To Live and Die in BA...part 2

January 15, 2007

To Live and Die in BA…part 2

Buenos Aires is a city of too many sunrises. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that in just a few weeks here I’ve seen the sun rise at least twice as many times as the rest of my life put together. I mean seriously, this is probably the closest I’ll ever come to living like a rockstar (except the part where I sleep in a hostel dorm room with seven other smelly dudes). The nightlife is unlike anything I’ve ever seen; the ratio of pesos to dollars is 3 to 1, which means that I eat and drink quite well here, and half the population is very attractive while at least another quarter of it is definitely fuckable. Buenos Aires will blow your mind. Or at least ruin your liver.

***Buenos Aires at night***



When I was checking into my new hostel, Giramundo, the guy behind the desk looked at my last name and said, “Schuffman, huh? Are you Jewish?” When I answered yes, he said, “Me too, my name is Emmanuel Goldberg.” After we talked a little bit about being Jewish and how Buenos Aires has the sixth biggest Jewish population in the world, Emmanuel says to me, “If you would like to meet some other Jewish kids from Buenos Aires come with me tomorrow night to a boat party in Tigre. A lot of my Jewish friends will be there.” I agreed to go partly because I’m always curious to meet Jews from other cultures but mostly because it was a fucking booze cruise! Who says “no” to a booze cruise full of Jews? Never mind, don’t answer that.

Giramundo was a far different hostel than Millhouse. It was smaller and homier, and it also had two semi-permanent residents: Paloma the tranny who was a cocktail girl and go-go dancer at the tranny/gay/hipster bar down the street, and Manuel, the insane Italian guy who spent half his day walking around scratching his balls through his board shorts and the other half of it yelling at the computer in Italian. As for me I could handle this type of shit, what I couldn’t handle was that I was beginning to feel like I was having a relationship with Krista’s myspace page, not an actual person (she’s the one who came up with that analogy). I still had 3 or so weeks until she arrived, so I figured I’d distract myself the best way I could, by partying my ass off.

I arrived to the boat party at midnight (like a typical BA night, it went from 12-5am) thinking it was kinda gonna be like a Bar Mitzvah party for twenty-somethings. I was wrong though; it was about 10-15% Jewish, which is still a lot, but not quite the magnitude of Jewishness I was expecting. The girl behind the counter hooked up me and my friends (all Jewish) with some free ham sandwiches. I couldn’t resist cracking a joke: What’s the biggest Jewish dilemma? Free ham sandwiches…..my rabbi would be so disappointed in me.

Like any place, hanging out with the locals allowed me much better insight into the how shit works. For instance, if you’re out at a club (or a boat party in this case) you’ll notice that a guy will go up and talk to a girl for maybe seven minutes before he tries to kiss her. This shit amazed me because in the States you often gotta talk to a woman for like half the night and then lure her outside, away from everyone else, with things like, “Hey you wanna get some fresh air?” before you make you try to give her a smooch. That is definitely not the case here. In fact I remember my first night in BA while I was looking for a place to sleep, seeing a pretty girl walking by herself, stop and talk to some guy for literally a minute, make out with him, and then hop in a cab to go home. And when people here do end up locking lips, it looks down right violent. When I first saw Emmanuel kiss the girl he hooked-up with, I thought homeboy was gonna chip his goddamn teeth. But down here everyone kisses like that; you almost expect them to start dry humping against the wall (which I actually did see at a club later in the week). Chalk it up to that passionate Latin blood, or whatever other stupid shit you wanna call it, but whatever it is, it’s certainly interesting to observe.

I didn’t get back to the hostel until 7am and spent the rest of the day sleeping and hoping that my hangover would dissipate. Sometime around midday I got a text from my buddy Greg who moved to Buenos Aires from SF about a year ago. Greg and I have a couple things in common: we’ve both done work for Lonely Planet, (him photography, me writing) and we both share a mutual good friend, Marina. Greg invited me to go out with him that night, so around 11ish I arrived at his place which was a super cool studio/loft in an old convent that had been chopped up and subdivided into apartments (nope I don’t have photos; I know I’m an idiot). All the apartments surround a lovely courtyard in which a big communal dinner was being held by all the occupants of the complex. It was the type of cool dinner where I got to sit down and practice my Spanish for awhile, before it completely devolved into a squirt gun fight. We took that as our queue to leave.

