On Every Street

Breakfast is hostel flakes, bread, coffee and a banana. All hostels, all around the world invariably provide the same homogenous imitation cornflake cereal. The South American twist on the hostel breakfast is Dulce de Leche. It´s a spread made from condensed milk. It´s something like a toffee spread. It´s extremely sweet. I´ve been slightly sickened on more than one occasion as I watch people pile it high. I think that even my young friend, Princess would flinch at this, but on second thought, I expect she´d probably chomp spoonfuls of it for lunch, leaving me to flinch and wretch. I prefer conservative spreading. The game is to cover the entire surface of the bread with the least possible amount of spread.

With all the rural and watery adventures of the past month, I´ve forgotten what one does in a big city. Then I recall. One drinks and one smokes. My big city tourism methodology is well practiced. I walk around aimlessly, and usually up and down streets of no particular significance, but broadly in a frayed circle of the world, as it exists on the tourist map.

I´m in the far top right corner of the map in an area that is precisely ordinary. I´m sitting, beer in hand, in the closest thing I can find to a wooden pub, watching the last ten minutes of Juventus-Cesena with a group of old, but highly animated Uruguayan gentlemen. It´s the middle of the afternoon. The old men and the thirty-something owner are glued to the game and nursing something in a highball with ice. The owner is somewhat incredible. He´s perfectly relaxed, smiling and laughing, but everything he says, from taking my order to passing indifferent comments on the game, is as if we´re actually at the game and he´s shouting over the roar of a crowd as their team scores. The game ends and is replaced by South African rugby. The guys are perfectly happy to watch this in just the same way.

There´s no smoking indoors here, which really sucks a lot of the fun out of it. I scarcely smoke in any case. Most of my smoking is to support of my few smoking friends, but there´s no denying that it is delicious and it is cool and in the sun, it´s even better.

After my obligatory drink and smoke, I leave the old men to watch whatever sporting repeat that ESPN might choose to fill otherwise dead air. I´ve done a little shopping and am on the way back to my hostel with an English-Spanish dictionary, a spanish comic book, and a litre of beer. I´ve never bought a comic book before and have picked "Alien Vs. Predator", on account of both franchises being flawlessly designed and executed, at least for the first half the movies in their names.

Dinner is a DIY job of pasta and a fine pair of sausages, with blackened red pepper. Cooking for one in a hostel is most often pain. There´s nothing more provided than oil and salt. The only useful thing someone has left behind is white pepper. The sausages are good enough to make it very adequete meal.