the end, part I: hills, things, holidays

I went to Valparaiso for a few days. It is an impossible city--a collection of hills dropping dramatically into the ocean below while the urban fabric drapes carelessly, casually over them. It looks easy for them, the houses, they hang on like it is no big deal. But it is a big deal, the city has been rattled by the earths grinding plates time and time again. Porteños are a determined people. Valparaiso`s magic goes hand in hand with its grittiness. The winding streets and hidden vertical staircases speak as much of sea-fresh whimsy as they do of piss-drunk sailors with switchblades. I was on my guard in the city, even while walking around the hip family-artist-tourist district of cerro Alegre. My vigilance was due partially to the improbable nature of the city but moreover because I am at the end of my trip. Yes, I am on my way home. And so, it felt somehow especially important to finish strong, alert. To get hit by a bus or suddenly find my passport missing on the last day would be not only terrible, but humiliating, pathetic.

Valpariaso is home to one of Pablo Neruda`s houses, with another one just down the coast. His homes, his things and his lifestyle were and are beautiful in such a way as to not only inspire me but also make me hideously jealous. I want it all. I visited both his house in Valparaiso, "La Sebastiana" and his other in Isla Negra. The houses and his surreal collections of things--from insects and folk art to ship figureheads and stain-glass doors--continue to live in such harmony with the sea. His houses were, as he said, places for him to play, places of constant flux. I had not intended my visit to his homes to be so poignant, but seeing as it is the end of my trip, his idea of home took on special meaning for me. Being around his things justified my wanting to come home--to be surrounded by my favorite playthings, to receive pleasure and peace in deciding where they live in relation to one another, to feel comfort in my everyday routine interactions with a space which I have created. These are some of the things I miss. More important was his emphasis on company. His homes, though containing private spaces, are designed to receive guests, have parties, and grand feasts. It is for this reason that I am most happy to be coming home--the sharing of meals with the ones I love or at least like. Neruda said that eating alone was like eating in the tomb. I`m not sure it is true. I don't want it to be true, but he has a point. It could always be better with cherished company. And so I was grateful to him and for the perfect timing with which I encountered his homes, it has made my homecoming that much more celebrated.
My hostel experience in Valparaiso also inspired celebration of my rapidly approaching homecoming. It was a classic hostel scene which I have come to dearly hate--australian backpackers (they usually come in ambiguous boy-girl pairs), a few cold and exclusive giggly swiss, danish or dutch girls, a couple of aging american men (always snorers, always relaxing with a beer and bragging about their recent adventures), and a decent-seeming couple from france or someplace who despite their decentness entertain the "where you´ve been, where yoú`re going" discussion. There is always an oddball. Sometimes these are the good ones and other times they are the exceptionally bad ones. This oddball was a seventy-year old world traveling narcissist by the name of Carol. She had just returned from Easter Island, and while she had loved La Serena to the north and Mendoza the the east, nothing was going to be better than the island. SHe wanted to go home, but did little in the way of making it happen. She stayed at the hostel during the day drinking instant coffee and was there at night getting very drunk on box wine. She was more or less the same by day as by night, though the box wine made her markedly more flirtatious. Her tactic was cornering anyone she could to lecture them about her travels--her likes and most of all her deep dislikes. She had many dislikes, and she became very animated in elaborating on them. She must have been a great beauty in her youth. This, I believe must have helped her battle through much of her life. She continues to maintain a good appearance--face made-up, body trim. She is, after all, a swimmer. She dearly misses her pool back at home. When I left the hostel to return to Santiago, Carol was sorting out her receipts and complaining to a newcomer (from Australia) about the filth of Valparaiso.
Valparaiso seemed particularly filthy in that particular morning's light; it was a holiday. The streets were quiet, the doors and windows barred, the still air heavy. It was a sort of Labor Day. Families gathered in the quiet plazas down below and a thinly populated parade passed by at one point. Even with their banners and megaphones, they barely filled the cobbled streets. It was in this holiday silence that I made my way back to Santiago by bus, where I found a similar scene. The streets here, however were filled with the quiet carnage of the mornings more lively parades. Only the occasional minimarket or restaurant were open, leaving the celebrating families to enjoy the peaceful comfort of their own homes. It was eery, bittersweet. A quiet farewell. The next part of the journey is all airports and changing time zones, both of which are neither quiet nor conducive to meditation.

mapuches, markets, megacities

I have been on my own again for almost a week now. I have not been hitchhiking. I have been in gritty markets, on nighttime buses and in a giant city. The gritty markets were in Temuco. Temuco is known for its bus stations, its universities, its markets and its Mapuche. "People of the Land," or the Mapuche, are the native people of southern Chile and Argentina. Historically they have been mistreated and tension is still strong. Their presence is more concentrated in Temuco than perhaps any other place in Chile which gives the town a particularly foreign and also segregated feel. While youth in collared shirts with german blood attend catholic universities on one side of town, ox-carts pull pig carcasses around and drunks sleep in the streets on the other. I saw both sides. I watched the students, nearly my contemporaries, coming and going from sterile academic buildings, taking cigarette breaks outside the library, reading from sturdy textbooks in between classes. On the other side of town, I saw blocks of headcheese piled high behind chickens nervously laying eggs, towers of tightly bound seaweed and rows of bright spices in open burlap sacks. The market is the largest in Chile and is proudly run by the Mapuche people. They should be proud too. It is a glorious and impressive sight. I was told many times by my Argentian coworkers that the Mapuches are mean. I took this as narrowminded racism. However, these market Mapuches lived up to their bad name. I was poorly recieved at the market, especially by the elderly cheese women with faces like old apples wrapped in thick shawls. My questions about the cheese--how long was it aged, sheep or goat or cow, what was on the rind--were less then welcome. Regardless, I was impressed.
So late at night I went to one of the many bus stations in Temuco. I took a bus that drove me through the night north on the Panamerican Highway. The seat, while supposedly semi-cama (reclining) seemed to be trying to spill me out all night. People snored loudly and I suspected that the adolescent sitting next me had a boner beneath his fleece blanket. If I could have tossed and turned, I would have, instead I just shimmied around in my seat all night.
I woke in Santiago. Sunrises in smoggy places are magic. This was no different. Everything has that hazy orange glow that makes you want to go to Hollywood and get famous. I was too cranky to entertain these fantasies, though I did think longingly of California.
I am staying at a very funny hostel here. It was not my first choice. My first choice was destroyed in the earthquake, which I discovered upon arrival in the hazy orange morning light. This place was next door, and still under construction. It is a beautiful old beautiful building with high ceilings and wavy glass windows looking out to a central courtyard. But the paint is still wet on the walls and the workmen come and go tracking plaster powder across the raw wood floors. The woman who works here is a gamer. She lives upstairs with her sixteen year old daughter and when she is not cleaning or microwaving chicken for her daughter, she is playing games on the computer. As we speak, she is behind me, face inches from the screen, clicking away at something that looks like midieval themed tetris. She also told me that she dreamed of going to Finland. She once had a chance to go there but was five months pregnant, so she couldn´t. She also drinks so very much instant coffee, late into the night.
Everyone (guidebooks included) seems to make apologies for the Santiago. They lament the lack of sights to see or nightlife to be had. I disagree. The city, so thick with smog, is delightfully self-satisfied. The buildings (most unattractive or atleast unnoteworthy) have been built sturdy and rooted to withstand impossible earthquakes. A personality seems to have come with this, a confidence that I find quite seductive. THe city knows itself, its limits, its strengths and it goes about its business in a graceful, cool, collected manner. In the last few days I have climbed to high heights to see the city under a blanket of smog, I have consumed fruits never before seen, I have visited lovely art museums and grimy markets both. It doesn´t seem bothered that I, a tourist, am here, nor is it doing anything to welcome let alone acknowledge me. This suits me. It is like the city version of a cat. And its behavior after the earthquake has proved that it can, indeed, land on its feet. That said, my eyes burn red and my skin feels filmy. This, I suppose is the price some pay.

hacer dedo

I have, in the last week, ridden in many trucks, cars, buses and boats. Mostly trucks though. Mariana and I turned out to be very compatible travel partners--both easily satisfied and amused and both possessing similarly balanced amounts of fear and fun. I had a couple of days on the island of Chiloe before she came and met me--That is when the hitchhiking began. Out of necessity really, as not only is the island quite underserved by buses, it is the low season which means most services are closed. When asking around for this or that (bike or boat rentals, mainly) the answer was always,"sorry, ít´s not summer anymore." Furthermore, the island is rural in that quaint, heartwarming way that makes you trust everyone. It is all green pastures and brightly painted fishing boats. There is of course, the sadder, seedier truth of the island which is that traditional methods of living are being challenged by the infiltration of large-scale, hormone-happy fishing farms. In the larger towns of Castro and Ancud, there is certainly evidence of unbalance. Nobody is prosperous, but most get by. Buses run infrequently if ever and thus when you are walking along any of the many country roads, you are almost always offered a ride by passing farmers and families. And so hitchhiking came to me. By the time Mariana arrived in Ancud it became the true theme of the trip, the decided and necessary means of transport. Hitchhiking with Mariana was a delight, she would sit up close to the driver and chitchat rapidly, about the weather, the crops, island life, argentina vs. chile, etc. while I could sit silent for the most part, trying to understand. Once we were dropped further down the road, she could fill me in on the details. The islanders are proud people and most conversations displayed this.
We spent several days on the island, walking and hitching our way down lovely country roads. Though we never realized our goal of going out into the waters with some kind story-telling fishermen, the island was all we wanted it to be. It is a place famous not only for fish but for it´s rare widespread belief in magic and spirits. Though I did not see any of the legendary trolls, witches or mermaids, their presence is somehow always felt throughout the island.

