NOTE: I´m changing most if not all names of the people I meet from this point forward unless I´m given explicit consent to give out their identities. I´ll note any changes in the text, too.

Buenos Aires is a beautiful city.

Went to Palermo today on a guided tour as part of orientation. I took some photos of graffiti.

Quick backtrack to thoughts from previous days… I´ll sprinkle photos of Palermo throughout.

Horacio, who I mentioned in a past entry, said that in Río de Janeiro (which Brazilians just call Río for short) he once went with his ex-wife to a samba contest in one the city’s favellas. After the contest was over, they and all the other attendees were escorted by drug dealers – riding motorcycles and wearing brass knuckles on either side of them – out of the favella. This is to make sure that none of the tourists get robbed or attacked.

Some of the city’s safest areas are those controlled by drug traffickers, he said. They don’t want violence, because if tourists and such are dying, that means less profit. The power in Río is divided among the government, the businesses and the drug traffickers. All Brazilians I’ve met so far have also said that you must at some point in your life visit Brazil because it’s an amazing country. They’ve all told me that Brazilians are open-minded, welcoming people, that their population is a potpourri of different races and cultures.

It was also with Brazilians, listening to reggae music in an Irish pub the other night, that I found two people who love The Stranger by Albert Camus just as much as I do. I never learned the girl’s name, but the guy’s name was Antonio, I believe. Like I said, I’d never before met anyone as passionate about it, and we got all fiery and jittery recalling it. It’s crazy – that book was written in French, I read it in English, they read it in Portuguese, and it profoundly affected all of us.

I also talked with a girl, Daniella I believe, about international politics and comparative literature. The takeaway from that conversation was that, these days, everything has become international politics. Art, business, you name it, our world is so global that international politics covers a bit of everything.

We talked about how China is the complete opposite of the United States in terms of economics. Let’s say that people are investing in some country in Africa. Businesses will generally invest what their profits allow according to the market, which ends up being a limited amount of money. China, on the other hand, doesn’t work according to the rules of market. So it starts investing with the backing of the entire state for perhaps long-sighted goals in the best interests of the country rather than the mighty dollar.

Feel free to elaborate on that, correct it or whatever – I’m just regurgitating information as food for thought.

Today I kept speaking Spanish with Fiorella, and I’m starting to feel really comfortable with the language.

One thing, is that everything feels so improvised in Buenos Aires. All Fiorella has with her are two bags of clothes. The rest of her things are locked behind closed doors in some apartment building that she’s half moved into. So she and her friend Julia are bouncing around from one friend’s apartment to the next while they figure things out. Julia, who was supposed to meet us at Plaza 11, ended up eating at a restaurant out of nowhere and never came to meet us.

And I love that, the fact that every moment here is a surprise.

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Location: Avenida de Paraguay, Buenos Aires, Argentina