Diet and travelling

We all eat. Most of us usually three or four times a day. Something we do that often is worth putting some thought into so we can do it right. Diet is incredibly important and has a huge effect on your physical and mental wellbeing, I wouldn't believe this if somebody told me (it's just food man, how can it affect your mood?!) but having personally experimented with it, I know what a difference it can make. I don't really know why, but I know that it does and that's enough for me to take some care with it.

In Australia I went through a period of about three months while I was working in the north of WA where I was going to the gym three out of four days and experimenting with a really strict diet called the Zone Diet. The basic premise is lean meats, vegetables, nuts, seeds, some fruit, little starchy carbs and no sugar, split into four or five meals throughout the day, each with carefully measured quantities of protein, fat and carbs. It sounds complicated because it is, and if I hadn't had the amount of free time up there that I did I'd never have bothered. Actually it gets quite easy to judge once you get used to it and I did have amazing results, physically I was (and probably still am) in the best shape of my life by far.

While I was working in Karajini, there was an unlimited supply of high quality food, and I had little else to do, so following this diet was pretty easy. Now its slightly different. Trying to survive solely on fruits, vegetables and lean meats in a country where all they eat is pizza and bread is quite difficult. Added to the fact that I don't have a routine and I don't even know where I'm going to be living each day, it becomes a pain in the arse and impossible to stick to.

I decided I needed to figure out a diet that is nutritious, cheap and frankly takes the thinking out of what I'm going to eat. Yesterday Luciana cooked some Brazilian food for me, the national dish is basically just rice and black beans but it tasted great and nutritionally it has pretty much everything you need. Black beans and rice are both phenomenally cheap and lightweight, so I went to the supermarket today and bought two tupperware pots and a bunch of brown rice and black beans (also soy beans which have more protein and are EVEN CHEAPER, 75 cents for half a kilo). I think if I can make this a baseline for my meals while I'm here, occasionally using fruit, vegetables and lean meats as a supplement rather than relying on them, I can eat pretty well. I also think you could eat for under a dollar a day on this diet which is ricockulously cheap.

I will try it for a while and if the flatulence problem doesn't get too out of hand, maybe I'll stick with it.

Shoe drop journal part 1

Here is the first half of the entries in my journal I kept during the Salta trip:

14/11

Woke up in Lime House hostel. Paid and left, spent the morning feverishly racing around Buenos Aires with all of my bags trying to get some things sorted out before I left. I printed off 150 pages of guitar lessons (as my phone has been stolen, I didn't have access to them any more). I bought a metronome and a strap for my guitar bag, and took a bus to this incredibly seedy looking clinic to get a free yellow fever jab. Waited five minutes and was grabbed by a harassed nurse who violently stabbed a needle into my arm then thrust a certificate in my face telling me I was apparently now vaccinated. At least the needle was clean... I tried to look for a spanish comic as well to help me learn, but the only good one I could find was TinTin and it cost $60AR which is far too expensive [actually Marion told me later that the Argentine comic is called Mafalda, so I will look for some of those].

Left for Salta at 3pm, kind of wondered if I'd made the right decision to commit to this for two weeks but a little late now. We stopped at a shitty motel and stayed there late overnight. Didn't practice much guitar, I have no good excuse.

15/11

Loooooong car ride all day. Pretty sure we got lost although Lily (incredible woman but a little kooky, runs LIFE charity) insisted she knew exactly where she was going. I'm not convinced, at one point we ended up on this potholed dirt road and I thought the car was going to shake itself apart. We also hit a donkey. Lily's driving is... interesting to say the least.

We arrived at a church/mission place at 2:30am and stayed there overnight. Very tired.

