In college Kyle Weber was co-conspirator number one. If they put people in jail for consuming vast quantities of alcohol they'd have to separate us in prison or we'd just spend all day hatching new drinking crimes. Looking online I saw that Milhouse Avenue hostel, located in the center of Buenos Aires, seemed to be the main party spot and the best place to pick up where we always left off. We booked it.
The day I left Spain I saw the sun rise over the plains of Andalucia on a bus from Seville to Madrid and saw it rise again as my plane descended into Buenos Aires Argentina. The first thing I noticed was the change of season. Before this trip I'd only traveled abroad to Europe, which obviously has the same season as back home, and to the tropics, which have no season. Buenos Aires though, deep in the Southern Hemisphere, was the opposite of where I'd been. The oppressive heat of southern Spain was replaced by the cold air of early Spring. Pale winter sunlight on the august edifices, the monuments to faded glory.
I decided to walk the mile or two from where the airport shuttle dropped me off to the hostel. I already liked this town. It had a New York City vibe to it. Passing mile after mile of apartment buildings on the way from the airport I saw its massiveness and here in the center I could feel its density. There were people everywhere, many fashionable, absorbed in their appointments, errands, tasks. Their lives.
I was at the hostel maybe an hour when my friend walked in. We actually began with restraint - just two beers apiece over lunch in a literary cafe in the San Telmo neighborhood. We walked around, crashed a civic choir's concert, witnessed a youth street protest. Good, we agreed, to experience some culture before the debauch began in earnest.
By this point in my journey I'd stayed in quite a few hostels and met a lot of great people, but I never had a crew like the one we put together at Milhouse. Drunken lunatics with hearts of gold - there could have been no better accomplices. Later on I met other travelers who stayed there and didn't like it. They said the place felt sterile, the people distant. Guess we just lucked out.
Every night Milhouse or its sister hostel has a party and then everyone goes out to a club. That first night Kyle made it home before I did but when I walked in our dorm room he popped his head up.
"Hey bmac."
"Hey."
"How was the rest of your night?"
"Great. Yours?"
"Great."
"Going to bed?"
"I'm not ready to but i might."
"I want to keep drinking."
"Let's steal something from the hostel."
"You serious?"
"Yeah."
"Let's go."
Fortunately we revised our plans and decided to obtain booze legally. Perhaps our somewhat deranged, desperate state was more apparent than I imagined because we were refused entry to several establishments and sale at several stores. Perhaps it was just morning. It was getting light now and the night's last revelers were trickling out of the closing bars. Finally we found a store whose owner discreetly pulled four 16 oz. cans of Quilmes beer from behind rows of soda-pop in the refrigerated case and sold them to us. We left the store and made our way back to the Avenida 9 de Julio, the widest street in the world. We found some park benches on a grassy median and sat down and with each of us having arrived twenty-four hours earlier from different quadrants of the world we cracked our beers and watched Buenos Aires come to life. Ladies walking small dogs, old men shambling along their secret predawn routes. It was warm out and the sky was blue. It was going to be a beautiful day.
And one of our greatest benders. After a riot of a soccer game, a weed-fogged drum party in a converted warehouse, and a giant t-shirt wearing cockroach, among other highlights, it was finally time to part ways. On his last day Kyle went out to buy some fabric his sister, who's a designer, had requested. He failed to do this and we went to a bar. Where else to say goodbye? When it was time I gave him a hug and wished him farewell and watched him walk out the bar. There were some Irish kids drinking there who had just checked into Milhouse. I pulled up a chair and got back to what I was doing before Kyle arrived: having a good time by myself. But it wasn't quite the same. When it comes to partying, I could only have so much fun without the guy.
ADDENDUM: On our second or third night at Milhouse we met a young English guy who was traveling in South America for a month and had come to BA from Bolivia straight through on an 80-hour bus ride. To alleviate the obvious hardship of riding a Bolivian bus for 80 hours he'd obtained in Bolivia, legally, a variety of pharmaceutical depressants to take on the bus. He was studying to be a doctor and had confidence that he could apply his medical knowledge toward getting him through the ride. His confidence was misplaced. Where he faltered was the dosage. Downers can cause forgetfulness and if taken to excess outright amnesia. When he first got on the bus he took too many pills, later forgot he had taken them, and took more. Soon he had taken around four times the proper dose, blacked out completely, and encountered misfortune. He lost his iphone, ipod, and other gear (South America and BA specifically seem to be a graveyard of iphones. I met 4 people, in addition to myself, who lost one). On the bus he met a Colombian guy named Fernando who, seeing his compromised state, had at one point placed his jacket in the overhead compartment for safekeeping. When they had to disembark somewhere to switch buses Fernando grabbed the jacket and tried to give it to our friend. "That's not mine," he said. Despite Fernando's pleadings he denied the jacket. Ten minutes later he asked Fernando if he had seen his jacket anywhere.
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