home sweet home

Last few weeks have been demanding. I had become truely tired of travelling and living out of a suitcase, tired of 30 hour bus rides, tired of not having a home to come home to, missing work and dreading starting from scratch again. I thought buggerit, even if i miss out on an opportunity of a life time i just needed to go home and rest, if not roost. But again I needed to be patient. Argentinians revealed themselves to be a good sort. And so on one rainy day here, sitting in and trying to consolidate my decision to go home (and any of you that know me well know how i torture myself with my own indeciveness), i started visualising life home and life abroad. The thought of going back to Glen Waverley (not that there anything intrinsically wrong with that) in the dead of winter, jobless and solitary, made me think that hanging out in Buenos Aires till the end of the year, the town that doesn´t sleep and lacks the usual xenophobia one encounters, is probably a brilliant idea. So here i´ll stay. having made a decision finally makes any outcome a good outcome.

This week i went back to Brazil in a mad rush to pick up my luggage and get my life started. Only 2 days there, but bloody interesting. When I get back to the hostel i had been staying, i hear that 68 sydney woman i met last time was still there. But when i went to the tv room to see her, i found her collapsed on the floor with folks around her trying to make sure she didn´t die. She came round finally and i accompanied her to the emergency ward of a state hospital... and remember she only speaks Arabic and english, but she was out of it anyway, and i thought i had to get by with my spanish. Well the doctor who eventually saw her, couldn´t bare listening to me anymore and so reluctantly agreed to speak english. There were loads of folks everywhere, drips hanging off everyone nearly, growns, vomit, emancipated bodies, and medical staff who just get there when they get there. Three hours later, after good ol Fatima gets her morphine hit, we´re back. Turns out she´s been getting robbed a lot, is stressed with high blood pressure and so smokes 3 packets a day. There´s also something fishy going on that she just can´t talk about and something that prohibits her from leaving the country for the next 2 years. Staying in a tiny cheap room with no windows makes her feel like she´s already in her coffin - this looks like a Mike Munroe story. Apart from that, i did manage to have an extremely enlighting and interesting conversation for an hour with a Brazilian - me talking spanish and he portugese!

Oh and i´ll be putting up photos soon, seeing i got myself a camera. Probably not the wisest thing to do 9.30 in the morning, hungry sort of ,and after only an hours sleep, to impulsively stop at the camera shopwindow in the airport ...oh well, now you can see how i´ve grown...as soon as i figure out how to use it.