This past weekend in Buenos Aires there was a heat wave, a chemical explosion in the Port that left yellow toxic cloud over the city center, and torrential downpours that overtook cars only a few blocks from where I am staying. I know what your thinking (December 21st!) but wait... I luckily escaped to the countryside during most of this madness, but it gave me some time to look back on my experience here and realize that the chaos hasn't really subsided, or even taken a break.
The yellow toxic cloud incident was particularly interesting and was really the talk of the town for quite a while. Some pesticide chemicals (fun fact: this part of South America is ideal for agriculture, and Argentina's main crop is soy to meet the increasing demand in China) were making their way from Singapore to Paraguay and stopped here in Buenos Aires before completing the last leg of their journey. That last leg never happened because the 17 tons of pesticide chemicals either reacted poorly to the excessive heat in this city or reacted to contact with water and then exploded. The explosion sent smoke and chemicals into the air above, right above downtown Buenos Aires. People who couldn't see the smoke or fires could smell that something was wrong from even further away. Government buildings and schools in the area were evacuated and worst of all the Boca Junior soccer practice was even postponed! And that's how you know something is seriously going wrong over here.
After two hours the situation was under control, but best of all were the news articles coming out afterward, like this one, whose headline reads "The Day the Locals Felt like Caterpillars". Fantastic! The article also talks about people who took the giant yellow chemical cloud overhead as just another sign of the pending apocalypse predicted by the Aztecs. Or was it the Mayans? Anyways, it's real and people are scared. Apparently, bomb shelter manufactures (yep, thats an actual profession) in the US have seen sales increase by a factor of ten while people as far away as China are clearing grocery stores out of water and medical supplies. Are you ready? But much more on that in my goodbye post. Maybe I should call it the "last goodbye" post.
As the yellow cloud loomed overhead last thursday (they don't capitalize days of the week in Spanish, imagine that!) I remembered an old "last man" science fiction story by M.P. Shiel called The Purple Cloud, which I highly recommend to those of us planning to survive this one (because c'mon, nobody plans to die in the rapture, how boring would that be?) Anyway, The Purple Cloud tells the story of a brave man and his group of expeditioners headed for the North Pole when they notice a giant purple cloud above. Never a good sign. (maybe a yellow cloud not as bad, like a happy, friendly toxic cloud? We can only be hopeful) And sure enough the purple cloud kills all the living things around except for him so he turns back for England. I guess what I'm trying to say is that maybe we need to look outside of the ancient American predictions to find out whats really going on. Let's not discriminate.
In other vaguely more relevant news, I will be lucky to get out of here by friday without having been completely eaten by mosquitos or dying of blood loss (Biblical locust rapture reference? You decide). Apparently the pesticide doesn't work on mosquitos. And if I don’t dye from the blood loss, I will follow up this post with my "last goodbye"!
Until next time,
Giordano