Are we having fun yet?

Dan: What do we do for fun? Hmm. That’s a tough one. We don’t really have a routine. It seems that at least every other weekend there is an asado or a birthday party to go to. We’ve been to quite a few parties at the rented homes of other travelers/ English teachers/ Spanish students. There is a young (or youngish) temporary foreigner community here that one can’t help being part of, because for the most part they are interesting, fun people and well, we don’t know many other people. This community is always in flux. People just disappear. Sometimes they come back in a few weeks or months and we run into them again. If we are out of the ex-pat scene for a couple weeks, the next time we join one of their gatherings, there are newbies. There is also a serious Ex-pat Community that actually lives here and has an organization bent on dominating the local economy in the name of Yankee-capitalism, but we don’t know them. For awhile we considered infiltrating their ranks to make contacts for non-teaching work, but we got busy teaching and forgot about it. Just as well. We meet enough foreigners as it is, and usually the type who are more focused on hiking through every country and dominating the damajuana of wine.

The last two weekends I’ve been to birthday parties of people from the art department at the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, the biggest college here. The party last weekend was in the birthday girl’s parents’ house and we came home at around 7 A.M. That is a pretty normal schedule for the weekends, especially for young people, among whom I no may longer count myself. This weekend’s birthday party was at a sort of party room at the dorms. How old am I? Anyway, Lou and I were the first to leave at 3 A.M. There is an art gallery a few blocks from here that hosts a gathhering every Wednesday night. Okay, you know I’m not really an art show guy. I was initially lured there by the free live music and wine, but now it’s a place to go every other week or so and see the regular crowd. It’s kind of like going to Grumpy’s in Minneapolis; we always know at least somebody there, and the art on the walls changes from time to time.

I just turned to Louann and asked what we do for fun. Are we having fun yet? I’m not sure. We’re not on vacation any more, so real recreation only comes on weekends. Every once in awhile on a sunny day we go and sit in a plaza to study Spanish and watch people. Yesterday we took a two-hour walk in the big park. We went and saw “The Queen” at the cinema the other day. I play Civ 3 and write blogs on the computer. Lou does yoga, tai chi, capoeira. I hang out with Sergio, usually for a beer. I’ve sometimes helped him hang commando art works on posts and walls around town (don’t tell anyone). We have been getting busier having language exchanges. I don’t know how much it helps our Spanish, but it is something to do. Also I meet my Minnesota buddies for Skype virtual happy hour every other week They bring a laptop with microphone and camera to a bar, and I do the same here. I sit on their table like Max Headroom and jealously watch them eat buffalo wings in a patio. I feel like I was actually at Billy’s on Grand this weekend, except no one made me drink a straight Jameson at closing time. Good times.

We’ve been trying to do short trips every other weekend or so. If we don’t get very far out of town, we’ll at least go check out a winery 30 minutes away or wander to a part of town we don’t know yet, as an afternoon field trip. 9 de Julio winter holiday is coming up so there will be 2 weeks without work. We are trying to figure out what we can realistically do with two weeks. Argentina turns out to be a pretty big country. The plan right now is to try to get to Iguazu falls. Since every school in the country is closed at this time, we imagine that we won’t be alone. An alternate scenario has us travelling to the north of the country, to Salta and Jujuy.

I just realized today that the 4^th of July is coming up. It is so strange to think that summer is happening as usual up there while we’re wearing stocking caps to bed every night. I had that realization aloud this afternoon during one of my classes, to which one of my students responded that the 4^th of July is also the premiere of the Transformers movie.

Entertainment

Dan: During the summer there seemed to be a new group of Andean musicians in town every week. Some of them had CDs for sale or shiny costumes. They must have moved to warmer climes for the winter, since there are few tourists in Mendoza right now. There aren’t that many street performers here. There are the duos singing folklore tunes, wandering between outdoor restaurants. There are the guys in monochromatic costumes who stand like statues in the plaza to earn money. The most common street performer actually performs in the street, and one can see them every day. The traffic light turns red and he stands in front of the cars juggling. When the light is about to change, he wanders between the cars to collect donations for his rush hour distraction. They can be seen juggling balls or sticks, twirling flags or even flaming ropes. There is a guy on our corner who dresses as a clown and juggles standing on a step-stool, so more people can see him.

