When factories become discos

This past week was about dinners with locals and getting the jokes in Argentine Spanish. It was impressive boliches (nightclubs) and meeting boys. Romantic intros in gorgeous spaces and moto rides at sunrise and one packed nightclub after another that go on into the morning.

Ciudad Konex is the name of what’s known here as a cultural center. It’s not a YMCA. It’s a neighborhood nightclub – grit instead of glamour and plenty of art and personal touches. Music, and sweaty dancers and high ceilings, old buildings, and miles of Argentines. Ciudad Konex is the largest scale cultural center I've seen. It was a factory the first part of the 20th Century and is now a design feat of indoor and outdoor stages and bars where live bands and djs play in a concrete, metal and glass structure with scaffold style walls and courtyards strung with clothesline as décor. Colorful lighting and brightly painted stairways direct the crowd into the main spaces where a big sound system manages to fill the vacuous factory with dance music.

Saturday night (Sunday morning) It was a Balkan party – just my kind, where circus horns and accordions accompany big drums and bass for a bouncy dance style – the milleneum’s answer to ska. A nine-piece band on a tall stage got hundreds of Argentines to dance, jump, and bump around into eachother gleefully.

I went out with my friend Leandro and his friend Pedro. Leandro makes me laugh constantly - Ciara and I met him at a bar in San Telmo a couple weeks ago and I've hung out with him in Palermo since. I convinced him to go to something other than a bar with the promise that we'd meet up with Carla and her girlfriends. Leandro is a bit girl-crazy.
He and Pedro and I went to a Peruvian restaurant near the club to get dinner (at 1am). I was happy to have the option of hot sauce in a country that doesn't include spice in its diet - you have to ask special for pepper.
Pedro tried the littlest taste of salsa on his chicken and he couldn't make it to the club after because his stomach hurt. We got to the club at 3am and the line to get in was two and a half blocks long. We decided to get a drink at a nearby pub and come back. Pedro headed home, we caught a cab back and found the line still pretty long at 4:30am. We cut to the front and they stopped selling tickets to wait for people to leave because it was full.

We waited about ten minutes and got in and were really happy we hadn't given up. It was a city of fun inside. We couldn't find the girls in the sea of people and when Maxi texted me at 6am to say he'd give me a ride home on his moto I said goodbye to Leandro. Maxi and I rode off into the sunrise.

I'm looking forward to my next adventure at Konex city (sounds a bit like Kotex, no?). There's a dance show, multi-media art shows, and an acrobatic performance before the dance clubs and live music that start at 1am. Later this week there's an all-girl breakdance competition. I can't wait to see pop-locking set to reggaeton and cumbia.