish speaking carnivore

try walking across a dance floor in cali or anywhere in colombia, or in buenos aires and your sure to lose a limb. its like walking across a fucking land mine. i mean you better have moves like barry sanders, bobbing and weaving through swinging and twirling couples, desperately trying to make your way to where "you think" the bathroom is. ppssss, good luck my friend. I tried my hand at a little tango (which i guess tango means "sadness over losing the one you love") in buenos aires. gosh, it was dispacable, lieutenant Dan couldve performed better.....after the vietnam war that is.

so before my next attempt, a few colombian friends i met in bogota were kind, and patient enough to give me salsa lessons. after drinking a litre of a local fermented corn brew/alchoholic mixture/aguardiente called chicha that is. this proved to be futile. i still walked into the bar that night with 2 left feet. oh well, some things were just not meant to be.

Standard operation procedure in Buenos Aires: get off work or finish doing whatever your doing (in my case walking endless miles around an unfamiliar city) till about 7 or 8pm, take a nap till 10, go out and eat a strictly beef diet dinner at 11, hit the bars at 1am, drink as much isenback as possible till 7am, catch another beef filled breakfast, and head home around 9am. i cant do this much longer. the consuming of so much beef is slowly shutting down my digestive system. i mean i ate so much meat that i felt like i just finished eating a lion that just finished eating a wildabeast (just picture it for a sec). But pain no more, i must consume.

I feel it, i feel my spanish getting better, understanding more, picking up on more of conversations. at least this is what i thought. I have been staying with an argentinian friend who lives in buenos aires. we met in medellin. we went out with him and some of his friends for some drinks and mate sessions. why is that when i hear a group of young argentinian people speak, i automatically assume they´re talking about something political or intellectual. i have no idea why that is. but i just assume theyre talking about some upcoming revolution or planning a revolt of some sort. i dont know but i want to be a part of it.








family guy-"you cant look at that and tell me it doesnt look like a giant penis"




time for me to leave the hectic city and head north to check out some falling water of sorts. Iguazu falls. not sure how it compares to niagara falls but ill be the judge of that. you enter the park and must walk a short distance of a couple km to the first set of falls. before even entering the trail, you can hear the roaring thunder of the massive falling lake. the sheer power of the falls is astounding. a bit touristy though. so you walk around the park from area to area as tiny butterflies zip past your head.


unless your on a mission to visit everywhere in the world or need to buy black market electronics, liquor, cigarettes or anything one can think of, you have absolutely no need to visit Cuidad del este, paraguay. i had a legitimate reason however. my camera was stolen in colombia and i needed a replacement. since CDE is on the borders of brazil and puerto iguazu falls, arg, it was a hop, skip and illegal border crossing away. Electronics are cheaper here then anywhere in south america because of 2 reasons: 1. paraguya does not have an import tax an electronic items. 2. when your crossing the border from argentina on a rickety, non-patrolled bridge, you cross alongside people smuggling goods on horseback. you can seriously find anything and everything here. i saw a whole street dedicated to stearing wheel covers. no joke. this place is Tijuana on steroids. So i hustled and bustled through the crowded, humid, sticky city streets trying to wheel and deal on a good camera. i randomly stumbled into a store and began to bargain with the clerk. I overheard two people behind the counter say something to each other in arabic. what? arabic in paraguay? no fuckin way, it cant be, i must be hallucinating from the scent of open sewers and overcooked unknown meat. i decided to investigate. "you speak arabic" i said to them. "hell yeah, why the hell do you speak arabic". before i could finish my sentence he was making me a turkish coffee and he explained to me the big lebonese migration to paraguay. I had to support my peeps. bought the camera and got the hell out of dodge.











so seeing how i hitchhiked in the US successfully, id say that constitutes me as an expert. i mean if i could do it back home, it should be a breeze in argentina where its rumored to be efficient, and common. i plan on somehow, cheaply making my way to the mystical land of patagonia, where it has been my dream to see the andes mountains. so im off to try my hand (no pun) at the forgotten art of thumbing a ride. lets see what i get into now.

release me

Medellin, once the worlds most dangerous city (thank you Detroit and Baghdad for taking that title) is now a bustling city of beautiful colonial architecture, an immaculate metro system, and an abundance of museums and galleries. The city of eternal spring has shed its drug nightmare and is a wonderful place to be. I didnt want to leave. I arrived with the intention of leaving after a couple days and ended up staying 8 days. like i have somewhere else to be. i spent the first couple days reliving a chicago tradition. that is riding the metro at all hours of the night all over the city. familiarize myself. its the best way. by far my favorite city in colombia thus far. for some reason it just feels like i belong here. Medellin is filled with gregarious, resiliant citizens eager to shed the darkness of their past and not yet completely acquainted with the gringo tourist traveling just for the hell of it. I was given a couple "what the hell are you doing here" looks while out and about. granted that may have been because i was in neighborhood i clearly didnt belong in. it would be like walking down cass corridor in detroit with a suit and tie and a briefcase.

The hostal i stayed at felt like family. Claudia, the owner, would convince us all to make a big dinner and eat like family as opposed to going out to eat. and then she would always bust out a gallon bucket of ice cream for everyone to enjoy. like being given a treat by your mom after getting a star/smiley face after your first spelling test.

The people there were great. I met a japanese guy named Azou who was traveling solo and didnt speak much spanish or english. the talent and memory this man possessed blew my mind. He didnt own a camera. So at the end of every night he would sit down with his stencils and drawing book and re-create the image of the most memorable thing from that day. There were drawings of the mountains, churches, people he met, buildings and even meals he ate. I asked him what was so memorable about that meal and he replied in a bruce lee accent "i was just glad to eat". he was extremely skilled. They were more portraits then simple drawings.

On one of the days i decided to roam around the Universidad de Antioquia. Like most universities in colombia, it is a private school and hence very expensive. tuition is almost on par with that of STATE U per semester. so typically only the wealthy can afford an education. The campus is a very politicaly outspoken campus though. While meandering through the halls i came across a spray painting on the lockers: LESS REPRESSION, MORE EDUCATION.




There was beautifully painted murals on the wall that would make the best graffitti artist in NY feel small. On the politcal science building there was a giant mural of Che Guevara.

These kinds of political statements would be washed over in a matter of minutes in the states. i think im going to start this trend back home. My first piece of work will be "LONG LIVE SADDAM". Yeah, i think thatll work.

As i was walking by a lectur hall, a professor came and grabbed me by the arm and dragged me into the class like an eagle scooping a fish out of the water. Before i can object, i was in the middle of a "bi-lingual engineering day" lecture. He saw that i was a foreigner and assumed i knew spanish. NOPE. there was about 30 students in the class, and each student was asked to come up front and say to the class in a language other then english and spanish why they chose engineering. no problem i thought. ill dazzle them with chaldean. A success. after the class i was in a conversation with a bunch of colombians about iraqi politics.



The renaissance is most noticeable in Santo Domingo. A once impenetrable slum of tin-roofed shanties on a hillside in northern Medellín, that once took over an hour on a rickety bus ride now takes 10 minutes on the new metro cable cars that run up the mountain. There is also the newly built Parque Biblioteca España. An opal shaped library perched on the edge of the hill. took the cable car to the top and hiked the rest of the way to the actual top of the hill where there were no homes or anything, just a vacant field. time for a break. I lay down on my back and play a game with the sky above. I close my eyes and open them every few minutes to a new set of clouds and try to guess what they resemble. With "realease me" by PJ on repeat (for reasons known why), i lay comfortable with my face turned up toward the face of the sun, and i let the world around me rush on unnoticed.