Another form of street performance is the strike/ protest. The trolley drivers. I think. Are looking to get the same pay and bennies that the bus drivers get. So every once in awhile, they stop for an hour, around noon, and shoot off really loud fireworks in the plaza on our corner. A couple of weeks ago, when I happened to be subbing on the other side of town, they stopped running for two full days. Trolleys are nice because they are quiet, and you pretty much know where they go, being connected to wires and all. But I have been stuck when they break down twice. The first time I just waited for the next trolley. The other time we were all out of luck because they were all out of electricity. Can anyone tell me if it is really all that ecological to run on electricity when that electricity is generated by burning coal and oil?

Paul asked if there was any iconic Oprah-like figure here. I can’t say that I have my finger on the pulse of the nation or anything, but I know who is on TV, at least on our two channels, at prime time. The first is Susana Gimenez. When she was younger I guess she was quite the hottie. These days she is the plastified host of a talk show in the Tonight Show style, that also includes a segment in which Susana calls a viewer at home. If they answer, “Hola Susana,” they get a chance to win a pile of pesos. The only time I ever watched the show for more than 5 minutes was when I saw that Viggo Mortensen, the Lord of the Rings guy, was on as a guest. It turns out that he speaks some wicked Argentine espanol, having grown up in the country. Whooda thunk it? The other evening TV icon is a tall fellow named Tinelli. He hosts a show called Show Match that, over the past few months as far as I can tell, has been doing a show called “Bailando por un Sueno” (dancing for a dream). Being slightly more entertaining than Big Brother on the other channel, we’ve watched it a little bit more. It seems like a couple months ago they were teaming up a semi-celebrity with a professional dancer who had a serious cause for which he was playing, usually a family member who needed money to combat an illness. They showed a video of the potential recipient of the winnings, then the couple would dance. I think every week they would change the theme of the dance. One week it would be swing music, the next it would be disco or Brazilian. The costumes would match the theme and coreography. But the costumes also seemed to get skimpier as the weeks went on, maybe because the judges favored skin over dance moves. They don’t even talk about who the contestants are playing for any more. The peak of this trend was, and I’m not kidding here, Pole Dance Week. There was a public outcry against the Tinelli show that week. The stripper pole was put away and the show continued the next week with scantily-clad salsa, so much more respectful.

I was also asked about the status of Diego Maradona, the futbol superstar from Argentina’s last world cup championship. He still remains in the spotlight. A few months ago he was hospitalized, and the press was all over it. They even pronounced him dead for a little while. But he recovered and even appeared on the Tinelli show, opposite the Gran Hermano final, where he chatted with the host and they showed highlights of his soccer career. People make fun of him, his sanity, his off and on drug problems, but still respect him for all he gave to the country in the area of futbol awesomeness. Diego is the Spanish equivalent of the name James, but I have my suspicions why we have met so many guys in their twenties named Diego.

Ischigualasto and Talampaya

30·04´59.77" S 67·54´59.92 " W

Dan: I believe there are 11 or 12 major, get-off-work holidays in Argentina. This week we had Flag Day. Taking advantage of the three-day weekend, along with everyone else, we got on a bus and got out of town. We headed over to the next province, San Juan. We stayed in a little town called Valle Fertil, which I guess was slightly more fertile than the desert surrounding it. We took and all-day excursion to one provincial, and one national park in the area. The first one, Ischigualasto, a very hard to spell and pronounce park is more commonly know as Valley of the Moon. It is a sort of badlands that they claim is the world’s largest dinosaur graveyard. The other park was right next to it but took about an hour to get to. Talampaya was more desert, cactus and funky rocks, many of them with a reddish color. It was nice to finally get out in the nature, even if it was with a tour guide. Both of these places require accompaniment to protect the area and keep people from stealing fossils and cool rocks. We got to see petroglyphs and some wildlife. The whole morning was sunny, windless and silent. The wind picked up later on but we still actually felt warm at times and may have gotten some much needed vitamin D.

Click on any of these pictures to make them bigger.

My very small wife.

This little fellow is a guanaco, cousin to the llama.

Here are some pictures of his ancestors.

If you enlarge this picture you can look between the trees, on the left side to find a couple of gigantic birds called ñandúes, or rhea.

