Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Back. Sort of.

I'm home again, but not sure I'm really back, if you get my drift. I'd hoped to kick off a new year of blogging with a stunning photo of myself sipping a green coconut through a straw on Copacabana Beach - and yes, I have such a photo - but I arrived home after two glorious weeks in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires to find major computer problems waiting for me. Partly the result of abruptly dead Entourage, partly too the result of outdated operating system.

To mend or not to mend, that is the question. Whether tis better in the end to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous Microsoft Entourage, pay someone to come out & try to mend it & buy an upgrade to newer operating system, or to take arms against a sea of computer problems and by buying an entirely new machine, end them?!

Anyway, I have had the most wonderful holiday of my life, so I shouldn't complain. If I can find some way of loading the pictures onto my outdated computer, I will post them...Here's a quick summary.

In RIO, we:
Ate a lot of tropical fruit;
Sipped caipirinhas by the beach, watching the sunset;
Went up Sugarloaf Mountain, started chatting to a fellow English speaker at the top & then discovered he was Nitin Sawhney;
Walked around Santa Teresa and almost didn't return, it was so beautiful;
Went to intimate venue in Ipanema to hear bossa nova singer Ricco Duarte, who has a voice like a bass saxophone;
Felt safer than in New York or even London.

in BUENOS AIRES, we:
Had two tango lessons;
Bought leather jackets & the most sensual of all tango shoes, in multiples of 3 (Argentina is cheap leather land);
Ate steak, steak and more steak;
Drank fabulous local red wine;
Met up with some friends whom Tom got to know during his tour there a couple of years ago & went with them to a real tango Milonga, where we watched the experts and realised that none of them were doing the one basic move we'd mastered...
Walked around La Boca, where the tango was born;
Poked about the antique shops of San Telmo;
Were glad to escape with our lives from the taxis....

That's the summary. Off to solve computer situation now. Don't forget that Solti is blogging too! Go to my website's Links page and click on the Solti blog box to access Paws for Thought.