Our next destination was north to the lake and volcano district. We could not, however, hitchhike our way off the island and thus, restrained by bus and boat schedules, we failed to make it all the way to our destination by nightfall. We found ourselves in the lakeside resort town of Frutillar. A fast-talking holiday-maker on our minibus insisted we stay at the lovely hospedaje she frequented. The hospedaje owner was lovely, with a limp and a warm way, but the damp room was freezing. It was, without a doubt, the coldest night of my life. Mariana and I shared a musty bed piled high with filmy faded blankets and still we woke stiff and miserable. The mood was brightened by the generous breakfast of german Kuchen (a sort of dry yet dense fruitcake common in the region) as well as by the magnificent sight of Volcan Osorno across the black sands and clear blue lake. Frutillar, like most of the lake district, is German. It all has a bizarre bavarian touch--the architecture, overusage of the letter "K", and most notably the popularity of strudels, kuchens and afternoon tea. It is quite convincing, what with the rolling green hills, snowcapped peaks, black and white cows. It is, indeed, a perfect picture of alpine paradise.
We finally made it to our desired town of Puerto Octay, where we had such high hopes in a certain hostel on the outskirts of town, "Zapato Amarillo." It was, in fact, quite lovely. Grass-rooves, raw wood, swiss-owned. From there we went on a miriad of adventures, by bike and foot, all of which started with vigor and enthusiasm and ended in exhaustion and laughter while thanking some truck driver as we climbed from his cab. I had never actually ridden in the cab of a real big truck before. I had never known the sensation of ´climbing´up. Or else the feeling of riding so high. I had never even considered hitching a ride from a truck driver. But somehow here, on these quaint country roads--all dairy, wool and toothless farmers--it seemed perfectly appropriate. We pushed our luck however in trying to arrive at the the supposedly lovely town of Ensenada. THe one and only road going to Ensenada was under serious construction and thus work trucks seriously outnumbered passing vehicles. we walked for quite a while, waiting for some nice farmer to pass. He never did and soon we began taking rides from the tractors and bulldozers. Ensenada seemed to never come. We began to get annoyed with one another as we bumped along through the construction zone getting endless hoots and kissing sounds from the working men we passed from on high. Mariana got fed up first and demanded, quite abruptly that we return. We made our way back through the site, bumping along high in some cement truck, waving at the working men. Once we were safely on paved ground, Mariana declared that she didn´t want to see any more "orange people", referring of course to the men´s work uniform. It is refreshing to travel around with someone who has not been raised in post-80´s, PC, private California schools. We avoided rides from the "orange people" for the rest of the trip, which left us to ride in cars and small trucks. This was fine too, though they all seemed to mention how very lovely Ensenada is. We will never know.
Our last destination was EntreLagos, not because it is so beautiful (it is, like it´s name, between lakes), but because it is close to the Puyuhue hotsprings. We rented a lovely little two-person cabana and then made our way on yet another rickity rural bus to the thermal springs. I faired better than Mariana in the hot waters. I, in fact, seemed to fair better than most. I attribute this to the scandinavian ancestry I am told to have. There are indoor pools but we opted for the outdoor pool next to the river. It is a funny family scene, full of peaceful old ladies in frilly-skirted swimsuits and red-faced bleary-eyed children. If you are brave enough, you can venture out into the misty frigid air and take a dip in the ice-cold river. I did this often, each time rubbing my flesh vigorously with the course volcanic black sand of the riverbed. This attracted quite a crowd who all looked more disgusted than impressed by this private, primitive act. I think Mariana was embarrassed of and for me. Rightfully so. But my skin later spoke the truth, so much like a baby´s it was.
We finally parted ways in EntreLagos, promising one another that we would not hitchhike alone, and also that we would meet up to travel again someday soon. I trust both of these things will happen.

sea legs/land legs

Have you ever read the David Foster Wallace essay titled "The supposedly fun thing I´ll never do again"? The boat was something like that. Unlike Wallace´s experience, this was no cruise in a traditional sense. This was a cargo boat simply outfitted with passenger facilities. And we were not sailing on light blue waters. There were no bikinis, poolside drinks, etc. (Though we did play bingo the last night). The level of cruise-ness depended on the attitude of the passengers. If they wanted four nights and three days of party, they could have it, but they would have to be ok with flourescent lights, blinding sterile surfaces, cold metal and rough waters. It is also the off season, which means the fun loving summertime students have gone back to school. The weather is frigid, the seas rough. We, the passengers, were the stragglers. We got our tickets at ridiculously discounted prices and still we failed to fill the dining hall. There were, in fact, more cows on board than people. There were probably twice as many cows. They lived quite unhappily inside trucks at the stern of the boat amongst the other cargo containers. They shuffled around uncomfortably in their cramped quarters as we fought our way north through the windy fjords. They never stopped mooing--moos of fear, discomfort, surely sea sickness. They also never stopped smelling. Even when the winds on deck were strong enough to knock you down, the scent of the cows, and increasingly their feces, wafted (often violently) through the air. With that said, the passengers were ready to party. They were ready with their cases of liquor and junk food. They were ready like freshman are ready for dorm parties. A sort of `What happens on the boat stays on the boat` mentality pervaded. There were of course some calm native Chilenos who kept to themselves or serious science-oriented foreigners, but the rest could be divided into two groups. There were the bleary-eyed working class Chilean men, who were rarely at breakfast but always in the bar, and then there were the backpacking party gringos, always at breakfast but also always in the bar. The latter group were the people that they talk about when they talk about the Gringo Trail. They were from all over the US, Europe and Australia but had all met eachother in all the places you are supposed to go. They were on a sort of circuit. They already had inside jokes. They had bought booze together. They were facebook friends. I recognized many of them from the famous mountains--we had passed eachother on trails beneath glaciers. And here we were, all stuck together for three days. Here is a basic timeline:
Night one: Board the boat. I was in a starboard side bunk with a girl from Oakland and one from Australia. I was quite pleased by the quaint little cabin--complete with roomy lockers and curtains to pull around your personal bunk. I walked around the boat,watched the cows being loaded on board and then went to sleep. Meanwhile, above me, two floors up in the bar, the party had already begun. Booze was being pulled out of backpacks and blurry digital photos being taken. Or so I assume. I slept well that night.

Day One: Breakfast promptly at 8am. A safety briefing and short science lecture given in spanish and english on the glaciers. The lecturer, whom we got to know well, was quirky and incomprehensible. His lectures-there was one each day-were scattered at best yet frought with cringeworthy humor. I played cards for a long time with some of the partiers. I found they were not so bad. Lunch was promptly at 12:30. Salmon, potatoes, cauliflower. I read for a while, played some more cards, went on deck here and there. The partiers had decided it was time to start drinking. Upon joining them, I found that we could, in fact, be friends. Booze did a lot to help this. The night, after a prompt 7:30 dinner of beef tenderloin, was exactly that giddy-freshman-dorm-getting-to-know-you kind of thing. People were very drunk, very friendly. The lights were very bright, the surfaces very shiny, very cold. It all felt nightmarishly familiar. I enjoyed myself nevertheless.

Day Two: Pouring rain and angry wind. Once again 8am breakfast. Science talk on Flora and Fauna. At around lunchtime the rough waters began. The rest of day two was, for me, thus spent either rolling uncomfortably in my bunk wishing for death or vomitting violently on deck also wishing for death. There was more partying that night. Few were as sick as me. Inside, they drank wine with their spaghetti and bolognese sauce while I dry heaved into the wind, so full of the scent and sound of the equally ill cows. I finally slept though I suspect the cows never got proper rest.

Day Three: 8am breakfast. Science-culture talk on the island of Chiloe. Calm waters. I had some very lengthy discussions with some germans about business and emotions. Befriended a hipster from New York. Read some. Went on deck. Watched the cows. Felt so very appreciative of my health and of the relatively placid waters. The waters were so very placid that I not only ate my pork chop dinner, but I also drank wine, and a fair amount of it. This was the last night, the night they want you to remember: bingo night. This took place, of course, in the bar. The prizes were ship paraphanalia, mostly baseball caps and fleece vests. However, If you won any given round, you were awarded, or rather punished, by having to dance in front of the rest of the passengers. They were considerate enough to dim the lights when it was your turn to dance, but still it seemed cruel. I played with no aim to win. Once there were no more vests and caps to win, bingo was over and we were left to our own devices. The party crowd tried with varied success to finish the booze they had brought on board. The giddiness in the room was different than the first night. It was a giddiness to see land, to step off board and leave it behind.

