goodbye old girl ...

for this blog post i was hoping to do some fancy technological shit where a song plays when you read it ... sadly i have no idea how to do that.  so instead, please press play on this video so that you can hear the song that i would've attached to this post had i known had to do that.



okay, is the music playing?  cool ... then please read on!

my dear blog readers, this week has been mierda.  to recount ... first i took a tumble off my bike injuring my knees and leaving me hobbling around like a cripple.

then .... THEN ... the other day i had to walk to one of my classes since my knees still weren't bending properly.  and i saw that my trusty old bike was locked up outside of my apartment building as always.  so i  limp over to my class, only to be stood up by my student ... grrrrr ... and then when i come home i find that my bike is gone.  GONE!

say what?!

that's right.  ladrones stole my motherfucking bicycle!

oh girl, had i known that our time
together was gonna be so short
i totally would've taken more
pictures with you.  i'm sorry i
didn't treat you better.  and i didn't
mean to get mad at you when you
fell out from under me and made
me skin my knees.  i'd do anything
to have you back. 

now as i have mentioned before i have been the victim of bike thievery before.  my bike's been stolen, my back tire has been stolen, my gears have been stolen, my quick release lever for my seat has been stolen, and multiple lights have been stolen.  but i'll be honest with you, every time i was lucky enough to be in the financial position to replace these things.  but now, being a lowly under paid english teacher / writer, i don't really have the funds for a new bike.  and i rely on my bike to get to several of my classes that are in transportational black holes.

it's very much like the famous italian film Bicycle Thieves.  i have even thought about stealing someone else's bike, but as a moral and upstanding citizen, i cannot bring myself to do such things.

so with this blog post i bid a fond adios to my beloved bicycle.  yes, dear bicycle we have come to the end of the road.  it is unnatural for us to part this way.  you will be missed greatly.

a chocotorta and two skinned knees

i don't like to think of myself as accident prone, but the evidence is stacking up to prove that maybe i am. as a child, i typically always had at least one skinned knee and there was probably a band-aid somewhere on my body covering a recent accident.  and now as an adult it's still pretty common for me to have black and blues from where i have accidentally walked into stuff or knocked into something.

since coming to buenos aires i have had the following "accidents" which have needed some level of first aid:

1.  i sliced the side of my hand on a broken glass while doing the dishes.  had this wound been on a different part of my body, it probably would've needed stitches, but since it was in such a weird spot there wasn't much to be done.  so now i have a nice v-shaped scar on the base of my thumb.

2.  while taking an outdoor fitness class, i slammed my shin onto the ledge of a concrete wall causing a large gash in said shin.

3.  and today, while the bolshevik and i were out on a pleasant saturday afternoon bike ride, i had a little biking accident.  you see, there are some lovely bike lanes here in buenos aires, but the problem is that they don't all connect properly.  so there's this area by the waterfront where the bike lane dies for a bit and all of a sudden you're left to fend for yourself in this shady industrial area.  first, there's a part where the bike lane actually spits you out into oncoming traffic.  great.  then after that there's this weird area with all these old trolley type tracks crisscrossing over the street.  so i was riding over the tracks and my tires hit the tracks the wrong way and my bike slid out from under me.  not cool.  and i did this little number to my legs.  (please note, there is actually one more bruise on the side of my right leg, but i couldn't get it into the picture. not only that, but i fell in a way that i actually re-opened the injury listed above in #2!)

so now i'm laid up in bed with a swollen knee.  grrrrr.

and of course, we were far from home when this happened so we had to stop by a pharmacy to get first aid supplies.  and then the bolshevik decided the best thing to do was to take break before riding back home, so we got some ice cream.  claro!

we got a chocotorta sundae from freddo ... it was divine.  for those of you who don't know, a chocotorta is a dessert typically served at birthdays, consisting of several layers of booze soaked chocolate cookies alternating with layers of a dulce de leche and crema.  the freddo's version has dulce de leche ice cream and big hunks of crumbled chocolate cookies. i highly recommend it regardless of whether or not you have sustained an injury.

everything's coming up rosario

man, i am just the worst blogger ever ... i am SO behind on my posts.  how do you stand it?  anyway, about a month ago the bolshevik and i went to a little riverside town called rosario.   here are some highlights:

there's a long promenade along the water so the bolshevik and i decided to stroll around and look for a restaurant, as i am a sucker for waterfront dining.  mind you, we have a guidebook and the guidebook does not say anything about waterside dining.

as we are walking around, we see all these odd looking elevator shafts that seem to be advertising restaurants.  strange.  eventually we venture over to one and look over the side to see a fully functioning restaurant below the promenade right on the water.  that's right ... secret riverside restaurants only accessible by elevator!  why wouldn't you put that in a guidebook?  anyway, we ate at different "secret" restaurants every meal, and had some fantastic fresh grilled fish.  mmmmmm.  i love buenos aires, but they are lacking in the pescado department.

later we tried to find che guevera's house, only to learn that it is now a bank.  lame.  but they did make this nice park in his honor down the street.  here is the bolshevik looking all radical and shit.

one of the more interesting things about rosario was that they seemed to have a wide range of free community programs.  for instance, we were walking around these old warehouses by the river promenade and we saw one of them had been converted into a skateboarding park where all these  local teens were hanging out. skateboarding is not a crime dear blog readers!  as we explored further, we also saw that there were free art lessons and other social organizations that offered various activities and services to the good people of rosario.  but my favorite was when we walked by the old train station that is no longer in service and we saw a bunch of girls learning how to do some elegant style of trapeze on long flowing scarves.

all in all, it was an amazing ruckus trip ... i mean, nice weekend getaway.