El Castellano Argentino

Dan: I think I’ve gone the last four days without speaking Spanish. Yes, I’m still in Argentina, but I speak English at home, I speak English at work, this blog is in English. I need to find a way to practice more, other than the typical store transactions etc. The other day I was ordering some food at a butcher shop and a woman said,”Your Spanish is very good,” and began to talk to me in English (which led to a job interview at another insitute). I need to figure out how to work on my language a little more. Lulu and I both quit our Spanish classes a couple of weeks ago due to conflicting schedules and the feeling that we weren’t getting much out of them anyway. When we first got here I spoke a lot of Spanish, looking for work, asking people questions, trying to figure things out in Mendoza. I was feeling confindent with my pre-existing Spanish. I also studied on my own quite a bit. Louann has continued to be very self-motivated, crunching away at those irregular verbs. We have some Argentine friends but we only see them every other weekend or so. Now I think my work schedule is becoming more consistent so I need to figure out my own language enrichment plan.

Maybe I should say a little about Argentine Spanish. For one, Spanish isn’t the same wherever in the Spanish-speaking world you go. The vocabulary for things as basic as food items changes from place to place. We always used ‘fresa’, ‘aguacate’ and ‘frijol’ for strawberry, avocado and bean. Here the words ‘frutilla’, ‘palta’ and ‘poroto’ are preferred. Buses = micros, colectivos. Trabajo = laburo. In addition to that, there are all kinds of names for prepared foods. There are names for different types of pasta sauces. Don’t get me started on all the cuts of meat. The word I that always knew meant “bowling alley” was “boliche.” Here, “boliche” means ‘disco’, a place where people dance until 6 AM. I didn’t know this back in March when some tourists from Buenos Aires asked me on the street for directions to a boliche. I pointed them to where I was sure there was a bowling alley. Oops.

There is also a sub-language known as “lunfardo.” These are slang terms that came from the tango culture, I suppose similar to how the jazz culture permeated our language. Cool. The tango culture, coming from the bars and brothels where the dance originated, gave birth to a slang vocabulary that is still used today. The vocab is most evident when people are talking about crime, police, sex or money; you know, everyday stuff.

After leaving Chile, we were relieved to find out that Argentine, or at least Mendocino Spanish is much more intelligible. Santiago Spanish was fast and seemed to be missing a lot of consonants. Buenos Aires Spanish is a little more musical-sounding. Another aspect of Argentine Spanish, an old friend of mine from studying in Costa Rica, is the ‘vos’ form. I’m not even going to bother trying to explain what that means to non-Spanish speakers.The ‘tu’ form is never used. The ‘usted’ form is used very rarely. I think it is seen as putting space between the speakers, but I guess can be used with someone who is much older.

Food: The alfahor is similar in concept to the Oreo cookie. It is a cookie sandwich using sugar cookies. The stuff in the middle is dulce de leche, (caramel-like sugar and milk stuff) but variations have included chocolate and dulce de raspberry. Sometimes they come dipped in chocolate. Sometimes, and I don’t know if it is technically even an alfahor, it is an open-faced cookie sandwich with a cone of dulce de leche, covered in chocolate. A truly amazing confection. The alfahor is the ubiquitous sweet around here. They are sold packaged in little shops, grocery stores, and by guys on street corners at 3 for five pesos. Fancy-pants coffee shops sell freshly made alfahores.

Here are some fancy alfahores brought from Bariloche. One is bathed in white chocolate, the other in chocolate with dulce de frambuesa (raspberry).

Mate

sheryl said...
Hmm, mate. My Merriam-Webster Collegiate (11th Ed.) says that mate is "a tealike beverage drunk especially in South America." What makes it tealike?

Lou: I’m not sure that I can do mate justice in a blog since I am no expert, but here I’ll try. If you want more info Wikipedia it! Mate (pronounced mah-teh) is “tea-like” because it is a bitter drink from the leaves of a (I believe) magnolia family bush. It is served in a gourd or wood cup and drunk through a special metal straw that keeps the leaf pieces from getting into to the straw.

I think most of our experience with the drink is with Spanish teachers that were kind enough to bring this great Argentine past-time for us to try in class. The cup is pretty small and a lot of leaves are used. (It looked a little gross to us at first-- all green and foamy when full.) I believe that, unlike tea, the mate leaves leach their chemicals and taste at a slow rate so that the same leaves can be used for many refills. For this reason after each person finishes off a cup, it is simply refilled with hot water and passed to the next person. It is often a thing to do in the afternoon with friends. Seeing people sitting in the plazas with friends and their thermoses and cup is a common thing.