Day four: We disembarked early at Puerto Montt and made a mass exodus to the bus station. I got on a bus going to the island of Chiloe while others went north, east, south. While I have made some very fond contacts, I was happy to say farewell. ONce in the lovely, grimy little port town of Ancud, I went walking around looking for a place to stay. I never felt so happy to be carrying such weight with me as I moved over solid ground.
And Chiloe has already turned out to be everything I wanted. Both sleepy and chaotic, lovely and filthy. I have already eaten steaming fish soups and tasted oysters and smelly soft cheeses from the markets. I have ridden the rickety rural buses around to see the funny little towns with their tin houses on stilts and brightly painted wooden churches. Everyone honks and waves and asks you if you want a ride. The weather changes by the minute and no one seems to mind. I have learned to put plastic bags in my shoes and ignore it as well.
Tomorrow Mariana, my dear sweet friend from the Estancia will meet me here. She is taking her vacation. She will give me all the gossip about the staff back in argentina. We have no plans, just to hike, canoe, eat, look for hot springs.

new country

So I almost did all the things I was supposed to do. I did El Chalten: ice climbing on the Cerro Torre glacier and the Lago de los Tres trek of Fitz Roy. I was thoroughly wowed by both. Wowed by the spectacle of it all as well as the ability of my legs and especially my sad little canvas sneakers to bring me to these points of spectacle. Then I took the bus back to El Calafate and did the Perito Merino glacier. The only way to access the glacier is by doing some sort of bus tour. I chose the "Alternative tour" as it was said to be imformative but to the point, no frills. My fellow tourists were all Australian and easy to hate. The phrase "I´m not here to make friends" kept running through my mind. They seemed to pick up on it and left me to myself. The special little extra surprise of the tour was that we took a rugged dirt road to the glacier where we got to take an early morning stop at a primative estancia for tea. The leathery men of the ranch looked uncomfortable to have us there, like they wouldn´t have invited us if they didn´t have to. They were burning gasoline soaked tree trunks and garbage in large aluminum oil cans. We huddled around them to keep warm. We sipped our tea and watched the resident baby llama play with the baby cat. Then one of the men prepared a baby bottle with some chunky white formula and we took turns feeding the llama. Then we got back in the bus and rumbled away to the glacier. The glacier was massively impressive. Truly beyond anything I had ever seen. I felt too cool for the whole tour experience but definitely not too cool for the glacier. Noone could be unimpressed. And the day was perfect, bringing out the violent blues of the ice. We were lucky to witness giant ruptures as well: the equivalent of an 18 storey building crumbling to the ground. we spent a good four hours wandering up and down the steel balconies that traverse from one side to the other. We took a boat right up close to the glacier. The boat people pulled a chunk of ice out of the water and broke off pieces for us to suck on. We sucked at the ice and looked at the glacier while the boat idled, spewing black smoke into the crystal air. On our return bus ride, the australians showed eachother the photos they had just taken. They had a sort of rating system and got very raudy and competetive.
I spent the afternoon wandering up into the outskirts of town where the dirt roads disappear into the endless Steppe. There are all sorts of concrete structures that are either being built or being taken apart. It is difficult to tell which. I met no one on the roads and could hear nothing but the electricity running obediantly through the power lines above and the distant barking of dissastisfied dogs. It was magic so unlike the glacier.
The next morning I boarded the bus to cross into chile. There was nothing exciting about the border crossing except that we all had to give over any animal and plant products. Puerto Natales, Chile is a port town and also the main town to access the famous Torres del Paine. I am not doing the "circuit" in "del Paine." All the dedicated trekkers and big-talking backpackers are dissapointed in me. "you going to Paine tomorrow then?" they ask. When I say no, they want to argue. "but you are so close" they say. Some have the skills to sense my irritation and leave it at that, while others (and they are usually the Australians) keep pushing the issue. They want to know what treks I have already done, perhaps what climbs, etc. I entertain very little of this discourse. So I will not do Torres del Paine. I have thus not done all I am supposed to do. I feel no regret. It is not that I don´t like the mountains. They are breathtaking. As I have said, I have been humbled and amazed. But I am ready for salty air and rusty metal. Puerto Natales has given me a taste of this, while giant glacial peaks still provide that sense of nervous wonder. Puerto Natales is more tired than sleepy. The kids are not so cagey as they were in El Calafate, where they seemed downright angry. Here the people are just tired. They have all painted their corrugated metal houses bright colors too many times, only to have the unforgiving salty glacial air wear the paint down to the same rusty gray every time. The men here work with both fish and sheep. Some of the men are unloading boats of fish while others are unloading trucks of sheep. I saw both happening yesterday. I also saw a group of young children beat a partially mummified cat carcass with sticks. I wanted to take a photo but as I approached them, the stench of death brought blinding tears to my eyes.But my humble explorations of the town have grounded me. Would it be too much to say that I don´t need Torres del Paine? I don´t think so. I am somehow so satisfied to watch the men pack sheep and fish and the children bat-around dead cats. I need very little.
With that said, I am tonight boarding a giant frieght boat which will take me up through the fjords. I am supposed to be amazed by this too.

national geographic

Now I am in El Chalten. It is the famous climbing outpost town giving access to the legendarily unclimbable Cerro Torre and the iconic Fitz Roy. My state of awe began during the plane ride from Bariloche to El Calafate. Never have I been so humbled by the surface of the earth. Pocked gray moonscapes gave way to blinding turquise lakes. We would disappear for a moment into thick white clouds only to reemerge amongst snowy jagged peaks, winding neon rivers, lush valleys. It was an hour and a half with my face pressed against the already greasy plastic of the window before making a dramatic landing over the piercing blue

I spent only a few hours in the tourist town of el calafate before boarding a bus to el chalten. During the five hour bus ride between the two towns, I came to understand what is commonly understood as Patagonia. An unfathomable expanse of what seems like nothing. It is not nothing. What look like tiny influctions on the horizon, are, in fact giant mesas of rock and sand. Those influctions become, very slowly sun-blocking giants upon approach. There is only one road. We met no more than a few cars, though we almost hit what I assumed were alpacas leaping, so carefree across the desert. I later saw their massive hides hanging to dry from barbed wire fences. But whose fences? Who is to keep out or in here? I had thought that texas was huge, the deserts of New Mexico, arizona, oklahoma. They are, they are all very large. But those states secure its travellers always with a feeling that perhaps, just over the next rise in the road, there could be a walmart. There is not that feeling here. To say that one feels small here, would be a gross understatement.
I arrived in El Chalten after dark. I spent the night in a fairly inoffensive hostel. Inoffensive in that more spanish was spoken than english and people kept their voices at a reasonable volume. I awoke this morning to find what it was that I could not see in last night's pitch--the giant forms of Fitz Roy and Torre looming over the dusty town. The town not only hovers between these two peaks, it also lives perhaps awkwardly between being an rugged outpost town and a tourist comfort station. There are all traces of luxury in the tiny almost trendy cafes and freshly painted hotels with thick-paned glass and central heating. At the same time, the roads are still gravel and the dogs that hang around look bored, hungry, full of fleas.
But topography once again brought me to my knees. It is the kind of place that makes people either really believe in science or really believe in God. Or else, you are a freespirited young soulsearcher: you do not know enough to believe in science and you are still too scared to believe in God. And so instead you take local hallucinogenic drugs, San Pedro or the like. It is a safe alternative; your mind is blown and yet you do not have to thank god or science. I am scared of both science and god. And only hallucinogens frighten me more. I am left, thus, with nothing but disbelief.
Tomorrow I try ice climbing. It is not really my style, what with all the harnesses and wrap around polarized sunglasses. But I have already been humbled.

holy week/farewell

I feel somehow as if I must apologize for such a long absence. The lack of writing was not for lack of activity. On the contrary. There has been simply too much going on. Here are my excuses, my reasons for not writing:

dog sitting: I was given the priviledge if not task of watching the dogs--feeding, medicating and walking them. The dogs belong to the lovely owner of Estancia. She had to go to Buenos Aires to attend to family matters. I was to stay at her house--also very lovely, right on the lake, beneath the mountain, full of raw wood and leather. There are four dogs. Two heaving, heavy golden retriever brothers, their golden retriever mother and then an unrelated crippled black lab. The mom and the lame one are fine, just sad. The other two, the beefy young brothers, are horrors. They eat rocks, live chickens, leftovers from every human meal. They are both fat and orange and thus I can´t tell them apart, though one is supposedly the more dominant one and also supposedly more muscle than fat. regardless, I cannot and could not tell the difference. I am also bad with remembering names. I need to put names to faces in order to remember them. The faces of these dogs mean nothing to me and so I am left with nothing. This became a problem with regards to medication. The pills(and there were many different types for various ailments to be given at various times of the day) were to be hidden inside little balls of some mushy rice-chicken-cheese concoction made specially by Manu. All was well. I hid the pills, gave them to their respective patients and then went about my business. But the right patients did not seem to get the right pills. I woke to vomit on the couch and at breakfast, found golden diarrhea in the kitchen. Both had chunks that resembled the rice-chicken-cheese concoction. I held my breath and waited for the illness to pass. It did. Mariana joined me in the house/dog sitting. Together we lived at the house and she took over the task of medicating the beasts. Under her care, nobody became ill.

Mariana: My friendship with Mariana blossomed out of the shared dog-sitting among other things. She helps run the estancia--and does a very good job. SHe speaks better english than I do spanish and this has also helped us to develop a friendship more sophisticated than with my other coworkers. She has an infectious laugh and a keen sense of the absurd. We share meals, hikes and much discussion about the guests that pass through here. Though it is truly not a complaint, she has taken up much of my time in which I might otherwise be writing.

