Today I went to the gym to lift and run, completing both actions because I wanted to feel good. Then I walked all the way to Shopping Abasto and wasted time at said shopping mall. Wasted time looking for a coffee maker that would suffice, promising to myself I wouldn’t buy anything new, and leaving the mall with nothing. The competing desire was to do homework, but that’s not really a desire, but a task at hand, that I must complete, otherwise I’m screwed… Regardless of the things I just said, I still went to Shopping Abasto, and the pace of people inside there was glacially slow, and so I had to dodge several people on several different occasions. This was all fine, despite the fact that I felt like a trapeze artist once when I slipped past an elderly lady with a cane on the right side, barely squeaking by the wall and this person, whom I almost ran into, and who probably cursed me silently after I muttered “Lo siento,” under my breath, which means, literally, “I feel it.” I did feel it, but I couldn’t tell her at the time.
I wasted time at Shopping Abasto looking for a manual coffee grinder as well, an instrument I did not find there, and rather, I saw what I thought to be a music store, with Marshall amplifiers and a guitar on display, however, the store had nothing to do with musical equipment, but was a mere clothing store. Needless to say, I was highly disappointed by this mediocre performance by the store to show me, a major guitar enthusiast, an electric guitar setup on display, but to sell nothing of the like in the actual store. How ludicrous this was! And I didn’t even bother walking in, either.
My trip to Shopping Abasto was thus capped off by the fact that I had to wait for the subway on the way home, and this was fine. It concluded there, but then I was inspired to buy a Coke in a glass bottle at a kiosco, (a small miscellaneous food item store). And my impulse to write this blog was spurred by the simple fact that I do not wish to do anything homework-related tonight, even though I have a lot of work to do.
And anyway, the glass bottle Coke was ridiculously good, though it may have been the placebo effect from the bottle being made of glass that made the experience so pleasurable, who knows.
And my little brother called me and we talked of video games we used to play, and he recently started playing one of those long forgotten video games again, and thus I was tempted to log back in, but sanity helped me out and prevented me from doing that. This was a game that I had wasted many hours on in my past.
I ate in a small pizza shop where they played a ridiculously good song whose artist I was luckily able to find. The pizza had ham and some red peppers on it. I waited probably 30 minutes or fewer for my pizza to be prepared. This was acceptable to me. I was hungering for a pizza late in the day. And thus I capitalized on this desire.
And I also had gone to Villa La Angostura a couple weeks ago, which was a fun trip, indeed. It was fun primarily because of the novelty of the location; on dirt roads most of the time we drove, especially when you asked for a taxi, and it was hard to flag one down nonetheless… The location was beautiful as well; large lakes were around us, seemingly in every direction, and this was one of the key highlights. The blue expanses of lakes were quite stunning, there were few boats that I saw, at least, and perhaps they were out there, just maybe more in the distance. We did some biking, riding with about 35 people at once, which I wouldn’t recommend unless you have to, though I was able to enjoy a few moments of relative peace and solace during the bike ride, but a lot of it was spent trying not to hit other people in my group. It seemed like a pretty remote place. We flew in via the Bariloche airport, and after that we took about an hour and a half bus ride to where we were to stay. I bought maté and a cup to make it in, in order to integrate myself into Argentinian culture. Maté is a earthy tea that a lot of folks down here love. It is made in a small cup, and is drunk out of a straw, while not-quite-boiling water is poured on top of the fresh maté leaves. My host brother and a friend of mine both taught me the best methods for cultivating the best cup of maté. There are various techniques, but the most important takeaway would be that you don’t boil the water like you do with ordinary tea because this would scald the maté leaves.
Words 
Leave a comment