This is a guest post by my good porteño friend, Carlos Miceli from OwlSparks. Carlos writes about philosophy, marketing, ambition and anything else that comes within range of his rapid-fire analysis, and as part of our bromance blog exchange, I also wrote a guest post for his blog entitled Bonding by Being Tied. Happy New Year!

Today I woke up at 11am, checked my email, dilly-dallied around the Internet for about an hour and then took a shower.

I’m on my third beer, this one is green.

It’s the local specialty; so local in fact that it’s named after the bar I’m sitting in. ‘Dublin,’ the label proudly reads. Made by Beagle, the brand I’ve been drinking since I’ve been here. Dublin is the only place in town where you can find other people this time of night, any day of the week.

I’m sitting outside a small restaurant in Baroliche, an outdoorsy city in Patagonia that has recently become a tourist destination of sorts due to the diverse varieties of adventure trips and medium-end food that has become available since the economic downturn Argentina experienced these past few decades.

I pull up the Facebook message from Joey (name changed to protect the innocent) – a small-and-spunky English gal I met shortly after moving to Buenos Aires – and exhale slowly. It’s time.

“colin, my dear friend. dont even think of leaving without arranging to see me. that is all. x.”

It can be very hard to get into a fitness or workout groove. The initial soreness, the shortness of breath, and the unfamiliar shock to the nervous system are the reasons that most gyms are empty once again by February each new year.

It’s 3:30am Friday morning and I’m still procrastinating.

But this is Buenos Aires, and 3:30am is nothing. 3:30am is for sissies and I’m no sissy.

Seeing as how I’m leaving Buenos Aires this weekend — leaving all my new friends behind and setting out by bus to god-knows-where in the Argentinean countryside — I’m having trouble focusing on getting this done.

I may be a sissy.