Here is the 12th and final video recap of our last city on Remote Year, Buenos Aires:
And here is the month told in photos:
Highlights of this month for me were:
- Bomba de Tiempo – A percussive show they do every Monday night in BA in this outdoor concert area. It’s like the musical STOMP in that you can’t help but get sucked into the rhythm of this thing. It’s all improv and they have an “orchestra conductor” steering things and making music on the fly. Incredibly cool.
- Fuerza Bruta – is an immersive, raucous musical/arts assault on the senses. It reminded me of Blue Man Group in that you’re in the middle of the action and there’s just chaotic craziness happening all around you. Apparently this is an Argentina-borne show that has made it to the US. Highly recommend.
- Cirque du Soleil – this was my first Cirque experience and it was amazing. It’s a mix of music, tumbling, juggling, trapeze acts, real-time sand painting… just a crazy hodgepodge of impressive human feats really all set to music. It made me rediscover the band Soda Stereo (I had heard them way back in the day in Ecuador but had forgotten how good they are).
- Webinar I did with Pre-motes to cover their questions about Remote Year. Should be useful for anyone entertaining doing this adventure.
- Charity Makeover – Merakis (the group following us, Darien) stepped up their game and successfully completed the first ever handoff of a Charity Makeover initiative started by our group. This blog post is a good recap of what we did for Proyecto Caraya in April and Merakis came in on our heels and advanced their cause by translating the site to Spanish and Portuguese, building out testimonial functionality for volunteers but most importantly, laying the technical groundwork for us to be able to do the contest we envision running across the Remote Year Nation to seed pledges for these guys and jumpstart their fundraising.
- Our farewell party was pretty hard to top here. Huge shoutout to the Hussinecka guys for creating an unforgettable going-away party experience that melded experiences from all the cities over the past year into a progressive party night.
I’m now in Mendoza, Argentina wine tasting for the weekend before bouncing over to Santiago & Val Paraiso, Chile. I’m intending to head up to Costa Rica and spend 2 weeks there before heading to Dominican Republic in July where I plan to kite surf with my buddy Keith all month.
Gear recs
Only two this month:
- This universal power adapter has come in really handy this month. I thought we were good for the rest of South America on not needing any special power conditioning but the outlets here have slanted plugs. Fortunately I kept my adapter and this thing has worked like a charm. Note: it’s not a converter, only an adapter so it’s assuming you have 220v power and just need to change the shape of your plug. If you go somewhere where the voltage is different you’ll want to get a power converter to transform the voltage.
- These little laundry soap pods are super useful if you’re doing your own laundry on the road. Rather than buying powder soap or a bottle of liquid soap you can keep these in your bag and just toss one in when it’s time to do wash. I had never seen these before but a guy in one of the laundromats turned me onto these things and they’ve been useful.
Music
Here is the soundtrack to this month.
This was a particularly emotional month as you might imagine in saying goodbye to 50 people many of whom I’ve become close with over the last year of travel together. I’ll write a longer post where I unpack all the emotions and takeaways from this past year. For now it’s pretty amazing to have completed this year-long journey. Thanks to all who have made this past year possible. I’ll write more soon in an introspective wrap-up post for the year.
