Yoga in Buenos Aires

Ten minutes from home was my yoga studio; Buena Onda Yoga. Run in English, it’s founded and frequented by American ex-pats, has three studios across the city and the one in San Telmo is above a vegetarian restaurant. I practiced around four times a week for five weeks until I got a job with conflicting hours. The instructors played nice music and were happy to tailor classes to people’s needs or wants.

The street my yoga studio is on: the middle white building.

At $88 for an unlimited monthly membership, it was a great deal and I really missed it when I started working, and still do! The restaurant does cheap and delicious weekday lunches and your membership also gets you discounts on boot camp classes, cooking workshops and I think their retreats.

Steps to the yoga studio.

Lunch entree: mini pumpkin soup, toasts with dip and home made lemonade.

It was so nice to have a regular place to be and see familiar faces. Especially welcoming were the hugs and kisses, which is pretty common in Argentina anyway. I find it unique and almost astounding that these days you can be almost anywhere in the world, but once you step onto any yoga mat in any yoga studio, it’s pretty much the same. You hear the same words, feel the same stretches, tensions and reliefs and see the same shapes made by the yogis around you. It’s a terrifically assessable home away from home.

Suspecting that the yoga community would be a good way to connect to my new home, I started yoga two days after arriving. My suspicions were correct! After the first class I had the details for some Spanish schools and teachers, advice for getting work and an invitation to lunch. I made friends! Michelle sadly left three weeks later but not before we went to a party at her apartment, stayed out til 5am at a club and were introduced to other people.

There were plenty of other yoga studios around Buenos Aires and at least one other that spoke English but I didn’t get around to visiting them. Buena Onda in San Telmo was more than fine. While the public transport was easy, it was usually muggy and crowded!

America … well, California.

Flying into San Francisco on Superbowl day, the soundtrack for the seven hour drive north to Arcata was mostly over excited game commentators, charismatic evangelicals or patriotic country music. All equally disarming. We kept up our energy with burgers and large take away percolated coffees with ‘cream’. Yup, we were in America.

Arcata, Humboldt County (hehe, County. Like in the movies!).

I love Arcata. I’m a hippie at heart and Arcata may just be hippie headquarters. Apparently, a bunch of hippies were following a Grateful Dead tour in the 70s and never went home after one of the band members died somewhere nearby. That doesn’t explain all the young hippies though… the force must be strong.

Arriving at night Arcata greets you with giant illuminated peace symbols in house windows. Dream catchers hang from porches and there’s op shops, record stores and organic bakeries. Of course, there’s the obligatory gaggle of dirty hippies singing and playing guitar in the town square. Supermarkets are filled with probiotic, antioxidant blah blah blah drinks and food. It’s all a bit too hipppyish for me but they don’t hurt anyone and I even tried kombucha (not bad as long as you keep reminding yourself it’s meant to be good for you).

The whole place smells faintly of weed, helped along by the skunks. Skunks do smell bad if their spray’s too close, but it’s easy to see why skunk is another word for marijuana in America.

We were there for a week and I’d alread decided which of the many yoga studios, and even what class, I would go to months ago. Om Shala didn’t disappoint. Even the short drive there and back on my own, in the dark, on the ‘wrong’ side of the road didn’t faze me.

Om Shala shares an entrance with HumBrews; a cool bar any night of the week. If I lived here I suspect I’d be using that door a lot. Most bars have pool tables and are down to earth with good microbrewery beers and fried pickles. The old cinema has weekly, not-necessarily-quality-but-that’s-the-fun sci-fi night where entry’s free if you buy food (we saw ‘Eegah!’).

Arcata reminds me of the Dandenong Ranges outside of Melbourne, if you replaced the trees with giant redwood trees and added a butt load of moss. It was pretty cold and rained on a couple of days, which was welcomed as California’s going through a drought.

We took a day trip through the Avenue of Giants, where the redwoods are truly enormous and the forest out of a fairytale. It was pretty quiet and in the down season, but a few places were open to buy touristy wood carvings, be amazed by big foot sculptures and be challenged to find him (or is it her?).

We visited a light house in Trinidad and walked to the beach through sand dunes in Samoa (haha, wishful thinking on the place names). Samoa is an old pulp mill town and we had breakfast at the cookhouse where the lumberjacks and mill workers used to eat.

I found it hillarious; Califorrnian Tristan didn’t get it. The cookhouse is a large dining hall made and full of wood, with red and white checkered table cloths and a weathered, slightly bossy but friendly blonde waitress. They only serve one meal and it’s eggs, sausage, toast, biscuit (like a scone), gravy (delicious peppery white sauce), a pot of coffee and a jug of juice. Yum.

We stayed at Tristan’s brother’s place in a gorgeous little wood tiled cottage in the forest and one night at an airbnb place only because I was allergic to his cat. It was our first of many airbnb stays to come and was great. We stayed in the spare room of a group of uni students. For $45 we got a room, breakfast, use of the house and garden, nice towels and bedding.

Hello computer…

I left Australia on 2 February 2014 for a 10 month budget journey around Latin America with my partner Tristan. We’re visiting his family across California for a few weeks at either end and hope to experience as much as time and money will allow in between. We quit our jobs and here we are!

I’m still learning about how to use this site, so please bare with me while I learn and make changes as I go! My internet access relies on wifi which isn’t always steady, so it may take a while to get the blog and pages up to scratch.

Right now, I’m in tropical Bahia, Brazil, volunteering at EcoTrancoso. We work on permaculture gardens, build adobe bricks and walls, care for a horse, ducks and chickens and once a week cook for the other volunteers (currently five of us), the project leader and Jilbert; an eccentric old Madagascan who sounds like he’s led an amazing life. Tristan and I got here on 7 March and will stay for three weeks. More on that later.

Since we left we’ve visited different places that I haven’t gotten around to writing about but will now in chronological order. I aim to use this blog not so much as a daily journal (clearly), but to record and share my photos and feelings about the place, people, culture and of course the food! I do love my food. I’ll also do the odd review of a hostel, bar etc. Any prices will be roughly calculated in Aussie dollars.

YOGA PAGE
If I’m somewhere for long enough and they have yoga, I’ll go to a class or more and review them. Back in Melbourne, I practiced barkan method yoga at Yoga Flame in Essendon. It was a lovely mental and physical constant for over three years so I want to keep connected. I never was disciplined enough for a home practice, so it definitely won’t happen while travelling!

RAMBLINGS PAGE
If a topic takes my interest and is too detailed or distracting (aka potentially boring) for the general blog, I’ll write about it on this page. I studied Cultural and Feminist Anthropology and Sociology and worked with Indigenous and multicultural communities in Melbourne, but I’m no expert and always stand to be corrected.

WHAT I’M READING PAGE
More for my memory, I’ll keep note of what I’m reading. I really think that what you’re reading shapes how you think and write at the time, so it might be interesting to notice if that happens. Since 2 February I’ve read four books, so it might be long! I’m not capable of passing books on when I’m done (even though I know I should) so the bag is getting heavy and the post may get costly. We’ll see how long that lasts!

PHOTOGRAPHY PAGE
I’ll post pics within posts but so as not to clog it up, I hope to start a photo gallery.

Let’s start at the very beginning…