***Greg***


Following dinner Greg took me to something very rare in Buenos Aires, a hip hop club, where I saw something even rarer for BA…Black people. You just don’t see a lot of Black folks in Argentina, they don’t live here, so when you do see them they are generally tourists from the US, UK or Brazil. In fact Argentina has a reputation for being pretty racist against Black people and Bolivians. I am obviously neither black nor Bolivian, so I can’t say from experience, but I can tell you that I was absolutely surprised to walk into a club full of Nigerians. I was stoked to get down with a little diversity and some hip-hop; it reminded me of being back in the Bay Area.

When we returned to Greg’s place the courtyard dinner had turned into a courtyard party and hippies had replaced the squirt guns. I got into a conversation with this really cool hippie couple (he from Uruguay and she from Colombia) and they told me how they’d been traveling around South America for the past 6 years, living off the income they derived from making and selling macramé jewelry. I like to adorn myself with tidbits and trinkets that I pick up during my travels, so I of course bought one of their amazing bracelets. I was instantly their new best friend.

***New bracelet made by traveling hippies***


The sun was rising and my cell phone read something like 6am when two Norwegians with London accents (they’d lived in London for years), started offering up lines of cocaine to everyone. Greg had already turned in for sleep an hour earlier, and I had absolutely no desire to start doing stimulants at sunrise, so I went into Greg’s apartment and passed out on his couch.

I was awoken at 11am by some type of pot banging and a chorus of voices amounting to what sounded like a marching song. The courtyard was obviously still alive and I knew that if I wanted to get any more sleep it would have to be back at my hostel. Descending the stairs, I hit the ground just in time to get swept into the procession of revelers who were now vacating the courtyard and pouring out into the street. The Uruguayan guy who I’d bought the bracelet from was a big bear of a hippie and he collared me around then neck and informed me, mostly in slang I didn’t understand, that there was no fucking way I was going home. Somebody had bought seven kilos of meat (over 14 pounds!) and it was now time to grill that shit up in the park.

Standing on the street in that San Telmo’s early afternoon light, it appeared that our numbers had managed to double while I slept. It was like feeding Gremlins after midnight. The pots and pans I’d heard banging were actually a giant slab of aluminum roofing and a five foot long grill that could have easily come from the front of a Mack truck. I was told that the two 15 year old street urchins that were now in our group had pinched them from one of their mother’s kitchens. I’m not quite sure where he came from, but by the time we got to the park we’d somehow managed to pick up a Native American guy too (unlike most other South American countries, Argentina doesn’t have much of an indigenous population left). Walking into the riverside Puerto Madero park that afternoon, amongst the Sunday family picnics and the teenage soccer games, we were certainly a sight to see: 15-20 drug-addled and sleep deprived people, consisting of hippies, Spaniards, street urchins, Norwegians, Argentines, a Native American and me, with everyone helping to carry part of the 7 kilos of meat, 2 armfuls of bread, a piece of aluminum roofing, a giant grill, coals, lighter fluid and a dozen or so 1.5 liter bottles of Quilmes beer. It was definitely a unique way to spend the first half hour of my day.

I spent most of the walk trying to figure out what the hell the aluminum roofing was for, but when we got to the park and set up in the middle of a dirt pathway (the Uruguayan guy said it was just as good a place as any) I saw that it was gonna be the bottom part of the grill, the part that actually held the coals, while the thing that looked like it came from the front of a truck, would be where the meat was placed to cook. Myself and the Norwegians kept wondering when the cops were gonna show up and tell us that we couldn’t BBQ on the ground in the middle of a pathway, but it never happened. Then at some point the Native American guy pulled out a bunch of indigenous instruments from his bag and started playing some of his tribe’s songs for us. I think it was at this point that Thomas, one of the Norwegians said (in his London accent), “I don’t know if I can handle this shit any more. This just keeps getting more and more bizarre. Fuck man, I didn’t even sleep last night…”

When I finally did make it back to my hostel at around 5pm I asked myself how this type of strange shit always seems to happen to me. I still haven’t figured out the answer yet, but I do know I wish I took more photos.

