La Bomba de Tiempo!

Argentina
1/9/2009

La Bomba de Tiempo is a really exciting event that happens here in Buenos Aires every monday night in the district, "Once". There is a group of drummers and other percussionists about 15 of them, and each monday there is a new conductor from the country that will lead them.

As we round the block, on our way to the show, we can already hear the tribal sounds of african style drum beat. We meet up with about 20 other couchsurfers outside the area, and head in. Once inside the arena is a large cobblestone parking lot with a huge set of red metal stairs in the middle, where the band is situated. The conducter is coger then the drummers, and they are all playing in an amazing sync. We walked around the backside of the stairs, where we have plenty of room to dance, and still see the band. As the concert goes on the music starts to pick up and become more energetic and faster. As the sun sets and the arena become darker, the music also becomes louder and the people dancing are more spirited. It was a very exciting environment. The last song of the night had an excepcionally good beat, and everybody was jumping/bouncing/dancing like crazy. With two loud, deep bass drum beats, the show was over and everyone screamed and applauded! Whew it was hot, loud and slightly overwhelming!

Buenos aires has a very strong young culture of people who come to these shows, and so pretty much everyone was just starting out their night. We headed to a local bar, and watched some more music, met some more fun travelers (from france, Australia, england, and russia). We alltalked about our travel stories and advice for different places.

The next few days laina and I stayed close to home, studied spanish, and relaxed, nice..

Cory came in on Thursday! It took us 3 hours to get from Ceci´s to the airport, however it only cost about 2.40 pesos! If we took a taxi it could cost up to 100$ pesos. When we got him, he was still dressed in jeans and a flannel from colorado, and refused to change despite the 85 degree summer heat. It was nice catching up with old storues and what not and the return ride back to the city was much faster. Auenos Aires´s airport is 21 miles out of town!

We did some sight seeing, headed to the ecological park, bought some meta sándwiches for cheap, and met up with some couchsurfers. We are all trying to learn spanish, which is a delight for our host, because she is trying to speak to us only in spanish!

Today we had one main chore, buy tickets out of BA. We walked around, and took the subte (subway) and eventually made it to the bus station, and bought our tickets to Las Grutas, our next destination, and our first in Patagonia! 185$pesos later, and 3 tickets in hand, we were ready for our 13 hour bus ride to patagonia! We heade back to town for our last night in BA, and went to see some music of the balkan/gypsy type. We went to the same place that La bomba was, but this time a 6 piece gipsy band was playing! They were great, the croad was wild, and the music was fun. They played many songs with violin, accordion, and saxaphone. They even played the theme song at the beginging of pulp fiction, which everyone went wild and stared a really fast version of a conga line and ran around the stadium barefoot! We went out later for some food and socializing, said bye to manyo f the friend we met here in BA and started to get ready for Patagonia.



Here´s the flight plan: Bus to las grutas, 2 days, then train to Bariloche, then getting down to Ushuaia, and from there we are not sure!