Extractos de un 'mail'

Excerpts from an email:

It is a place of light and air, earth and water, trees and stone. A foreign land within a foreign land, it draws its serenity from a distant world and a lost time, before the glass and steel cities sprouted up. Red and gold bridges arc elegantly over deep ponds teeming with long fish whose gaping mouths break through the clear surface. Pink blossoms shift gently in the breeze and glow in the afternoon sun that has broken through the gray clouds. Wooden lantern posts and intimate pagodas dot the swells in the carefully crafted green landscape, inviting ancient energy to flow. Strange symbols adorn many surfaces, sweeping brush-stroke characters that our pens and pencils, so accustomed to angular Latin letters, cannot reproduce. It is Japan within Argentina, and it is a pocket of peaceful timelessness in the eye of the whirling storm that men know as Buenos Aires.

I spent nearly two hours there, taking photos, sitting and watching the sunlight shimmer crazily on the water, and ignoring the work that I had in my backpack. I made a friend; a scrawny but oh-so-adorable gray and brown cat seemed to enjoy be petted for a change. Eventually I looked at my watch (that curious device of gears and clockwork in which I imprison time and bend it to my will) and began walking south to the office, many blocks away. A detour for lunch in the form of spinach tartas with cheese and ham and a subte ride later I arrived at my mystery destination...

... After the appointment I continued walking down Avenida Santa Fe, with the intention of eventually winding up near the building that holds my afternoon class. With an hour to spare I finished my lunch in a plaza and read about the fractured history of Argentina in the early 1800s. Class came and went, and I returned to Casa Grande on the subte. An hour or so after that I took off to a cafe to read and study. The mozo was friendly, the coffee cheap for Buenos Aires, the sandwich a godsend, and the atmosphere tranquil...