Holy Week: Holy week is the very last rush before the quiet season. Holy week constitutes some sort of spring break for Argentines and thus a time to come in droves to the mountains. We have had many day-trippers. Families coming for the day to horseback ride, kayak, hike, eat lunch, dinner, take tea with cookies, see the views, etc. They often come with their children. The parents sit at one table and drink wine and stain the table cloth while the children sit at a different table where they throw food and stain the table cloth. In short, they create an awful lot of work. There are americans too, spaniards, south africans, finns, french. Yes several french. They have all brought their own little quirks. Nothing too disrupting except, perhaps, for the three generations of loud women. They just departed this morning, and left behind them a wake of empty sweet-n-low packages and empty bottles of sauvignon blanc. Daughters (two, ages 17 and 21, always tired except when drunk), mother (disatisfied with everything but her crossword puzzles, newly divorced) and grandmother (the loudest and most willing to make an impression). They were from Florida but with the distict accents of Long Islanders. They shared a lot (with one another, but projecting so that I could always hear) about the unfortunate situation with their new stepmom. There is scandal in the family, very juicy, very crass. There was also a huge fuss because the grandmother nearly lost her life on the rafting trip. She was thrown from the raft which left her both petrified and sore. Her life was spared but her nails were not. Her hands were a sight. Knobbled veiny fingers ended in jagged, angry bright pink nails. I helped her to repaint the damaged nails. She was not pleased with the results.

Training: Because I am leaving, somebody needs to take over my position. I have come to work in the service alone most of the time, manning the tables, the drinks, the cocktail, etc. I have it down to a science, or perhaps an art if I dare flatter myself. I have a delightful relationship with Silvina and a very functional one with Manu. Gladis--timid, depressed, slow-moving gladis--was somehow chosen to take over. It is is my job to train her. This has been a challenge to say the least. Though I had previously had very lovely feelings about Gladis, she is beginning to try my patience. My language skills are limited in such a way as I cannot explain to her the need to improvise, to think on ones feet, to multi-task, etc. But I have been kind and patient with her. Manu has not. THere is drama in the kitchen. Manu has made Gladis cry on several occasions. The administration has gotten involved. I am, by default, involved. I try to mediate. I use my body and my face to express what my words cannot and thus I am exhausted by all the encouraging smiles and shrugs-of-understanding. The two will work something out. It is no longer my problem.

Trip planning: My last and final excuse. This one has perhaps been the most occupying. I have been, for some time, deep in the process of preparing for the next part of my trip. I have bitten my nails a lot. I have debated internally and aloud, with myself and with others about where I should go, what I should do when I go there, etc. This all coincided with a steady stream of earthquakes in Chili (my supposed next destination. I could not help but take all the earth-shaking as some message from the gods. But I have decided, more or less.
Tomorrow I go south. South to the giant glaciers. I expect to be wowed. I will write about it, I hope. The glaciers, then up through the fjords by boat, then to the lush island of Chiloe, then north to Santiago, to the valleys of wine grapes and then who knows.
I could stay on here if I wanted. They want me to. I have already stayed longer than I thought. It is because I like it here. A lot. But I am excited now about travelling again. My bags are packed and my feet significantly itchy. They paid me today. More than I had expected. All in cash. I will guard it with my life as I climb up those mountains of ancient ice. I will, though, be taking with me more than money. I have new friends, new characters, a deeper understanding of the tourism industry, a solid vocabulary list of cleaning-associated words, and other less quantifiable gains.

pepsi challenge

Yesterday the daughters of Diego arrived. Ages nine and fourteen, they are bucktoothed and brighteyed. This means that Diego was a mere twenty-two or twenty-three years of age when he became a father. It is difficult to imagine him more boyish than he his. Their presence, however, renders him more youthful and goofy than any conjurable image. He is giddy. Heartbreakingly so. He can´t believe they are here and can´t seem to think of what to say. I had dinner with the usual crowd (eugenio, cris, mariana, diego) and the two quiet daughters. Diego cut their meat into small pieces and then watched them eat. Throughout the meal, he stroked their bushy hair and touched their elastic cheeks. His hands seemed unaccustomed to such delicate subjects. The girls clumsily ate their meat without looking up and then asked for dessert. They might have asked for anything and he would have complied.
Prior to their arrival, Diego was very nervous. He ran around collecting bedding, mattresses, pillows. He washed clothes, sheets, towels. He was out of breath and upset about the musty smell of the old mattresses. The girls will sleep (for the next few weeks) on these mattresses on the floor of Diego´s tiny room inside the tiny house just on the other side of the chicken coop from my little house. It is a two-week long slumber party.
But Diego must have been preoccupied, as he forgot to buy Pepsi-lite on his weekly shopping trip. This would normally not be a problem. We have stacks upon stacks of 24-packs of Coca-Lite in the storeroom. And who really drinks pepsi anyways? But today Pepsi-Lite was in very high demand. We are hosting the Argentine chapter of the PepsiCo Group. They come here once a year to do corporate bonding activities, watch power-point presentations, listen to motivational speakers and consume a lot of Pepsi products.
And so today I spent a good deal of time running around looking for Pepsi-Lite in all of the various refrigerators and storerooms. We had just about everything else made or owned by pepsi--Lays potato chips, Quaker cereal, Gatorade, 7-up, some diet drink called H2-oh-- but no Pepsi-Lite. This greatly upset the brand-loyal and calorie concious group. It was also quite difficult to explain, in my limited Spanish, that there was simply no Pepsi-Lite on the premises. They assumed it was my inability to speak spanish that was the problem, which in fact had nothing to do with the absence of the the zero-calorie soda. The staff and I discussed the possibility of serving Coca-Lite instead, a real Pepsi Challenge. Marcelo (general manager) found the test too risky, our jobs were on the line. He explained to me that they must not know that we serve any products made by Coca-cola. This was why I had spent the afternoon prior to their arrival looking for and then hiding products baring the Coca-cola logo. I discovered that pretty much everything is owned by either Pepsi or Coca-Cola.
And so, the dissapointed Pepsi employees drank the normal 150-calorie-per-can version of the soda. They drank a lot of them too. I wondered if they all liked pepsi before they started working for the company. And do any of them every slip up, drink a coke?

And so tomorrow poor sweet Diego will have to take an emergency run to the store, this time accompanied by his two daughters, in order to purchase Pepsi-lite. They group leaves the following day and so I suspect that most of that pepsi-lite, along with the normal pepsi and the H2-oh will go undrunk. Coke will come back to the front of the shelves and the blue and silver cans will grow warm and collect dust.

in the kitchen

The guests are dull these days. There are lots of them, but they are relatively unremarkable. There was a wedding party a few days back. It was a wedding between an Argentinian woman and a German man. There were onehundred germans and argentines milling around the grounds and eating barbeque under a large white tent. The athletic adults played a spirited soccer match on a field that we had specially set up for them while the children jumped around in an inflatable castle. Then we had a group of Americans here for someones 60th birthday. They unhinged me. It was four couples, in their fifties and sixties from Grenwich, CT. They reaked of investment banking and spoke often of Duke, Yale, Princeton, of team colors and golf scores. They were bores and I hated them. The girls could not understand why these seemingly inoffensive guests aroused such dislike in me. I explained one afternoon to Vani and Xime that these were the odious people that more or less owned America. They listened with owl-wide eyes. They came and went along with some lively british couples (flyfishing enthusiasts), a young attractive Swiss couple (fitness enthusiasts) and some friendly Argentines (leisure enthusiasts).
The season has a feeling of slowing down. Even the weather has become chillier. The nights are crisp and the afternoons less appealing for swimming. With fewer guests, Manu, the chef, works alone. Maria, her unpleasant counterpart, has left along with Gabi and Mica. For this I am glad. I like Manu more and more. She is both harsh and controlling, stormy and unpredictable. Her face reveals, with expressive drama, her everchanging mood. I have learned to read it very well. Her wide dark eyes watch my every move, they check and recheck that I have set the tables correctly, placed the gristini in the bread basket correctly, filled the water glasses the correct amount. But she rarely finds fault. She likes me, which I realize is a rare priveledge. She talks to me about her private life--she lives with her boyfriend, Luis, in town. They live in a big house but will soon move to a smaller apartment. She shows me magazine pictures of the kitchens she would someday like to have-dream kitchens. Unlike her country people, she doesn´t like to share mate and she hates sharing food. She asks me questions about my life and we often have a sort of stilted version of what would otherwise be girl talk. We are both not real sharers and we recognize that in one another and exist in one anothers company quite happily. I somehow know she feels the same. I love to watch her work, the way she plates the food, the way she watches (like a hawk) the guests eat, the way she gets flustered, annoyed, often nearly enraged. I also love to hear her speak in english, timid and sweet. Speaking english makes her blush. Most of all, I love to see her at the end of a shift when she is out of her chef´s shirt, apron and hat. Her hair is wavy and long and she wears tight jeans and worn t-shirts, sometimes puffy jackets and big sunglasses. She drives a little black VW Golf, which she drives very fast on her way out, down the long dirt road and home to Luis.
Manu has an understudy, Silvana, who does prep work and prepares dinner or lunch when there are only a few guests. She has a round, open face and smiles easily. Working with Silvana is always fun. It is just the two of us, two amateurs let loose to take control of the night, the meal, everything. We are like children left home alone to make dinner for ourselves. She is very nervous when she plates the food and when each course is brought to the table, she exhales loudly, releases her tense shoulders and paces back and forth in the dishroom, smiling, giddy. She always makes an extra dessert for us to share and she does not judge me for eating the guests leftovers and drinking wine on the job. She likes this about me, I can tell. We are always teaching eachother words, as she has more patience than the others, always glad to spell out words for me on dirty napkins. When the meal is done, her joy and relief is palpable, the mood is celebratory. I want to break out the champagne and toast to a night well done. But instead, she leaves, breathless and exhausted, usually with some scrap of leftover venison, and I am left with millions of dirty wine glasses to wash, dry and polish.