***Another South American sunrise***

To Live and Die in BA...part 1

December 26, 2006


To Live and Die in BA...part 1

I slid into the center of Buenos Aires at roughly 4am on a Friday, ready to crash out at the hostel that I’d booked while in Cuzco. At the airport I’d met Noah from the Bay Area, who happened to be going to the same place, and the two of us shared a cab to the Millhouse Hostel where we tried to check in. I say “tried” because the guy behind the desk said we couldn’t stay since our reservations were for Friday. Being completely knackered and not having the patience to deal with this shit, I said, “Look man, what time does your computer say it is?”
“4:15am,” he answered.
“Ok, what day does it say it is?”
“Friday.”
“Then why can’t we check in and go to sleep?”
“Because your reservation is for Friday.”
“But it’s Friday right now!”
“I know.”
“Then why can’t we check in?”
“Because we’re full.”
“But we have reservations.”
“Yes, but they’re for Friday”
“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me, you just told me it was Friday!”
“I know. But you can’t check in till later.”
This bit went on for awhile before I finally gave up and Noah and I left to wander the streets and attempt to find a hotel. We checked at least ten spots but everything was full because Shakira was playing a concert the next night. We were ready to accept defeat and just go to a 24 hour café to get completely bombed, when we finally found a place. By the time I got into bed it was six in the morning and the sun was up. The guy back at the hostel said that to get our Friday reservation, we had to check in between 1pm and 2pm. I wanted to kick him in the teeth.

A hundred something years ago Buenos Aires was one of the most affluent cities in the world. The boom of Argentina’s meat and agricultural industries allowed many portenos, aka residents of BA, to accumulate great wealth and they used this wealth to create a Buenos Aires that looked as much like a European city as possible (there’s supposed to be a squiggly line above of the “n” in “portenos” but my computer doesn’t do it). BA was to be the “Paris of South America” even though much of the city’s population was first or second generation immigrants from Italy and Spain, not France. It’s because of this large scale immigration that almost everyone here looks like white Europeans, which is pretty strange for a country in the heart of South America. Regardless of ancestry or inclination though, the portenos of the late 19th/early 20th centuries created a magnificent city that I was absolutely delighted to explore after I woke up from my much needed sleep.

***Buenos Aires has cool buildings***




I finally checked into the fucking Millhouse Hostel, and that night went to dinner with my friend Nick who was visiting from Brooklyn with five of his friends. They were going home the next day so this would be my only chance to see him. In typical Stuart fashion I bumped into my friend Nish, from yelp.com, at dinner thus making Buenos Aires yet another on the long list of cities where I’ve run into people I know. I live an awfully strange life.

Dinner was god damn excellent and after eating steak for the second time that day (Argentina is renowned for its meat), I was bloated and wanted to go to sleep. But it was my first night in Buenos fucking Aires and I had to go out and sample the famous nightlife, so I agreed to go out for a few drinks.

Buenos Aires is a very “out” city and because of this it has seen a huge increase in gay tourism in the past few years; so much so that it even has a gay hostel. Since Nick and his friends are gay, we all went to a gay bar after dinner where there was a burlesque show with hot topless women (go figure). The show ended with a dance by a woman who got completely naked but it was a point of contention between us whether or not she was actually born a woman. None of this was new or surprising for me because, well, I live in San Francisco, but the part that blew my mind was that for 14 pesos, it was all you can drink. 14 Argentinean pesos is roughly $4.50 American so you could imagine how excited I was. In normal circumstances I’d get three-sheets-to-the-wind and end up dancing on a table with a couple of Trannies, but since I was so tired and full I called it an early night (at 3:30am) and went back to the hostel.

I wasted nearly an entire week of my life at the Millhouse Hostel. I seriously don’t know what I did with my time. It has a huge common area where people are drinking almost 24 hours a day, so it’s really impossible to lead anything resembling a normal life while you stay there. I met a guy from Dublin there, named Robert, who told me that he hadn’t even intended on coming to Buenos Aires but somehow had spent ten days at Millhouse and hadn’t seen a single site in the city. His schedule was this: wake up at around 2pm, get some food, check his email, shoot the shit with other hostel people, start drinking around 5 or 6pm at the hostel, somewhere fit dinner in, head out to the clubs around 1am, and then around 6am get a “super pancho” (giant hot dog) and go to sleep. That was it. My schedule wasn’t much better except that I tried language school for two days and then walked out on the third because I was too hung over and sleep deprived to sit through 4 hours of school. I never went back. That week was such a waste that I didn’t even take a single photo, so all the photos you see in this blog were taken after I freed myself from that mind-numbing hostel.

***Photos from the amazing Recoleta Cemetary where BA´s rich get buried (no photoshop just filters).***





The best thing about Millhouse though was that I purposely met back up with Oliver and Ville, the friends I met in Costa Rica, and we hung out a bunch. Other than that I seriously
spent a week just kicking it at the hostel, going out to bars and clubs, and occasionally walking around. During this time I did decide that I should make a t-shirt with a photo of my liver holding a sign that says, “I hate Buenos Aires.” If nothing else I think it’ll sell well at the Millhouse hostel.

p.s. The next blog is when Buenos Aires gets really interesting…I promise.

