Día del amigo

We have Mother's Day. We have Father's Day. We have...you know, other days. But we don't have Friendship Day. Argentina has one on the United States for that. 

Día del amigo is a day dedicated to friendship. You can get together and have mate with friends, go out for coffee, or go get a few drinks. Sure, it's kind of commercialized, but it's a great opportunity to see people you haven't had great contact with in the past. Here's what I did on my first-ever Friendship Day.

Friendship Day was a Wednesday (July 20th), and mine started by getting coffee at a café near my house with some of my fourth-year friends. After that, some of us went over to Lucía (La Negra)'s house to chat and have pizza. I can't really give you a lot of details about what we did, because we really didn't do anything incredible or out of the ordinary. What was nice was that we were together and expressing how much we loved each other (Eww....that even sounds cheesy as I'm typing it). Ok, let's stop with this part.

After that, I met up with some second-year friends in a place called London. London is not really English at all. It's more like a collection of everything small-town American; I loved it. There was pool, bowling, and great drink specials. This "bowling" was a little different than bowling alleys in the States. For starters, you could wear whatever shoes you wanted to. Nope...no fancy clown shoes this time. Also, there were very few lanes (something like 5 or 6), and you had to get a number to wait for your turn to play. Finally, like older bowling alleys, the pins were not set up automatically by sorting machine that puts them in the right place, but rather the pins were tied to strings (like something you would see in an arcade game). One of the most interesting cultural reflections I found, though, was that there was absolutely no hint of competition in bowling with my Argentine friends. In the US, even among friends everyone has their own name slot and gets their own score...and hey, let's be honest, at the end of a game you see how well you did compared to everyone else. Not here. There were 6 or 8 of us playing, and 4 slots for players. They didn't seem bothered by this and, rather than establish teams or anything like that, they just started throwing the ball. There were no teams. There were no designated turns. There were no personal scores. It was very communistic, but it was a little refreshing in a way. Still, though, it felt so, so weird. This method of playing is good, since most Argentineans seem to be horrible bowlers.

I should add that this day was filled with me having cocktails here and again, so at about this point (after 3 or 4 gin tonics and long islands), I'm starting to get pretty buzzed. I think that we went out after London, but we might not have. I also think that some people came over to my house, but I don't remember. Instead of blaming intoxication, I'll just chalk it up to the fact that it took me so long to write this post. Oh, memory...you tricky fiend.