16/11

Woke up in a flat bed on the ground. Crazy, I just woke up in a freakin' catholic mission house in the middle of rural Argentina! Went outside to find out that someone had left bread, pastries and coffee on the outside table for us. Damn I love these catholics. We were expecting the shoes to arrive so we could start giving them out but standard Argentine organisation meant they were nowhere to be found. Instead I practiced guitar all morning. I am very excited to be learning from a proper structured course, I know I can become a musician if I just keep working at it! In the afternoon I wandered around the local town of St Ramon de Pallera Oran with Tom and Marion (they are the two other young people on the trip with me). It's an interesting place. Incredibly, it seems to be stuck in a timewarp. There is a sugar factory from 1920 still running and powering the economy of the town, pouring out thick black smoke. All I can find to eat is bread and empanadas, do the Argentines eat ANYTHING ELSE!? Eventually found a grocery store after an hour of searching and bought some fruit, then immediately found five more right next to it. Fucking typical. Most of the day I was surrounded by people speaking either french or spanish. Not having a firm grasp of either puts me in a curiously isolated little bubble. My spanish is improving hugely now, words are emerging from unintelligable chatter as if coming into focus. Not speaking the language gives a unique viewpoint on human behaviour - we are far more apelike than we care to admit sometimes, once the distraction of meaning is removed we can see some of human communication for what it really is. The key I think is to EMBRACE some of our more apelike tendencies, especially those of generosity and hospitality, because these are what make us truly human.

17/11

Today I practised two hours of guitar. Still no sign of any shoes. Today we go to Bolivia. This morning I had the unique privilege of playing and singing a couple of songs for a crowd of children at the school/mission where we stayed. They were playing and I spontaneously decided to do it, so glad I did. A young lad was kind enough to lend me his guitar.

"I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn to do it."

-Picasso

I am barely an amateur player at best, but I want to be a musician and you aren't a musician unless you play for others, so I try to take as many opportunities as I can to do so. It was truly a great gift to be able to share my music with these kids, and I think they liked it, clapping and whooping. Although I could only converse in a basic way with them, music communicated far more than words ever could. It truly is a universal language. All cultural barriers fall to music, I believe it holds at least part of the solution to reducing conflict everywhere. Conflict results from FRUSTRATED COMMUNICATION and music is communication in its purest form. I want to become a musician in order that I may say what cannot be said with words to all who want to listen. It is far to say I have been very deeply affected by this experience. By the way, the spanish way of saying "to play guitar" is "tocar la guitarra" - literally "to touch guitar". I think this has a very interesting meaning, a true player only needs to just touch the right notes at the right time in order to create music.

Anyway, after we left it turned out we couldn't enter Bolivia officially because the border post only granted visas that required you to stay at least 24 hours. However, 50 metres away was a river ford where the locals crossed (many with huge packs of smuggled goods) with impunity. What a crazy situation! The border officials were helpless to stop them, if they stopped them they would just move upstream and continue. Not to be phased by the problem with the officials, Tom, Lily, Marion and I took off our shoes and waded waist deep across the river into Bolivia. My first time as an illegal immigrant! We spent the day in a market town there, everything was much cheaper than in Argentina, curiously. I bought a pair of shorts. I spoke to some of the men carrying goods across the river. Some had very heavy packs, 40kg or more. Apparently they are paid a pitiful 8 pesos (less than 2USD) per crossing. I tried to lift one of the packs and really struggled, the men laughed uproariously at my efforts. I tried some coca tea before bed. This is tea made from the leaves of the cocaine plant. It didn't get me high but it was quite delicious.

18/11

Woke up at 6am. Disgusting. Immediately left for a remote village in the north of Argentina to give out shoes. We fitted maybe 2000 pairs on the first trip. The people who live out here are like zombies. Not just fiscally impoverished but educationally and culturally impoverished also. I feel ashamed to admit it but I am disgusted by them and their behaviour. To them, we are the sole source of everything they have and just machines for delivering to them free stuff. They lined up like dead people, shuffling forward to take their shoes and mill aimlessly around. Not a word of gratitude or please to be heard. These people have forgotten how to live. Their only source of value being free handouts since birth, and provided with no education, they have had no driving impetus to develop any kind of culture. All they do is eat, sleep and fuck. I saw so many babies and pregnant women it was ridiculous. I am repulsed by them. They represent a cultural void, a pure drain on society, a sink for resources. These people don't need shoes - they need some sort of halfway decent mental programming. Their situation closely mirrors that of the indigenous peoples in Western Australia. I don't know what the solution is. In this situation, giving free handouts is attacking the symptoms whilst cultivating the source of the problem, feeding the walls that imprison them. Either give NOTHING and allow their own culture to develop, or fully embrace and integrate them into our society. This halfway house of throwing the outcasts the scraps from our bloated table serves only to foster helpless, animalistic creatures dependent on outside help for everything.