***Wish you were here***

No Gracias

December 15, 2006


No Gracias


“No Gracias,” becomes a sort of mantra as you wander Cuzco’s beautiful cobblestone streets, navigating through finger-puppet selling five year olds and elderly women slanging everything from bracelets to toothbrushes. These things you take in stride because you’re in Peru and you understand that people have to hustle to put food in their mouths, but when you reach “Gringo Alley” you almost wretch at the vampire like way in which locals try to get your plata (literally translates to silver). People stand outside the restaurants and shops of this narrow street like dozens of carnival barkers trying to get you to see the sideshow, and if they aren’t saying, “My friend, good food here inside,” they’re hissing, “Coca-eena. Marijuana. What would you like?” Even if Cuzco does have more hustlers than pre-Giuliani New York (who apparently did such a good job that even my spellchecker recognizes his name), all of it is worth enduring just to be present in such a magnificent city.

***This is my favorite photo I've ever taken. It's election day in Cuzco, notice the riot police in the background. This kid was selling finger puppets. I gave him a couple of Solas to let me take his photo***


***This is a peasent family in traditional clothing***


Pre-colonial Cuzco was the seat of the Inca Empire and it’s because of this that, once the Spanish finally conquered the city, they made sure to demonstrate the power (and wealth) of their god by building here some of South America’s most impressive and elaborate churches. Many people arrive thinking that it’s just the last big shitty city before reaching Machu Pichu, only to be absolutely floored by how truly lovely the place is. I arrived absolutely floored by altitude sickness, but after a few cups of coca leave tea and about a day of taking it easy, I felt much better.

***Beautiful Cuzco***




I’ve done a decent amount of traveling in my life and what’s cool is that almost everywhere I go, I run into someone I know. Just to name a few places; I’ve bumped into people in: Belfast, Barcelona, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, New York, Montreal and Washington DC. So I wasn’t surprised at all when on my second day in town I ran into a girl I went to UC Santa Cruz with. Back in college Rose and I didn’t actually know each other, but we’d seen each other around enough that when I ran into her in Cuzco it was like, “Hey didn’t you go to Santa Cruz?” Rose was staying at the same hostel/hotel as me so the morning I ran into her; she and I went and got some breakfast. Since we shared a similar past and knew a lot of the same people it became more like catching up with an old friend, than getting to know a new acquaintance. She was a bit bummed out because she had just left Buenos Aires after living there for eight months and she’d left behind someone she’d fallen in love with. I on the other hand was fucking elated because I found out that day that Krista had bought her ticket to come and meet me in BA. Doesn’t it seem so far that all things in these blogs revolve around that fucking city? Maybe I should call these blogs “The Buenos Aires Chronicles”.

Funnily, right after breakfast I ran into Rod, a guy I recognized from my neighborhood in San Francisco. He was in Cuzco for the same reason everyone was, to go to Machu Pichu and he was gonna be on the same train as me the following day. While I didn’t end up sitting by Rod on the train, I did end up sitting next to an American named Mike who was still drunk from the night before. Mike was one of those guys who, when he drank, had very very poor decision making skills, which of course meant that he had great stories.

Apparently, after drinking at the bar for a few hours the night before, he’d gone back to his hotel only to find it locked. When no one answered the bell, Mike decided that he should break in so that he could get some sleep before the train. “So there I was scaling the wall of my hotel,” he told me, “when all of a sudden there were these two local guys pulling at my legs. So I started kicking at them and ended up putting my foot through one of the windows. And then once I got down, I realized they were trying to help boost me up, because they asked me for some change.” Only in Cuzco would someone hit you up for change after randomly trying to help you break into a hotel. The dude had me practically dry heaving from laughter throughout the entire train ride, but his shining moment was when the stewardess asked the girl sitting with us if she’d like a beer and he answered, in Spanish, that she can’t drink because every time she does she cries a lot.

But yes, Machu Pichu, that’s what you really wanna hear about isn’t it? I was a little worried that because it was so hyped, I’d be kinda let down. I mean, it’s always been on my list of things to do before I die, falling somewhere in between singing a Danzig song at karaoke (check that one off my list) and having a threesome with two beautiful women (still not accomplished). Put quite simply, Machu Pichu is world of superlatives and I don’t think I can properly describe it. I’ll just say this, I am really glad I went. Those Incas really didn’t fuck around.