What did we think? Well, we aren’t completely won over. First of all we would have to get the equipment (ok, not such a big deal). Which would consist of the cup a straw and a thermos. The thermos is essential to keep lots of very hot water nearby, but not boiling water. Boiling water ruins it. It is very bitter. I love green tea, but it is way more bitter than that. I have had it with sugar and once with some mint like leaves mixed in. It was pretty good then! One afternoon I had maybe 3 cups of mate and I could not sleep that night. According to web research I did, its not supposed to have that affect on you, but then I’m not used to caffiene. It didn’t give the heart racing feeling of coffee when I drank it, so I must not have realized that I had overdosed on caffeine!

We also have some pre-packaged, roasted leaves in tea bags that we just make like tea. It tastes really good—green tea like. But I have had some otherwise unexplained restless nights after drinking the tea, too. Needless to say I drink it in moderation. And Dan? Well, he’s been happy about having a coffee maker…But stay tuned, we may be converted, yet!

The Teaching Scene (part 2)

Dan: I suppose I’ve forgotten that some people are actually interested in hearing about my teaching. Although it still doesn’t really occupy a lot of time (the planning and teaching part, that is) at least as compared to what I was doing back home, it has already become just another part of my day so I forget to report on it.

Right now I’m working at two institutes, or private language schools. They teach adults throughout the day and kids in an after-school class. Though I’ve been asked to do otherwise, so far I’ve only taught grown-ups. Word of mouth and personal reference seem to be how jobs are found in this profession, and in Argentina in general, from what I’ve heard. I guess that’s why it has taken over three months to finally have a full schedule. At first I was only working at Highlands Institute with a few hours per week. This soon turned into one or two hours per day plus a lot of substitute dates. All my letters of reference, license, diploma and C.V. detailing sizeable experience weren’t good enough. They had to get to know me, figure out that indeed I wasn’t the worst teacher they’d ever had, then offer me more hours. Then our friend Aya recommended me to Star Institute and I’ve started with some students there as well. It’s about a 20 minute walk to Highlands, another 15 minutes from there to Star. I generally take a 10 minute bus ride instead of walking if I’m traveling between home and Star, since it might take 45 minutes to get there. Classes are generally 60 or 90 minutes. Classes meet once or twice a week. I have a sort-of team-teach thing going on for some classes, in which I teach one day, she teaches the other. Also there are a few classes in which I replace the Argentine teacher once a month, so the students can get access to my sweet Minnesotan English. More than half of my classes are one-on-one. I’ve never had any classes larger than six students. All our attempts to get private students have come to nothing. They’ve all either expressed interest then never followed through or took one class, didn’t pay and never came back. This week a friend is leaving town and passing me a student who will come right to our apartment for class! I am optimistic. Lou has been working out some language exchanges in which she teaches English for an hour, then gets some Spanish for an hour.

I’m at the point now at which I can be choosy about the classes I accept. I’ve turned down some classes with other schools due to tough schedules or bad word of mouth from other English teachers, and travelers who find work teaching. I even considered teaching little kids until I got reports of late paychecks, above-average expections for below average pay and general disorganization. And speaking of ‘word of mouth,’ just by virtue of knowing me, being a native English speaker and being cute as a button, Louann has started to teach a few one-on-one classes at Highlands as well, though some of those are off-site at a place of business. All of my regular gigs are in the actual schools, but last week I subbed a couple days at the Ministry of Something-or-Other, teaching two guys whose job it is to help rid Argentina of the Mediterranean Horned Fly, which apparently has been making its way southward from Panama ever since it hitchhiked over with the canal builders. Who knew? The gentlemen’s ambition to study English obviously wasn’t related to their work. I don’t even speak Mediterranean.

Ok here are some paragraphs for the English teachers. Anyone else can go check their email again, this might get kind of boring. At Highlands we’re using New Interchange for lower general English classes and Opportunities (Longman) for higher ones. Also there seems to be a great desire for Business English. There is a series called Market Leader we use. It comes from the econ magazine The Financial Times, so it is fairly high-interest but it uses British English. At first the whole concept of Business English was funny to me. I thought “just let me teach English.” But as I get to know the material and get to know the learners and their professions, I’m seeing that the targeted vocab and grammar is actually going to be useful for them. Most of them work for subsidiaries of international companies and need to communicate with the yanquis who just bought them out. At Star they are using a series from Oxford English called English File. More X, Y, Zed English. Maybe the Brits are better marketers down here. There is one place in Downtown Mendoza where I think all the ESL material for the city is sold. But it is quite common to make copies of an entire book. In fact, the local copy shop near the institute has copies of most of our books, so that we can just send students to the shop to buy a bound, black-and-white copy. I suppose it’s quite a bit cheaper for students that way.

