Birthday and Bicentenario!

Seems I'm always a day behind with this, eh lol?

Well, yesterday was my 21st birthday!!!!!!!!! So we went to the cemetery. Hahaha, well that wasn't *why* we went, but it was as good a day as any to go! There was an art museum (Museo de Arte Bella, was the name?) right by so we hit that up too. But in chronological order...

On the way there, we stopped to get change for the bus (it's really almost scary how sacred one must hold their change to be... nigh impossible to get any anywhere and the bus ONLY takes coins). They had oreos, but I'm not in Buenos Aires to have American junk food. So I bought these SUPER AWESOME OREOESQUE THINGIES!

Super delicious and just as addictive, lol. More importantly, though...

Outside the cemetery:

And there were SO many stray kittens in there. Cats and tombs just go together I s'pose, eh?

*so adorable!*

Here's a taste of what inside looked like:

Yeah. It was a legit necropolis (I actually forgot that word existed until I saw it in the pamphlet...). As for individual tombs...

There were a lot of legit statues, too:

But not every part of the Recoleta Cemetery was so well kept:

All the same, there were a lot of really beautiful things to see there. Take this, for instance:

This was dead center of the whole place. Really gave a physical manifestation to a general sense of connectedness, ya know?

I'll wrap up this section with some other random shots:

On the way to the art museum, I saw a pretty little red robin sitting atop this:

Buuuut he flew away before I could capture him. Still looked like a nice shot to me, so I kept it. Anyway, there were TONS of street merchants a little ways past the cemetery (think micro-San Telmo). A small branch of the massive tree of merchanty goodness:

There was SOOOOOO much beautiful art in the museum, and it looked like there were quite a few originals too (ie: I saw some Picasso's that said "donated from"). It was a pretty large museum, at that. Two very expansive floors. The room that had these babies was playing some creeptastical music (made for a solidly good effect, though):

So then we came back home and on the way in I snagged a picture of this guy:

This little bugger has been sitting outside my doorstep the entire time. I thought he'd like to say hello, lol.

Anyhow, that night we went out with Alejandro and Mariel for some partying at this place called The Alamo. If that sounds cheezily American, it's because it is. They were playing straight runs of The Killers and Red Hot Chili Peppers (which was fine by me, what with those being two of my favorite bands) and 95% of the people there were Americans, lol. Let me continue by copy/pasting my facebook status from earlier today

"All I'm sayin' is that the cover charge + 5 pesos gets you a pitcher of beer. A PITCHER OF BEER. *PER PERSON*, MIND YOU. Just to give you an idea how wonderful last night was and how unhappy waking up is right now lol XD But all that said, Happy Bicentennial of the Argentine Revolution!!!!"

So um, yeah. Excellent night lol. Would you believe it, I talked to another random girl? Not to be a terrible person who judges bananas by their peels, but I'm preeeetty sure she was a lesbian. I come to this conclusion by way of her haircut, the fact that when I put my arm around her shoulder she kindly removed it, and that it's a bit more comforting to think that she wasn't into guys than that she was just that repulsed by me, lol...

Still, making good progress with being a sociable individual.

I'll end this with how today went, since it's a pretty short post. I woke up with my first actual hangover, which felt like something of a milestone lol. But more importantly, for some reason I had convinced myself that no real festivities would be going on until tonight for the Bicentenario. At around 9pm I decide to Google up some info and see that the last event started at 8pm. Obviously there are probably people partying still, but official, organized events finished long ago. I'm kinda really upset at myself for not checking this beforehand. Talk about missed once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, ya know?

On the upshot, it's been an extremely chill day that's been wonderful for recovering and just generally gathering my bearings. Also, I changed my return flight to the 7th. Apparently I booked myself here for an extra week. BsAs is absolutely lovely but I do miss home lol. It's $175 extra if I want to chill with my dad's side of the family for a week while I'm in FL, but I'm not sure how finances are gonna be at that point. I've spent a LOT on getting here/set up here/my first half month and first actual month's rent covered when I get back (this is what happens when your college screws you out of on-campus housing...), so I'm down to roughly half of my stipend already. The only real worry from here is the next cell phone bill since I've been using it quite a bit more than I should, abroad. I don't expect it to be more than any given month in Italy, though. That said, I think I'm still ok for now. The difference, I figure, is now that instead of having to try really hard in order to spend all of my stipend money in Argentina, I'll have to make some small to moderate efforts to refrain from spending everything here. It *is* phenomenally cheap to live here if you don't have rent to worry about, so I'm not terrified or anything.

So hopefully we can go out tonight for a bit. I wanna get up really early so I can finally get a sim card for my phone and get people's numbers (particularly people I'm friends with and work with). Heres to the morrow!!!!