Mexican Food? and Art Museums and Street Performers and Shakira.

Yesterday I spent FOREVER on my feet.  

             

The night before we hit up a Mexican restaurant for Tacos in Palermo Soho.  It's called "La Fábrica del Taco" or something like that.  It translates to "The Taco Factory."  It was GOOD.  Not all that cheap, but fair enough.  I had a really rich, full of meat taco.  Then I followed that up with a more Argentinian style Quesadilla (with Chorizo inside).  Add some Salsa Verde (not Picante, Goodness NO!)  and you might just feel right at home, as if you were in Tijuana.  Not that I'm from there or anything.

We were up late carousing, of course.  This followed the night at which I got to bed at 5.  I woke up at 2 in the afternoon the day after that night.

And yesterday I improved.  I woke up at a little after 12.  Great!  My regular group of friends met up at El Museo de las Bellas Artes and we spent a bit more than an hour looking at extremely old paintings and sculptures.  Some of that stuff was amazing.  We weren't allowed to take any photos, but I didn't mind.  Just seeing that stuff with my own two eyes was special enough.  I saw a lot of European art - much of it of Biblical scenes - from the 15th and 16th century, all the way up through the 20th.  It was impossible to not gawk for me. That's Renaissance art, folks.  Like some dude painted that stuff 500 years ago.  I was very impressed.  I also spent a while by myself en la sala de 'Arte Precolumbiano", which is Pre-Columbian Art.  Stuff from prior to the conquests of Latin America by the Spaniards.  That was even OLDER.  I saw stuff from before Jesus' day.  BAM.  There was some cloth material, woven by Peruvians over a millenia ago.  There was a lot of stone art of sorts - big cups and jars, massive pipes, etc.  All of this stuff had multiple purposes.  It was symbolic and religious, hewn in the shape of faces, animals, letters.  It was utilitarian, obviously used every day.  I read that there was virtually no distinction between the religious/spiritual world and the world of everyday items.  It all blended.  I gawked.

After that we decided to seek food and though our methods were a bit misguided, we were successful pretty quickly after we began searching.  We passed the Hard Rock Café (lol) and bought "filled bread" with various fillings, anything from basic Ham and Cheese to Basil, Parsley, Tomatoes, Olives and Peppers.  Nom nom.  The plaza was beautiful - at some point on Facebook you may see me tagged in a photo or two in which I am struggling on some obviously-too-small play equipment.  SO FUN.  My friend Sarah happens to like playing on playgrounds as much as I do.  Or almost as much, she didn't get on that twisty bar thing that I climbed about on!  Instead she just took embarrassing pictures.  So...just a forewarning.  You may see that at some point.  rawr.

We then discussed travel plans for the rest of the weekend and ended up stumbling upon an epic street performance.  4 shirtless, very lean and muscled men danced and performed acrobatic...stuff.  To music.  It was hilarious and awesome, in general.  They spent a lot of time talking and joking around with each other, more or less acting.  I took some footage that I will upload sometime soon.  My camera is with my backpack at another person's house because I dropped it off there a few hours later, on the way to the concert.  We laughed VERY hard at this performance.  At one point most of my group moved to the very front row, and one of the performers pretended my friend Michael had touched his rear end.  It was hilarious and I was very happy I had retained my seat 3 rows back.  

They did lots of acrobatic stuff.  yeah.  Videos on Facebook.

The cap to the day was attending the Pop Festival, featuring Shakira.  We arrived early to hear Ziggy Marley reggae-ing it up.  Very enjoyable, actually, Ziggy Marley is VERY good live.  After a while, we noticed that the great majority of people were walking around with bags of chips.  Sometimes as many as 5 to a person.  We soon realized that they had to be free...and we set off to find them.  With envy in our hearts and hunger/nothing in our stomaches, we furiously walked around and asked several people where we could get these free chips.  The Holy Grail awaited, and we would not give up easily.  At long last we found them, a truck load of boxes of Lays.  We cheated the system and hit up multiple lines.  I walked out of there with 4 bags, but Silvie managed to get 6 or more.  Then ensued the epic force-chips-down-your-throat-and-hope-you-don't-choke-and-die-phase.  At least for me.  I was famished, and I refused to buy the 25 peso sandwiches that everybody else caved in for.  I absolutely MOWED DOWN on those chips.  I ate 4 bags, total.  Yum.  Of course then the massive dosage of Sodium had me longing for a drink...but I held off on that, too.  We sat around for about an hour after Ziggy Marley finished until Shakira finally took the stage.  I'm not exactly a Shakira fan...or maybe it would be better to say I wasn't before the concert.  She really does do an amazing job.  A huge part of the entertainment is all of the dancing.  It gives you a lot more to take in than just the music.  Shakira is extremely talented.  The closing song was, of course, Hips Don't Lie.  Aww yeah.  Well, there was Waka Waka too, or something like that.  The ending was kind of a tease, as it is with most concerts.  "Oh bye!"  "just kidding we're back!"

Someone lost their balloons...and they had a lot.

By the end everybody's feet were killing them.  We had walked and stood for most of the day, and when I finally got home I thanked God for the simple fact that I was finally in bed.  Early night - I was asleep before 2am.  And today I woke up at 11 or so, further improved!  Today I am spending most of my time at home, recuperating and relaxing.  And writing blogs, since I've failed pretty hard to take care of that.  I've also been searching online for a church that is within travel distance.  Tonight I'll probably go try to watch a Carnaval parade of some sort...or something.  It IS Carnaval weekend, after all.

UPDATE: I tried to go watch a parade thing, ended up missing it by an hour or something and carousing about the San Cristóbal neighborhood for a good while.  Got ice cream and tasted some wine.  Gross wine.  Amazing ice cream.