tales-from-tigre
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Tales from Tigre

An hour’s journey north from the heart of Buenos Aires brought us to a place that just as easily may have been on the other side of the earth.  Gone were the miles of pavement and blaring of taxi horns.  In their place were the infinite waterways of the Tigre delta.  Raw gasoline fumes drifted through the humid air and the loud rumble of the water taxi’s vibrated under the soles of our feet as we stepped onboard. 

Instead of the overtly advertised tourist cruise, we queued up with a line of locals waiting for their river bus home that afternoon.  They piled their necessities onto the roof of the long polished wood boat; crates of eggs, jugs of drinking water, school supplies, and cartons of cigarettes all in a well practiced chaotic balance.  Kids in public school uniforms that resembled a cross between a doctor’s lab coat and a smock greeted the driver and huddled in groups for the ride home; a dynamic not unlike any other school bus.  As we wound our way further up the veiny outcrops of the delta we passed other families rowing home, four to a canoe; we tooted hello to precariously overloaded tugs ferrying logs; and saluted mothers and grandmothers waiting at the end of rickety wooden piers for the afternoon school bus to deliver their children home.  As the driver swung the boat up to each dock for no more than one or two seconds, we watched as the elderly and the young alike alighted from our water cruise with the balance of seasoned sailors and fishermen. 

Eventually, with shaking legs and trepidatious steps, we got off at the pier for Tres Bocas, our island oasis for the afternoon.  We sauntered down sidewalks lining residential waterways too small for the bus, and snapped covert photos of passing peoples motoring or rowing to and from home.   Under a trellis of draping green vines, we sat at white plastic tables where we drank cold Quilmes out of styrofoam coolers and ate a lunch of milanese.  A grey-brown cat trailed round our feet, and local dogs napped in the shade beneath our table.  The scratchy sound of delta blues tunes swayed us into a timeless daze.  Here, an hour from Buenos Aires life couldn’t be more different, but it couldn’t be any better either. 


                      

seven-steps
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Seven Steps

It’s been said that this city is the Paris of South America.  It’s also been said that it is the “new” New York.  Both and neither are correct.   After nearly a month in Buenos Aires we gently uncovered a place with a depth, tradition, and pride that defy any comparison. 

Like all great romantic cities this place is best explored by walking its streets as aimlessly as possible.  It’s buildings are majestic, old, and wealthy; craftily hiding the torments of time.  So too, are the numbers of old ladies who take charge of this city during the day.  To start to understand what makes Buenos Aires herself, sit at any cafe at any time of day and watch the women. They’re a living version of Rene Magritte’s man in the bowler hat with his face hidden by the apple.  They all radiate with the same carefully bronzed skin.  Their quaffed hairstyles are dyed the same gold over silver. They’re purposefully poised.  However, instead of a polished red apple hiding their face, they’re all throwing the apples.  Under the St John knit sweaters and carefully stylish and sensible shoes they have sharp elbows on the bus.  Clenched fists fly in a rage at street bands who overstay and overplay their welcome too near the sanctified peace of an Argentinian Nona.  Shop in their store and they’ll grace you with a Parisian kiss on each cheek.  Attempt to hail a taxi at the same time, and one will, without mercy, upstream you faster than it can happen in New York. 

Walk deeper down her streets and you’ll find bars and cafe’s in the early evening filled with locals drinking coffee and eating a sickening amount of sweet pastries to fill the void between meat at lunch and more meat for dinner at ten or eleven PM.  Each night we drowned ourselves in what they called half sized cuts of steak. 

Afterwards we would set out in search of the night layer of Buenos Aires.  We visited bar after bar of the city’s supposed best and recommended nightlife.  We sat in gigantic Victorian chairs sipping whimsically named cocktails while a larger than life “Alice in Wonderland” worthy clock spun circles overhead.  We passed secret messages at dinner to find an escort into a too perfectly reenacted hideaway Prohibition bar.  We followed our noses through an overflowing flower shop to find a secret refrigerator door to an illusory underground mirrored tunnel.  On an acid high from the botanic biosphere above we drank from lab beakers of smoke, swirled vials of rose petals, and gaped at a giant octopus.  As wondrous as it was, we couldn’t help but feel the tinge of anticlimax.  Hadn’t we been to these bars before?  Didn’t we sneak though the same secret passage, and sip on an equally exotic elixir?  Maybe this is the new New York. 

