Residents of Casa Pasco

Ruth and Lauren, both from Leicester, England






Gus from Buenos Aires








Mette and Anika from Denmark and Germany, respectively






German from Montevideo, Uruguay








Petros from London







Tigre from Buenos Aires




Olivier from Lille, France

I'm not a businessman, I'm a business...man

I haven't been updating this blog as regularly as before because I have been UNBELIEVABLY busy with two entrepeneurial ventures: Bucketfeet and Ojo Photos. For those of you that don't know, for the past couple years I've had a small-scale custom shoe design business (www.bucketfeet.com), and it has taken off a bit down here in Argentina.


My other, newer venture, is nightlife photography. Since working with the Buenos Aires Pubcrawl, I have been the unofficial, official photographer. The work I've done with them has encouraged me to go out on my own and start a company that essentially documents the ridiculous nightlife of Buenos Aires. My good friend Julian Walter, who in his own right is an amazing photographer, came down here to help me set it up, mostly with getting the website up. The two of us have very different styles of taking pictures so we compliment each other very well, both can learn a lot from one another. In any case it is very, very exciting and I will only be getting busier, but it's a GREAT kind of busy. The website is: www.ojophotos.com. Check it out, there will be new updates regularly!

Aside from these new developments, life is generally the same here. I'm hoping to get out of the city for a couple days next week, maybe hit up the beach in Mar del Plata, or go to Uruguay for a day or so. This massive concrete jungle can suck you in.

Manu Chao live in Bs As

The second I found out about Manu Chao was coming to Buenos Aires, I rushed down to the local locura to get my ticket. At 70 pesos (3.6 to the dollar) I could not pass it up and after his playing for nearly 3 and a half straight hours, made it a huge bargain. It was good I got them when I did because they ended up selling out really, really quickly and a lot of my friends were pretty bummed they couldn't go. In all honesty it wasn't really anyone's fault it wasn't advertised very well. I heard about it word of mouth, otherwise I wouldn't have known about it till it was too late. I saw Manu Chao at the Outsidelands Festival in SF in August and while it was great, I have to say the atmosphere was a bit different here. Everyone knew all the words to every song, there was a lot of OLE OLE OLE OLE, MAAAANU...MAAANU! Here is a 10 minute video compilation of the footage I got with my digital camera.

Re-Cap of the last month...

I think this is the longest period of time I've gone without updating my blog and for all those diehard fans I apologize (that one's for you Jonah...). In early January I realized that in the three months I had been here, I took at least one trip every month. Because of this, I also realized that I didn't have any clear idea of how much money I was actually spending so I decided to stick around here to try to gauge it (I still don't have a clear idea, my bookkeeping skills haven't improved). In any case, I have stuck around Buenos Aires and for that, multi-weekly blogposts would be kind of dull.

Life here is excellent. My house is now rolling seven-deep with the addition of three new roomies: Petros, Ruth, and Lauren, all twenty-four years old, and all British. We have a good time going back and forth with roast-like jabs about why the other person's country is worse. They have ridiculous expressions and words that I have a very hard time understanding, and to them the way I speak is equally confusing. We definitely have some good laughs. Having them in the house too is a great gauge for my spanish, which by the way is doing excellent, because they don't speak ninguna carajo (literally translated as: not a single fuck) of it and I am now the sole link between my spanish speaking roommates and them.

For those of you that don't know, I am one of thousands of fully employed illegal aliens/expats living in this city. I work with various other wanderers on the Buenos Aires Pub Crawl, doing promotion, and most recently all of the photography for the website and various fliers (all of the pics can be seen at: http://www.pbase.com/afirestein/buenos_aires_pubcrawl). It is an awesome job, every night is a different adventure, and a lot of the people you meet are incredible. It is however, still a job, and can get VERY exhausting. I wouldn't put up with it though if I didn't really love it and didn't think what we are doing is a great thing. When a city is this big, and with so many nightlife opportunities, you don't want your night to be a bust. For all those travelers coming through and spending a night or two, we are the perfect solution, and people love it. Sidenote: so far the craziest countries represented based on my experiences on the PubCrawl go in this order: 1. Brazilians, 2. Aussies, 3. Brits.

I'm going to leave you all with that for the time being, hopefully I'll get around to getting a much more detailed post, but to be honest it is just too damn hot to do anything.

Inauguration Day in South America

Well, the day finally arrived, and it couldn't have come soon enough. Barack Obama is our PRESIDENT!!!!!! I woke up around 11 (that's early here) to get ready and go meet some friends at a very well-known American expat owned bar called Sugar. They had a big election night party that I missed so I wanted to make sure I was around for this. The festivities started at 3 pm BA time but just to make sure I could get in I tried to get there a little earlier. The bus that takes me to the nearest point of the bar picks me up right on my block but since it is almost clear across town, it is at least an hour-long ride. I ended up getting to the bar at about 2:30 to find, to my horror, that it was already filled beyond capacity. I just HAD to watch the speech(es), especially since election night, while fun and amazing and all, was missing that little something: other Americans. Fortunately I remembered hearing about another place, also owned by an American expat, that was broadcasting all the events. I hopped in a cab and screamed over to that bar, which is about 5 minutes from my house (I didn't opt to go there in the first place because the vibe just isn't the same) and managed to get there just in the nick of time. It's a good things cabs are faster than buses. It was amazing watching this part of history happen in a foreign country with so many Americans living here right now. The place was packed, standing room only. The speech to me was great, but as I've mentioned to a lot of people, what really made it seem real was watching footage of the Bushes literally "flying" away, as if now maybe they can just fly away from our collective conscience and let a new beginning arise.

I hope all of you had a great time wherever you were (especially Tristan and Andrew, those lucky SOB's). I love it down here, but Election Night and Inauguration Day are two days I really would have loved to have been in the States. Oh well, we got 8 more years!

BsAs Breakdancers

The music scene here, at least on the surface, is not the most diverse. About 90% of the bars or clubs I've been to have played literally nothing but electronic music, which don't get me wrong, is fun, but it gets old. I actually found a place that plays hip hop and was eager to check it out. Here is a video of some fairly decent Argentine breakdancers from last night.

Best Photos of 2008

I thought since we have entered 2009, I would compile my favorite pictures of 2008. These are in no particular order. Enjoy and let me know which ones you like the most!