Power of the unexpected

Back from the weekend, I can't help but thinking that plans and schedules are really useless in Real Life more often than one might guess, and that indeed the joys of Real Life are usually to be found in the chanceful parts. I say this because I managed to pull off a nice weekend despite the fact that my ideas for it got completely scrambled.

As I said earlier, the Rosarigasinos are planning a photo exhibition. We'd scheduled an informal meeting in a bar, Saturday morning, to get all of our pictures together and collect the money for high-impact plastic sheet we're going to use to frame them. But since I was having my friends over for a late birthday celebration on Friday night, I took them beforehand to Facundo's place (Facundo is one of the Rosarigasinos). First unplanned occurrence — I changed my mind at the last moment and chose a different picture instead of one I'd selected before. I'd given quite a lot of thought to it, since we only get to show three photos each, but I looked at it and found it nice and Facundo concurred, so I dropped the other picture.

The picture I decided to use instead of the other

Friday night dinner was pizza and bits of the assorted crap that goes with beer. One of my friends has a 3-year-old child who is generally a good girl (this time was no exception), but has the horrible habit of junk food which afflicts so many children her age, and which the mother cheerfully allows. Faced with greasy cardboard-like chips, delicious home-made pizza, sausages in tomato sauce, meatballs and peanuts, the little junk addict went straight to the chips. (Even the peanuts would've been better. They've got Omega-3 and stuff.) I'm of the rather extreme opinion that children shouldn't be allowed to eat junk food, drink Coke or watch TV until they're at least 5, but it wasn't my call. So I only said to my friend, as she motioned for more chips, "Is she not going to have any real food?".

Saturday morning, second unplanned occurrence — I woke up after only 4 hours, too late to reverse my decision and rush to the Rosarigasinos' gathering, and too early to do anything else. Got up, had breakfast, and then I decided to go jogging. Bad idea. Lots of pizza and peanuts washed down with beer at unusual times, plus little sleep that gets your head alert again but doesn't rest your body, meant that I was tired too soon. I did manage to run all the way, about 5 km, stopping every now and then. It was OK; I needed to resume the habit some day.

Got home, took a shower, had lunch, then went to sleep again. I figured I was going to get out in the evening, and on Sunday either go on a photo trip to a nearby town (with a friend and her photography classmates) or have grilled fish for lunch (with another friend), so I'd better get decent sleep or I'd be wasted. Third and fourth unplanned occurrences — the first friend I called wasn't sure he could go out due to a family problem; the second one had his cell phone turned off or not working. Fifth unplanned occurrence — no fish; my friend of the fantastic grill was suddenly going to have his parents over. Sixth unplanned occurrence — my friend of the photo trip had second thoughts and nobody in her group had arranged anything, so the trip was basically cancelled.

Fine. So I go to sleep early (on a Saturday night! what a sin!) and next day, facing a sunny Sunday with nothing to do, I start by having copious breakfast and then go out to walk and take pictures. I grabbed a few ones of the Ludueña Stream. You can see the difference in level from the first picture, taken where the open channelized section becomes piped underground, and the last picture, where the stream ends in the Paraná. Those are a mile apart at most. The channel is a real dump when it's low, as it's now (compare to the time of the Great Rains). The little harbour in the mouth of the stream was being dredged less than a month ago, but the water level seems to be OK now.

Pollution in the channelized stream

Mouth of the Ludueña Stream

I was surprised to see that, despite the horrible pollution, there were birds, fish and turtles in the stream. The black ones are biguás (aka Neotropic Cormorant, Phalacrocorax brasilianus); I don't know what the other one is. I also saw a group of small birds with pointed wings, black with an iridescent blue patch on the head and back, and a kingfisher (the goddamn bird waited until I was on top of him, camera on hand, and right then it flew away).

Biguás (neotropic cormorants)

Some bird

A biguá up close

All of these, of course, were unplanned occurrences.

In the meantime I received an SMS from my friend who couldn't go out — saying he could go out after all. It was dated Saturday at 10:40 PM, about twelve hours before the time when I received it. The cellphone grid works like hell, and I was very angry, but then if I'd gotten out Saturday, I wouldn't have met those birds on Sunday morning.