I believe education and cultural programming represent the solution. People think they are helping with handouts. Ironically I think this giveaway quick fix may do more to insidiously destroy indigenous culture than the Spanish conquistadores ever did. We poison them with droppings from our consumer culture, causing them to become fat and lazy. Paradoxically, aggression and suppression would be MORE likely to cause a reaction and promote a lean, strong culture of solidarity and creativity. Case in point - look at the black slaves in 1800s America. Oppression was rife yet they developed an incredibly potent culture in response to it. Is oppression a solution? Of course not, that's not what I'm saying. But we certainly need to think more intelligently about how to help these people. I saw a man today with no shoes but a mobile phone in his pocket. WTF?!?! What can I do to help resolve this problem? 4000 shoes and not one thankyou. Talked to an older, more jaded volunteer in the back of a ute (pickup truck) travelling between drops. He was well aware of the problems.

Frankly these people need CONDOM handouts more than shoe handouts. It is ridiculous that most have cable TV but not enough to eat. This truly is the ugly, seething underbelly of our oh so shiny consumer society.

We only ate one meal today, greasy chicken and salad provided free of charge by a kind man called Julio. I have no idea where it was or why we went there. We returned exhausted at 10pm after 16 hours of work.

19/11

Got up early once again frustrated by the total lack of hurry about anything in Argentina. Waited from 8pm til 2pm for shoes, by the time the car arrived, everybody had decided it was lunch time so it took another hour before we could leave. It was grossly hot and sticky, but the people receiving shoes today were much more grateful and organised than yesterday. One of the sites saw the older women organising kids into lines and helping us to fit the shoes. The supply of kids was unceasing, these slums are huge and there is a massive proportion of expectant and breastfeeding mothers, talk about an overpopulation problem. We had to abandon ship when it started to rain (thankfully bringing with it a break in the oppressive humidity) but I left with a slightly more optimistic outlook than yesterday. Maybe there is hope for some of these people. We ate pizza and hungout with the other charity guys afterwards. Bear in mind this past week, all I have heard all day every day is spanish, almost no english. The strain of not speaking the language well is starting to take its toll a little, I am very tired a lot of the time and feel quite lonely and isolated, but I am optimistic and my understanding takes a new quantum leap every day. Remember, I spoke and understood NADA when I arrived just three weeks ago. Now I am expecting perfecton? Be realistic Sam! But if you aim for the stars, you might just hit the moon, and I'm sure patience and repeated exposure will yield results.

To be continued...

The big Salta update...

Wow. What can I say, this trip was mind-blowing, eye-opening and incredibly eduational for me in a lot of ways. This is really the kind of thing that I hoped for when I decided to travel South America in the first place.

I saw first-hand some of the real problems in these areas. I return to Buenos Aires simultaneously both jaded and buoyed by what I have seen. I have realised how INCREDIBLY lucky I am to have what I have in my life: a loving family around the world, an exceptional education, citizenship of a privileged country and the opportunity to do ANYTHING I want to do. I have everything whilst many of these people who live in rural Argentina have NOTHING. I now recognise the privilege I have been granted to live this life, and also my responsibility to give back to others.

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

-Henry David Thoreau

So many people live lives of sullen resignation in the UK, working a job they hate, losing sleep about whether they will afford the next downpayment for their shiny Merc or whether they might have to quit their expensive local golf club membership to pay it. WAKE UP FUCKERS! There are millions of people out there to whom one month of your car payments would equal five years of living. Get your head out of your arse, stop feeling sorry for yourself and start realising how goddamn lucky you are to have what you have. How about you all stop frittering this privilege on cars and self-pity and fucking do something incredible with your life? Are you living a life of quiet desperation? I mean really? Take a long hard look at what you are doing and if it is working in your life. Did you succeed in achieving any of your dreams? How about you quit your job that you never liked anyway, start your own company doing what you love and give 10% of profits to support educational iniatives in developing countries? Now THAT'S doing something awesome with your life. [insert ten billion excuses here, oh my mortage, my family, the risk, I wouldn't know how, I'm not smart enough, whatever]. The truth is, if you decide to do it, you simply will find a way. If you divert your (very substantial and powerful) Human Creativity towards actually achieving what you want instead of inventing excuses for why you don't have it, you'll find that you are pretty much unlimited in what you can do when you truly decide to commit to something.