With that realization, our flower headed high began to wear off; until one night when a friend said ‘come with me.”  We still used special keys, and spoke secret passwords to find our destination.  This time however the key was a subway card, and passwords, unintelligible local Castellano Spanish.  We found ourselves in a cross between a local community center and below ground gym.  It didn’t start until after midnight and didn’t end until after the long after dawn.  We sat at cheap tables surrounding a polished wood floor and drank fernet and cokes.  The lights dimmed ever lower.  An accordion sprang to life on stage, and then another, and then three more.  Then the strings, and finally the suede voice of the singer.   Gracefully and gradually they glided in pairs onto the dance floor; timeless old men in shimmering suits; young beautiful women in bedazzled dresses and sparkling shoes.  Those simple seven steps to the music was all it took and we were mesmerized.  They spun and twirled;  toes swept the floor and wound up around each others bodies.  Their hands barely touching each other.  Their eyes were closed and yet not one of the hundred people on the small dance floor bumped another.  They moved like every great Tango scene from every great movie, except better.  These were regular people.  They were the old ladies we walked past on the street, and the young couples we sat next to in the prohibition bar.  This is where we found the real Buenos Aires and fell in love.  Here, Argentina didn’t cry for us, we cried for Argentina. 

         
          

the-big-ice
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The Big Ice

Our glacier chase continues.  It only cost us five hours by bus, and an overly dramatized customs check that required our entire busload to stand outside slowly frosting over at the border crossing to nowhere, while rifle slinging customs agents peeled through our bags for the the singular smuggled Dole banana. 

We found ourselves in a town not much unlike the last.  Built alongside another glacial river flowing towards the end of the earth; El Calafate’s streets were lined with a familiar plethora of local (they say typical) restaurants, well aimed tourist shops, and adventure promising tour companies.   A few things were maybe a little different.  The currency symbols had changed again, which required a day or two of retraining ourselves to do the quick math when the check came.  The locals drink mate from hollowed out and decorated gourds that are both a function of tradition and individual expression.  The tourists gorge on better ice cream.  And, somewhere not far, there is the crystalline crack and slow crawl of the Big Ice we came to meet. 

For a few days, we hobbled around the town eating ice cream, resting stiff knees and stretching sore muscles; anticipating a new adventure we knew would be spectacular and expected to be thrilling; in much the same way you’d wait in line at an amusement park eating cotton candy before riding its biggest and fastest rollercoaster.  Scary with a safety net.  So we thought.

More perfect, and unseasonably clear, warm, windless blue weather graced the day of our ice trek.  After a morning of bilingual facts, figures, and admonishments to keep all hands and feet out of ice crevices, our predawn bus arrived at our glacier amusement park.  We threaded our way down metal gangplanks for our first face to face with the ice.  Just in time, as the first ray of sun crested the mountain peak, she heaved a wall of ice like the face of an apartment building into the still sleeping water at her base.  Already worth the price of admission. 

A short, and iceberg free ferry ride, brought us to the base of the behemoth where we met our guides, and guardian angels, for the day.  We hiked for some time through the empty space where the glacier and the mountain once danced together.  We marveled at her shape and spied into the cracks in her armor.  She waited patiently. 

After strapping metal teeth to our feet we took our first steps onto her heaving chest.  What looked  no different than an slick ski slope in the distance was now a field of merciless razor edged broken glass beneath us.  Our angels watched, and assessed our capability as we scaled our first rise.  “Angry monkey!  Stomping penguin!”  they would holler over their shoulders as we fumbled our way up the first curve or her rib. 

Up and in we continued, one deliberate step in front of the other, no longer walking, but dancing to the firm heartbeat of the living giant beneath our feet.  At our first plateau we left Earth for the first time.  Nothing left was familiar.  The expanse ahead of us forced our senses to recalibrate for something so foreign.  We stood atop the white blade of a ridge; each side plunging into a vacuum of electric blue endlessness.  Our angels swung their axes and chiseled a crusty path along one slope. One by one, we stomped across,  while her blue depths below begged to inhale us; and we dared to consider her proposal. Ridge after ridge it went on like this, one guide clambering ahead to scout the path that wouldn’t come to an impasse; the other hammering out footholds and securing ice picks for us to hang onto as we inched our way along steep slopes.  One misstep would have sent us down an ice luge with no end.