So I say to my friend, let's go somewhere this afternoon. Sure enough, we meet, get some hot water in a thermos for mate, drop by another friend's house, and head for the Parque de las Colectividades. The streets and the parks near the river were packed.

Parque de las Colectividades

Last unplanned occurrence — we run into some friends of my friend and, as the sun goes down, they propose having some snacks. I think beer and peanuts, they think big picada. No way, I tell them; I don't have that money on me and I just want something light. We settle on a compromise — fried chips (real potato chips fried on the spot, not salty pseudo-potato flakes) and a carlito (hot sandwich or tostado with ham, cheese, chicken, red pepper strips, and salsa golf) with one beer for three of us and water and orange juice for the other two (one had a late hangover, the other one had to drive a car back home). The service was slow, the waitress un-cheerful, the food expensive, but at least it was good enough.

And that's the story of my unplanned weekend.

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!

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.

Night out with the boys

I don't usually do advertising for free, but I thought this would merit some. Last Saturday night I went with some friends to a bar that one of them had visited once long ago. Nenina is on a corner of the northern Costanera (the avenue that follows the Paraná River starting just north of the city center), close to the impressive arc of the Rosario-Victoria Bridge, maybe 300 m south of Circunvalación Avenue and the municipal limit. Not many people go there on purpose, since the "good" parts of Costanera are on the middle section, full of open-air bars, discos, and the beach. Once you get to Nenina, you either stop there or have to turn back, or at most make in a wide detour to go up to Circunvalación, on the bridge, and across the maze of islands and river arms, eastward, to Entre Ríos.

I tell you, this bar should be in tourist guidebooks. Rosario's been working on that field lately, initially much to the surprise of us locals, but I still have to see a guide with a list of those small places that make a city special — those curious spots that most people don't know about and that you get news of only by word of mouth.

Nenina can be a bar like any other, where you can order a pizza or a carlitos (a hot sandwich with cheese, ham, and ketchup, optionally plus tomato slices, hard-boiled egg, mayonnaise, etc., not a tostado as in Buenos Aires) and down it with a beer... but that would be an awful waste. The place specializes in cocktails, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic; its menu is about 70% drinks. It's not cheap, but it's not expensive either; and the service is so good that it makes the money seem unimportant. These guys prepare a drink like a chef prepares a favourite dish.

My friends and I sampled a few cocktails and were pleased about the quality and variety. It's not that simple to have a place in a small establishment (that already needs to cook and serve regular bar/restaurant food and drink) to store a sufficient amount of several icecream flavours, several types of fresh fruit (lemon, orange, pineapple, watermelon, strawberry...), a lot of alcoholic beverages, and slightly more exotic ingredients (Tabasco sauce for Bloody Maries, fresh leaves of hierba buena for mojitos). The drinks do take a while to come, since the place seems to be packed all the time. We arrived a bit late and couldn't get a table outside — the outside is another bar! — so we went inside, which was a bit hot. That (lack of a) choice proved the best, since one hour later it started raining... and raining... and then there was something like a hurricane. Indeed, with the icecream cocktails and the margaritas to the tune of Gloria Stefan, I felt like I was in the Caribbean during the hurricane season. Naturally, at this point the people drinking outside had to get in or leave, so the place became slightly more packed; but the wind cooled the inside of the place.

The storm went on and on... You could see the trees buckling and hear the curtains of rain hitting the roof and the windows. Mind you, we had no wheels to go back. None of us owns a car, and anyway nobody in Rosario goes out by car anymore if they plan to drink alcohol. We got to the place by bus and had to get out like that; a taxi from such a distant place to anyone's house would've been too expensive (not in an emergency, but this wasn't one, and we'd forked more than a few pesos already). We waited (Bloody Mary) and waited (more Bloody Mary) and as the storm subsided a bit we decided to brave the drizzle and go up six or seven blocks to Roundeau Boulevard, where we'd be able to catch plenty of buses. That was a mistake. Two blocks after that the drizzle turned into a deluge, as the huge low-pressure center above us sucked in more clouds. The storm reassembled and we had to seek shelter in a porch. Forty-five minutes later the rain stopped (mostly). Off we went to get our bus.

Long story short, I arrived home much later, wet and shivering. Good news is that my immune system seems to have toughened; after a string of colds in last autumn and winter, I didn't catch anything...