***Machu Pichu***





After Machu Pichu, I spent a few more days dicking around in Cuzco, drinking beer, eating well (Peru is very cheap for Americans), reading, hanging in the Plaza de Armas and not doing a single touristy thing. It’s nice sometimes just live a normal life when you’re traveling, instead of running from one attraction to the next. The day I left Cuzco I had a seven hour layover in Lima before my flight to Buenos Aires so I decided that I’d spend some time downtown at some museums. Although I saw some cool things, like the catacombs underneath the Church of San Francisco, the one thing that will always stick with me about that day was my cab ride into the city. Jesus Christ, that cab driver did shit I wouldn’t have even done in Mario Kart! It was terrifying. I kept saying to myself, “Please don’t let me die in the back of a cab in Lima.” But as you can tell, I survived Lima and back at the airport I had a hearty Thanksgiving dinner of Chicken McNuggets and coca-cola. And finally, after two weeks on the road, I was on my way to Buenos Aires.

***What has two thumbs and loves Machu Pichu? THIS GUY!***

Elections, Crabs and Cocaine

December 5, 2006

Elections, Crabs and Cocaine


~~Lima writhes and bends under its own weight; bustling, bumping, wobbling, weaving, bucking, like a city trying to decide whether to consume itself completely, or reach way down low and pull itself up by its dirty-ass bootstraps. Hustlers, hoods and thieves circumnavigate the city center’s plazas and colonial buildings in search of their next mark, while stray dogs fuck and kill each other in the street. Contrast this with upscale, outer-urban areas like Miraflores, and Barranca and you get the feeling that the entirety of Lima resides on two different planes which, despite proximity, try to ignore the other’s existence. Granted, boutiqued and restauranted Miraflores, and bohemian Barranca have their share of criminals too, but the feeling is completely different and a hell of a lot less ominous.

~~I landed in Peru ready to be back in a city, but after pulling out of the airport and seeing what stretched beyond the gates, I wasn’t quite sure if I was ready to be in this city. Someone should put up a sign that says, “Now leaving Lima’s airport. Welcome to the Third World motherfucker!”

***Soccer field outside of Lima Airport***

~~The flight had been pretty mellow (I befriended the stewardesses and flirted my way into free beer) and afterwards, me, two Argentinean girls, and a Swedish kid named David, marveled at the differences between Costa Rica and Lima as we sat in a cab on our way to Miraflores. Compared to the massiveness of Lima, San Jose just seemed like a provincial town in a backwater country. Lima was a real fucking city, and after a week of being muy tranquilo, I was ready to party. Unfortunately we managed to arrive the day before election weekend, which meant that, beginning at midnight, no alcohol was to be sold...anywhere.

***The girls of Air Taca love Broke-Ass Stuart***

~~That’s some serious shit right? In the United States, where (it would seem) people have fairly direct access to their government, there are tons of people who don’t vote simply because they just can’t be bothered with it. Whereas, in Peru, where roughly 45% of the population is made up of indigenous peasants who have absolutely no realistic influence on national politics, the country goes dry for 3 days for fear of drunken riots. It’s actually mandatory for Peruvian citizens to vote, and if they don’t, they get fined some ridiculous amount of money. People get so into the elections that political slogans and candidate names get painted on walls all over the cities. If you didn’t know better you think Oscar Gutierrez was a prolific graffiti writer, not a guy running for mayor.

***Election Time***

~~Well if my liver thought it was gonna get a holiday because of the elections, it was totally wrong. Some random gay man who we met on the street and who spoke perfect English took the four of us to an Irish bar that apparently had no respect for Peru’s liquor laws and served booze all night long. In Costa Rica the local girls won’t even acknowledge you if you are a gringo, so it was strange that suddenly here in Peru, I was getting all kinds of attention from every girl in the bar. So much so that I actually thought that all the women were actually hookers and that the gay guy who brought us to the bar was their pimp. Even though that wasn’t the case, I still wasn’t interested because I was still totally hung up on Krista back in San Francisco.

~~The following day, I met up with L, a friend who lived in Lima and she and I went out to Barranca to meet up with a friend of hers for crab soup. When it comes to crab soup, people don’t fuck around in Lima; each bowl had at least four claws that were almost the size of my hand. Having now tried the crab soup, there was only one other thing I couldn’t leave Lima without trying (mom you may want to skip to the next paragraph), so we went back to L’s friends house and did a couple lines of blow. Now, I don’t do cocaine very often, in fact I’ve never really been much of a fan of the drug, but I figured that since this was my only chance to try really really good cocaine from a reliable source (there’s no fucking way I’d buy drugs on the street in Peru), there was no way I couldn’t try it. For the equivalent of seven American dollars you can buy a gram of some of the best shit on Earth, so I did, and then did two lines of it, and then remembered why I never liked coke much in the first place…it’s kinda lame.

