Outdoors mind-clearing

I've heard (somebody will correct me if I mis-) that we Argentinians are among the most gregarious and outgoing folks in the world. Going out to a park by the river in large numbers when there's a noticeable breeze and a freezing cold must surely count.

Anxious to escape the monotony of a Sunday at home was the motivation; the fact that Sunday actually honoured its etymology (not a cloud in sight) was the excuse. You simply can't stay home when there's such a nice day outside, and if you're sick and tired of staying inside waiting for the "polar wave" to subside, you'll do anything. (If you live outside Argentina, consider this: temperatures just above or below freezing every other morning and evening for two months. That's not a wave, that's a flood.)

Parque de las Colectividades, Rosario

I caught my second cold of the year more than a week ago, doing the second afternoon trip on the Barco Ciudad de Rosario I with the Rosarigasinos, and I'm still rather rough, but I couldn't resist the sun and went with a couple of friends to have mate by the river. Silly us, for some reason we were sure we were the only ones to be so clever, but alas, the coast of Rosario (all the 7 km of it) was full of people, young, old (with additional scarves), middle-aged (with kids), and dogs fighting, barking at, or trying to copulate with other dogs, when not sniffing around people's legs and belongings looking for yet another place to soil with the byproducts of their metabolism.

It was quite OK, though. It's always fun to talk nonsense over mate for a while. That is, until the sun starts to go down and the cold bites you again. In the meantime, I managed to do some boat-spotting. There's a Flickr group that collects pictures of ships in the Paraná River, and I'm always happy to contribute. Being part of the (soon-obsolete, I guess) last generation of people who were born and lived a good part of their life without the Internet and globalized communications, I'm still amazed when I realize I can spot a cargo ship off the coast of the city and, mere hours later, learn everything about it just by googling its name.


(If you're curious, it's the Jag Rishi. It's an Indian drybulk cargo, and from an online report I found and promptly misplaced, it appears to be taking cereal from the terminals that Cargill has here in Rosario and in San Lorenzo, to the UK. Seems like a nice boat, though actually they all look the same... The name in devanagari was a nice touch.)

Well, besides nonsense and some politics (on which I won't allow to get started), the boys and I discussed and decided to start role-playing again after an overlong hiatus. The direction, or more properly the storytelling, will be done by moi. Should be fun, unless I get nasty like one of those stereotypical stage directors when dealing with "incompetent" actors, which I tend to do... sometimes. Ahem.