From The Sublime To The Ridiculous

After leaving BsAs we spent two weeks in hostels featured in the Lonely Planet, speaking English. Now that Kai has left and Victoria has arrived I've gone from speaking virtually no Spanish to speaking no English, in fact I think I've spoken more Spanish in the last two days than I have in the last two weeks.

This was compounded by Victoria taking me to meet some old friends of hers and their families, where the subject of the Falklands (or "las Islas Malvinas (Arg)" as they appear on every Argentine map) came up. The father of one of the families is a veteran and his daughter works in the veteran's association and his son has the islands tattooed on his arm in the Argentine colours. They couldn't believe how little the English know on the subject. I had to explain that it really wasn't that important to us, we've done far worse things. The lonely planet actually says that the war, or rather Argentina's losing of the war, played a major part in the down-fall of the military dictatorship, although the families we were with disagreed.

I really think that all the Mail readers in hysteria over girls binge drinking in the UK should come to visit Cordoba. Here the girls buy three litre plastic top hats called baldes, into which bar staff seem to just pour whatever is in front of them, starting with beer, through vodka, cider, melon spirit and God knows what else, finished up with granadin. All this costs about £5, including a £1 deposit on the hat. I saw various variations, one including a whole bottle of Champaign and another with 4 cans of the Argentine equivalent of Red Bull, Speed.