Kites, birthday party, roleplaying, asado

Quite a lot of things to report, so I'm doing it in order.

First, the kite festival seems to have been very interesting, only I wasn't there to enjoy it. As it turned out, the whole weekend was extremely cold and windy, quite possibly superb to fly kites, but not good for fragile humans. Since the festival's schedule said "Friday, Saturday and Sunday, starting 10 AM", I went to the Parque Scalabrini Ortiz on Saturday at about 11 AM hoping to find the festival raging. There were only a few people trying kites, setting up tents, and watching. The blue-ringed octopus was impressive, but there wasn't much to see apart from it.

When I was starting to leave, an hour later, someone announced over a loudspeaker that "in a few minutes" they'd be starting to open the festival, formally, with an exhibition of some sort. My head hurt and my nose was already a half-melted icicle, so I left. Saturday afternoon was overcast and I had to go out at night because it was my brother's birthday and he was going to celebrate it with pizza in a bar, so took an aspirin, a long siesta, and a very hot shower, in that order, thus regaining a measure of consciousness.

I couldn't go to the festival's last day either (you'll see why soon). So I only got to take a few pictures on Saturday morning, but one my photography mates was covering the event and took more than a hundred, so please check them out: 7º Festival Internacional de Barriletes.

Saturday night, I ate with my brother and his friends and a couple of mine, and the ones left after that went to another bar and had a cup of coffee. My friends and I then split and went for beer elsewhere. The last place was as crowded as it was warm, fortunately.

Sunday started at noon for me. Again it was very cold, but I had already arranged a roleplaying meeting. The place was new, though — the home of one my players, where none of us had gone before, in Granadero Baigorria, just outside Rosario. Easy enough to go by bus, but not nearly as advisable to return from at night in winter (both weather- and safety-wise). The house resembled, at parts, a cross of a junkyard with an untamed garden, plus living spaces with touches of several decades of the 20th century: alcohol burners, a collection of dark glass bottles and flasks, a lava lamp. Very interesting indeed.

There was a dog too... a Giant Schnauzer, an adorable black-haired monster that alternatively amused and bothered us, tirelessly jumping around, trying to make us, cold humans, into one of his own. He had to be confined to a neighbouring room behind a couple of chairs to stop him from assaulting the asado we made in the evening. Dogs will be dogs!

The RPG session went fine. Our host's character was just entering the story and he made a good job of it as an older, experienced leader of men with a dark past, supposedly "retired" but actually under the command of powers beyond his comprehension. So far I've only prepared the characters for a more direct encounter with those powers, which they'll run into, violently, very soon. Mwa ha ha!