Eventually we crossed our last ridge to find ourselves in the middle of an ice prairie. At the center sat a blue lake so perfect that no description would be fair to its beauty.  We sat there that afternoon, dining on Snickers bars hardened by the ice, and drinking water dipped from the azul lagoon and wondered how anything after this could ever be more spectacular.  We dropped a few frozen tears for a place that we were sad to see go, even while we were still there; knowing that sooner than later it won’t exist for future generations of us.  No photo, or go pro, or drone; no TV show, or documentary, or movie;  and no drug or prose can describe what this place does to you.  Just this once, don’t look at the photos below, but go and see for yourself.                              

past-the-precipice
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Past the Precipice

The next several days trekked us through a wilderness that flipped though all four seasons in no particular order.  In the morning we’d have to cling to the side of a barren rock strewn mountain, the wind threatening to give us an extra shove over the edge.  By afternoon we’d be stomping through muddy green meadows, stripped down to shorts and t-shirts.  Every bend unveiled a new vista worthy of a full camera card of photos.  Every angle was packed full of something to see; a lake bluer than the last, a new mountain face covered in ice brighter than sunlight, or a beach covered in water polished rocks sprouted with ice crystals.  We walked through miles of burnt forrest, each tree a black and white headstone with sprigs of fresh green life growing from the ashes.  At the end of the forrest we came upon another lake.  On this lake a parade of icebergs drifted past us. 

Further up the lake as the icebergs grew larger, so too did the new sound of improvised wooden flute music undulating along in its own unfamiliar rhythm.  This took hold of us.  We were the needles slowly rippling across the surface of a vinyl record; our trail, the groove guiding us through its peaks and valleys; our sound whistling in the distance.  On the most narrow and steep section of trail we passed our flute player sitting on a barely balanced boulder on the cliff’s edge surrounded in the hazy shimmer of the music.  Once past, we never turned around to see if he really was there. 

A hilltop later, we gaped at our first view of the mammoth frozen mass that had born the bergs.  We sat on a rocky bluff that evening and watched the lights go out over the blue ice.  In the distance we could hear the crack of breaking wood bats and the bone rattling boom of thunder as the ice cast off new wedges to make their way down the floating parade. 

At night we would take refuge with other pilgrims equally over stimulated by the scenery and events of their respective days journey.  Groups would gather to warm their blistered and sore stocking feet around wood burning ovens and share the day’s stories.  Hunks of glacier ice rattled around in our cocktail glasses.  As the last of the ice melted away, two by two, we pad off to our dorms.  Tomorrow, we wake and walk to something new. 

For all the magnificence and sensory overload of this place by day, it was night that was the most overwhelming.  A few hours before dawn we stood in heavy silence beneath an endless sheet of sparkling space.  Each second, hundreds of tiny new bright pin pricks light up above us.  They drip down frozen star dust. It lands in spires on the polished beach rocks we’ll walk over tomorrow.  Some of the lights break loose and streak past us; others dilate and grow more intense; while some flash and then disappear.  We watch as this continues, waiting for the sky to rip open and catch fire.  Eventually the tips of the Torres behind us begin to flicker and glow red.  Far away, a wood flute plays.                         

at-the-edge-of-the-world
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At the Edge of the World

On an unseasonably clear and blue day for April, our flight silently drifted over the crop of snow covered mountains.  The huge mass of snow seemed to trail its way down and in-between the peaks for miles and miles.  It shined up at us with bright lightbulb whites, and hummed with deep polar blues.  Striations and corduroy lines streak the top of the snow like untouched groomers before the first chair.  Our plane continues to descend lower over this new landscape at the edge of the earth and we watch, mesmerized, as the snow continues to etch it’s way through the landscape until suddenly it comes to a halt at the end of a lake.  It takes another moment to wrestle the reality that this mass of snow is actually a giant mass of ice.  We’re gazing down at our first Patagonian glacier.  And we couldn’t wait to get closer. 

Down here, at the edge of the world, God and Mother Nature are having a little more fun.  The daylight has a crispness to it that adds extra contrast to everything.  The sky feels bluer, and the leaves are richer shades of earth and fire.  Sunlight warms us like a sip of hot tea. Something so small as pebbles on the ground cast an impossibly long shadow.  Time slows down, or moves backwards; we’re not sure and it doesn’t matter.  Patagonia is dramatic and intense.  It lives just outside the grasp of the normal rules of everyday civilization.  And we haven’t even left the staging area yet.  This we come to know, just walking the sleepy streets and waterfronts of Punta Arenas and Puerto Natales.  