free days

The Brits with the fast-drying pants did get more interesting. Much more interesting. Turns out, she is a guilty secret smoker and he most likely an alcoholic who never eats sweets. We became fast friends after I startled her while she was sneaking a smoke by the lake. I told her she looked glamorous with a cigarette and not to worry. They invited me to go horseback riding with them and I did. Turns out Tony is a natural on a horse, which pleased Lisa very much. They kept repeating the same joke, which was basically Lisa asking Tony how his ´backside´ was feeling and Tony replying that she shouldn´t ask personal questions while I was around. That night they had braised lamb, which Tony felt was the best he´d ever had. They also drank bottles of wine and once Lisa had returned after a cigarette, they shared quite freely about their personal life. Tony is fifteen years older that Lisa. Tony has three children from a previous marraige with a woman named Lainette. His children are very cross with him on account of the divorce. Lisa assured me that she had no part in the divorce and I assured her that she was worth divorcing for, which they both loved. Lainette is a very difficult ex-wive and a pushy mother. She still makes sandwiches for her children (all in their thirties) and has turned them against poor Tony. Lisa thinks they have a right to be cross with Tony and Tony, with wine-glazed eyes did not object.
The next day was my free day. I had two freedays this week. The first was a bit of a bust. I took the bus to a local town where there are supposed energies oozing from the rocks and has thus brought hippies from all around. I was just curious, which I shouldn´t have been, but everyone said the bus ride itself is worth the trip on account of the scenery. On the hour and a half ride there I saw little of the mountains. The bus, which picked me up on the side of the gravel road, was full and so for the entirety of the curvy ride, I was forced to stand over a woman who was feeding her baby from her enormous breast. The baby, judging by its watery eyes and embryonic features, could not have been more than a few days old. Her nipple, resembling the phalliic end of a steamer clam, continually dripped milk all over the baby´s contorted face and rarely into it´s gaping mouth. On the ride back I got a seat by the window and must admit the scenery was lovely if not breathtaking.
On my second free day, I went on a lengthy and often perilous trek along the top of a giant mountain ridge, resting at a mountain refugio. I went with three men. One an enthusiastic local climbing guide, one a gentle, kind-eyed regional travel agent and the other a silent employee and climber from the rufugio. The guide and the travel agent kept up a steady stream of conversation, which I was rarely able to keep up with. Turns out the refugio employee was in fact a carpenter from Italy who had come here for a change of life. We exhausted conversation options very quickly. The hike was, without a doubt, the most incredible I have ever experienced. The views, at every moment were beyond dramatic--giant spires of granite extending above us while miles below lush green valleys with curving turquoise rivers and neon lagoons. Really something.
At the refugio I experienced the climbing ´scene.´ It is not one I want to be a part of. It consists of climbers, trekkers and hippies fueling-up and discussing their conquests in the mountain or on the rock face. Directly above the refugio there is a giant creviced rock wall providing constant entertainment for the people resting and eating below. The worst were the Australians. They kept up a constant stream of conversation concerning the level of difficulty of various cracks or crevices. They name dropped a lot of mountains and talked a lot about gear, particularly carbon fiber. The hippies who don´t climb sat around too and talked about how hungry they were on various treks; this is a subject everyone has something to add to. Based on their behavior I imagine that the Argentinians were acting just as badly. We spent a good deal of time there, as the enthusiastic mountain guide knew everyone and had a lot to say to them. The silent Italian ex-carpenter went into what was actually a hole in the ground, his sleeping quarters. And the travel agent, Augustine, and I drank mate and spoke about fatherhood. He has two young daughters and is nervous about upcoming adolescents. Augustine is a dear, gentle soul and I imagine a very good father. One of the Australian hippies began juggling sand-filled socks and I was ready to go. We resumed our descent some time later, leaving behind the Italian. We traversed our way through forests filled with wild flowers and little creeks. We arrived at the lake some hours later, where a boat was waiting for us. It took us on a speedy ride across the lake, back to my home just as the sun was disappearing behing the mountain. I kissed the two men goodbye and then picked sweet peas in the garden for a while, had dinner at the boys house, cleaned the girls house, and went to sleep.
The girls house is very empty these days. We are in the slow season. Gabi and Mica left to go back to Buenos Aires and the other girls spend more and more nights in town with their children. I was glad to see Gabi go. As for Mica, I was growing very tired of her constant weeping and giggling over boys. She will, however, always hold a special place in my heart. This has meant that I spend my evenings with the chicos(Diego and Eugenio) and Cris, the woman horse wrangler who lives in the stables with the horses and many cats. I like cris, a lot. She is nearly forty, wiry, and wild-eyed. She has a very large mouth with lips that she often paints red and when the weather is fine, can be seen running around in a red bikini. She has a very special way with the horses and with animals in general. She calls and they come to her. She and the chicos have been more than welcoming of me. I am happy to be in their nighttime scene, which usually consists of watching badly dubbed episodes of Friends and eating dessert.
But today, eight new guests arrive. They are a group of friends celebrating someones birthday. I think she is turning fifty.

holiday

Today is International Women´s day. We did nothing to celebrate it here. Yesterday seemed the real holiday. There was nothing to celebrate but the fact that the two egg eating guests were on a day long trek and thus the grounds were free of outsiders. When I arrived at the Casa Principal to perform my usual morning tasks of sweeping, mopping, fluffing pillows and beating rugs, the girls were already at work. The furniture was all moved to the edges of the living room or turned on it´s side. They were playing, blasting, euro-club hits. Mostly remixes of american or eastern european dance hall classics. Such a festive air, as if we were all finally preparing for an event we had been anticipating for quite some time. It was like spring cleaning or else Thanksgiving preparations. Everyone had their task and seemed genuinely thrilled to be doing it. My task was to wash the outside of the windows. I was indeed happy to be doing it. Eugenio was cutting the grass nearby and the sun was bright and the wind fresh. I could watch the girls inside often dancing or singing along to the club music, only slightly muted by the triple pane glass. When the place was spotless, Vani, Gladis and I ate fruit and fried chicken in the kitchen.
Vani and Gladis are cousins, but this is a secret. For reasons I could not seem to understand, they want no one to know. Vani is bad, like a naughty child bad. She lies a lot and says mean things and makes dirty jokes. She loves to say english words and is obsessed with money. She wants to know the cost of everything, my plane ticket, my shoes, my rent, my salary, my boyfriends salary, my moms salary. She wants me to be rich. She has this very grand vision of the United States--all disneylands and hollywoods-- and my being here mopping floors with them distorts her image. Regardless, she is glad I am here. I can tell. She has cruel little nicknames for me and always brings me special pastries left over from breakfast.
I like Gladis and Vani together. Vani acts bad and Gladis laughs. I like to think of them growing up together. Gladis has two sisters while Vani has five. Now, they both have children. Vani has one boy and Gladis, three. Vani said she killed the father of her child and also her father and gladis giggled a lot. I assumed it was a lie and so laughed too. They told me all this while we sat and ate chicken during our break from holiday cleaning. We then shared with one another all the words in english and spanish for male and female genitalia. Vani was especially intent on learning the words, though Gladis, whose english pronunciation is nearly perfect, repeated the english words with more ease than even I. Gladis is cool. So collected, unfased, observant. We laughed quite a bit and then Diego came in to wash his calloused hands and pick at the chicken. The girls repeated the words for him and then a lot of other spanish words I didn´t know, which made the girls laugh a lot and Diego smile and blush. Jokes concerning human genitalia are a universal crowd pleaser.
After lunch, we polished the silverware at the same low table we had been eating chicken at (also the same low table the guests had eaten ten eggs at the previous afternoon). There is something about polishing silverware that inevitably makes one feel a certain anticipation for something grand. It is a hopeful activity. It speaks of someone coming to dinner.
The fact is, someone is always coming to dinner here. Today, a retired british couple came to dinner in travel sandles and fast-drying pants. They spoke so softly as they ate their venison that I had trouble making out the conversation, which was frustrating. I do know that they are going to go horseback riding tomorrow to see if tony, the man, can keep up with lisa, his wife. She rides and he doesn´t and they want to know if it is a potential activity for them to share in their retirement. I also know that he only brought one pair of pants on this trip, the rest all shorts. He also likes to run, though has only managed two runs in the last three weeks. I hope they get more exciting.

eggs

We are in the midst of a few quiet days here. The couple from the Netherlands left this morning. We had become quite friendly by the end of their stay. I liked them, though they were always a good half-an-hour early for cocktail time. Last night two new guests arrived. She is from Czech republic while he is an American, from Manhattan but has three homes elsewhere and spends most of his time in Connecticut with his family. She continues to reside in her home country. The best I can understand, based on their discussion of their separate lives--families (children included) and jobs in their separate countries--as well as their constant nauseating affection for one another, they are having an affair. They have been "together" for ten years and only meet to travel, which they are very quick to say is difficult on their relationship. She is a spunky blonde with wide set blue eyes. She speaks with a sort an earnesty and volume that is both heartwarming and irritating. Her accent is charming and somehow lends itself very well to the endless flow of words constantly coming from her mouth. He is a body builder though his income is earned through owning golf courses. He is very short with leathery skin and protruding veins. What he lacks in height he makes up for in width and girth. He is a massive little man. Today they went horseback riding and I simply could't imagine what he would look like on horseback. His eyecontact is unnerving, steady and blank. For all of her many words he has very few and they are all delivered in soft, gentle tones that give me the bad kind of chills.
He does not drink wine, but instead drinks bottle after bottle of water. Though the tap water here is the purest on the planet (in fact you can drink straight from the lake), he insists on bottled. This afternoon they approached me in the kitchen and asked for a snack. No mind that dinner was only an hour away, they were hungry: He told me in a serious, quiet almost-whisper that they could eat all day, and she repeated this in a shout that ended with laughter. What they wanted was eggs. She wanted hers soft boiled (6 minutes) while he would have his hard. They made themselves comfortable in the kitchen, which is not really a place for guests, while I boiled them some eggs. He ate six eggs while she could only manage four. They also ate several pieces of toast each and finished off a jar of jam. She drank coffee and wine and he, bottled water. Full of eggs, they then showed me pictures of their trip to some waterfalls in Brazil. There were many photos of them kissing and touching. Afterwards, she insisted on taking a picture of me with him. He told me, huskily, not to be nervous. I was very nervous.
Half an hour later they came down for cocktail and appetizers. They were very hungry and they both repeated, in their respective manners, that they could eat all day. When I served dessert, it was clear that she had been crying and she was holding her neck in a funny way, all stiff with her chin tucked. She told me with tears in her eyes that she hurt her neck and he would't give her pain killers. They went off to bed early. Their last request before retiring was for more boiled eggs in the morning; "we can just peel them as we go," she said, still choked-up, red-faced and stiff-necked. I will see them tomorrow.

