Things were far too good to be true: I realised that the the guys making noise outside my door weren't going to stop making noise any time soon. They're decorating here in the hostel at the moment. Right outside my door! After much searching, I found my earplugs (for a while, I thought I'd left them in the other hostel), and they helped a bit.
But still, I was woken up by the workmen before 7am this morning. I had planned to get up at 8 anyway, but being woken so early after having been kept awake so late, I was pretty tired for the first half of the day...
Anyway, the thing is: I'm going to bed far too early. Unlike on my last adventures abroad, I didn't come here to party. I came here to read and study and think and produce. Even so, in this country, everyone goes to bed late. The elderly are out until midnight. I'm in bed before 11. The hardcore raver. I joked last year that I'm in bed early every night, unless there's a nightclub to go to, in which case I can (and will) stay up all night, dancing until security pull the plug on the DJs.
I saw San Telmo at night for the first time this evening. It was hardly night, mind. About 10 o'clock. Dinnertime for these folks. I'd been to the cinema at Plaza Defensa, to see La Antena, which I'd half-wanted to see at the ICA a couple of months ago. In a way, it was good that I didn't, because I got to see it this evening free of charge. Plaza Defensa puts on shows for free all of the time: exhibitions, films, plays... It could well be a place I visit frequently.
This is the only noteworthy thing I did today, other than signing a contract for the flat I saw on Monday. I'll be paying less for three months than I used to pay for one month in Gipsy Hill. Nice. Jaime came along to make sure that everything was in order, which was nice (even though he had difficulty doing his sums correctly...). The meeting was prolonged as he got talking to one of the estate agents about mountain climbing. I like the way that Argentineans talk. They're like Italians. They just love talking. These two guys just talked and talked and talked. I was getting a headache, because I was tired, it was hot, and I hadn't had any breakfast.
The funniest part of the meeting was, of course, when the female estate agent asked me what I was up to in Argentina. The contract had been signed, so I let her know that, actually, I wasn't a student who was dependent on my parents for financial support. I was just someone who'd saved up enough after working for a while as a computer programmer. She looked very surprised indeed. I stopped short of telling her that, actually, I used to earn more in a day than I'd be paying for the flat for a month... I just said that, yes, if I liked it here, and if I could find work here as a programmer, then I may well stay on a more permanent basis. We'll see what happens...
I realised today why I'm not fond of blog chronicles, though: you just end up repeating yourself over and over again. Not in the same blog, but in emails and phone calls. People write and say: "Hey, what's going on?!" And it's not like you can say: "Just read my blog." So instead, you end up writing multiple versions of the same stories. And writing one version of events can be dull enough. The challenge for this blog now is to try and maintain my own interest in what I'm saying. Like I think I said (or at least suggested) in my first post: I'm not too keen on writing in straight lines. Another challenge is to format things so that the right edge of my photos don't get cropped. I looked at the published blog yesterday, and the photos looked stupid.
Anyway, time to try and read something now. I've been waiting for the right moment all day.
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