I headed to Buenos Aires, Argentina, with plans of tracking down my friends. I had split off from the group I was traveling with in order to spend a bit more time with a friend in Peru. I was racing through countries trying to catch up to the boys, while still enjoying a glimpse of some of the sites, when I got sidetracked in Argentina’s capital for a few days.
It was almost time to hit up a bank machine again. I had just prepaid four nights stay at a hotel that advertised cozy rooms with extra amenities. I swung open the door to my room and discovered what cozy and extra meant in Argentina. Cozy meant that my door hit the bed when I opened it. Extra meant that there was a tv in every room. Cozy meant that due to a lack of floor space the tv was mounted on my ceiling, hanging precariously over my bed while i slept. Extra meant that I didn’t have to share a communal shower because there was one right in my room. Cozy meant that I had to take my showers while sitting on the toilet, with my knees touching the door, and pull a cord to turn the water on overhead. Extra meant that I had a free plastic bag in the bathroom. Cozy meant that i was supposed to put the toilet paper in that bag because of the shower was located right over the tp roll. Extra meant that they charged me more for all of this.
I was starting to feel sick, the full body muscle ache/headache/sore throat/throw-up/fever kind. The kind that makes you groan and sigh a lot. The kind that makes you ask strangers to feel your forehead and tell you if its warm. The kind that makes you want everything else to go smoothly for a couple days.
I walked down to the pedestrian boardwalk area, and with a fever induced fascination, watched some statue people for way too long. There are all kinds of people on the streets trying to hold your attention long enough to get a buck or two out of you. Some of them juggle soccer balls, some of them play the violin. Many of them have real skills that are worth rewarding with a couple bucks, but some of them are just a waste of skin in the entertainment world. You know the ones, the people who paint themselves in a sickly silver color and then hold one position for hours at a time. We watch them for a couple minutes then for some reason we feel obliged to pay them some of our hard earned money, for being lazy and doing absolutely nothing for hours on end. Oh look honey, that man has stood perfectly still for an extended period of time, lets pay him some of that money that you earned while mucking out stalls on a dairy farm. Worst job ever by the way, shoveling manure that has been cured in rotten milk, yum. Kind of ridiculous.
Anyway, I stood there for way too long watching a man do absolutely nothing, i blame the fever. I finally shuffled away after putting two Argentinian dollars into his can. I was hungry but didn’t feel like eating. I knew that i probably should get some energy food into my body so i stopped at a vendor to buy an amoebic riddled delight to eat. The bill came to two dollars. I knew that I had a hundred dollar bill in one pocket and a two dollar bill in the other. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the hundred first. One glance at the look on the lady’s face told me that there was no way she was gonna be breaking my bill for me. As I fished around in my pocket for the two dollar bill, pulling out all sorts of pocket lint in the process, a man ran by me. He reached out his hand and accepted my deposit into his pick-pocket fund.
I’m usually a pretty quick thinker on my feet, so i place all the blame on my death-flu when i admit that not only did i not run after him, but i also didn’t even shout or point. I just kinda watched him run off down my hazy tunnel vision, then i turned to the lady and told her i didn’t think i’d be having that tasty treat after all.
Now it really was time to hit up a bank machine. No big deal i thought. That guy probably needed food and a blanket and even though he was gonna buy alcohol and drugs in the near future, my hundred dollars was gonna go towards buying him the food, i was pretty sure. I wandered several blocks to where i had seen a bank and swiped my Royal Bank card. I had just taken money out of there a day or two earlier, but this time it said that my card wasn’t accepted. After trying several banks i took my last two dollars and went to an internet cafe. I got online and managed to get ahold of my dad on MSN. I told him that my card wasn’t working so he said he would call the bank and see what was going on. A couple minutes later he came back online and told me that it was good news. My card was fine, it was just that their international internet banking was down and would probably be down for a couple days. Not good news. I thanked my dad and told him i was relieved to hear that, just a mini-white lie to keep him from worrying.
Luckily I had already paid for 4 nights accommodations or my next 4 days would have been even rougher. On the second day i walked all over Buenos Aires, trying my card in every single bank i found, with no success. By that night i was getting desperately thirsty and my hunger pains weren’t making it any easier to deal with the flu. I started trying to think of ways to panhandle for money, but I was throwing up all the time and didn’t think there were many people out there willing to pay to watch someone, covered in decorative toothpaste, throw up several times a day. Besides i needed that toothpaste. On the morning of the third day i decided to start my day with a smile. I walked into my mini bathroom and brushed my teeth and cleaned away my sickness breath. The toothpaste made my mouth feel so fresh and clean. The first little bit that i swallowed may have been an accident, but the next half a tube i ate was on purpose. I was so hungry. I had never eaten anything that tasted nearly so delicious as a half a tube of toothpaste, which i quickly chased with gulp fulls of non potable water. Within days you could add cramping diarrhea to the list but at the time i didn’t care. I made the toothpaste last through the third and into the fourth day but by the time midday rolled around i was desperately stumbling up and down the streets. My prepaid room was about to run out and i wasn’t excited about spending a couple nights on the street. It would be pretty rough if i had to go borrow a blanket from that pickpocket.
Finally, at about the eight bank i tried, the screen lit up with the most magical words ever, “enter amount”. Cue the “Feast of Sickness in Buenos Aires”, blast the trumpets and get outta my way, i had some grocery shopping to get to. You know how a smart shopper will always tell you to never go grocery shopping when you are hungry? Its like the rule about never emailing an exgirlfriend after 1 in the morning, there’s just some things you shouldn’t do. I shattered that rule. I was a madman, i can still clearly picture the store in my head, and i can even hear myself trying to explain my weird grocery list and crazy eyes to the poor girl at the counter who didn’t care one bit. One of life’s cruelest pranks is what your body does when you get hungry, i mean really hungry. Your stomach size works in the opposite direction, proportionally, to the size of your hunger. As your eyes start to swim with hunger, your stomach works its way down to the size of a pea. I sat on the curb, with people walking all around me, making an absolute spectacle of myself. I can only imagine what people were thinking as they paused to watch a raggedy white kid force a half a loaf of bread, two bananas, 600ml of coke, two trays of cookies, a bottle of orange juice, six crayons (just kidding), and three bites of an apple into a space the size of a pea. I am sure that as many of them were eying me, down their turned up noses, they were muttering things like glutton and ’stupid americano’. But i didn’t care.
Oh i cared later, as my hunger pains turned to severe stomach cramps and then to volcanic diarrhea, i cared. But right in that moment of bliss, i didn’t care because once again toothpaste was for brushing teeth. And it wasn’t so bad, life has little ways of working itself out. It seems like if you just give it a chance, yesterdays annoyances can often become todays conveniences. It just sorta alleviated some complications later that night when i ran out of toilet paper, that i was conveniently placed right under the shower head.
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