Since Friday last week I am back to Buenos Aires and enjoy city life and a social environment. I am staying with a friend of a friend of mine who happenes to have a room to let. This accomodation turns out to be the greatest luxury in all my traveling so far! Not only do I have my own room with wardrobe, bookshelf, and a little table, but also my own bathroom! And, even better, a grand roof terrace right next to my room!
But all this is topped by the joy of sharing the house with Veronica who is truly amiable and very patiently puts up with my shaky Spanish. This brings me to the subject of language classes which I started taking again last Monday. What a pleasure! But very exhausting, too. Besides school - four hours a day - and homework, I did not do that much during the week, except maybe the odd conversation with Veronica. Being an actor and singer, she invited me to a gig she gave last Sunday in a bar in Palermo, which was truly great. She has an impressive voice and sings a repertoire of Latin-American folk songs.
Even more impressive was the gathering in our house last night. Veronica had invited a group of friends for dinner, many of them musicians and singers themselves. What a special bunch of people! We ate and chatted on the terrace and then someone brought out the guitar and some percussion instruments around midnight... Without even a single repetition and without a break we kept singing Latin-American songs until way past five in the morning!!! Well, I should really not include myself here - as some of you may know, I am musically rather challenged. But I did help out a little with the percussion. All sorts of genres were brushed; sambas, boleros, well-known Argentinan songs, as well as songs from all over South and Central America, even compositions of some of the people present, and - of course - many Tangos. I felt quite embarrassed for not even knowing a single German song. Unfortunately we do no have a culture of meeting up with friends and spending whole nights singing. Before five nobody left. And after many people had gone around then, we kept chatting with the few remaining souls. I hit my pillow a little before eight in the morning, the time I normally get up and ready for school. What a night! Certainly a highlight of all my time so far in South America.
