Nick Curry

I spent 1.5 days in London, stopping over to pick Ross up on my way to China – in that time I had an unfeasible amount of things to do. I did manage to meet up with Onyee the day I arrived for a quick coffee, and it was great to catch up and hear the good news about her band Sunny Day Sets Fire (I’m their #1 fan, or at least #2 after Daniele). By the time I left her I was positively buzzing from the endorphin, adrenalin and coffee – I’d had almost no sleep on the plane, and had a couple of moments during the day where I must have nodded off without realising it and woken up to find, for instance, that someone had put breakfast on my tray (on the Milan-London flight).

My Dad popped over from Paris on his way to Newcastle the next day – we had lunch together, and it was also fantastic to catch up with him, I was pretty glad he found the time to stop over. By the time I had bought a couple of travel extras, and a couple of dinners with Ross later, and it was time to go again – and so off to Hong Kong…

After a very short night at Peter’s place, it was time to leave Porto Alegre for Sao Paulo and then fly back to London via Milan… I had to spend the whole day in Sao Paulo airport, which I now know very well – the only advantage of being so tired was that I didn’t have much energy to feel sad about leaving, although seeing the plane about to bring me back to Europe definitely struck an emotional chord…

After leaving Buenos Aires, I headed over to Porto Alegre (via Montevideo) to meet my brazilian uncle Peter – we had only met a couple of times before, and the last time was in 1998, so I was looking forward to catch up and find out more about this part of my family I knew so little about…

It was great fun meeting him again, and he hadn’t changed at all from how I remembered him – he kindly came to pick me up from the bus station, and after a quick stop at the local primary school for his girlfriend to vote on the gun law referendum (on whether or not to continue allowing guns to be sold in Brazil – the final outcome was to continue selling them, although this has been interpreted as a vote against the government more than anything else), we headed over to an airfield to see an airshow. The airshow never happened, but we did get to see lots of planes, talk to an apprentice pilot and see Peter’s new plot of land, located nearby. The next day I walked around Porto Alegre, and got to see the Gazometro, a converted energy plant now serving as an art gallery space – I was sure I had been there before, but couldn’t remember how or when – after a while I remembered that we had spent an afternoon there with my family the last time we visited Peter, over seven years ago…

On my last night in Porto Alegre, Peter invited my cousins Patricia, Marilia (and her boyfriend Fernando) and Pepe over to dinner – I hadn’t seen them in as much time as my uncle, and fortunately my Spanish was a bit better this time than last, so we did actually manage to communicate a little this time. It was great catching up, and seeing how everyone had changed – especially Pepe, who was 10 last time I had seen him…

After delaying leaving three times, the inevitable had to happen – I finally had to leave Buenos Aires.

My last nite was absolutely great, four of us from the hotel headed over to the launch party for Mathias’s girlfriend’s archaeology review, and had a great time until the early hours of the next day… A great way to leave, with great memories…

Yesterday evening we went to see one of the strangest things I think I have experienced so far – the world’s oddest Tango show.

We were looking for an affordable show and, after wandering through the city and finding either full or horrendously expensive places, we landed in a place called Opera Show – a tango show featuring a dancing couple, a male tango singer and a female tango singer, an opera singer and a ‘surprise guest’. Now this sounds fairly innocuous, although the opera singer and the surprise guest should really have ticked us off – this was a show that David Lynch would have been proud of.

When we got in, we realised only three other tables were taken. The decor featured a felt curtain, a chair and a coat hanger – the first act we saw were the tango dancers, the male lead bearing an uncanny resemblance to my gay driving teacher (minus green-rimmed glasses), thereby taking a lot of the conviction out of the steamy male-female interaction key to tango. The male and female tango singers were also not very good; the opera singer, completely out of place in a tango show, looked like he had been airlifted directly out of his native Bavaria without even being given the time to shave off his moustache, and had the bad luck of having a mouth that made him look like a surprised fish. But the real star attraction was the ‘surprise guest’ – an obviouly demented woman whose numero consisted of dancing with a coathanger. Unfortunately, in a failing to the Lynchian tradition that this spectacle was obviously an homage to, the one-eyed dwarf never made his appearance – but then we didn’t stay to the end, so maybe he did…

Mathias, Sania and myself went to the Centro Cultural Borges yesterday to see some awards being presented to an painter Mathias is working with. And at the event, which unbeknown to us was one of the major art prizes to be awarded in Argentina, none other than Ernesto Sabato turned up to honour the event with his presence. We hesitated to wish him the best from France, but he was lead out surrounded by cameras before we had a chance…

The pictures at the exhibition were good, some of them quite interesting – though Mathias’ friend’s, who also won the first prize, is not amongst any of my images…

Today we saw one of the most reknown football derbies of all times – River Plate vs Boca Juniors. These two teams are traditionally the most powerful agentinian teams and, being neighbours in Buenos Aires, also entertain a strong rivalry. This rivalry extends to Maradona, a Boca man, never visiting the River stadium except when the national side plays there, and it not being recommendable for River fans to wear team colours when walking in the La Boca neighborhood. Through sheer luck, the derby was on the first week-end I am here (I did extend my stay in BsAs by a couple of days to see the game), and it was thus with great anticipation that, after finally getting our hands on some tickets, six of us went to see the game at River’s stadium.

We sat in the River side of the stadium (Boca fans had only been allocated 4500 seats), in the seated sections (the “populares” were the first to sell out). The game itself was OK but not great – both teams were too fielded in recent years. However the fans were the stars of the show – the stadium was filled to capacity (65000), and I greatly extended my repertoire of Spanish insults thanks to the encyclopedic knowledge of my fellow supporters. I had also never seen a father so enthusiastically exhorting his 10 year-old son to shout profanities – all in all it was great fun, a great chance to see the kind of enthusiasm for football still unique to Latin America.

I’ll probably be spending a week or so here, enjoying such modern ameneties as hot showers and meals not consisting solely of chicken, rice, and potates, before heading up north to Porto Allegre and then to Rio…

The city so far seems amazing – kind of like how I imagined Paris being in the 1930s, with artists everywhere, a great atmosphere, great cafes and bars, great food – and better weather (Spring just started here). Am looking forward to this…

After a 3-day marathon train and bus ride through Bolivia and Brazil, I arrived to Iguazu to see the falls – another impressive sight, the sheer strength of the waterfall makes nature’s presence strongly felt despite the amount of tourists, which makes for an awe-inspiring spectacle.

This area was relatively tourist-free, but I bumped into an Italian and a Dutch who were attempting a trip into the nearby Kaa-Iya National Park. Despite being Latin America’s largest park in terms of surface, Kaa-Iya is not open to tourists (although the planned construction of a tourist bungalow could change this); by sheer luck, we were granted authorisation to visit the parc, and even though we didn’t see as much wildlife as we had hoped, we did spend one great night by a natural well admiring the sound and light show created by fireflies and other insects.