Exile Lifestyle

It’s the final day of my 72-hour bus ride from Buenos Aires to Lima, and the seats around me have turned into a strip mall, my fellow passengers into skeptical (but willing) customers.

Day two on the three day bus ride from Buenos Aires to Lima.

I’ve discovered a number of things today about travel and about myself.

The bus is late. This shouldn’t be a surprise, but it is.

As a clunky green giant pulls up, looking a bit like a dilapidated, heavily curtained refrigerator from the 70’s, the contrast between my ride and the other, sparkly, shiny, clean and friendly Argentine buses is clear.

The Renaissance was a time of great intellectual and artistic prosperity; many people were pulled out of the mud and darkness of the Middle Ages and shown a bright, shiny, new future – one of endless possibilities.

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.

What’s the perfect length for a blog post?

This may come as a shock to some of you, but I have a history of stalking.

I was having a conversation over orange juice with one of the handful of English expats I’ve met since I moved to Buenos Aires, and the topic of sentimentality came up. It went something like this:

I arrived in Buenos Aires, Argentina 2 days ago and after a solid 18 hours on various flights between Miami, Mexico City and Santiago, I was ready to crash into anything soft and bed-like I could find. My wits were a bit scrambled, and though I was conscious enough to not get taken (too much) by the taxi driver who carted me from the airport to the downtown area, I still wasn’t ready for what I would see immediately upon exiting the vehicle.