Writography by JoeySee: A Few Quick Argentine Musings

Argentina has indeed been hot.

I love being Captain Obvious. :-)

Andrew and I have been with our friend Claire (she´s half-French, don´t mind her)
since the day of our arrival in Argentina.

Claire Sandwich

Things are going generally well.

A couple of notes worth mentioning...

The first 3 straight hours of our flight out of NY to Santiago, Chile, was complete
and pure turbulence. At one point the plane took a short dive, and I found myself
grabbing my brother´s hand in preparation for our imminent doom.

"Damn!" I thought. "Mom is gonna be PISSED."

But we didn´t perish in a plane crash, which relieved us greatly.

Still Alive.

After our arrival at the airport, Andrew and I marveled at how little Spanish we
actually knew. We somehow found our bus and 60 cents and 2 hours later we
managed to find the hostel we were staying in. I don´t know how we did it, but we did.

Being that the weather is so hot here, Andrew and I felt right at home in Buenos Aires
because most men were walking around the city streets and parks with their shirts off.
We noticed that the women didn´t quite take off their shirts, but many of them rolled
them up as far as possible, despite their body type or current stage of pregnancy. I
swear I saw some of the unborn trying to kick their way out, screaming "SOMEBODY
OPEN A WINDOW OR SOMETHING!! I`M BURNING UP IN HERE!!"

Drivers in BA are known for their incredibly daring and dare I say "loco" driving talents.
That´s fine - other countries are notorious for that as well. What stood out about BA
was that when the sun went down, the drivers of taxis, private cars and even most buses
never even put on their headlights. Some were so dim, they must´ve been in there since
1954. Others just seemed to not want to use them at all. This made for crossing streets
at nite a fun guessing game.

Andrew´s language skills have improved quite significantly since our arrival. He´s been
studying and speaking quite a bit. I have not.

I seem to have a general travel sickness that never quite leaves me. Every time I take a
big trip somewhere, my immune system seems to say "Time to go offline for a while..."
I´ve been congested almost non-stop since our arrival with that one-nostril-is-clogged-then
-the-other-gets-clogged-while-the-first-one-clears-up-lather-rinse-repeat condition. It
hasn´t stopped me from doing much besides tasting the supposedly delicious food we´ve
been eating.

Now that my congestion is going away (not because I´ve been resting, but I think rather
because of the Emergen-C packets I´ve been downing daily), I seem to have acquired
some sort of eye infection, which is always a blast. I just put some flower gunk in my
eye at the suggestion of a few members on the farm we are at now. We´ll see what that does.

We´ve had a really nice time at the first farm we WWOOFed at - we are still here now,
but leaving tomorrow (Monday) for El Bolson. We hope.

I´d like to write more because we´ve done a lot more and met some great people already,
but my thoughts are a bit jumbled and I just want to put up some photos now anyway.

Also, we really like Mate. No accent on the e?

Hope things are well.

Ciao...