barbeque

The day before yesterday I had a day off. I was supposed to go on a trek high into the mountains and spend the night at a refugio. I was going with two guests from the Netherlands; he looks like Steve Jobs and wears a Lehman Brothers hat where as she resembles a more animated Lauren Bacall. Our guide was to pick us up in front of the Casa Principal promplty at 9am. I arrived only to learn that lightning storms were to be arriving in the afternoon and so instead of the hike, Carlos, a knowledgable local taxi driver, would take us on a driving tour. I was rushed into the back of the cab without the time nor the opportunity to say I´d rather not. The couple had been given time to change their clothes, but I was stuck, quite self-conciously in a pair of what are basically hot-pants and a ridiculously large pair of hiking boots (which I borrowed from the generous estancia owner). Carlos, with tight crunchy curls and brawny exposed chest was a good guide. He took us to all the important vista points and tourist attractions, pointing out this lake and that tree as we drove in what seemed like circles. It was impressive on account of the natural beauty, but not what I had bargained for. My legs, as a sat pressed up against my backseat companion with whom I was making continuous small talk about business and government, have never felt more exposed.
And so, my return to work yesterday seemed a let down. I had been cheated, and was sour about it. Then there was the barbeque, the Asado. It was an important event for us as a group of 25 or so Argentians from a special travel agency were coming to experience a traditional day at the ranch--horse rides, massages and a barbeque. The crowd was rowdy and demanding. They drank equal amounts of soda and wine and the girls and I were left running drinks around as meat -chorizo, blood sausage, all parts of beef, lamb, pork- was pulled off the fire and placed before these blood thirstly guests. I was very hungry, all the girls were very hungry, and so we ate the leftover sausages in the dish room, tore at the steaks and sucked at the rib bones. It was disheartening to watch these hungry women gnaw on discarded pork fat and suck at empty sausage casings. But the mood was lively. Xime washed dishes and I fed her pieces of steak. We all laughed about this and we licked our fingers and went back to work.
There was a lot of clean up and then a short break before dinner. The large party had left and it was dinner as usual-salmon, creamed carrot soup, some puffy cold dessert with cassis liquor. I returned to the girl´s house, my house, weary and already nauseated on account of having finished all the guests leftover dessert liquor. The girls were home, sitting in the steamy kitchen watching music videos. They were gathered around a large tray containing the afternoons barbeque remnants. There was more fat to be gnawed at and still more bones to be sucked dry. Sweet Mica, sensing my exhaustion, took it upon herself to make me a blood sausage sandwich. She first microwaved the little black package and then pierced its skin so that the bloody innards poured out, releasing both steam and odor. She offered it to me between two crusts of white bread and I felt I would vomit. I had liked blood sausage, quite a lot. I had liked the different cuts of meat, the whole thing. But standing over that trough of gray and pink torn flesh, the wafts of animals, the sound of fat between teeth, I felt very much akin to all those queasy vegetarians. I begged out of the morcilla sandwich and Mica, so sweetly said she would put it in the fridge for me. It is waiting there for me still, 24 hours later. I imagine it has developed a solid consistancy and has little immediate odor.

the servants and their quarters

As I mentioned, I live with the girls. We live in a one-story characterless house on the outskirts of the resort. There are four bedrooms each containing one or two beds and one or two girls. The number of girls depends on the day. Some have husbands or boyfriends or children in nearby towns, and leave us on the days off. I have my own room, a luxury. There is a small and quite stuffy kitchen which doubles as a laundry room and telenovela viewing area. I choose to spend little time in that space as it is either hot with laundry steam or stale with the previous nights chicken bones filling up the sink. The girls, despite their fanatacism in the guest´s rooms, do not keep their quarters so spic and span. The girls are as follows:
Gabi: generally unpleasant, unsmiling, bossy, complaining and condescending. She is from Buenos Aires and her work period terminates in just a few weeks. She will be glad to go. I will also be glad. I have fought with her several times already, in spanish. Her eyes have a way of searching for fault in each of my actions. When she finds it, she likes to speak to me as if I were a young retarded child with whom she has had enough. When she does not find fault, her eyes flash with something like hatred and she storms off. When we are not working, we feign cheerfulness with one another.
Maria: One of the cooks. She has a boyfriend in Bariloche with whom she spends half the week. Generally bored by her work. She does not like the things she cooks and would prefer McDonalds (or so she says). Instead she is stuck whipping up raspberry wine reductions and wild boar wrapped watercress. She is generally unpleasant but I make her smile when I drink the last drops of wine from the bottles and pick at the unfinished food of our picky guests in the dishroom.
Mica: Sweet Mica. She is the only one who speaks english, though it is worse than my spanish. She wants to practice her english, and I my spanish and so we have an arangement where she speaks in english, I in spanish and we correct eachother. There is much laughing and saying "I no know" or "no se". She is bright, fresh and optomistic to a fault. Though she has been experiencing boy trouble and she comes into my room at night, in her tiny girlish nightgown, to talk about love related woes. She is a little gem.
Gladis: Gladis looks wounded. She is small, quiet, dark. Thick bangs and a long thick ponytail. She does things very slowly as if exhausted by the weight of the day. One night, a few nights back, we all went dancing at a hippie rave full moon festival at a campground nearby. She danced with more spirit than expected and together we laughed at the speed freaks and dirtbags. We left the party before the others and on the way back she told me that she just divorced her husband and has three children in town. She speaks very quietly.
Xime: Very short, older than the rest. Laughing eyes and a very fierce manner. She is not afraid to make demands but I am glad to take them from her, as she is organized, efficient and no-nonsense. She also thinks it is very funny when I speak english very fast. They all seem to love that game.
Vani: Pretty and doe-eyed. She is most curious about me, and especially fixated on the fact that for me, coming from the US, the salary is not very much. She cannot seem to understand what it is that I am doing here, but she is also very kind to me. She and I like to steal chocolate and mini cremetarts from the special store room. In the mornings she practices her english, saying: "hello, good day." It pleases her to say this.
Mani: The other cook. I don´t know what it is in her freckled face, her sturdy build, her frantic mannerisms, but she seems to me the perfect stereotype of a chef in training. Perhaps it is that I have seen too much top chef. She is fierce and unfriendly with the other girls but somehow is a bit kinder to me. I translate for her as best I can the conversations of the english speaking guests. She thinks this is funny, especially when I call them estupido. I want her to like me, I try very hard with her.

Those are the girls. There are others. YOu will hear about them later. But those are the ones I am most in contact with, either in our steamy little house or in the casa principal, in which the meals are served.

Next to our house is a chicken coop and then on the other side of the chicken coop are the male servants quarters. There are only three residents there:

Eugenio: Young, sunburnt, loud. He is often seen dressed as a gaucho (shawl, funny hat, braided belt) on horseback leading guests through the woods. He is also seen mowing the lawn. Mica had a short-lived fling with him and he left her heartbroken. I tell her that he is not worth it. no vale la pena.
Samuel: Very quiet, dark, shy. He once saw me picking beets from the green house. I looked very guilty and asked him if it was ok. He said yes and quickly scampered off. He seems to work with much diligence.
Diego: the pride of the ranch. Strapping, brawny and bright, Diego is a man of all tasks. Fishing, boating, building, digging, guiding, etc. Diego does it all. He has longish dark hair and chiseled features. He takes brisk nightly swims in the lake and speaks in a soft brusk voice. I think the female guests are happy to have him on the premises.

a week gone by

A week ago on this night I was drinking wine on the second story of a double decker bus from Buenos Aires to Bariloche. At this time exactly (it is around midnight) they attentive bus attendant was coming around with whiskey and champagne so as to put us to sleep. We were also all watching a very terrible movie starring Will Smith as a heroic single father who, against all odds, became an investment banker. The bus took twenty hours, and we stopped once. It is not like the buses we know. The seats turn into beds and they play American music videos from the 80´s and other films dubbed in spanish. I woke up after a good night of sleep and got to watch the sun rise over the Pampas rushing by.
I arrived in San Carlos de Bariloche the following day (last monday afternoon). it is an alpine town. A man was there with a sign, it had my name on it. I went with him in a little car with the windows shut up tight on account of the wind. I was hot and also very nervous. He took me to my new home. So let me tell you a bit about this new home, where I have spent the last week and will spend the next month:

