Pickpockets, techno drag shows and fine wine

I´ve done a lot of things in the past week or so that I´ve never done before. After spending a few days checking out the museums, craft markets and architecture of Buenos Aires, Gus and I decided that we´d seen all of what the city had to offer while the sun´s up. While there are a few good museums and some fantastic places to eat, I think growing up an hour outside of NYC has made me a bit spoiled when it comes to cities. For all the talk about BA being really European in terms of architecture, Gus and I were never really in awe of what we saw. The people on the other hand...they are very european. And incredibly attractive. In that sense I was in awe about three times a minute. And while they daytime activities aren´t out of this world, the night life certainly  is. On Thursday, after a nice meal with some friends of Mr. Hobbs who live in the city, we did a bit of bar hopping then headed to this club called Niceto. Every Thursday night (actually, starting Friday morning at 2:30 am), they do a drag show complete with techno, strobe lights, incredible break dancing, and lots of female and male near-nudity. We had a great time, and the club was still packed when we left at 6 am. At least we got to watch the sky brighten on our trip back to the hostel! After sleeping it off for a few hours, we did a bit more daytime tourism and moved from a comfortable, clean hostel in the microcentro (city center, with lots of hustle and bustle going on during the day but empty streets at night) to a funky, cheap, dirty and disgusting hostel in Palermo, which is an area packed with great restaurants and bars. So location was great, but dealing with used feminie products sitting in the sink and a kitchen with one pot, no pans and one barely functioning burner was less than desireable. But we were happy to sacrifice cleanliness for a few nights if it meant being a short walk home from all activities, and the hostel did have some really interesting artwork on the walls, as well as an absolutely gorgeous hostess. If I´d only had money for a wedding ring... We went on a very touristy pub crawl the next night, following a delicious meal of flank steak, sweet potato mash, rice, fries topped with a fried egg, and a big slice of fried parmesan cheese. Although we had to fight off the urge to vomit after eating so much, our stomachs were eventually settled enough to grab a quilmes, the Argentine equivalent of bud light. At the pub crawl, we made friends with a Dutch couple, a German woman and a guy from Toronto. We had a great time swapping travel stories and hearing about hometowns and cultures. And now we have a place to stay if we ever want to go to Amsterdam! After the pubs, we got vip access to a popular club. I felt really awkward as a tourist cutting past hundreds of people in line, but I soon forgot my worries when Hello by Martin sloveig came on. After fighting off an increasingly strong urge to lean against a wall and fall asleep from 4-5 am, we decided to head home. Unfortunately, upon leaving the club we discovered that we had 4 pesos (about a dollar) between us and we weren´t even on our map of the city. Exhaustion and seriously aching feet led to a pessimistic attitude, and we decided that we had at least a 50 block walk to our hostel. So much for staying close to the action. Luckily, after asking a few people for directions, we found that we were only about 20 blocks away. We made it home, fell asleep immediately, and enjoyed two more relaxed days in the city. We went to the zoo, which has some shockingly small cages, saw plenty of animals going crazy in their prisons, got annoyed, then did some craft shopping. Also had one of the best meals of my life...a huge flank steak from this famous cheap parrilla called El Desnivel. Only cost about $12 US!  Here we are two days later in Mendoza. We were very relieved to get out of the hustle and bustle of the city. It´s a cool city in terms of culture, which can be summed up in one word: wine. They live wine. And although we´re in a semi-arid region with a few cm of rainfall a year, they have a really cool irrigation system that diverts water from snow runoff. It runs next to nearly every street in the city, and parks are decorated with cool fountains. Having said that...the city is not pretty. Kind of ugly, in fact, and people have a habit of throwing all their trash into the trenches. They also still drive cars from the early eighties, and it´s less than nice to walk through a thick cloud of exhaust every few blocks. It´s also at a fairly high altitude...the province has the highest vineyards in the world...anywhere from 900 to 3000 meters! We did a wine tour yesterday by bike, learned a lot about how it´s made (I can be a wine snob now!), tried some seriously tasty and fine wines, especially at Trapiche, and endured pounding headaches and upset stomachs later that night, from something in the wine or the water (or maybe the altitude...good call mom). Now we´re taking a day off to plan our hiking and camping section of the trip. We may have to rent a car. Based on my experiences on the roads so far, I´m a bit worried...

Yelling at animals

It´s raining a lot here, so I´ve had to move most of my farm work from the veggie garden to the chicken coop (ground is too wet to work). This wouldn´t be too bad if every tool I´ve had to use weren´t rusted and broken! I´ve managed to clumsily cut my fingers and wrists several times in attempts to remove rusted nails with rusted screwdirvers, but at least I´ll be able to appreciate the wild one´s garage full of quality equipment when I return! Especially the John Deere tractor. In its place, I´ve been using a small electric mower that´s missing one wheel, is about to lose two more, has to be plugged into a never-quite-long-enough extension cord, has blades about as sharp as the head of a spoon, and is in serious need of some electrical tape to eliminate the perpetual shock from the swinging exposed wires. Ahh, farm life. It really is great though, partly because of these eccentricities. The three-wheeler certainly makes mowing more exciting, if not overly efficient.

