Three months in Buenos Aires (again)
Like
I did two years ago, I've spent three enjoyable months in the capital
of Argentina. Land of Borges and Cortazar, of Gardel and Piazzolla, of
Maradona and Messi. My plan was to relax, and that's precisely what I
did.
There's always a battle between two little monsters inside me. I
invariably want to jump into a bus and go visit those ruins outside
town, or go to several museums in the same day, or walk ten kilometers
photographing the landscape. That's my first monster: curiosity. But at
the same time I also want to not do any of that and instead stay home on
a comfortable couch drinking tea and reading a book, or drinking wine
and watching tv, or just playing a computer game. That's my second
monster: lazyness. During these nomad years of mine, I've been letting
curiosity win most of the skirmishes. But for this summer in Buenos
Aires, lazyness was in control.
In my cozy Palermo apartment, I read fourteen books (J.L. Borges again,
Philip K. Dick, Samuel Beckett, Julian Barnes, Han Kang, and a bunch of
Chinese authors), watched many hours of tv (including rewatching the
full eight seasons of House MD), and played the old computer game Darklands again.
I also attended two literature courses at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA). The first one was Literatura China del Siglo XX,
where I learned about many authors I had never heard about (Lu Xun, Ba
Jin, Ding Ling, Wang Meng, Wang Xiaobo, Can Xue, among others) and two
that I had (Gao Xingjian and Mo Yan, both Nobel Prize winners). The
second one was Las Trampas de la Memoria, connecting the works of J.L. Borges with authors like Philip K. Dick, Samuel Beckett, and Julian Barnes).
Yes, that's my idea of a relaxing time.
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