This country is showing me the variety of material things.

Buenos Aires is huge. Once I left the airport, with the help of Maria, so gracious, we took a bus deep into the city. The journey down the highway was a good introduction: elevated over the city, we passed, one after another, huge apartment buildings ("monoblocks"), festooned with signs and clothes and air conditioning units. They tower twenty-five stories over everything else, and everything else is infinite in its shapes (architecture we would never dare to use in America) and density.

This city is filled with so many nooks and crannies, all of which tease and pull at my imagination. Every building here looks old, aged, and used as efficiently as possible. A building is never too old, no matter how many decades and renovations have passed, never too ugly, no matter how much the plaster has crumbled and the graffiti has accumulated. All those corners and little spaces, who knows what dust and debris and histories they hold?

Street level is no different, apart from the view. Now every building you pass is home to the little spaces: a basement bar beneath the hostel, a five by eight bedroom on the roof, tiny shops packed beneath apartment buildings, ten feet wide, with a specificity of wares that America has forgotten.

Best of all, balconies are everywhere, to my pleasure. Here, everyone is entitled to look out over the whole mess that no one has ever had the time to clean up, even me, in my hostel.