We're off to Mar Del Plata

The day immediately following Quilmes Rock I hopped on a bus to Mar Del Plata, with no idea how long I planned to stay and an indeterminate amount of time available. I prefer going without plans, fuck a deadline.


I set off in the bus from Retiro with an excited attitude. I was about to see some actual countryside of Argentina. Was there hills? Mountains? Rivers, valleys, volcanoes?? As it turned out, no. There was none of these.

The countryside surrounding Buenos Aires is as flat as it is boring. But even though there is nothing to see, it intrigued me immensely. There was not a hill to be seen, not a dip in the road or a ridge on the horizon, and yet there was water everywhere. In Australia if there is a flat area of ground for more than a few tens of kilometers you will be met with dirt, sand, rocks, or on the best days, dry scrub. Here I was presented with the flattest ground I have seen and there was just water lying around everywhere. No real rivers to speak of nor lakes, but water. I guess I would say it was an extended puddle system.

So I arrived at the bus terminal in MDQ and started to grab my bags, only to be poked in the back by someone I hoped knew me.

"Hey! piwrgp wpow gpjweg -9j04ignlng -94g 0inw!" Ana exclaimed, and gave me a hug. The upper features of my face said "what the hell just happened?" while my mouth tried to reconcile it with a smile.
"Como andas Ana!" Ana lived just a few blocks from the bus station, in a barrio se llama "La Perla". We grabbed her bike from the bike racks and headed there, via some wicked graffiti.

It's kinda weird meeting someone you have known for a few days again. Kind of like when you meet a girl you like and then have to re-ignite the engines again the next time you meet. I couldn't remember the dynamic of our relationship and I think Ana was expecting me to steer the entirety of the interaction. So I took the reigns as best I could.

Now here's the thing with Ana. She's the kind of person who looks at you while you talk with a wincey-smile, the kind of expression you have when you see a cat lose its footing and fall off a ledge, and waits for you to stop talking. It's not really a conversation. It's a monologue. I soon realised that when talking to Ana, in order to indicate that it was her turn to speak you had to either ask a question or request an action. I'll illustrate as best I can.

As I grabbed my bags off the floor Ana looked at me, smiling as if she had just seen a magician make a glaring mistake in his set.
"So... how have you been?" I offered to start with small talk (ugh).
"Good!" She nodded.

...

"Uh cool, I went to Quilmes Rock last night and saw some cool bands." We started to walk towards her house.
Ana continued smiling at me through scrunched up eyes.
"Yeah I saw some new ones I hadn't heard of"
Ana gave a little encouraging nod.
"Uh, conoces Cafe Tacuba?"
"Oo yeah, they're really good"
"Yeah they had really good stage presence"

...

I glanced over to see her still smiling and almost grimacing at me, continuing her nod.
'Yeah, well silence it is then' I thought to myself.

Ok so maybe it wasn't THAT bad at the start, but towards the end of the month I stayed it got to this point and worse. With just me steering the conversation and getting nothing back, all my jokes fell flat and all my expressions of opinion were met with total agreement or polite acceptance. We never got to talking about anything of value, besides a few times when we were drunk. Regardless, I appreciated her hospitality and intended to be as good a house guest as I could.

Ana's house was an apartment in a characteristic MDQ block. It was small and cosy, and she had made honourable efforts to spruce it up with her own flare. The kitchen had some colourful cutouts, of what I think was wrapping paper, stickytaped in a strip around the room at elbow height, and te house had colourful pictures and trinkets that she had either made or picked up at markets. It was like hippie-nouveau. I really liked it. She also gave me a bike to get around Mar Del Plata, which was entirely covered in a uniform layer of rust, and was perfect.

But here's the thing about MDQ. There is nothing to do. I mean they have beaches, yeah, but I am passionately indifferent towards that classification of landmark. I used to love surfing and I still love diving and swimming and fishing and all the activities one can partake of at the beach, but these are things you do, to which the beach is the gateway. The beach in and of itself is useless and boring. Ana liked to go twice a day.

The first morning we woke up and she decided the beach was the thing to do. Yeah cool, I would like to see the beach. So we went to the beach. And we sat on the beach. And we tried to maintain a conversation on the beach. And we just... stayed at the beach.

I think I understand now when people are reluctant to 'go to the river'. I think the river is to me what the beach is to Ana. 'The river' presents a myriad of things for me to do. I can sit and study the flow of the water, and the moss growing between the roots of trees. I like to imagine how I can reproduce that digitally, in a low budget realtime game environment. Where the polies would be best used and how much I would need to rely on environment maps. I can watch a trail of ants run between the rocks and rivergrass and ponder on how amazing it must be from their perspective. How lush and fertile their world must appear to them and how, fractally, it appears to me as such as well.

So I can sit on the river bank and do apparent levels of nothing, but to me it is always a mental experience, a meditative adventure. The river has details, dynamicity and interest. The beach has sand, salty water and people also wondering why they are spending so much time just soaking up the cancer. After about half an hour of sitting around, looking around, I was ready for the next item of activity to perform. But it never came. And it was thus every visit. So after the third or fourth time we went to the beach I decided that it would be socially more acceptable if I were to just do other shit. We would leave the house, I would accompany her to the beach, and then I would offer the suggestion that I was going to look around town, to the overly concerned and confused face of Ana, who couldn't quite get that I was bored as hell sitting on the beach.

As much as this sounds like it was all a bore and a chore, I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Mar Del Plata, and I think I left at precisely the appropriate time. Although if I hadn't have fucked up my knee I would have left a whole lot quicker.