***Crab Soup***

***Peru's national soda. It tastes like bubblegum flouride...in a good way***

~~Earlier in the day, before the crab and coke, David (the Swedish guy) and I went and bought our trips to Machu Pichu. I guess the lady who helped set it up kinda fancied me and invited the two of us to her friend’s 28th birthday party. Considering the whole damn country was dry, we of course obliged. I’ve always found that one of the best ways to get insight into another culture is to get yourself invited to a party at someone’s house. In this case there were a lot of differences from an American’s 28th birthday party. First of all, the hostess/birthday girl, set up all of her chairs in a circle and the inside of the circle became the dance floor. She also cooked food for everyone, but when she served it, all the men got served before any of the women received their food. They also shared all the drinks. If someone opened a big bottle of beer (it comes in huge bottles here, almost like 40 oz’s) everyone poured a little into their cup and then passed the bottle on. It was also interesting that the crowd ranged from 20 years old up to like 55, and if there was a couple, the man was always at least 15 years older than the woman.

***Fiesta Peruvian style***

***Salsa***

~~Overall it was a fun night and one in which I was made to dance meringue and salsa in circle of 30 Peruvians I’d never met before. But easily the best part of the evening was when I’d convinced everyone that David was a bullfighter from Sweden. A few people offered to help get him some fights, but he respectfully declined because he was on vacation. I was just surprised that he went along with my bullshit as long as he did. But I guess you are too if you’re still reading these blogs.

***Me and David the Swedish Bullfighter***

Strange and Creepy

Wednesday, November 22, 2006


Strange and Creepy

When you spend time on the road you gain insight into yourself, the places you visit, and you get, more or less, a greater knowledge of how world around you works. For example, my travels in Ireland made me realize that I belong in cities and not the countryside. That was an important bit of knowledge I gained about myself. It took me only about three days of traveling in Costa Rica to come another profound conclusion, this one about the world as a whole. It goes like this: generally speaking, old white men traveling by themselves are creepy as fuck. I mean, Jesus, what’s creepier than a balding guy with a ponytail, wearing Tevas and a Hawaiian shirt, coming all the way to Costa Rica to pay for sex? The answer is: a balding guy with a ponytail, wearing Tevas and a Hawaiian shirt, who comes all the way to Costa Rica to pay for sex with someone underage (This is actually such a serious problem that there are multiple signs between the airport and the bus station informing people that, yes, sex with minors is illegal in Costa Rica too). So while I managed to avoid getting murdered in Jaco, I did get the pleasure of seeing loads of old farts walking arm in arm back to their hotels with gorgeous, and likely underage, Tica (Costa Rican women) prostitutes.

***Main Road in Jaco***


Happy to be getting out of Jaco alive, Oliver, Ville and I headed back to San Jose where the next day they would get on a plane to Buenos Aires and I would catch a bus to the Caribbean Coast. What’s interesting is that I’ve noticed a tendency amongst back-packers towards the idea of, “When I get to Buenos Aires…” It’s as if some sort of Emerald City like mythology has developed around Buenos Aires, and everyone with a back-pack is on their way to see the Wizard. If that’s the case, I guess that makes Taca Airlines my Yellow Brick road and Costa Rica my Munchkin land (not because it’s full of drunk midgets, but because it’s my first stop, duh).

In San Jose we chose the Pangaea hostel because a flyer said that it had free internet, free phone calls, a swim up bar and a mechanical bull. Well, the bull was hibernating, the bar was not in use, the internet was tediously slow and the delay on the phone calls made it feel like you were a CNN correspondent out in the middle of Afghanistan. But it was actually a pretty cool place and at least there were no mosquitoes (I’m walking proof that the mosquitoes here have a Jew fetish). The next day me and the guys made plans to meet up in Buenos Aires and we went our separate ways.

