The biggest difference for me here? It's not difficult to say, but in truth many things are the asme here as they were in Paris. I'm living with a girl (although I wasn't fucking Lili), the cold chill of fall turned to winter is in the air, I'm writing (although not as much admittedly). No, the big difference for me is the music. It can't follow me wherever I go because the headphone jack on my iPhone is busted. So there's no option to tune everything out. My ears are left to suffer the sounds of the real world. In the streets walking, on the bus, on the train.
I don't mind it really. If I think right, I can find the music just about anywhere. In anything.
Or maybe it's not about the music at all. Maybe I've had enough of it, too much of it. Hiding behind headphones and preferred bands and what I want to hear, and me, me, me. It must be my music, my music, mine. And all the while I was blind, or I should say deaf to this grand symphony jazz orchestra surrounding me, always playing, percussion, treble, the vibration of the bus engine and it's whistles and it's squeals, and all the tremors of the street, the dog barks and the beautiful Spanish, the kind I'd never heard before until now, here in Buenos Aires. It's not coarse Mexican, or the tongue of his Spain, but this deep passionate Argentine, from deep in the heart, deep Latin that keeps time in this song that insists on soldiering on, only changing through the movements.
This is life in Buenos Aires.
Maybe this is what everyone means when they talk about growth. I feel older than before. It takes much less time to acclimate to new cities now. I'm developing a knack for it, I guess. That is if you can look pass my glaring language barriers.
For the final we went to Ferdinand's. He used to be Guada's boss when she worked for his investment firm near Retiro, where we had watched the game against Belgium in the park. His flat's across the street in fact, floor three with two balconies overlooking the park, which was, by the time we got there, already packed and flooding out onto the streets with some 50,000 Argentines so that the slope of the hill looked less like a grassy knoll and more like a sea of flowers azul with flags waving and all dancing in the wind. The roar was just as deafening as the sight of it, so that we had to yell to hear each other while we smoked Lucky Strikes on the balcony and drank Compari.
[stop]