I brought a couple of grammar books with me and they’ve been OK for working on discrete grammar points, but there are so many other things I wish I would/could have brought. I’m starting to make new sets of conversation cards and filling an accordion folder with copies of articles, worksheets and a few pictures for just the right moment. Luckily most of what I need is still rattling around my coffee-addled brain from the last ten years of similar work. I admit I am still trying to remember what kind of activities and games to use with high-level students, since it has been so years since I’ve needed them. If you have any ideas, please send them along.

I suppose that’s about the basics of what my work is like here. The people have been friendly. The students or their employers are paying, so attendance is pretty good. Argentines aren’t generally shy people, so getting them to speak isn’t an issue. Yesterday I was a little frustrated by a class that insisted on translating everything into Spanish. Maybe that’s what their regular teacher considers teaching English. It’s a new experience for me to have to teach a homogeneous population and be able to resort to their language from time to time. But most classes are close to 100% English. Most of the people had some English in High School, and then picked it up again as an adult. I am amazed at how well some people speak English despite having never been to an English-speaking country. It’s certainly better than my Spanish, and I’ve been working at it awhile (but that sounds like another blog entry).

The cutest police station in South America

Villa General Belgrano

Dan: This is actually Part 2 of the Cordoba entry, though I guess you can read this one first and it won’t ruin any surprises or anything. Since typing that last entry, I’m pleased to announce, we have resolved our heat situation. The landlord’s brother came over and confirmed that our tank was empty. He gave us some numbers to call for gas delivery. So the next day we called the company and two days later, we had heat! Two cold days later. In the meantime, the caretakers of the building and the door security guy were concerned about our freezing. The caretaker came up to try to figure out a way to hook up the gas and also gave us a coil of metal that I think we were supposed to heat up on the stove and use as a source of heat. Louann and our houseguests Ben and Petra were skeptical of the potential of a small piece of metal to heat an apartment. Their suspicions were confirmed. Luckily those two had just spent the past two months in Patagonia and had warm enough gear to tough it out on our couch.

So to continue the story of our weekend in the Cordoba area, we decided that we wanted to spend the night elsewhere. Our destination would be Villa General Belgrano, reportedly the home of the world’s third most important Oktoberfest (the second being somewhere in Brazil, the fourth, I assume, in my parents’ backyard in Robbinsdale). Oktoberfest of course is still a long way off, but rumors of microbreweries were enough to bring us to Cordoba in the first place. This isn’t the first time a Bruski has made a pilgrimage simply for beer (Chippewa Falls, Denmark, Hudson, WI on a Sunday, you know who you are).

When we got off the bus we went through the woods to a hostel. Woods! Real trees and birds and nature. There were flocks of green parrots raising a ruckus in the trees. Unfortunately the beautiful, sprawling chateau hostel had no vacancies for people without tents. So we ended up wandering through town until we found a room at a place called Eurostop. The name of the B&B was just the beginning of the semi-European character of the town. Much of the architecture of hotels and stuff had a German look to it. This comes from the Germans who settled down in with the local population in Villa General Belgrano after their naval vessel was sunk by the British in 1940 somewhere on the Altlantic coast. And boy am I ever glad they got sunk. We got to have lager, black beer, weissbier, rauchbier, and a honey beer. I also got to eat goulash! Lou was content with spaetzle and cream sauce. We tried beer from two microbreweries. I admit they weren’t anything like a good Summit, but I was quite happy. I guess the area is also known for its salami, smoked cheeses and chocolate. We tried to get some before getting out of town, but it was Sunday, so it was hard to find a place that was open and still catch our bus on time. Maybe next time.

So we took a 2-hour ride back to Cordoba, then caught another bus for the 10 hours back to Mendoza. We got the front seats on the top level of the double decker bus. From now on I think that will be my preferred seat, at least when there are things to see. We were also treated to the films Bowfinger, Ladder 49 (without sound) and a weird film from the 70s called Bless the Beasts and Children.

Right now it feels like that was the last weekend of Fall. That may be because I’ve been sick all week. But it has been pretty cold. We even saw some snowflakes on Monday. Soon I’ll be able to start thinking about the slopes (and maybe some health insurance).

