I had to throw in a Living Legends lyric because I’ve finally found my favorite bookstore in Buenos Aires and now I’m feeling particularly artsy.  

My creative writing professor decided to hold class at Libros de Pasaje, which is this really awesome bookstore in the Palermo barrio.  Erin and I took the colectivo (the bus) from school to Palermo and after getting off 10 blocks further than we wanted to we made our way to the bookstore.  What I love about Palermo is how artistic the area is compared to Recoleta.  Recoleta, where I live, is more comparable to the Upper East Side of NYC with really expensive shops, lots of green space, gorgeous architecture, and really chic beautiful people meandering about.  You’d never find something like this in Recoleta:
 

~*s0 @rtzy*~  Anyway this bookstore is exactly the kind of bookstore I wish was more prominent instead of massive corporate Barnes & Nobles and Border’s that serve Starbucks.  Libros de Pasaje is very cozy and welcoming. It’s not big, but it has a few comfortable chairs and couches and a bunch of tables and places to study, read, or eat.  I walked in and was like BAM!  I think my IQ just rose 20 points.  
 

There’s also a café (and a bar…we are in Buenos Aires, after all) with really delicious sandwiches and the BEST alfajores I’ve had in Buenos Aires so far.  I’m pretty sure they were homemade or blessed by Zeus’s lightning bolt, one of the two. I ordered the desayuno Francés which came with three medialunas, orange juice, and café con leche, all for 20 pesos.  Which is $5.19.  Suck it, large coffee corportations!   

Here’s a picture of the café and bar, om nom nom, más vino, por favor:

One really cool thing about Libros de Pasaje is that whenever famous Latin American writers visit, they’ll sign the wall.  One of the huge walls is filled with drawings, poems, and signatures.  This part of the wall translates to “How I want to stay here…”:
 

I happened to be sitting next to the “Sex and Gender” section, so of course I looked for my favorite Argentine professor’s encyclopedia on gay culture in South America, but to no avail!  My search for the Enciclopedia Gay continues…

This week it was my turn to have my creative writing piece read and critiqued in class and I was really nervous because it was written about a really personal topic that I have only recently felt comfortable with discussing with close friends, so imagine my discomfort as 15 people I barely knew were reading about it.  I felt completely dizzy and disoriented and kept thinking WELPWELPWELP WHY DID I WRITE ABOUT THIS WELPWELPWELP.  Thankfully my professor and the class really liked it, so I felt a little less like crawling into a black hole of despair after that. Then came my turn to answer everyone’s questions and that was probably the strangest experience of all because I had to force myself to open up and explain.  The piece is called “Braille” and the only part I feel comfortable sharing on this blogiverse is that in the piece I wrote that one of the characters was speaking in braille to another character, meaning that the path of communication was obliterated to the point that not only were they speaking different languages, one was speaking in a language that is impossible to hear and understand. 

On a much happier note, I absolutely LOVE my creative writing class and my professor is brilliant on every level.  I get these periods of pure mania where I can’t sleep or eat or basically do anything except write, write, write.  That’s only happened to me for journalistic writing and it’s incredible that I’ve finally been able to channel into a creative writing style as well.