This place (and I will not name it on account of privacy, internet search stuff) is a sort alpine, Gaucho-themed estancia resort. It is remarkably, breathtakingly beautiful; at the foot of a giant snowcapped peak and rolling verdant mountains intermixed with smaller craggy peaks. We are on the shore of a crystal clear blue lake. There is a a lovely giant garden with lavender and berries (it is rasberry season here). There are horses all around and wild ducks, pheasants and of course many chickens and some stupid dogs and wonderful mouse-catching barn cats. I live in the servants quarters with the girls. The girls are the other workers. If you have ever been to a very nice hotel and wondered who ironed your pillowcase, who turned down the comforter, who vacumed and swept and dusted all the things, that is me and the girls. I am one of the girls.
The guests are very demanding here. They come from all over to have a very contrived experience--horseback rides, boating trips, fishing trips, massages, guided treks, three meals a day, cocktail hour, afternoon tea, todo. The girls, my girls, don´t speak a word of spanish or if they do, it is usually less comprehensible than my spanish, which is saying a lot. The first few days were emotionally and physically draining beyond my greatest fears. So many new words, new names, new rules, new skills. I learned, in spanish, how to set a table with a million forks and knives and glasses. I learned all the words associated with cleaning. I learned that I understand less than I thought I did. More so, I learned so much about the English speaking guests. This is the interesting part of my job: while I am trying to understand what it is that gabi, xime, maria or mani want me to do in the kitchen, I am also fully understanding and thoroughly distracted by the forced conversations of our english speaking dining guests. They come here, pay a lot of money and then sit together at a large table to be served three meals a day, two of which (lunch and dinner) are three courses. Lots of gamey meats and sweet sauces and lots and lots of wine. THey are disgusting a lot of them while others seem deserving of a second look. From now on, you will hear about them if I deem them worthy of your time.
But besides the guests, the girls (some of whom I am befriending in sweet ways), the cleaning, serving, shining of wine glasses and china, the fancy folding of napkins, etc. Besides all of that, I am hiking up in the mountain, swimming in the clear lake, boating, and picking fruits and vegetables from the garden. Today, for example, I hiked high up into the mountain, under a waterfall and then sweaty and tired, dove into the lake for a swim--all this between three course lunch and cocktail hour. I sleep like a rock and the roosters wake me when It is time to wake up.

clubbing

I decided to come back to Buenos Aires for a night before getting on a bus to drive twenty hours down into the mountains. I took the faster ferry back from Uruguay, which though smaller and without entertainment, managed to have a bar and a Duty Free shop. I spent most of the hour ride in the Duty Free shop both because I like Duty Free shops and because this was a particularly exciting one. The boat was moving fast, bumping over waves in its hurry back to Argentina, causing the Toblerone chocolate bars to fall off the shelves and the bottles of Jameson and Kahlua to rattle against one another threating disaster. People had to continually steady themselves against the perfume shelves. No one found it odd. They just went on shopping, tax free.
Though I had been relieved to leave Buenos Aires behind less than a week ago, I could not have been happier to be back, so much like greeting an old friend. It was raining, hot rain, and yet I still felt glad to be sweating amongst all the Porteños on the subway. The city has an energy that is both exhausting and utterly invigorating. I can now understand why the ones with money like to take the weekend away, it is so lovely to come back.
I walked and walked as I am wont to do in the city. I revisted some places I knew and walked on streets I had not previously ventured down. I spent the evening with my friend Leah, (from Denmark) who is still here in the city studying spanish, and Justus, (from Holland) also studying spanish. I got my last traditional meal here of meat and wine, both of which were not disappointing. The consensus was then to go to a ¨club¨that sweet young Justus had heard about from all the Brazilian girls at his school. The club was by the airport. I do not go to clubs and I have certainly never been to one surrounded by landing strips. Upon arrival, it was clear that Pascha (the name of the club) was something special--a giant two story stucco house surrounded by parking lots full of cars, taxis, police, security and then hundreds of young people, waxed, greased, chests pouring out of shirts greeting one another, smoking, exchanging tickets, money, joining lines and making new ones. Everyone knew where to go. There was a sort of beaurocratic order that we failed to work our way through. It involved going through a series of lines, showing the correct identification and then knowing which line to join in order to get in(segregated, as best as I could figure into men, hot single men, women and hot single women.) Security, also with waxed chests greased and exposed, were fierce and unforgiving though friendly with the young women (also with chests exposed)who came to give them cheek kisses over the movable steel security gates. Sweet cherub faced Justus did not have the proper identification and none of us had the proper attire and so we left so much like all the roaring planes overhead, defeated if not better-educated.It was nice to get a brief if distant taste of the Buenos Aires that I had missed out on.

horse girl

I am in Punta del Diablo, Uruguay. It is a small fishing town that once I assume had just white washed thatch rooved houses and a lot of silence. Now the thatched rooved houses are very close together and spreading further than they should. It is not so quiet either, what with big buses always driving down the rutty dirt roads to drop off tourists and backpackers. There is still a certain magic to it, though it was hard for me to adapt to the whole ¨chilled-out¨ vibe that this town both sells and enacts. I am not chilled-out, not in the way that the people here would like me to be. When arriving at a beach, it has always been my practice to venture far from the crowds. This is something that I have been taught and it is something I continue to live by. In this case, it meant walking a very long ways over grassy dunes and shiny with mica volcanic boulders. I was rewarded. The water, the Atlantic, feels so lovely and warm and the air cool with wind. Though pleasant, surely, it is also a very dangerous combination. I awoke this morning with the worst sunburn of my life on the backs of my legs. I had generously applied sunscreen but as the hostel worker informed me, all the gas from the thousands of cows in Uruguay have depleted the ozone and so the sun is stronger here. Who knows if that is true, but today I was quite pink.
I had wanted to ride a horse. I rented one. A bit of a touristy gimmick, surely, but it was what I wanted. The two horse guides (one man, one woman) were lovely, fresh, unkempt and very relieved that I spoke spanish (or some). For the first time, I understood what it is that those horse girls, whom I had hated in my youth, were after. Riding a horse is so much more athletic and engaged than I had imagined. There is this sense of connecting with the animal in a very real way. I loved it.
My horse was pregnant. Her name was Baracha and I think that sometimes she looked sad, like she were preoccupied. We rode down the beach a far ways and then turned into some swampy forests where we let the horses wander around to gnaw at the branches while we drank wine. The mosquitoes were terrible and couldn´t help but think of all those vaccinations I did not get. Full of wine, we called the horses back through the dark and rode them down the shadowy beach. It was easier to gallop after the wine and I felt so happy just like those horse girls with the LisaFrank TrapperKeepers dreamed of feeling. I hope it will not be my last ride.

uruguay

I left Bueno Aires this morning. Took a humbling bus ride to the port. Humbling in that I rode half way around the city it seemed before realizing I had passed the port miles ago. I got to see new neighborhoods, see all the people getting on and off. Lucky I had left two hours, I got on just as the boat was about to depart. Stepping onto the ferry, I thought I had stepped into the lobby of the Marriot or some equivalent, mirrored surfaces, fake trees all around, little bars and concessions counters here and there, a waxed floor. I spent most of the trip on deck, watching Buenos Aires disappear on the horizon. And strangely, for all the endless wonderful things I can say about the city and all my awe and admiration, I felt somehow glad to see it go. The wind whipping around felt deserved.
Then there was the enternainer on board. Hair sleak with grease, he sang some tango-opera type show tunes on the shiny waxed dance floor below a large pyramid skylight. The speakers were turned up way high causing the whole boat to shake with his baratone. The passengers, veiwing from the balcony above and the ground floor below all seemed to enjoy the show. It was a very full transportation experience.
I met Belen on the boat as well. She is from Paraguay, on vacation. She is a doctor in training and has a love of life that is both admirable and exhausting. She and I joined together to explore the historic town of Colonia for the day. The "old town", though lovely, is like all others in the sense that it is filled with tourists taking pictures, taking pictures of one another, and taking pictures of themselves. Belen seemed to take endless pleasure in offering to take pictures of tourist families. She loved it, every picture as much as the next. And it was my job, in turn, to take her picture on every street corner, vista or the like. She was really something special. She spoke english but we spoke in spanish, so that I might learn. It was more than kind of her to humor me. I know that she will make a very wonderful doctor.

last day

Today was my last day of class. I am glad of it. German Peter is making me crazy. He is having an extremely difficult time with the imperfect vs. indefinite. Today he scolded dear Marta, with her free-spirited teaching style, and told her that she ought to give us a list of clear rules for the past tense. He is taking tango lessons and comes to class each day to proudly report that he is improving.
Instead of more school I am going to Uruguay starting monday. Being my first real travel plans, I am nervous. My doubts come to life most concerning hostel accomodations. The hostels that get good reviews are the ones that supply some version of a 24hr party. I am not very much fun, I don´t think. I don´t want the party. I suppose I am still figuring out what it is that I do want in an accomodation, but I don´t think it is the party. The photos are most detering for me: subjects always sunburnt, always gathered around plastic patio furniture, always with plastic cups. I am excited nevertheless, as this is the beach part of my trip. I am going to ride a horse on the beach I think, I don´t care how much it costs.

