Parkour and Zombies

My head was an absolute whirl with the changes of the last few days. From tranquil familiarity to alien hecticity. The city bore a striking resemblance to Mega City 1 with its barrio-blocks and slum towers. I felt the oppressive grasp of sandstone brick skyscrapers, squeezing me into the street like long stony fingers. I immediately set out to do something awesome with this new environment.

Parkour.



I had hit up the Buenos Aires Parkour group on facebook a few days before and had the general idea of where to find them. They train every Saturday on the south side of town in Parque Chacabuco. It was a sprawling park that seemed to be snake juice for all your leisure needs. It had dog walking tracks winding through a forested market stall area, basketball courts right next to the pool, those permanent chess tables and even permanent table tennis tables with metal grille for nets. It also had some of the most prime rails, walls, gaps and ledges for parkour I have yet encountered.

The parkour group consists of roughly 100 permanent members, all of which were enthused to speak far-too-fast spanish to me. After introducing myself and practicing a little I started to really vibe out and get a wonderful flow in my movements that I have found hard to get in Aus. I think it's something to do with the energy of the situation when you have a large group of people wanting to not only improve on each others runs, but to impress with creativity. I made some gaps that I would otherwise have not attempted, including a double kong on rails to a precision on the curb.

Having a good day of parkour like that really gets your mood up. Whenever I feel I have progressed in anything I do I always feel better for days. I think it introduces testosterone into your system or something when the stress level of your current activity is exactly at your tolerance threshold and you are therefore continually met with success. I certainly felt very confident even though I could hardly speak a dickens to anyone around me.

When I got back to Milhouse, despues bañando, I got an amazing surprise popup on facebook from one of the parkour crew that I had added.

FUCKENNNNNNNNN ZOMBIE WALK

I was quite excited. Zombie walks are the thing I have always wanted to do and never got the opportunity due to it not falling neatly into my sedentary lap. And now it had. I briefly weighed up suggesting to some of my fellow hostel travelers that they should check it out and quickly decided that they were a bunch of twats and I didn't want to share this experience with any of them. Solo it is.

The next day I set about making some fake blood to throw on myself in order to look like a bloody mess. I had neither time nor resources on my person to create such, so I went to the nearby supermarket to get some cornflour, red dye and other random red/chunky things. I ended up buying what I had thought was tomato sauce but was not, a bottle of wine and some sort of polenta. Apparently you need to go to a specialist shop to find food dye here. There are a lot of things that you need to go to specialist shops in order to find here. I think that's the primary way they keep the economy of small business ticking over in their both post and pre collapse environment.

Long story short I ended up making a concoction that was not blood-like at all, throwing it out and drinking the wine. So it was I headed to the zombie walk with a bloodless stumble but altogether excited to see what would happen.

I was not disappointed in the least. To say that it exceeded my expectations would have been an understatement. I expected to see a small progression of nerds and hipsters with fashionably ripped jeans and bad VG cosplay, but instead was greeted with a swarming mass of impeccably designed costumes and tasteful zombie culture references. At one point a guy dressed like a soldier from S.T.A.L.K.E.R ran through the crown with an airsoft and mowed down swathes of zombie with red dye pellets. My brief attempt at costume creation failed, I partook of the make-up booth at the park, ripped my singlet and became one with the mass.

The ringleader, Reynaldo, was a man dressed as a fairy floss vendor who would walk through the crowd with a megaphone playing eery childrens music and staring blankly at people for too long at a time. It was like something straight out of Resident Evil. The games. And the good ones, back when they were actually creepy, not the action packed sexy shit-a-thons they shovel into the mouths of retarded casual gamers nowadays.

When the walk eventually began, we shuffled down to the end of the park and spilled onto the road, a major artery in the city - 10 lanes wide - and blocked traffic for hours. We shambled through the cars, staring wild eyed at the passengers within. Periodically a scream would issue forth from the crowd and everyone would join moaning and shouting in perfect zombie unison. Some people in the cars actually panicked. If we had have been more violent I am sure there would have been some seriously hilarious reactions, but everyone seemed to know that would be unacceptable if the walk was to continue for years to come.

15,000 people zombies

The walk terminated at another park, where they had a full stage set up and a live band playing. The music was hilariously inappropriate, which was odd considering the rest of the walk had been perfectly in tune with what you would expect from the zombie youth. It seemed that the second half of the party had been organised by some PR fatcat attempting to gain the support of the youth by sending them 'rock and roll', while the first half had been organised by one of the zombies themselves. Some dude sang some strange opera/swing song for far too long and, after about three key changes, Reynaldo just straight up said "Graciaaaas!" and pushed him offstage. Reynaldo for president.

The walk home was almost as good as the walk itself. I had no idea where I was but knew the general direction in which I had to head, and ended up taking a bunch of backstreets where people really didn't expect me to be. The reactions were mixed. Some people met me with feigned indifference, not wanting to get caught up in whatever the hell I had been doing, some people gave me high fives and knowing smiles, and some people stared in horror. I liked those ones the most. One guy came around the corner on a pushy and almost fell off when he saw me. By the end of it all I had been training a days parkour harder than ever before, walking around for the entire day and then trudging home on what felt (and looked) like bloodied stumps.

I'll fucken do it again too.