That first morning instead of the smell of freshly brewing coffee or crisping bacon, glacially cold air from the top of Torres sliced through an open window to jolt us awake.  Laced with each gust were geysers of steam from a horse’s nose poking his head into the room.  In the early dawn light outside, fields of grass and strings of hiking trails were covered with a thick icy frost that would stick with us well into the afternoon.  After a gruelingly long uphill slug, which we refused to admit was actually only half over once we reached the top; our summit at the Torres del Paine that day was a religious experience.  The three towers erupted out of the mountainside like an altar on the far end of a milky candied blue lake.  Pilgrims are scattered among the rocks offering prayers.  Their camera lenses flashed like candles being lit in the naves.  A silent reverence blankets the basin while the wind plays hymns off the rock faces towering around us like organ pipes.  Just then, snow begins to fall.

   

   

city-in-the-sky
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City in the Sky

It’s easy to book a trek to Machu Picchu and even before you go, feel like you’ve already been there.  After all, you’ve seen the countless photos and social media posts of friends making the requisite pose above the citadel.  You’ve seen it a hundred times.  How different can it be? 

The journey alone to get to this World Heritage site was the first indicator that this was going to be nothing like we might have guessed from our extensive scrutinization of photos by those that had come before us.  A short flight from Lima plopped us down with a hard banked landing into the two mile high basin of Cusco.  From there, a two hour taxi ride wound us up and out of the sink bowl through switchbacked rubble streets.  Stray dogs of every breed watch from their stoops as we careen by them, climbing higher out of the city.  The thin air, long day of travel, and steady sway of the car are the perfect cocktail for a few minutes of sleep. 

Some time later we wake up in a world we can no longer call our own.  Instead, we’ve found our way into something resembling a scene from a Harry Potter movie.  As dusk creeps into the crevices of the Andean mountains that now press in on us from either side of the twisted valley we’re in; we look out at the green pasture covering everything the eye can see.  Wooden farm shacks and alpacas whip past us on the hillsides.  Countless curves later we begin to descend onto the far below blinking lights of a mountain town tuckered into yet another valley.  Our driver bobs and weaves around tuk-tuks and flying soccer balls.  As soon as we’ve entered the town, we’ve exited it.  Another twenty minutes through the now night blackened terrain bring us to a stop quite literally at the end of the road.  The driver unloads our bags, and in Spanish too fast and garbled for our gringo ears, points to the end of the gently sloping and narrow street.   We scoop up our packs and begin the first of many hundred yard journeys of the next few days.  Not more than ten steps later, with a deep, rumbling whoosh the power shuts off.  Here we stood, in absolute darkness, miles from any world we know.  People whoop and whistle around us.  Old fashioned wax candles flare up in the shop fronts. The power flickers back on…. then off again.  A train whistles in the distance.

We eventually find our way to the real world equivalent of platform 9 & 3/4.  There we wait on the wooden deck; creaking and wet with rain for the next stage of what is gradually less vacation, and more pilgrimage.  Ninety minutes of rail splitting rocking and rolling at the behest of a conductor too eager to get home; spit us out in the small town of Aguas Calientes.  A few misplaced rights, lefts, and bridge crossings over a black and roaring river land us a hot butter beer and a bed for the night. 

We beat the sun to our bus the next morning and boarded for another thirty minutes up a bobby pinned dirt mountain road at a speed that had us considering scribbling last wills and testaments on our phones, “just in case”.  Upon reaching the citadel, we scramble through the main gates to find the entrance to our mountain assent before our cutoff time; not yet pausing to fully consider where we are, and what’s happening.  For the next 2,300 feet we climb uneven, muddied, and shoulder width steps straight upwards toward the clouds.  At some point, we pass though the cloud layer.  Another half hour later we must have crossed into a new layer of the atmosphere.  A final few steps, and the mountain crested to the view far below.  And just like that, no longer did the countless photos of our friends and peers make sense.  This view is impervious to camera lenses.  The intensity doesn’t translate to Instagram.  Machu Picchu’s magic does not transcend to the muggle world.  There is no substitute, or even introduction to this experience. 

