The day when time stood still...

Sometimes I wonder why I'm here. None of the existential philosophizing and that stuff, but rather: why Buenos Aires? It's definately not for the school, I think we have established that by now. And to be honest, it is not really for the Spanish either. I mean, then I could have gone to Spain and learned "real" Spanish and not the "Vos sos de acá?"-argentinian Spanish. (I'm starting to use vos now! Oh no!) The weather, I guess, but now I wouldn't mind a rainy day or two. I'll leave that question alone for a while because today I wasn't really thinking about it. It was a good day today.

They had a Swedish Christmas Bazaar at the Swedish church today and it seemed like a good idea to go there and drink some warm glögg and eat some peppercookies in the cold winter... eh... well... It was nice with the glögg anyway. This was at about half past two.

We stayed at the bazaar for quite some time: enjoying ourselves, talking to some other Swedes, and trying to get into that advent-spirit in the shadows of some tropical trees.

Me, Klara, Elvira and Arne, the Swedish ambassador

After I had bought two jars of lingonberry jam and three packs of hard bread for a whopping 95 peso we decided that we had had enough Christmas for one day and headed for Puerto Madero to grab some lunch. The hour was approaching 2:30.

Being in a financial crisis, with the Swedish krona losing more value for every day we decided that it was a good idea to eat expensive sushi for lunch. They had Asahi beer, and I even found some gyoza. (Not the CA-type, but quite good anyway!)

We were surprisingly hungry seeing as the clock was only about 14:30 in the afternoon. We were wondering what else to do with the afternoon when Klara suddenly asked. "Is it really half past two?" That is when I realized that my watch had stopped. For the whole afternoon we had not realized that it wasn't actually 2:30 but rather approaching 6. Proof that we didn't really care about the time for the day.

Me and Puente de la Mujer

As time had caught up with us we decided to go to Plaza de la Republica to watch Berliner Symphoniker as they gave an "Open Air"-concert with a reportoire filled with, as the Swedes say: "publikfjäsklåtar". It was quite enjoyable but seeing as the concert was in outdoors it was disturbed by the many honking cars passing by. Mateo, an Argentinian friend who also came to the concert, was ashamed of his countrymen for this. He should be: during the 2-hour concert, there wasn't a period of longer than 20 seconds when the cars weren't honking.

I think you can here the cars on this video...

The day finished with the most expensive plate of gröt I had ever eaten. But it was worth it.