Day 78: The battle between doing and drinking
August is here (insert frown here). This of course means I have but one month left in my trip, which is scary and unhappy for poor ole me. The real life will return soonly - and it will be painful surely! At this landmark in my trip I try to reminisce about how it all started, and have this sensation in my head that the events of May and June and July happened a very, very long time ago. Odd what travel does to time: speeds it up in advance and reverse, meaning the present is accelerated since you are having fun, and past memories tend to fly away, like a roadsign you pass at 100 mph and watch fade away in your rearview mirror. In short, it seems like I have been out here forever or a day, depending on how you look at it.
Life in Buenos Aires has a daily continuity to it's ryhthms for our merry gang of three (which now comprises of myself, Sam, and Silje, the Norweigan gal who was last with us in La Paz). We tend to get up late, do more or less nothing during the day (shopping, movies, aimlessly wandering about), then go out for a great dinner (Vietnemese, steak, sushi [twice], and pizza have been our fare .. tonight is Mexican) and afterwards for drinks. We've managed to ruin two of the last seven days by recovering from the previous night's drinking, on one day I went to bed with the sun up and woke up with the sun down. All this wonderful debauchery has been just what the doctor ordered, after spending the three prior weeks zooming and zipping about from place to place, seeing incredible sights, but doing little in the way of pure relaxation.
In other words, Buenos Aires has been the perfect destination for my state of mind. There really are two travelling mindstates, for me anyway: drinking and doing. They sit on opposite poles of the spectrum. The "doing" mindstate is the one that gets you out of bed and off on the road, to go to a museum or a famous plaza or experience a bit of culture or history. The "drinking" mindstate is the one that thinks all of those ideas sound like too much work, that the real ticket is heading off to the pub. Doing too much of one inevitably leads to doing the other. It seems paradoxical that going out and drinking gets your mind prepared and ready to do touristy things again, but I swear it's the truth! Eventually you are lying there in bed, in another haze, and you come to the realization that you are sick of staying up all night, and the desire to see, use, and experience the day overtakes you. So you start doing things. But then you get sick of doing things all day and just want relax and be lazy, which leads to more drinking and less doing. As that wacko in Happy Gilmore said, "It's circular".
Life in Buenos Aires has a daily continuity to it's ryhthms for our merry gang of three (which now comprises of myself, Sam, and Silje, the Norweigan gal who was last with us in La Paz). We tend to get up late, do more or less nothing during the day (shopping, movies, aimlessly wandering about), then go out for a great dinner (Vietnemese, steak, sushi [twice], and pizza have been our fare .. tonight is Mexican) and afterwards for drinks. We've managed to ruin two of the last seven days by recovering from the previous night's drinking, on one day I went to bed with the sun up and woke up with the sun down. All this wonderful debauchery has been just what the doctor ordered, after spending the three prior weeks zooming and zipping about from place to place, seeing incredible sights, but doing little in the way of pure relaxation.
In other words, Buenos Aires has been the perfect destination for my state of mind. There really are two travelling mindstates, for me anyway: drinking and doing. They sit on opposite poles of the spectrum. The "doing" mindstate is the one that gets you out of bed and off on the road, to go to a museum or a famous plaza or experience a bit of culture or history. The "drinking" mindstate is the one that thinks all of those ideas sound like too much work, that the real ticket is heading off to the pub. Doing too much of one inevitably leads to doing the other. It seems paradoxical that going out and drinking gets your mind prepared and ready to do touristy things again, but I swear it's the truth! Eventually you are lying there in bed, in another haze, and you come to the realization that you are sick of staying up all night, and the desire to see, use, and experience the day overtakes you. So you start doing things. But then you get sick of doing things all day and just want relax and be lazy, which leads to more drinking and less doing. As that wacko in Happy Gilmore said, "It's circular".
