No, Konex isn´t a Tampon Brand

Woke up way too early today for my first class (Argentine Literature) at la UCA, the private Catholic University in Buenos Aires. When my alarm went off at 6.30 it was still pitch-black outside, thanks to the accidental daylight-savings time being observed in Argentina this year. (I totally don´t understand that. How can an entire country accidentally decide to set its clocks forward an hour? I think I´m probably missing something.)

Anyway, I´m not going to be taking the class. I wanted to study Argentine literature while I was in Argentina, but I started falling asleep after fifteen minutes. The next hour and a quarter was pretty much torture. I´m not usually a sleeper, especially on the first day of class, but I definitely woke myself up more than once when my head jerked down.

The boringness is actually kind of a good thing. I really didn´t want an early class on Tuesday mornings after last night. I went to a drum concert at Konex, a cultural center in the Almagro neighborhood, which happens every Monday night. I plan to become a regular.

Melissa, a girl at the residencia, needed someone to go with her to the concert. She was meeting a guy whose number she had gotten at a club over the weekend, along with a few kids from FLACSO. I agreed to go with her for lack of anything better to do. It was a good decision. We got there at around 7.30 last night to find hundreds of Argentine twenty-somethings in skinny jeans an mullets hanging out in the street outside. No one seemed like they were in any rush to go in. Michelle and I bought a liter of Quilmes for a dollar and drank it on the street while we waited for the FLACSO people and watched the crowd. Most people were sitting on the sidewalk, talking and smoking cigarettes. The women were all impossibly thin, with sideswept bangs and torn leather sandals. The men had long hair and day-old beards, and looked like they probably kept a copy of Marx on them at all times.

Eventually, we went inside. The cultural center is in a converted factory. For the concert, everyone stood in packed courtyard surrounded by old industrial warehouses, listening to about 10 drummers on an elevated stage in the center. The atmosphere was relaxed and mellow, and it reeked of pot. After about an hour, a trumpet joined in the music, but mostly it was just the drums.

The concert cheered me up about Buenos Aires in general, which I needed. I found out yesterday morning that I can´t go to Patagonia if I want to take Filosofia y Letras classes at la UBA. BUt things look better this morning. I just hope my second class of the day, Contemporary Spanish Literature, is more interesting than the first.