Anyone acquainted with me knows that if I’m in a room with 99 other people, and a lunatic walks in, invariably, that person finds me; I’m like cat-nip for crazy people. So it’s only logical that, if I’m headed to the Caribbean Coast of Costa Rica on a bus with 49 other people, and the only empty seat is right next to me, the one armed American veteran with no shirt on is gonna sit there. That type of shit doesn’t even surprise me anymore. Out of four hours on a bus, this motherfucker talked for at least three and a half and the only question he asked me was my name. Otherwise it was a fucking soliloquy. I can tell you anything you want to know about James, shit like, he didn’t lose his arm in war (he was too young for Vietnam) but actually in a motorcycle accident 15 years ago (he was more upset about wrecking the bike than losing his arm), or that he’s in Costa Rica looking for property (he already has some in California and Nevada but keeps some under his sister’s name for tax purposes and so she has something just in case he decides to ride a motorcycle again). After 30 minutes with this guy, I stopped being polite and just looked out the window, listening to my Ipod. He continued talking. The coolest thing about the bus ride though, was noticing that the drivers here act as porters as well. I mean this in the sense that they’ll bring goods from one town and a person will be waiting at a bus stop to pay for and pick up the goods in another town. It’s kinda like a third-world version of Pink Dot.

I ended up liking the Caribbean Coast more than the Pacific because all the Rastas seemed a lot less high strung then the folks on the other side of the country. The only minor harassment I got was the locals soliciting, “good smoke and cocaine, mon.”

***This guy sat in the tree all day, and tried to sell me drugs everytime I passed by. In this photo he's passed out***


When I first arrived in Puerto Viejo, I was depressed because I was once again alone, and I missed Krista (my girl in SF) like crazy. Everything changed though when she emailed me and told me that there was a 90% chance she was gonna meet me in Buenos Aires. I haven’t had a bad moment since then…but I have definitely had some strange ones.

***Random photos of Puerto Viejo***




In Puerto Viejo I was staying at a place called Rockin’ J’s, a cool hostel right on the beach where you can choose to sleep in a hammock, a tent or a dorm. Apparently J, in all his “rockin”-ness, is living out his pubescent fantasy of having a spot in tropical Costa Rica with a big-titted French girlfriend, 15 years his junior. That’s all well and good (we should all be so lucky), but the rub is that also living here is his severely maladjusted 13 year old son who may or may not be in school, spends all his time with 20-something year old backpackers (who score coke and weed from the Rastas), and who’s first words to me were, “I stabbed a dog today, do you think that’s wrong?” On top of all his Lord of the Flies bravado, I’m pretty sure the kid was hitting on me…seriously. Our conversation went like this:
The kid said, “I stabbed a dog today; do you think that’s wrong?”
“Umm what?” I said.
“Yeah I stabbed a dog today, I feel pretty bad about it”
“Why would you do that? That’s fucking awful!”
“The dog was attacking my dog so I grabbed my knife and ran up and stabbed it. Then they had to take the dog to the hospital. I feel so bad about it.” (I later got verification that the kid was not bullshitting me, that in fact he had stabbed a dog)
“Yeah kid that’s pretty fucked up…”
“Hey do you think it’s wrong to be gay”
“Umm…no not at all, in fact a lot of my friends and family are gay…”
“Really? You don’t think it’s wrong or gross?”
“Of course not. Do you?”
“Yeah I think it’s gross…but hey, wanna come and see my books?”
“What!? No thanks, I’m ok, I’m gonna hang here with my friends.”
Then a few minutes later he said to me, “Hey you wanna go sit on a hammock with me?”
“Um, no thanks kid. I gotta go. I’ll see you later.”
If getting hit on by a deranged 13 year old boy who had stabbed a dog earlier that day wasn’t frightening enough, the thought of what that kid is gonna be like as an adult was. Costa Rica is a strange and creepy place.

***Representing Broke-Ass Stuart at Rockin J's***


***Wish you were here***

Tropical Fucking Paradise

Saturday, November 11th, 2006

Tropical Fucking Paradise


***Three days before I began this trip I got a fortune cookie that read, “You are heading for a land of sunshine.” I thought it was funny and prophetic because I was about to go to Costa Rica, “tropical paradise”. I am currently sitting in a hostel/hotel type thingy in Jaco, on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast, hoping that the rain will cease; it’s rained every day since I’ve arrived. I’m not gonna lie, I was prepared for the rain because Costa Rica has “rainforests” and “rainforests” generally mean rain. But just because I came prepared for it, doesn’t mean I have to like the weather…the stupid fucking fortune cookie was stale too.

