Estados Unidos

Let start with the lower right pic. That is my roommate Francisco Madronal in La Plata, Argentina. His mother had a house in the 60th. Str. was near the campus, and I rented half a room that I shared with his son. He was Spanish born and expert in frying eggs and carving palmtree branches into African masks. Actually he was not studying, but he never bothered me. Most of the time in my years in La Plata I lived in a large and cheap pension in calle 49, downtown, owned and run by the Boles family. Originally it was conventillo, and they rented room by hours for couples and prostitutes. Each room had two or three beds, mostly rented by students or single men. There I met a varied population of Peruvian and Bolivian students. Mama Boles had one son who shared a room and business with another Jewish man and they erected La Plata's largest mall and apt. building. The pension was frequently serviced by prostitutes. Many foreign students had been in La Plata for years and worked and had girlfriends. The pic to the left was taken in one of our field tours - I think it is in Santa Rosa, the Province of La Pampa, looking at different types of grasses.
My first stop in my graduation trip was in Montreal, Canada, where Klein Pista (Istvan) was living with her only daughter. He was a first cousin of my Father, a self-effacing suffering watchmaker, who following the liberation of Hungary in 1945, had spent a year in Communist jail for trying to pass illegally the border - to escape from Hungary. They had a miserable life and his wife had been ill for many yers till died a few months before. His only daughter was a nice girl of 18 and I should have married her ipso facto, it would have been in the nature of the things and she liked and wanted me, but I was so confused and stressed out by the recent effort of finishing my studies, that I was unable to focus and after two weeks I had to leave. Writing 35 years later, I am still embarrased by my behaviour, but then I was insensible to all. She is married with twins, living in the US. I boarded a Greyhound bus in Montreal without any idea in my mind, slept drunk till arrived at Winnipeg, it was a strong December storm, and I walked to the YMCA with my heavy handbag. Spent two weeks in an overheated room, reading and drinking to relax. Then, again purposeless, I entered the United States in a night Greyhound bus in North Dakota, I was sleeping in the warm last seat of the bus when we had to go down into the fresh night air, which I remember. I continued travelling for days on Greyhound buses, stopping to eat cold and rancid chickens and tasteless cold coffee at Greyhound bus stations, they are and smell the same everywhere, so I crisscrossed America from side to side several times.