When I arrived home from school today, Elsa was there with her nephew. He has down syndrome, and Elsa cares for him sometimes. I sat with them in Elsa´s cool dark living room listening to Michael Jackson. Her Nephew was shirtless, and wearing several rosary bead strands around his neck and tremendously thick glasses. He asked me many questions which I did not understand and Elsa would repeat them for me slowly and clearly. I in turn would answer back to her nephew-a sort of three way conversation. It was surreal. Perhaps the most striking thing was how normal it was for me to be unable to understand a word of what he was saying. He was just like the rest of them, incomprehensible. I suppose it is all relative.
I really like Elsa. I like how she goes around with her blouse unbuttoned and her lacy bra and wrinkly stomach exposed. I also like the way she carries her little radio around with her all about the apartment. I am going to miss her and I flatter myself that she will miss me.

american pride

Very quickly. Yesterday I went to see the Andy Warhol exhibit the Americans at the modern art museum (MALBA), located in the ritzy Palermo Botanico neighborhood.
The show was what it is--I think this was my third time seeing it. However, my heart swelled with a powerful mixture of acute homesickness and raw pride. I felt this funny sense of ownership, not so much over the soup cans as I did over the images of Nancy Reagan. These are my people, I thought. It is really something to experience images of your own country from abroad.
Afterwards I went to a traditional Parilla with Lea (my friend from Denmark) and several other new friends from Holland. Parillas are an Argentinian staple-restaurants serving mainly meat and pasta. The main part though is the barbequed meat, so much meat. We ordered a Parillada completa which was recommended for 3. Served on small charcoaly grills on a wooden block, the parillada contains every cut of beef along with blood sausage and chicken and I think pork sausage. It was my first time with blood sausage. The taste, unlike the texture was quite lovely.I don´t know what is not to like about the taste of blood. There were four of us, and we could not finish. The couple to our left had no problem devouring the same portion.This was at around midnight, the time when most people eat or start to eat. I suppose it is how they can eat nothing but sugary bread in the morning.

school

I am taking classes in the center of the city, at one of the millions of language schools all around. The teachers are all enthusiastic, waving their arms all around and opening their mouths so wide even to say the simplest of words. I have three teachers.
Marta is the morning teacher. Thin, pale, with dark flying-around hair an expressive sharp-featured face and an explosive personality. She always wears these flowy dresses and sometimes looks very sad. I very much like her and I fancy that she likes me the best of all the students. She once said that her father is passionate about indigenous cultures and it really endeared me to her. I like to think of her having dinner at her father´s apartment surrounded by artifacts and heavy books about the Mayans.
Marciel is the afternoon teacher. Probably in his fifties, Marciel is not bad looking. He needs reading glasses only sometimes and has kind eyes that seem to deeply consider the questions of his students. His only real remarkable trait is that when he gets talking fast, a single line of white froth spittle appears in the perfect center of his lower lip. For this, I like him. They are both good teachers, refuse to speak any English and rattle on as if we understand them always. They especially like to talk about politics or media. Class is usually started by reading newspaper headlines.
Claudia is my private teacher. Small, boyish and very dark, almost black kind eyes. She has a tiny, somewhat strained voice, as if her throat is constricted. She is nothing like the other two teachers. She is quiet and private and shares little about herself, accept that she lives with her boyfriend who does not cook at all and thus she must cook everyday, though she hates it. She chooses funny times to break into English, as if she wants me to really understand a particular point. This was one of those times, and breaking out of her rapid Spanish she said carefully, "we no eat delicious food at our house." It made her laugh and so I laughed too. She has a strange ability to make me very nervous--I never know where to put my hands, my eyes, my feet. This is good, I think; if I can learn under these nervous conditions, then I am prepared for anything.


Then there are the students. There are many of them, always milling about the water dispenser in various combinations. I have three others in my class. First there is Peter: sixty years of age, Swiss German, obsessive in all he does-notes, punctuality, pronunciation, etc. He fits all of the stereotypes of his nation´s people. He has a little sack of neatly sharpened colored pencils, so as to color-code his notes and highlight roots and endings of verbs. He also has a neatly trimmed moustache (which I noticed he has trimmed more than once in the last couple of weeks), a balding head and ruddy complexion. His pronunciation is mechanical and utterly infuriating.
Andy: 20 years old, German and very proud to be so (a fact which he as declared to our class, which made everyone look at the ground). He is thick, pasty, doughy. Dresses like frat boy and brags about his capacity for beer. He is smug, full of rolling eyes and heavy sighs. He fiddles quite a lot with his MP3 player and likes to make superlative statements such as, ¨"Oktoberfest es el mas grande fiesta el todo mundo." The teacher had to argue that Carnivale was, but Andy sat proud, eyes unblinking beneath the brim of his trucker cap.
Laia: Norwegian, blonde, fair, and avoids eyecontact (except with andy). Her age is unknown, though I guess 35 or so. It is difficult to tell especially since she and Andy are very buddy buddy--always taking their breaks together and looking at eachother across the table. She is sweet, timid, but seems utterly interested in my eagerness to speak of our common ancestors. She speaks Spanish with a lovely accent--rapidly and with funny lilts and trills. It makes me wish I were Norwegian learning Spanish. Nevertheless, she is really struggling with direct and indirect object pronouns. I quite like her.

I understand that my descriptions seem cruel and joyless. I assure you they are not. I spend many hours with them each day. The six hours of class makes my head spin, and it doesn´t stop spinning as I try to sleep. My dreams these nights are full of people from home and my classmates along with this ever present stressful feeling of searching for a word.
But despite what it seems, with all my criticism and nervous sleep, I am indeed having a `good´time. `good´in the sense that it is what I wanted- the learning, the exploring, the meeting of new things, words, food and people every moment. I will later write about some of the fun times, but for now certain characters need to be developed as they will not be part of my life for much longer. I will say though that Elsa and I are becoming closer all the time. She irons while I eat my breakfast in the morning and some nights she drinks Fernet Branca with me before bedtime. She takes it the same as I do, just with soda water, not with coca-cola as is the custom of her country people. Her daughter is having trouble with her pregnancy and so Elsa is very worried. When I returned home this evening she was researching diseases on Wikipedia. Motherhood, it seems, and its relationship with the internet is a cross cultural phenomenon.

a late start

My original plan was to start a blog so as to reflect on my experiences and inform those who might be so interested to know of my whereabouts. I had a lot of original plans--all these sweet ideas about how things would be. I had something very ambitious in mind. In the last week and a half, the ambitious ideas I had for some very comprehensive blog got swept away, and I had agreed to abandon the idea entirely. Now it is back, in a humbler form. I will do what I can to relay my experiences in a way that is hopefully helpful for me and perhaps interesting or informative. That said, I need to get up to date on where I am, what I am doing, etc. I will try to make this brief.

I arrived in Buenos Aires in the afternoon of the 27th of January--so swelteringly hot and the light so bright. The homestay that I had previously arranged dissapointed. I arrived at the apartment building and spent a good twenty minutes walking up and down these rickety stairs, finding that none of the doors had numbers. I could hear the activity of the families within, clinking their plates and changing the channels. This made me feel very alone. Turns out I was in the servants stairwell and the sweating doorman finally led me to the right place. Silvana was the mother of the house, Natasha the daughter (age 21). Silvana was warm, with big leathery arms and a strong bitter scent. Natasha was kind to me, though I think she was dissappointed by my humble atire. The room which I was going to pay good money for was already occupied, by one, maybe two Brazilians who had their clubbing clothes strewn about in such a way as to say, there is no more room here for you. I was to sleep on one of the beds, though not sure which. The one Brazilian sat around the steaming room watching a game show on her computer and Natasha and her friend Frederico chainsmoked in the kitchen. It was not so bad, I could have kept it, made friends with the Brazilians and Natasha and surely Silvana. Instead I made up some very broken excuse about how I actually had a friend who lived here that I didn´t know about before and I was going with her. I left and used the one connection I had in the city--girlfriend of a friend´s brother, Mary. She so kindly let me stay at her apartment for two nights while I went searching for a place to stay. I found a decent hostel, and there I met Leah, a lovely Danish girl who, like me, is here on her own to learn spanish. She and I have become fast friends--actually my only friend. It is nice to have one at least. After a few days Leah moved into a dormitory, and I into the apartment of a little old woman by the name of Elsa. Elsa is a dear woman with a tiny high voice and funny things all around her shady, cool apartment. She sometimes has friends over and they drink beer and smoke cigarettes on the balcony. I think that Elsa thinks I am quite lonely and sad because when I told her that I was going out with a ´friend´she acted much too happy and told me that it was not good for me to be so alone all the time. She has a point, but I have in fact been enjoying much of the time alone, especially in exploring the city, which is an inexhaustive task. Elsa speaks to me in rapid spanish and then will occasionally throw in a few words of english. Although I prefer her to speak Spanish so that I might learn, the way she pronounces english words makes me feel sort of warm and silly. I only hope I sound half as charming as I am struggling with her language, though I doubt it.
In the days I go to school and explore the city. I will talk about school later, as there are some characters there that deserve a bit of development. As for exploring the city, that is not something I can accurately relay. The city lends itself very much to just walking endlessly and aimlessly. Elsa´s apartment is in the shady and family oriented neighborhood of Palermo botanico. Nearby is Palermo viejo, split into Palermo SoHo and Palermo Hollywood. These places are very hip and desirable for a young, often elite crowd. My school is in the microcentre--a nasty twenty minute subway ride away. Nasty because we are like sardines in the subway cars, hot air blowing our hair into one anothers gasping mouths. It is the most unpleasant part of my day. That, and then walking through the swarming streets at lunchtime. It is incredible to always be around so many bodies and though I am fascinated by it, often thrilled, it is in the end just very exhausting. I have now walked through at least part of most of the neighborhoods in inner Buenos Aires, though rarely walking the same streets twice. The city is an incredible mix of first and third world urbanism--most all of it old. I could go on. But in brief, the city has certainly captured and maintained my attention, despite the fact that it renders me feeble.