***My first few hours in country were overwhelming. I arrived already homesick because I left a wonderful woman back in San Francisco (Tony Bennett isn’t the only dumb son of a bitch to leave his heart there). Then when I stepped out of the airport, there were so many people shouting, “TAXI! TAXI!” at me, that I felt like I was a famous soccer player with that as my last name. I literally stepped outside, got verbally assaulted by 73 guys wanting to take me “wherever you want for good price”, turned right back around and went inside to gather my wits and find an ATM. The lady told me that the nearest cajero automatico was on the departure level which meant I would have to walk through the throng of taxi paparazzi to get there. The whole situation was pretty disconcerting because I hadn’t even put on my money belt yet (which I still need to do) and I wasn’t sure who was a hustler and who was legit. That’s one of the hardest parts of traveling in countries where the culture is so different than yours. What do you do when all the signs with which you’ve been programmed to help you distinguish the good guys from the bad guys, don’t completely apply? I guess just say “fuck it” and hope you pick the right taxi driver.

***Luckily I did. Jose was a short, scrappy Tico (native Costa Rican) with a big smile and a decent grasp of English (I still hid my money, ATM card and passport in different pockets), who, for $15, took me from the San Jose Airport to the Coca-Cola bus station. I was told that the station is called this because it used to be a Coca-Cola bottling plant…I think. What serves as one of the biggest hubs of transit for a city who’s metro area contains a million people, is less a bus depot than an open-air bazaar replete with butchers, lottery ticket salesmen, feral kittens and roosters. I guess it’s really not that different than downtown San Francisco’s Greyhound station.

···············Jose, my awesome cabbie·······················

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··············Feral kittens at the Coca-Cola bus station···············

***Lonely, overwhelmed and not quite sure if $15 was too much to pay for a cab ride, I arrived at the station and befriended the first backpackers I saw. It ended up that Oliver, an American from Maine, and Ville, a Finish guy were both headed to the same hostel in the same town as myself, so I diligently latched onto them and hopped on the bus to Manuel Antonio.

·····················Oliver, from Maine···············

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····················Ville, from Finland····························

***Manuel Antonio is less a town than a trickle of hotels, condos, restaurants and bars skirting the road leading to the Pacific Ocean. Most people come here for the area’s beautiful national park which has splendid beaches, lush forested hiking trails and eager to please monkeys; my reason was for free drinks. My cousin’s friend, Amy (who is awesome), owns a popular bar/restaurant, called The Lounge, in Manuel Antonio and since she’s the only person I knew in Costa Rica (by knowing her I mean talking to her a couple times on myspace); I decided to make Manuel Antonio my first destination.

·····································View from Vista Serena, our hostel······························

***That night, after getting situated at our hostel, we went to The Lounge for “Ladies Night” which of course meant that for every one lady, there were at least eight dudes. Now because of the obscene amount of American tourism (there’s gotta be more Americans here than in El Paso, Texas) Costa Rica, especially the Pacific coast, has a really strange cultural identity. Oliver said it reminded him a lot of Hawaii. So much of Costa Rica’s economy is based on tourism that US dollars are just as readily accepted, if not more welcome, than the local colones. And because so many people come here to ride the waves, California surf culture has really taken root. Wearing little more than boardshorts, flip-flops and t-shirts, most of the young people dress like they just spent the day at La Jolla Shores in San Diego. So just like any other place where local customs are inextricably handcuffed to American cultural imperialism, some of the Ticos seriously tend to resent us damn gringos. Now take that into consideration when imagining us walking into that fucking ladies night.

***Truthfully, nothing bad went down; it’s just that the vibe suggested that it absolutely could if we weren’t careful. The three of us made sure to stick together. The best part of the evening was actually when I went up to get my third drink. The guy behind the bar was wearing a beanie, despite the night’s heat and humidity, and sweat was streaming down his face. So after he delivered my drink, I said to him, “Man, you look really hot.” Completely misunderstanding this particular usage of the word “hot” he smiled at me a little confused, said, “Thank you” and moved on to the next customer. Classic!

***We made an early night of it at The Lounge and the next morning went to the national park. There we went swimming and hiking, observed big-ass iguanas and tiny basilisks, and got to see a monkey steal a ham sandwich from a tourist’s bag, and have a screeching match about it with its monkey family. It was sweet! I totally wanted to steal a monkey but thought better of it after seeing what those little fuckers did to that ham sandwich.

··································Photos from the natural park·································

***Now a day later I’m sitting in Jaco, writing this blog and waiting for the rain to let up so we can go out tonight. I’m a little nervous because, apparently, four people were murdered here last night and the population is only like 10,000 (Don’t worry mom; I think 3 of them were locals killing locals, and one of them was a dumb gringo girl who wandered out to the beach by herself at night. I fit none of these categories). So if I get killed and this is the last thing of mine you ever read, I hope you liked it.

···························································Wish you were here·························