Monday, January 26, 2009

argentine insomniacs

on friday night, at the beach, we tried to go to a restaurant at 9pm, but it wasn't open yet (YET!). So we went back to our hotel and shared a bottle of wine. when we returned at 11:30pm it was packed....mainly with families that had small children.

saturday night we walked into town in the evening, it was just 2 short blocks from the beach and our hotel. the town of 'villa gesell' closed down the main street. it was packed with people, so packed it was difficult to walk through. we found a place to have some dinner; 'pizza libre', where you pay a fixed price of $18 peso and you can have any pizza that the waitress brings by your table. after dinner, we left the restaurant and were trying to make our way through the crowd when i looked down at my watch. it was 1am in the morning - one a.m.! the streets were still packed (really packed, i'm not exaggerating either) , and with families too! babies of 7 months were awake, children of 2 were eating cotton candy and children of 5 were dancing to the street performers at 1am. all the stores were open for business too. 1am! 1am! how crazy (in a cool way and fascinating way).

my friend an i laughed because this would have been the same scene in a beach town in the u.s. at 7pm!

so, the next morning when we at breakfast at 10am. our table had a view of the beach but no one was on the beach yet.

Busy beach time was 6-8pm, dinner time 10pm -12am and going into town 12am - to.... i didn't stay long enough to find out.

(photo below: the main street of villa gesell at 1am on a saturday night)
IMG_0898

2 comments:

Nancy said...

Wow! Crazy! Noah goes to bed around 7pm-ish and stays asleep for 11 hours!

yillabean said...

I just asked my Spanish tutor today about children staying up so late in B.A. She was shocked when I told her that small children in the U.S. go to bed at 7-8 at night. I guess insomnia is taught in Argentina?

New York really looks silly to me now, saying that they're the 'city that never sleeps'. They need to relinquish their title, pronto.