Besides, you cannot fail if you live in the UK, you are always going to eat, you are always going to have a house. The real reason you don't do it is because you are scared. How about you live a little? Take some risks? Make your life a little more exciting and perhaps even help some other people instead of wrapping yourself up in your own secure little comfortable world.

People at home, this is a rant aimed directly at you. Pull your head out of your phone, facebook, video games and your perceived problems. You are living in a fantasy world, complaining every day about a lack of jobs or lack of help from the government or whatever, always coming up with an excuse instead of working hard and fixing the problem. You already have EVERYTHING and yet most people live their entire lives and never stop to think how lucky they are for what they have, and take a moment just to be grateful, instead they gripe and complain about the smallest things. Perhaps we might all live much richer and more fulfilling lives if we would go and see what REAL problems are, and learn to be truly grateful for what we already have.

Many apologies for getting up on my high horse but I feel I have needed to say that for the last two weeks. I do not intend to just say these things and feel better, I intend to take what I have learned over the last few weeks and apply it to my own life in order that I might make some small impact on the problems I have seen.

I'm currently staying in Buenos Aires again, in the flat of a lovely girl called Luciana who kindly agreed to host me for a few days. I am going to wander out to get breakfast now. In the next post will be some photos and a written up copy of my Journal that I kept every day whilst on my trip.

¡Hasta luego!

Leaving buenos aires

Tomorrow I am leaving Buenos Aires for two weeks with LIFE charity to distribute shoes to poverty-stricken people across Argentina.

It is kind of a road trip by car, we are visiting Rosario, Santa Fe, then Quebrada de Huamahuaca, Purmamarca, Tilcara and Salta city in Salta. Afterwards, Pirane and Mercedes in Corrientes. While there we will visit Esteros de Ibera wetlands, then back to Buenos Aires on monday 26th.

There are only four of us going, I hope it will be an amazing chance to see some more of Argentina outside of this city, as well as doing some charitable work on the way.

In other news, my mobile was stolen yesterday, picked from my pocket on the subway. I thought I'd be upset but actually I feel... liberated. Too often our phones and the internet can distract us from what is really important. It's another wakeup call as well, your stuff is NOT SAFE on this continent. I will exercise more vigilance in future. My spanish is coming along really well and I expect this upcoming trip will improve it even more.

On friday I went to a bar in Bs As, here they don't close til 7am in the morning so I stayed out and had some pretty MAD conversations with people in terrible spanish in the early hours of the morning. All in all, a fantastic success.

I had an almost disaster last night. My couch host pulled out at the last minute and I was left stranded in Bs As at 9pm with no place to sleep. To make matters worse, all the hostels were full due to a huge music festival this weekend called creamfields. I tried maybe 20 hostels and all of my previous couch hosts, as well as the emergency couch section on couchsurfing.org. Nothing worked out. I was seriously looking at sleeping under a tree in a park somewhere when LUCKILY I was able to turn up at a hosts house who I was meant to stay with next week and he was able to host me at the last minute.

Nothing like putting yourself in uncomfortable situations like this for expanding your comfort zone. My ball size has increased 150% just since I arrived in this incredible, poluted, grungy, mind blowing, colourful and eclectic city.

That's all for now. Will update on my return to Buenos Aires.

Bueno espanol antes del fin de mez

Si, pienso que es possible para hablar el espanol bueno antes un mez. Despues dos semanas yo aprendi mucho espanol. La lingua es difficil, pero trato de hablar todo el tiempo. Ahora, vivo con un amigo que habla no Inglese, por lo tanto tengo que hablar espanol SOLOMENTE. Yo esta aprendiendo muy muy rapido. Mi vocabulario tiene approximademente mas de dos ciento palabras y puedo hablar un poco con la gente de Buenos Aires mas de tiempos, por ejemplo a comprar cosas.

