Got Sick, Now Much Better 2/5-2/12

Last Wednesday I was reading in a park and started to feel really achey, and then my eyes started to get sore, and right as I realized I was probably coming down with a fever, I decided to go home. While I was in the subway, the combination of the heat + crowdedness + nearly unbearable noise = near blackout. I almost fainted but luckily got off in time, got a cab back to my place and fell asleep. I woke up with a raging fever and a horrible sore throat that lasted until pretty much today.

I started feeling a little better yesterday about my body, but my feelings toward this city were seriously low. I was feeling underwhelmed, and after all the amazing things I've seen so far, I was running out of ideas, and was starting to realize, maybe this city's actually kind of disappointing if I already feel like I've done everything, maybe I chose the wrong place, and what the fuck am I going to do for another six months?

I woke up today, though, at around 3 PM (I decided to buy an alarm clock because I'm pretty much missing out on every day by staying up so late reading/watching movies/being a drunk), and the city seemed completely fresh, which was also the result, I'm sure of me recovering from being bed-ridden for close to five days. I actually used my tour guide and went on a suggested "city stroll," which I thought would be kind of lame and touristy, but was actually really rewarding. Site by site, I walked around, stopped, looked at where I'd reached, read about it, looked some more, and kept on walking. Most of the locations I encountered weren't even tourist hotspots, but just places with really interesting stories, or symbolic architecture, or something like that. The majority of my time was spent like a total sunburnt white American tourist, standing in the middle of the sidewalk, looking straight up for long periods of time, and grinning. I then went to my FAVORITE park and read for hours, also stumbling upon some camera crews who I believe were shooting a commercial or a music video full of people standing on a grassy slope and stomping their right feet in unison. Haha

More importantly, though, what I realized when I was sitting on a bench in this park (by this point the sun was setting) was how unbelievably exquisite everything was around me. The statue that I usually walked by while I was scouring for a spot in the sun, when I looked at it again, I realized that it was actually so so lovely. And I noticed how green all the leaves were (it IS the middle of summer, duuhhhh), and all the shadows, and all the couples making out around me. I was completely by myself, and a feeling overcame me that was really overpowering. I realized that many of the nuances of Buenos Aires that shook me at first into an immediate culture shock and then hit me again by making me realize their aesthetic qualities, today were impacting me in a third way, much more difficult to explain. They were more than just really pretty things I was seeing, they were actual relics of my life here. I was thinking about how living in a foreign location, it's really like experiencing a re-birth. Cut past the "cultural sensitivity" bullshit, take in how the people live their lives in a way that is more than visual, and while the voyeuristic process of "trying to figure people out" becomes more cerebral, I think you'll start to adopt the culture around you and become a hybrid. It sounds weird, but from people-watching and being around these people who for my time here have just been a mystery, I feel like I'm starting to get them, and with that this city's starting to feel instinctual. I had the same thing with Manhattan, like it slid itself into me in little ways that I didn't even recognize at first. Slid itself in? I guess I'm slowly being penetrated by Buenos Aires!