Happy Birthday to me!

Ok so this will be a quick post since I haven't been up to much new since the last one and the fact that I'm also typing this on my iPad which is slower and will inevitably lead to some typos. I'm about to start traveling non-stop so the rest of my blog posts should be pretty entertaining.

I've been continuing to hang out, eat, live the dream, etc. here in Buenos Aires. Unfortunately I've picked up a pretty nasty cold over the past few days that has put a damper on properly celebrating my last weekend here.

Last weekend Joe, a fraternity brother from Davidson, was here for a little while with one of his friends from Davidson, Lorena, who is originally from Argentina. I joined them for an adventure to the city's Chinatown (Barrio Chino), where I found some creamy peanut butter, which I was pretty excited about. Later the three of us went to dinner at a parilla with Dolores, a family friend of Lorena. Dolores was a really interesting person: In addition to running ultra-marathons and such in her spare time, she is also the illustrator of the Spanish version of the Harry Potter books. I thought that was particularly cool since I actually have a copy of her work with me right now. I'm about to finish the 5th (Harry Potter y la Orden del Fenix). I've been reading them to practice my Spanish. 

Last Sunday, I went with some of my roommates and friends to Tigre, a beautiful city an hour away from Buenos Aires. The weather was great and the city is very nice. It is on a bunch of different rivers and other bodies of water and is a popular weekend getaway spot for people from BA. We took a water taxi to an island where we got lunch on the river and walked around for a bit, exploring the island. It was a lot of fun. Somehow, I ended up being an American in a group of 6 other French people, so I stayed more quiet that day than I normally would. 

Tuesday was my 22nd birthday. This is the second year in a row that I've celebrated it here in BA. (As you can imagine 21 was not quite as big of a deal as it would have been in the States). I had a little party at a popular bar here called Sugar. There were about 7 or 8 nationalities represented, which I thought was pretty cool. In addition, I was serenaded with 4 different renditions of the birthday song: French, Portuguese, Spanish, and English. It was a crazy night and a lot of fun. 

The past two Fridays I joined my old coworkers for lunch and really enjoyed seeing them. Yesterday, my old boss showed me all of the new stuff related to the work I did last year. It was really cool to see that I had actually done some really useful work for them. After lunch, yesterday I said goodbye to all of them, which wasn't fun. Unfortunately I'm just getting started with the goodbyes.

Fortunately, I'll be saying hello to my sister, who arrives here tomorrow. We'll be hanging out in the city for 3 days before heading west as we make our way across Argentina to Santiago, Chile over the next 2 weeks. From there, she'll fly home and I will fly to La Paz, Bolivia. After a few days in La Paz, I'll travel through Peru for the next two weeks before flying home from Lima on August 31. I'm really excited, but the relaxing part of South American adventure is definitively over. I will be constantly on the move for the next month.