'On This Night Of A Thousand Stars'

At night, it was colder in Buenos Aires than outside. And during the day, you had to look directly into the high-rise canyons to find the sun to warm up. Autumn air and the fresh wind from the Rio Plata cooled the city down.

The aftermath of the past weekend and the change to a new accommodation put me in a state of calmness. Coffee and walks were on the agenda.

I was also grateful that I was able to make contacts outside of my hostel bubble. I spent Monday evening with Blade. The Colombian had been living in Buenos Aires for five years. What was particularly appealing about this encounter was that my conversation partner spoke hardly any English. And yet we managed to have a conversation with my broken Spanish and his bits of English. We talked for two hours about Colombia, Miley Cyrus, casinos, and more. This meeting motivated me to approach my daily language app lessons with a bit more seriousness again.

Language is the key, and despite my efforts at the most basic level, access to people often remained blocked to me. I especially missed the first two months, when I liked to cling to people who mediated for me.

And again and again the phenomenon that people would naturally speak to me in Spanish and explain things to me in a very concrete way. These explanations often amused me, especially in the face of the seriousness towards my simplicity.

The Argentine Castilian (Spanish for Spanish) differed from the other Latin American variants in that it was faster and had more melody due to the influences of Italian immigrants, at least that's what the travel guide said about it. So slowness was required.

Even dealing with the inflationary national currency's high numbers sometimes made me capitulate. '780 Pesos' was simply harder to translate than, for example, '8 Bolivaros', Ocho Bolivarios. I felt particularly stupid when I handed over the wrong banknotes under the merchants' gaze. Even in these situations, not without a sense of irony.

The autumn atmosphere, thoughts about a conclusion to this journey, and the unbelieving look at the calendar inevitably initiated a process of detachment that I had to face, willingly or unwillingly.