Today is a special holiday here, the Day of the Virgin. People keep on sweating, the airconditioners above keep on sweating, the trees on the avenues keep on sweating. It rains from a clear sky.

on the back of my hand the words perspectives, family, an address montevideo 138, where I slept last night. Tonight is my last night in Buenos Aires, tomorrow my last day; I left my blue bike that made this city my home, now like a snail I’m carrying my home on my back and inside an old brown suitcase. I am heading up north to Bolivia, in a few weeks I’ll fly back to Guatemala. To continue my studies and start working. With what I’m not quite sure. Come Christmas and I’ll be back in good ol’ Xela.

I’m going back to a lot of frijoles, tortilla and egg, so there’ll meat on the menu tonight!

four months
on my bike through this city, this heat, these nights of warm concrete and flies in my face, I felt that it was finally almost mine, riding around in streets well known, cobblestones and treacherous sinkholes in the asphalt, murderous city buses spewing out dark brown smoke, ridiculous maneuvers on two wheels. I’ll miss those two wheels though. They served me well, and at times I almost betrayed them.

Always busy, even on holidays like today, the famed cartoneros of the capital spend their days scavenging, picking at the garbage, sorting out recyclable material in their massive carts, hand drawn wagons or horse drawn carriages, veritable towers of garbage to be sold by the kilo at recycling factories outside the city. Pushed or pulled through the streets while North American cars woosh past them at superspeed, and I drink my cafe cortado, sitting on the air conditioned inside looking out at them, and throw in a few spare words on them.

In the shopping malls, fake snow cover the workshop of Santa Claus and his elves, and plastic pine trees are supplied with a power adapter. In the night, cicadas or crickets take to the scene, chirping away in the night.