The Plan

Originally we had grand plans for traveling throughout South America. The realities of work schedules and money have made that difficult. We get out of town once a month or so for at least some short excursion, but we have yet to leave Argentina. It turns out that Argentina is pretty damn big. We keep coming up with different plans for when we finish working at the end of November and we’ve changed plans hundreds of times. We’ve never written in the blog about future plans because we’ve never settled on any one. Right now I think we can finally say that we are going with scenario # 532. In this scenario, we take a couple of weeks in November and December to explore Patagonia, specifically the area near Bariloche. We found out that getting up to Bolilvia and Peru would be a little more work than we imagined. So, this is the year we see Argentina. We’ve been all around the northern half of the country. It’s time to see the south. We’re not going to make it to the Tierra del Fuego though. We don’t really have the warm clothing for that anyway. All in all we should count ourselves lucky for having been able to travel as much as we have. We’ve already done more traveling than many Mendocinos ever will in their lives.

The main reason we will only have 2 or 3 weeks after school ends here is that Louann is returning to the U. S. of A in mid-Decemeber. When we came down here we thought that she would wait until next Septemeber to go back to college. But we’ve had a lot of time to think and imagine 500 exit scenarios and realized that she could just start in January. Sure, getting all the paperwork and stuff together would have been easier from home, but where’s the challenge in that? So she’s flying out Dec. 18^th.

So what the heck am I going to do? Not sure. I’m going to have to work on my own solo scenarios now. I don’t know if I know how to travel alone. I’m not even sure I know how to cook any more. I am expected to be back at work in Minnesota at the end of March, but I know the money won’t last that long. So I don’t know where I’ll go or when I’ll return. I’ll know better when the time comes and I can figure out what is still within my means. If you have ganas to come to South America, let me know where you want to meet in December, January or February and we’ll work something out. Seriously.

Gran Hermano

In this country, if a guy is from anywhere in Asia, the people are going to call him Chino (Chinese). And if he looks Arabic, he will be called Turco (Turk), as Fernando, whose grandparents are Lebanese, is called. That’s just the way it is. They aren’t as bad as in other countries I’ve been to about giving a person a name based on their physical appearance, like in Mexico where “gordo, pelon, güero (fatty, baldy, blondy)” I think are pretty well accepted. They do use flaco (slim) pretty regularly, but as a form of address to a stranger, usually young and probably slim. “Hey flaco, do you know where Plaza Peligrini is?” Used similarly is the word maestro, a word that could mean teacher or master or one of those orchestra-conducting fellows. The guy at the copy shop always calls me that, though I’m not sure if he’s calling me that because he is always copying my schoolwork or not.

Last night Lou and I were watching Gran Hermano (Big Brother). We hate this show, and I don’t think we’ve watched it all season. But it was 12:00 and I was flipping channels (we only have two channels, remember) and I saw that something different was happening, something different than young hotties chain-smoking and speaking so fast and slangy that we don’t understand. There was a split screen. On one side, Gran Hermano Argentina. On the other side; Gran Hermano Paraguay. Gran Hermano Paraguay was a lower budget operation. It wasn’t in a house but a studio made to look like a house. Instead of cleverly-placed cameras all over the place, they had cameramen stationed on the side of the room that was missing a wall. Another odd thing was that they had a ‘chino’ exchange participant from Gran Hermano Japan. Koiji didn’t speak a word of Spanish. Anyway, the host of GH Argentina initiated a contest between the two casts. A contest in quickly solving math problems on a white board. He read long multiplication and division questions for a team member to write down. Whichever team solved it first won a point. Koiji didn’t understand what was going on until his teammate finished writing the math problem. He gestured for the long-haried paraguayo to hand over the marker, then proceeded to quickly write the answer, 1293 or something. He did this three times in a row: saw the problem, asked for the pen, quickly wrote the answer. Paraguay 3 – nil. We said goodbye to the dejected Argentines and went on the the playoff with GH Spain. They did manage to get one point because Koiji didn’t understand the question once, but they ended up losing to GH Paraguay. Now we wonder if Koiji was brought in as a ringer, some rain man math whiz to get revenge on Argentina taking Iguazu after the War of the Triple Alliance. No matter what, I think that Koiji’s example should be a lesson to all xenophobes who oppose immigration. Also, can anyone Tivo GH Paraguay for me?

A reason to vote for someone

I was just told that all advertising for the elections has to stop at midnight, two days before voting. Candidates are really ramping up the ads on TV. On my way in to this cyber, I was confronted with what might be the most compelling propaganda yet for a governor candidate; beautiful women in white tank tops handing out leaflets.