Cordoba

Dan: First of all I want to apologize for the long time between entries. I’ll try to make up for it by writing an entry so long and boring that you’ll wish I would’ve taken another day off. I do have plenty of excuses though; we were out of town, then consequently tired, I’m having a very busy work week and have a nasty head cold, our stolen internet doesn’t seem to be working, and we’ve had some traveler-friends staying over.

Remember a few months ago, you were in the dead of February and had to read about how we were enjoying sun, BBQs, the beach? I just talked to family yesterday while they were having a backyard BBQ and we were waiting for our landlord’s brother to bring us a space heater to help us combat the single digit (celcius) evenings. We got the propane heater, and it worked pretty well but tonight it isn’t working at all. Maybe we’re out of gas already. We’re both too scared to disconnect the canister and check. Ok, after writing that last sentence I was a little embarrassed about being scared of a gas tank so I disconnected it and shook it around and it appears to still have gas. Time to bug the landlord’s brother again.

The past weekend we went on a nice li’l bus trip (9-10 hours) to the city of Cordoba. The long-distance buses are pretty comfy. On the way to to Cordoba, we paid extra for the semi-bed option on the overnight bus. I think we may have gotten an hour or two of sleep, but we got a meal of caneloni and sandwiches and got to see a Nicholas Cage movie. We stayed in what turned out to be a fairly rowdy, youngster hostel. It being a holiday weekend the place was pretty full. Fortunately the private rooms were across the street from the main building where the Pop Dj band was playing, starting at 1:30 AM. In general not a bad hostel experience I’d say.

The city of Cordoba is a real city. Makes Mendoza feel like St. Cloud. Big buildings, crowded streets, narrow sidewalks. Now we appreciate the wide sidewalks and clean streets of Mendoza. Of course one category in which Cordoba certainly takes the prize over Mendoza is architecture. Here the buildings are mostly utilitarian and all fairly new. Any colonial structures were earthquaked away long ago. Cordoba apparently had no such problem, and it was the colonial capital before B.A. came to prominence. So there are some cool old buildings, most noticeably the churches. One must-see in Cordoba are the Jesuit ruins. We didn’t see them. But we did get to experience something else very important: a Chinese Buffet! I know you think that there are Chinese restaurants in every strip mall nowadays, and none of them is too exciting. But we hadn’t seen a Chinese restaurant in three months. We once asked someone if there was any Chinese food in Mendoza. He turned around and asked his friend, “Hey, where did you have sushi?” So anyway, we didn’t really do too much in Cordoba. We shopped but didn’t buy, looked inside some churches but didn’t pray, tried to book some tours but did our own thing. But it was certainly nice to be in a new place.

The main reason we didn’t spend much time in Cordoba city was that our main aim was to get out in Cordoba Province. We wanted to get out to a national park a couple hours away but found out that it was difficult to do so without a car, unless we got up really early, took a bus, then walked 2 hours to get to the park entrance. And we didn’t find that out until halfway through our weekend. But we did end up taking some other trips to smaller touristy areas in the province. On Friday, national holiday, Dia de la Patria, we went to uber-tourist mecca Villa Carlos Paz. It turned out to be a town of hotels wrapped around a giant dam-made lake. It was a perfect sunny day, maybe the last one we’ll have for a few months. We walked by a lot of closed trinket shops. Picture Wisconsin Dells in September. Still a few sweets shops open. No go carts or mini-golf. We went to the biggest hill and paid a few bucks to ride the chairlift (a chairlift with no ski hill?) to the top, and then ride the “aerotrain” around the top of the hill. The view from above was impressive. We could see a good piece of the lake and the town and were able to spy a potential place by the river to sit and drink beer in the sun. Which we did.

Food: “Hay Locro” (We gots us some locro in here) read the signs pretty much everywhere we went this weekend. Locro is one of the traditional foods for this holiday weekend. After seeing so many signs, I was positively excited about the prospect of getting my locro on, not even knowing what locro was. In Villa Carlos Paz we stopped at one of the many places that had the locro sign. Locro, at least at this place, turned out to to be a kind of soup, with beans, corn, a very oniony flavor, and the less appealing portions of pork, chicken and beef. The soupy/gravy part was pretty good, as were the scarce bits of what I consider to be meat. The, shall we say, fatty other parts(?), though efficient in their use of animal, were to me a little unappetizing. I’m not loco for locro.