Aprender una nueve lingua es muy dificil y muy fatigoso. Pero, soy un aprendiz rapido y trabajo mucho. Pienso voy a poder tener rico conversaciones en espanol al fin de mez.

Chau.

Learning and commitment

I just finished my sixth spanish lesson. I am learning fast but I know I could be putting in a lot more effort. It is too easy for me to speak english with couchhosts and other travellers and that temptation is preventing me from learning as fast as I can.

I am currently able to express myself very well in the present tense, directions, shopping, introductions and telling people a little about myself I can do. I can understand maybe 50% of spoken spanish if it is slow and well enunciated, probably less than 10% if it is fast as in normal conversation between two native speakers.

I have recently been reading a Tony Robbins book with a lot of interesting mental techniques and strategies in. Tony places an emphasis on COMMITTING to something if you want to succeed in that area. You must prioritise your goals and make a decision to achieve them, then follow through with consistent commitment. In this case, my current goal with the highest priority is to become conversationally fluent in spanish. Up until now I have been putting in some effort but haven't been fully committed to this.

Today I made a decision to commit. I am attending a language speaking class this evening, I will spend my spare time reading spanish books and talking with people who can ONLY converse in spanish, this will force me to learn fast or be unable to express myself at all (this is called getting LEVERAGE on yourself). To this end, my next lot of couch hosts, starting this friday, will be spanish only speakers. My next blog post will be in spanish ONLY. This is holding myself accountable.

Enough of language. I stayed in a hostel last night for the first time because I screwed up a hosting situation and left my bag somewhere else so that was a bit of a mess. It's all sorted now though and I have another host until friday. Hostels are a mixed blessing, they are great for meeting people and being social but TERRIBLE for sleeping. I only slept four hours last night due to the noise, some retard was playing an electronic keyboard outside my room at 2am. Apparently porteños do not sleep.

Last night I went to a party called la bomba. This was INCREDIBLE. There were a group of tribal style drummers coordinated by a conductor using hand signals, and they had a guest singer, trumpet player, acapella/voicebox dude and a jazz keyboard player. It went on for about three hours, the atomosphere was amazing and I really felt like the rythym of the drums was grabbing something primitive inside of me, it was a crazy experience. I think I will go again if I am here next week.

I am going again to LIFE charity this afternoon. I already went twice with them to help teach the kids in las villas and it was... a really touching experience. The kids don't care that you don't speak the language very well, they take far more from your body language and voice tone. They all have their own distinct personalities and I really get a kick out of interacting with them. I am very inexperienced in dealing with children but I feel it may be something that we can discover inside ourselves naturally and I hope I can learn at least as much from them as they are learning from the charity school we provide. I feel like I'm discovering a side of myself I wasn't previously aware of and that's pretty cool.

On that note, I must head off there now! Laters...

Language classes, voluntary work and scams

I had my third day of language classes today. It costs $200 a week, my professor is EXCELLENT, the lessons are entirely in spanish and it is astonishing the amount we have covered in just three days. I think I will stay in Buenos Aires for the next two weeks at least in order to get my spanish up to a passable level.

Yo aprendo espanol por habler con los personas de sur de america. Yo quiesera estudio por dos semanas. Por cena hoy, como arroz y carne. Yo gusto mucho a aprender l'espanol!

I also signed up to an organisation called LIFE today as a volunteer. Their website is http://www.lifeargentina.org/ . One of my friends had a good experience with them so I went along to an induction earlier today and it looks fantastic.

Buenos Aires is a mixed city, there are some very rich areas but also some areas in abject poverty. Some of the kids living in the poverty stricken outskirts don't have any opportunities for education and many are starved of attention because their parents don't care, or are drug addicts or have ten other kids, or whatever. LIFE provides some basic education and love and care for some of these kids. I've never had much of a chance to teach and interact with children before and I feel I would have a lot to offer given the chance so I am very excited to be starting with them tomorrow afternoon after my spanish class.

I am currently surfing on the couch of a guy named Eduardo, he is a REALLY chill dude, totally cool, he's studying pretty hard for his exams at the moment but he is happy to give me his keys etc and we get on well, I can speak in spanish with him too.