Addendum: After I wrote that and put it on the blog, I decided that I should go home, get the camera and take a picture of the babes to put on the blog. But as I was walking down the street, who did I see? None other than the candidate himself, the guy whose mug I’ve seen a thousand times in the past month. This was too good an opportunity. I was walking toward him and asked if I could take a picture. “Of course.” “ Can one of you political staffers take a picture of us together.” (this is one bold gringo) “Of course.” So we posed for the picture, but the camera had turned off, so I went and turned it back on, then I still didn’t work. Oops the memory card door was open, so I went back and fixed that, then finally we got our snap shot. So, on his last night of campaigning, 4 hours before legally he must quit doing stuff, he wasted nearly a minute with a gringo who can’t vote anyway.

Mi Bici

Dan: OK, I know what you’re going to say. The same thing I said when I first saw my new mode of transportation. Girl bike, right? Well, after having rode around this town for the past month or so, I know the value of a bike without a high crossbar. It is easier to jump on and off, to get up stairs or curbs or to stop quickly. I’m sure there are rules for cars and bikes and pedestrians, but you can’t count on them. I have to be a very alert bicyclist. My childhood years of training on north Minneapolis’ wide bike paths has helped me little on the sidewalks and streets of Mendoza. But I take it slowly, and I still get to work a lot earlier than when I had to walk or take the bus. As things warm up, I’m getting out and seeing more neighborhoods, though my friends tell me to be careful about what neighborhood I go through. Supposedly I make an even more prime target for theft, a gringo on a bright bike (btw that color is not pink. It is known as ‘light red’). But I’ve never felt threatened by anything but traffic. Anyway I’m glad I had a few months to learn the streets as a pedestrian.

Maybe my bicycle acquisition will afford me other employment opportunities:



As a postal carrier.





As a vendor of coffee and rolls to daytime workers downtown.


We’ve never had the camera with us when we’ve seen one of the guys who sharpens knives on the street using bicycle power. He lowers a belt and sharpening wheel over his tire, pedals away and sharpens blades for whoever brings him one. He probably doesn’t have to go to the gym after work.

Motorcycles and all kinds of scooters are very common forms of transportation for individuals and groups. I’m sure I’ve seen a family of four of a motorbike before.

We regularly see horses with carts on the streets too, mostly in the evening. People collect recycleable (read: sellable) materials from places where trash collects and throw in the the horse cart.

I usually choose to use the sidewalks, even though I believe it isn’t lawful. I’d rather run into a pedestrian than a car. At first when we got here it seemed that the drivers were nuts; completely unpredictible. But now I know their patterns, at least on my daily routes. As opposed to how in the states people speed up at the yellow light, stop on red, and go only when the light has turned green, the people here have a similar, but potentially dangerous situation if you don’t know the rules. Here, everyone stops when the yellow light comes on. They do this out of self preservation because they know that the cross traffic sees their yellow light and is already inching into the intersection, in anticipation of the green to come. Its pretty much the same thing we do in The States, only cheating at the beginning of the green instead of the end. Even knowing the rules, I’m a little surprised I haven’t gotten clobbered yet. Louann doesn’t want to ride a bike here. She won’t even go for a little spin on my bike. And she doesn’t want to know anything about any near-misses of mine.

Vote for someone

Political season is upon us. The candidates’ ads are all over town, pasted on walls, on billboard trucks, on signs placed on carts trailing behind bicycles. And of course TV ads. The next president is likely to be Cristina Kirchener, the wife of the current President, Nestor Kirchener. What a backward country, right? Who would elect the family member of another president? Oh, right. Really, I can’t say that the democratic process is any better or worse than back home. Here they have 100% turnout for the elections because they take place on a Sunday and participation is obligatory. So everyone HAS TO vote for someone. Most people are so sick of their presidents running away with all their tax money, and the current president doesn’t seem to have screwed things up too badly since taking office soon after the economic crisis of 2001. He can’t run again, but his missus can. People tell me that often when a new government, federal or local, takes over, many projects of the outgoing administration are abandoned in favor of new ones. This has resulted in halfway built highways. Speaking of highways, there seem to be quite a few long-term construction projects being finished just weeks before the election, so parties can point to things they’ve accomplished. Or maybe it’s a coincidence that both the new overpass and the rebricking of Avenida San Martin were finished the same week. I’ve heard that the days of directly buying votes are not over here either. I was told of one brilliant plan from I-don’t-know-when, in which a candidate gave a pair of shoes to each voter in some town. He distributed the right shoe before the election with the promise of the left shoe upon winning. Most of the ads I see on TV don’t say much about any issues other than reducing crime. They mostly just say that, “candidate X supports the president’s plan. Vote for Nestor, Cristina and Candidate X and we all win.” The politics here are as complicated as anywhere, with all the influences an elected leader needs to appease. I’m not a political analyst, just a gringo who watches TV.