Once again, in our world of endless technology that can bring everything within a .”com” grasp; we were reminded that there is absolutely no substitute for the real thing. 
         

 

lima
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Lima

Most airports blast visitors with a heavy cocktail of jetful fumes and burnt rubber on their first step outside the overly air cooled terminals; but not Lima.  Our first step outside swallows us in a soft warm evening air rich with all the aromas of the ocean.  It tastes like sugar and intoxicates us like a third pisco sour.   

That evening, as we drive along the coastline with the windows down, Lima’s perfume persists relentlessly like a Glade wall plug-in done the right way by Mother Nature.  Ocean waves un-peel on the rock beaches in an orchestral timpani.  All the other noises of the city are sucked away with each woosh of a wave as it washes back into the ocean. 

By day Lima sparkles.  The sidewalks were polished the night before by the same lonely man who we see buffing the floors of airport terminals and malls.  The buildings are painted in gleaming white, clean cool grey; and the grass is freshly combed an evenly unrolled in the greenest green.  Under and overpasses were crusted in glittering mosaic art instead of graffiti.  Things only get better with the food.  Ceviches were so fresh we could only get them in the afternoon while the fish was still wet from the ocean.  Pisco sours come with a scoop of white frothy cloud.  It was all perfect, until we asked for an ice cold bottle of water to wash it all down because there was no water; anywhere. 

Peru was experiencing such massive flooding that water supply had become contaminated from overflowing rivers.  Mudslides had created a national disaster in the mountains surrounding the city and to the north.  Any bottled or potable water was being ported out of the city by the truckload, accompanied by military troops for disaster relief.  In Lima itself, toilets didn’t flush, and showers and sinks didn’t run.  For the brief minutes they did, it usually ran brown.  Our hotel supplied ten gallon bins of pool water each day with which we would brush and scrub as best we could.  Leftovers were used to refill and flush toilet tanks.  When absolutely necessary, we snuck our “showers” in the pool late at night.  By day three, many restaurants had shuttered their doors.  Where our walking tour gathered, so did a donation tent and an assembly line of volunteers loading up trucks to go north.  This city of ten million was rocked and rattled. 

As we left Lima for the mountains of Cusco we were left humbled by reminder that no amount of glitter, polish, and green grass can stop mother nature.   We are always at the whim of our planet despite our best efforts to believe the opposite. 

the-fat-bird
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The Fat Bird

Medellin doesn’t hide it’s past; but it doesn’t ruminate on it either.  It hasn’t been erased or built over.  In fact, remnants of it are still out in the open, displayed as reminders that this history is now part of Colombia and thus, part of the Colombian people too.  As a result,  people in this city embrace the past as a catalyst for living “in the now” more vehemently than we know how. 

Colombians in Medellin consider themselves a different breed than the rest of the country.  This started long before the most recent history that most of the world assimilates with this city; but the past 30 years have only catalyzed this perspective.  They’re shrewd, and quick witted.  They are tough and resourceful.  More than anything however, they have an unbelievable ability to compartmentalize the bad from the good, and then celebrate the good every day. 

Seventy year old women who in reality should not have to be grinding out a living, work the street stalls each day selling everything from t-shirts to brooms. Yet they’re all smiling, all the time.   Women line up against the sides of churches, selling their bodies to feed their kids;  and casually chat with our tour group, offering us candies from a super sized bag.  The gondola that connects the slums to the city glides over happy barefooted children playing soccer in the dirt.  They’re all happy just to be happy. 

At night this city comes alive.  Groups of friends linger at dinner for hours, each table sharing bottles of gin that they empty into goblets of tonic to mix their own bottomless g&tTs. Closer to midnight the sidewalk becomes a stationary parade of bars with open patio’s, each trumpeting their own soundtrack over the blare of their neighbors.  On the street corners, acrobats in bright colored body suits swing from ropes attached street poles in their own impromptu red light Cirque du Soleil.   And the people party. 

On our last day we stroll through countless plazas and squares crowded by the city’s residents passing the hours in the company of friends; doing nothing more than living in the moment.  Despite the hardships of history that in some way, shape or form haunt almost everyone here, they choose to celebrate the good things no matter how small.  On the far side of the last square are two large twin bird statutes donated by Botero; one gleaming, fat, and happy; the other bird blown open by a bomb years earlier, it’s metal feathers wrenched and torn.  The past doesn’t hide here, but it won’t capture the beauty of this city either. 