I had rabbit for the first time. It was pretty good.

Jesús, another wwoofer that joined us at the farm recently, has been keeping me company and translating all the spanish I manage to forget or horribly mispronounce (he speaks spanish, english, german and catalan!). He was also instrumental today in our nearly fruitless attemtpt to scare the bull, who had escpaed, back into his confined area. It took about 35 minutes, as well as a lot of clapping, yelling, and waving of sticks. I have to admit that I was pretty thankful at the time that we´d castrated  him earlier...he might have been much more aggressive otherwise.

The school system is really interesting here...Joaquin, who is seventeen, goes to school one out of every three weeks. He stays there all week (it´s about 30km away), has class from 8 to 8 every day, then spends the next two weeks at home working on the farm. He has homework, but not too much. The kids are on a rotating schedule (three groups, they all have a specific week), but the poor professors have to teach nearly 12 hours a day! Apparently they´re payed very well. The school is designed this way partly to allow kids to work on their parents farms and partly because public transportation is terrible in the area, and not many families own cars. It´s an innovative system (originating in France, says Cynthia, my host), but it seems pretty undemanding.

I´ve got one more day of farming ahead of me, then I´m off to BA for a tour of a famous old cemetery, including the grave of Evita Perón, a few craft markets, a day at Tigre, a small lake town an hour north of the city, then a week in the city with Warfield V, followed by a week in wine country, interspersed with some camping. Woo!

Buenos Aires

For at least the next two weeks I´ll continue to have limited access to the interwebs, so unfortunately these posts will be infrequent (sorry Dad). I got back a few days ago from a day and a half trip into the capital, which was fun. The two hour train ride into the city costs $2 in pesos, which is about 50 cents! Wow. The first thing I noticed about Buenos Aires, after wandering around for half an hour thinking I was in the city center, is that it´s really pretty ugly outside of a few key areas. There are cracked streets, old abandoned buildings and people who look at you with an unmistakably suspicous eye. I guess this is true of pretty much any city, but it´s a bit disconcerting when you´re meandering around like an idiot, pulling out your giant yellow map of the city every 5 minutes. I eventually figured out where I was, but my next task proved more challenging: figuring out how the colectivos, their main form of public transportation, are organized. You can buy a Guia "T" that puts the city on a grid and tells you which bus busses stop where (or rather, whether or not they stop somewhere in the 6x6 block area within a single grid section), but there are no actual routes outlined anywhere, and there´s no way that I found to tell if the bus is heading towards or away from your destination. I ended up abandoning that chaotic mess and walking towards the micocentro, a nicer part of the city, which was only a 20 minute walk or so. I found a very nice hostel with free internet, a tv in the basement in a nice lounge and complementary breakfast. A dorm bed was only about $15 US. After wandering around the city a bit, which, although certainly as European in feel as they say, isn´t much to look at outside of a few select areas. Of course, any other major city I´ve visited in Latin America can´t hold a candle to BA aesthetically, but it´s still nothing to write home about. What is worthy of note is everyone´s schedule: I was early to dinner at 10, and by the time I was ready for bed at 12, people were just starting to pour drinks in anticipation of going out. Nonetheless, the same people I saw starting their night at midnight were up serving breakfast the next day before 9. Impressive. I spent another day wandering around a cool crafts market in a northern part of the city before heading home. Although it was pretty uneventful, it was good to get a feel for the city, to get away from my farm, and to have converstations in english!! I met some very cool people, including an Irish couple who, after losing their jobs, had pooled all their money and spent the last five months traveling around South America. They didn´t speak a word of spanish, and their accents were so thick that I had trouble understanding them...I don´t know how they managed to communicate anything to a non-native english speaker, but they got by. They also gave me some great advice about the places I´m headed to, which they´ve already visited. And they managed to get me thinking about taking a 17 hour bus ride up north to see Igazu Falls before my good friend Gustavus Warfield Stingefield Hobbs V arrives and we head to northern Patagonia. I think I may. I also met a couple from New Zeland who have been hopping around different cities in SA, teaching english and learning spanish. Apparently there´s enough demand for native english speakers that you don´t even have to be certified in any way to get a job, and you can hold it for just a month! Just a degree from some university and you´re set. Great idea! I guess there are lots of ways to travel cheap and long.

Farm is going well...I´m beginning to see improvements in the vegetable garden in which I work, which is nice--to be able to really notice your progress. Speaking of progress, my spanish still sucks. Ugh. I also may kill the 17-year-old son of my host mother, who I´m convinced is actually a 6-year-old in a lazy, sloppy, unclean teenager´s body. He´s an irreverent little turd to his mother, who is a saint. And he constantly returns my ipod with big gobs of earwax and hair on the ear buds. Gross. So yeah, that´s my life right now. How are you?