Buenos Aires Vid

Here are two videos made from our weekend trip to Buenos Aires. I’m sort of addicted to making videos. I end up filling our 256MB camera card pretty quickly and then end up not getting very many pictures. The microphone is pretty bad, and focusing in video mode is terrible. But it is super easy to use the moviemaker program. As you will soon see, I’m going through a fast-forward phase right now. The first video is a tourist guide to some of the tourist traps in BsAs. The second video is from our visit to the Disneyland of cemeteries in Recoleta. They are both accompanied by songs that have absolutely no reference to the videos. They’re just songs I’m into this week and have the right time lengths for the vids. The second of the two videos may cause headaches and/or seizures

Recoleta Cemetery

Camping in Tupungato

Dan: This weekend we had a little camping trip near Tupungato. Sergio had been talking about going camping for his birthday for the past 3 months. We had most of the basic equipment we needed, three tents, a few sleeping bags and blankets, 100 pesos of food, boxed wine and booze, mp3 player and booster, a guitar, a ball for kicking around. On Lou’s and my part, we never planned on doing any camping down here, so didn’t bring any gear. But as our friends leave the country, they find things they don’t need to bring back with them, or generously decide that we could use them more than they could. So, we now have sleeping bads, fleece blankets and a tent (not to mention dishes, teas, spices, electric shaver, magazines). Hopefully we can find someone else to pass them on to when we leave. So, 6 of us (me, Lou, Mariano, Fabiola, Sergio, Aaron) caught a bus for a 1.5 hour ride to Tupungato, where we then found a man with a pickup truck to bring us the rest of the way to a campground.

The campground was a family-run place. We took quite a long time trying to find the perfect campsite, where no one woud bother us, and we’d bother no one. We saw some really nice ones on the other side of an arroyo. So, one by one we handed our equipment over the stream via a fallen log. It felt like one of those team-building activities. We were feeling the synergy --- a great way to begin the weekend. Upon finishing the transport of all our things, a man told us we were now in another campground. So we handed it all back over the creek. We didn’t so optimistic the 2^nd time, webut we did bring tons of downed branches for firewood from that side, with which we would cook our first couple meals.

Our meals consisted of meat. We had hot dogs, chori-pan (chorizos on bread) and asado(massive quantities of steak). Having not brought any firewood, or even paper for fire-starting, getting and keeping fires going occupied a lot of time, scavenging kindling and firewood, sometimes getting handouts of newspaper from other campers. We also had a couple salads and cooked some potatoes by burying them right in the fire.

The night got cold and wet. Aaron and I were counting the seconds between lightning and thunderclap to determine whether the storm was getting closer or farther away. At 13 seconds we felt safe. At 6 Seconds we started thinking about packing some things up. At 3 seconds I went to brush my teeth. When I finished, it was pouring out. We heard some crazy double-thunderclaps as the sound echoed off the mountains. The night was cold and moist. We put on every stitch of clothing we had brought with us and still shivered through the night. But I don’t think we had it the worst. In the morning Sergio came out if his tent with a completely soaked sleeping bag.

Also that morning the 4-wheelers arrived. There was an off road circuit near the campground, but that didn’t keep the day-user from hauling ass through the campground. Pleasant way to spend a day in the country.

My mother had sent graham crackers, marshmallows and hershey bars, so for brunch we had smores. (thanks Ma) Everyone was pretty nuts about the crazy gringo confection. Of course they’d seen the puffy white things on sticks before from TV and movies, but this was the first chance to try it. Argentines know how to grill paciently, so there were very few too-close-to-the-fire marshmallow casualties.

On Day Two all three gringos packed up and abandoned camp in the late afternoon. The other three opted to tough it out another night. We decided to walk back to town instead of calling the guy with the pickup truck. It took almost an hour and a half, and we ran the last few blocks in the drizzle, so as not to miss the bus. But it was a good chance to walk by chickens, horses, a pig, vineyards, veggies and fruit tree farms.

We did manage to catch the bus. Luckily it was late. It was easy to sleep on the bus and even easier to sleep 10 or 11 hours at home. From spending the whole weekend standing around the grill to make fire, make food or get warmth, our apartment sort of smells like a Hickory Farms gift basket. But today is Dia de la Raza, yet another national holiday, so we have time to rest and clean up.

How are the aires? Buenos.