 

the-city-within-the-wall
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The City Within the Wall

It doesn’t take long to fall in love with the city within the wall; where the music echoes off of the old buildings with the same vibrance as the colors they’re painted in.  Where the cobbled streets casually arc their way around the city, each turn delivering a new splash of sight and sound.  And where the tables litter the small squares crowded with travelers like us who have discovered this city’s secret.  It doesn’t take long at all. 

The heat and humidity hang in the air with a weight and thickness that don’t impart the usual lethargy from this type of climate, but instead intoxicate us with a floaty feeling; where time and space slow down to an era before instant message and instant coffee.  Days are easily spent sipping micheladas and mojitos while picking at fresh lobster ceviches; followed by lazy strolls through cooler shaded streets and lingering at local street vendor’s stalls hawking hand woven bracelets and bags as bright as the paint on the houses.  When the afternoon heat peaks and the air begins to shimmer like the inside of a brick oven, cool pools start appear as if from nowhere, tucked into shaded courtyards in local hotels, or in the middle atriums of the local houses.  In the late afternoon as the sun slips down towards the water with a now familiar lazy pace, the collective population of the city gathers together on rooftops and the old city wall ramparts to thank the day and welcome the night. 

However much we may love this new destination of ours, it’s not without reminders that something is happening here that we are at the same time, responsible for and unsettled by.  Restaurant menus are for the first time in this country, in English.  Every ten meters is marred by another street hustler intentionally and persistently blocking the way.  Michael Jackson moonwalks past us on the sidewalk, street guitarists and sax players echo off the normally peaceful old church square where we eat, aspiring Monet’s sling the same watercolored canvas portfolios, and the ultimate flow artists are throwing down the same cliched rhymes at any tourist (everybody) they encounter.  Prices for everything, they start to go up too. 

We love Cartagena.  As often as we can we’ll tell anyone to absolutely visit the city. It’s breathtaking.  And then we’ll go ask for forgiveness, because at  the end of it we’re still left with this unreconcilable feeling.  We’re sorry Colombia, for overrunning this paradise, and only hope that somewhere else you’re hiding a city more beautiful.

Just so you know,  we’ll find that too. 

the-bogota-beat
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The Bogota Beat

We landed in Bogota without knowing exactly what to expect from the city; maybe as our first act of letting the adventure take us instead of us trying to take the adventure.  Both of us knew what we’d been told however; and whatever 90’s era, dangerous, drug and corruption laden preconceptions Americans might have about Columbia, we’re overdue to get past them because this country is incredible.  The next trip you’re planning to take to New York, or Miami, or LA; do yourself a favor and go to Bogota instead. 

The first thing anyone would notice about Bogota isn’t actually the city itself, but instead the sheer expanse of mountains sprouting up from it’s edges.  Spattered with a few high-rises, many of of which are completely empty; “se vende” banners streaking the apartment windows, these buildings are just one of the indicators that this city was going to be different.  The buildings that do have tenants in them at a minimum have a few private security guards strapped with .45s; while those who live better merit fully uniformed military patrols with their fingers curled around automatic rifle triggers.  As if just to make a point of the city’s dichotomies, only the cloud white cathedral of Monserrate caps the mountains at almost two miles high overlooking the city below. 

The second thing you’ll notice about Bogota is that this city has a pulse.  New York has an energy to it, and Paris has it’s romantic je ne sais quoi, but Bogota throbs and pounds.  The city’s current intensifies when the sun goes down and it doesn’t stop throughout the night, no matter what day of the week.  Music from every bar, restaurant, and club hums with Bogota’s beat. Women’s heavy, and very high, heels quicken the pace as the night goes on.  And during the day,  Bogota’s endless walls of street and graffiti art throw color everywhere the eye can see.  Their painted images resonate a modern history that give us a better understanding of this city’s persistent edginess.

We were continually reminded of two Bogota’s.  One, the edgy, alive, thrumming city of young people; and then the other Bogota that they party so hard to forget.  A city that used to look a lot like the one US American’s mistakenly think it still is.  These two versions are the reason Bogota has a pulse.  One that you’ll find, before long after being there, starts to beat inside you. 

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