I had an interesting experience tonight. I went to the cinema to meet another couchsurfer but we must have mixed up our communications because I couldn't find her. I figured that was fine and I'd just have a wander around Buenos Aires at night and take in some of the city. So after about half an hour of wandering through bustling streets full of street sellers, neon lights, throngs of people, crossing the 16 lane wide Avenida de Julio and avoiding stepping in the dog shit that seems to be EVERYWHERE, I saw a small dingy looking bar labelled solely as "Irish Pub". I thought, great maybe I can get a guiness and wandered in to have a look.

I immediately got a really uneasy feeling about the place, inside there was nobody except a HUGE bouncer in the corner with a shaved head and a couple of not very attractive looking girls at the bar. The place was dark with a disco ball hanging and some bad music playing. One of the girls walked up to me straight away, grabbed me by the arm and led me to a seat.

Now two of my missions I set myself for this trip are "live in the moment" and "push your comfort zone" so despite a lot of misgivings, I stayed. Frankly my guess at the time was that the place was a brothel and I'd never been in one before. Now I would never pay for sex, it violates one of my core values (on a more practical note I doubt I could afford it even if I DID want to bang some nasty skank in a dodgy bar in Bs As) but I am a very curious person and I was intrigued to see what was going on, and what would happen if I rode it out. The girl started rubbing my leg and trying to get me to talk to her. I grabbed the opportunity to practice my spanish so I busted out some extremely broken sentences explaining that I was a tourist and asking her how long she had worked there. I was joined by another girl who sat on my right, then a fat woman with a face like a squashed toad brought a tray of drinks to the table and gave the girls some yellow looking things and put a coke in front of me.

So I attempted to talk to the girls for about ten minutes being very careful not to touch the coke. I kept an eye on the bouncer but he had his head on his chest and seemed to be asleep. The girls were smashing back their drinks at a rate of knots, at this point I still thought I might be in a brothel and so I kept trying to ask the girls how long they'd been working and what they did, they were very reluctant to tell me, I figured this was just due to my bad spanish and not making myself understood properly but then the toad woman came back and planted herself squarely in front of me. Suddenly I was looking at a drinks bill that had more zeros than bill gate's annual paycheck and everything became crystal clear. I glanced at the bouncer and sure enough he had got up and was slowly walking over towards us. Time slowed down for me a little at this point, I decided it was probably a good time to leave so I took out a wadge of low value pesos I had in my pocket in case of robbery (about 17 pesos in total I think), slammed it on the table, elbowed toad woman out of the way and bolted the hell out of there.

17 pesos for that kind of experience is pretty cheap I think. Wonder how many people have fallen for that little scam and not got out of there in time before being forced to pay hundreds of pesos for "drinks"? Mental note for the future: pushing your comfort zone is all well and good but follow your gut if you feel uneasy about something.

Learning a language

Firstly I wanna start by stating I have nothing but good things to say about my first couchsurfing hosts, Nico and Sol. These guys really took care of me, they showed me how to use the busses and cooked asado (argentinian bbq - boy do these guys love their meat!). On Sunday we went to the Zombie walk in the centre of Buenos Aires and then to this punk rock concert in the evening, there was a Ramones tribute band playing there which was badass.

I said my goodbyes on Monday morning and enrolled in a spanish language course in the centre of Buenos Aires, I was a bit late so I had a one on one catchup session and start the course proper today.

I arrived speaking almost zero spanish and in three days I have picked up at least 50 words and can make myself understood about 70% of the time with simple things such as directions or ordering food. I can tell you right now that anybody that says learning another language is difficult has never really tried it properly. Your brain has been honed over two million years into a finely tuned language learning machine. There is nothing it does better. When you totally immerse yourself into another language and suddenly it becomes a NECESSITY to speak and understand it, it is surprising just how fast you learn. I hope to be fluent by the end of the month and capable of holding a resonable conversation in three months. That's probably a conservative estimate.

I am currently staying with my second host, Eduardo, he seems to be another really solid guy. Buenos Aires is an electrifying city, I have a lot of good things to say about it but they will have to wait until my next post. Time to head off and start learning some spanish now, can't wait!