A Home Away From Home

After staying in an adequate, but less-than private hostel for my first week in Buenos Aires, I've found a shared apartment and moved in. The place is called La Casa de Marina, and it's run by a very generous and amicable lady named Marina. She's artsy and young at heart, which makes for relaxed and colorful household full of unique second hand furniture, exotic travel souvenirs, classic literature, and, of course, young travelers from all over. Currently there's me, a guy from Austrailia, a guy from the US, and a gal from Sweden. A young couple from Spain arrive in two weeks, my buddy Chris from the US will be here in February, and who knows what else the cat will drag in?

As it's in San Telmo, a historic part of Buenos Aires, the apartment is old and rough around the edges, but in in a cleaned up, hip, NY loft sort of way. Like all the other old dwellings in the city, the ceilings are really high, like 12 or 15 feet, so the whole apartment feels quite spacious (I think the high ceilings are for letting the oppressive heat and humidity rise just a little higher, maybe even where a breeze coming in through the balcony might carry them away). There's a big living room with two little balconies at one end of the apartment; in the middle are three rooms, a bathroom and a very long hallway; at the other end is the kitchen and another open air room. It's about four floors above the cobblestone street, so you ride a tiny little elevator up through the winding stairs to our door. If it's night time, the stairwell is completely dark and the only light is from a single bulb in the tiny cage that is the elevator. It's a bit eery, as if you're rising up through a mine shaft to go to bed.

Around the corner are tons of street cafes, little grocers and, of course, the ubiquitous Internet cafe, which, in Buenos Aires, you can't walk 100 feet without passing one. On Saturdays, as I found out this morning, a bunch of food vendors gather on our little Balcarce street to sell fresh vegetables, fish, bread, pastries, meats and eggs. I shopped there today, buying four tomatoes, a bushel of bananas, two onions, a head of lettuce and one peach, all for 5 peso. That's $1.70 in dollars! Ridiculous, isn't it?