Dan: Here’s a quick summary of the trip. We spent a long weekend in Buenos Aires, trying to do as many touristy things as we could. The city itself is markedly different from Mendoza in size and appearance. Buenos Aires is gigantic, and is at once older and more modern than Mendoza. Earthquakes got rid of any traces of colonial times in Mendoza; not the case in BsAs. We walked or took the subways around town to look at monuments and old buildings. We went to the exclusive section of the city with the highest real estate value; the famous Recoleta cemetery, where the rich and famous Argentine Christian families pay rent for all eternity. I think the highlight of the trip was El Bar de Roberto, a crowded little place with hundreds of dusty bottles behind the bar. It was full of people on Friday night. There was a tiny stage, big enough for two people to play guitar and sing tango music. Folks took turns singing on stage or just singing along in the crowd. It was a very nice environment to drink a bottle of wine and listen to some amazing voices sing some sad sad songs. We also went to a place called La Catedral afterward that had recorded music and space for dancing. We opted to keep going with the wine and just watch. We met another wacky gringo from New York named Tom who joined us for tourism and gustatory adventures. We made it to 4 or 5 museums. On Saturday night there was an event called “Noche en los Museos”, in which 102 museums were open and free from 7 PM to 2 AM. Shopping could not be avoided. There were tons of streets vendors and traditional shops. On Sunday in San Telmo, the neighborhood our hostel was in, they closed off Defensa street all day for the outdoor antique and craft market. All in all we had a really nice time in BA. Other than a day of rain and the cats in heat on the roof of the hostel, I can't think of many complaints. Definitely a great place to visit. Ok, here’s a boatload of pics. Stay tuned for the Buenos Aires trip video.


The pampas, as seen from a bus window.









Japanese garden in Palermo section.












Old buildings and new buildings.












We also stopped by Washington D.C.












Plaza Dorrego, San Telmo neighborhood Sunday market. Tom and Lou shop until I almost drop.








Casa Rosada - The Pink House. I guess they painted it that way to try to create peace between the party whose color was red and the party whose color was white.








The super touristy area of La Boca.









The Cabildo at Plaza de Mayo on a rainy evening.

another bus ride

Dan: After more than half a year in the country, we've finally made it to Buenos Aires. We took a couple days off of work and made a four-day weekend for ourselves. This may have been one of the worst bus rides yet. Not because it was 14 hours long, or because the only book I brought was of boring Argeintine essays, or because both the man in front of us and the man in back of us snored. The worst of all was that the only movie shown on the entire trip was an Olsen Twins film about a crazy road trip. If one could punch a movie in the face, I would surely do it after the two hours of torture it put me through. I hope we have better luck on the return trip. At least I found copy of El Gran Gatsby to read on the way back. Tht's one wonderful thing about hostels; they usually have a small library in which you can trade books. In some ways its better than going to a book store, because at a book store the choices are too great. When there are only a few dozen books, and many of them are in languages you can't read, you can't be too picky. As a result, we've ended up reading things we wouldn't normally choose. On the other hand, I have a suspicion that a large part of the book exchanges involve people abandoning books they never got into. A couple times I've given up on books in Spanish that are either too hard for me or just too heavy for me the read on a trip. I trade them in for Tom Clancy or sci-fi books. But I'll be working on F. Scott Fitzgerald in Spanish tomorrow. The Argentine essays are staying here.

In a few days we'll write some more about our trip and include some of the 4,000 pictures we've taken.

5 days of 21

Here it is. A blog entry weeks in the making. In August we discovered that the little Café 21 around the corner not only delivered good pizza, but also had a cheap daily lunch special available for take-out. This was my chance to check out and document some typical lunch cuisine for our readership. I’ve been trying to go there once per week, on a different day each time, until I completed the project. The following is the Menu del Dia from Café 21.

Monday – Bife a la criolla. Some thin steaks in a tangy gravy with carrots and onions. This might be my favorite of the five days. Like a pot roast. Heavy, savory and home-style. Simple and elegant. The cashier was really appreciative that I paid in exact change.

Tuesday – Pizza de carne. They should call it carne de pizza. It’s like a slice of pizza, but the dough has been replaced by a spicy hamburger. You still get the sauce and cheese and an olive on top. In Minnesota it might be called a “hot dago.” Mine came with mashed potatoes.

Wednesday – Pollo asado with papas doradas. People like to squeeze lemon on their grilled chicken. Today’s lunch was a little more expensive. The lady told me that chicken prices had gone through the roof. Also, she didn’t have any coins, so I owe her 50 cents next time.

Thursday – Pastel de papas. Similar to shepherd’s pie from your school lunch menu. A layer of thin dough, a layer of seasoned ground beef with onions, hard-boiled egg and green olives (with pits!), covered by a layer of mashed potatoes and baked. I always thought that the special of the day should be fast, but for some reason I had to wait 30 minutes for it to be ready. But it was nice and hot with a slightly crunchy top. It might have been a family-sized portion because I’m really stuffed.

Friday – Actually Fridays they make canneloni, ravioli, noqui, spaghetti or lasagna, according to the menu, but I never get take out on Fridays. So in its place is a picture of a tarta de jamon yqueso they had on a Thursday when they ran out of pastel de papas. The ham and cheese pie tasted a little like my mom’s Sunday brunch egg-bake. Tartas like this seem to be a popular, easy way to make dinner. You can just buy the crusts, fill them with whatever and pop them into the oven.