The Plague

Ok so obviously I don't have the plague but I am sick. I haven't felt great for a few days as I've been waking up with a sore throat and such but it has normally gone away (I just thought it was allergies due to the pollution here). But yesterday I woke up feeling terrible; although I still went to the market in San Telmo. It was freezing outside and I was out and about in town, outside, for a good 8 hours. I came back home feeling terrible. I did stop at the Farmacity (like a Walgreens) to get some medicine - just FYI Argentina has socialized medicine and you don't need a prespcription for most drugs. I bought a cough/throat drop that had an antibiotic in it. Basically I took a ton of allergy medicine and Advil Cold/Sinus and went to bed. A good 14 hours later of tossing and turning (as well as literally a few hundred tissues) I woke up feeling somewhat better. Then I walked to the grocery store and returned with a fever. After more medicine and hundreds, if not thousands, more tissues I do indeed feel better and I'm 99.9% sure I'll be fine tomorrow. Personally, I'm just glad that today was a national holiday and that I didn't have class.

So I was supposed to go to Uruguay today but when we went to buy tickets on Sunday all of the return boats were full. Therefore, we couldn't really make the trip (which turned out for the best with me being sick and all).

Beyond being sick and my plans for this long weekend changing yet again something else interesting did happen. Tonight was the first night I had no clue what I was eating for dinner. While I was afraid to ask I think my guess is pretty good - it was a thin layer of tough, dense meat between two thin layers of what looked like some type of lining; yeah, I'm rather sure it was stomach of some type. Again, I could be wrong but I was scared to ask. I just took a few bites and always took a bite of potatoes or bread with them. Yeah, it wasn't a great experience. Even if it wasn't what I think it was, it was surely a piece of meat I had never seen in a US grocery store, let alone on a US table. Considering the numerous parts of the animal they eat in Argentina and the many meals I've had here I consider my odds of encountering weird meats quite good.

I think that's it for now. I have exactly 200 Argentine pesos left (about $65) for the next 5 days; which should work if I watch my money. If not I guess I'll be asking mom to wire me some money. I leave for Chile on Sunday; until then I have a few more things I want to do here in Buenos Aires.