Full of Thanks! By: Jess

Though you might not believe it, experiencing Thanksgiving in another country drove home the actual spirit behind the holiday. Once the big meal, and the decorations, the football game and the general atmosphere of the holidays was stripped away, I really saw all that I had to be thankful for. To start the story of our Thanksgiving, it is important to note that Laura and I have been flying solo for a few days. Katy and Susie took off for a few days in Patagonia (to confirm the existence of penguins). As I type, Laura and I are waiting for them in a beautiful little bed and breakfast in Mendoza, Agentina. This is important because Laura and I cannot speak Spanish very well. Italian gets you only so far, but having Katy around (who DOES speak Spanish) is always a plus.

So, Laura and I, non-spanish speakers, had planned to spend Thanksgiving in a city called Cordoba. The second largest city in Argentina (after BsAs), and really the Boston of Argentina as it is famous for its universities and student culture. Our Thanksgiving morning actually started off quite pleasantly ... we woke up on the roof of our accomodations. It was HOT in Cordoba ... in the 90s, and there was simply no air flow in our room, so Laura and I decided to drag the mattress to the roof, and slept soundly and comfortably. We woke up very leisurely on Thanksgiving morning. Our plan for the day involved going to a museum, baking a pecan pie, and then sharing the pie (in true Turkey Day spirit) with a fellow traveller who had offered us dinner and conversation about New Zealand. Upon returning to our room however, we were immediately greeted with some unpleasant news. An Argentine (who, thankfully, spoke Italian) told us that a major bus strike was imminent, and unless we wanted to stay the entire weekend in Cordoba, we had better get ourselves to the bus station. Laura and I did not want to miss the weekend in Mendoza with Katy and Susie, so we packed our packs, sweating profusely in the heat, and grabbed a cab to the bus terminal. Thankfully, the strike had not yet started, and we managed to find the perfect bus out of Cordoba to Mendoza leaving at 10pm that night. We were even able to get a good price on a "cama" bus fare, which means that your chair folds almost flat and is ideal for overnight sleeping.

We bought the ticket, thrilled at our luck of having found someone who spoke Italian, who realized that it might be a good idea to tell us of the impending strike, and then happy with having found the perfect ticket. But. Now what? It was just barely noon and we had an entire 10 hours to kill. We ate a "feast" of bread and cheese and apples and orange soda ... purchased from the very shady supermarket in the bus station. It was NOT the thanksgiving meal we were used to, but luckily, the cheap cheese turned out to be surprisingly good, and we were both full after the meal. Sometime soon after eating, we realized that we had probably sweated away the meal and 10 pounds more just sitting in the airless bus station. Luckily enough, there just so happened to be one of the most famous parks in the city only 2 blocks away and we decided to head there for napping and sunbathing.

So you know exactly what our Thanksgiving "feast" looked like:
2 blocks to a park never sounds like a lot ... untill it is 95 degrees, and you are carrying a 20 plus pound backpack. We crashed in the first shady spot we found. Turns out that the spot was "shady" for a number of reasons. We had been lying around for 10 minutes when a police officer came riding up to us on his cute little bike and looked at us like we were crazy ... he quickly figured out that we werent from the area (surprised!?) and began to speak very slowly so we would understand. We had been lying around in a sort of peligroso (danger danger!) area of the park, and he suggested we move. How lucky for us. The last thing we needed was to lose our entire packs, which conventiently contain our entire LIVES.

We walked on, a little depressed at having to go on in the blistering heat, and wishing that we had cold water. The water in Laura´s bottle was actually close to boiling. LUCKILY, we managed to find the most beautiful rose garden, fenced in, abundant with shade. And would you believe that there was a COLD WATER fountain across the street? Just to make sure we were ok, our friendly police officer came back by on his bike and chatted us up for a few, being patient with our Italian/Spanish.

Around 8pm we decided to grab some dinner before getting on the bus. The restaurant we wanted wasnt open yet, so we went to a bar around the corner. When it came time to pay up, I only had a 100$ bill, and instead of telling me to deal with getting change myself ... the sweet Argentinian woman behind the bar told me to sit down while she walked down the street to get me change. The niceties only continue. When we finally made it to the restuarant, we realized that Laura´s phone was close to dead, and though we were a bit nervous about using our shotty Spanish to ask if we could please plug in our huge charger and phone to one of your outlets somewhere, we got nothing but smiles in response. Finally, after a delicious, dirt-cheap meal, we go to the bus station. We were cutting it a little close and the bus station is always confusing. After waiting in the wrong line a few minutes, someone, LUCKILY, just happened to notice our confusion, and pointed us exactly to our bus, which left maybe 45 seconds after we boarded.

The amount of people who have helped us for no reason on this trip has been incredible. The number of times we describe ourselves as "lucky" does not mean that we are not good travelers. Traveling is hard, and we get things right all the time. But everytime we have gotten something wrong, or had a wrinkle in our plans, someone with a smile has been there.

We realize just how much we are thankful for every single person who has helped us on the trip. People who stop us in the street, just because we are wearing backpacks, and ask us if they can be of assistance. We are also very thankful for the support from our friends and family at home ... who we miss and who we think about every single day.

Pictures of the fabulous sunset on the train from Buenos Aires, to Cordoba:



LOVE,
Jca

ps. marcus, I am clearly kicking the world in the booty. xoxo

Cultural Immersion -- birthday edition by Laura

After ten days of toiling with the Krishnas we returned to Buenos Aires filled with youthful exhuberance and a desire to spend our days and nights in a sliiightly different manner from our time on the huerta. It is true that I have high expectations, yet I will freely admit that the three of us have been doing exceptional work keeping in line with the BsAs way of life. There have been, however, some casualities as all of a sudden, we are now really old...I was the last to succumb with today being my 23rd birthday. I am told memory is the first thing to go with old age, so I will begin the weekly recap with today. Dinner is being prepared to the sound of the Rolling Stones and is a symbolic culmination of our last few days spent in Belgrano -- an area of the city that is a bit quieter and residential, but will forever be known to us as CHINATOWN. For real, we found chinatown and it has served us right in every gastronomical aspect possible -- we not only found the first peanut butter that wasn't an 'import' (overpriced skippy) AND every type of spicy deliciousness possible. We have yet to emphasize our various challenges with the Argentine aversion for spice and our adoration of it. My salt addiction aside, we are all unaccustomed to garlic and black pepper being considered 'spicy'. Alas, for my birthday dinner tonight we are joining the forces of peanut butter and salsa picante to make dleicious Thai noodles (I am being told by the sous chef in the kitchen that it must be mentioned how delicious the smell is around us right now because a) they are cooking with ginger, mint, cilantro, and garlic b) they have talent c) it is springtime here and everything smells good).

Jess being especially excited that we found Chinese 'pasta de mani'

Our new Argentine friend, Juampi, examining his first experience with peanut butter and jelly

skeptical, yet satisfied!

Our culinary achievements aside, we have been engaging with the culture of Buenos Aires' past and present. We have been going to museums almost on the daily and have been putting our degrees to work (again) by discussing the artists, movements, and curatorial decisions made. The 'second most highly regarded fine arts museum of Argentina' is in Rosario and we enjoyed discussing the unique decision to add black shoe prints to the walls, the use of tattered and crooked wall labels, and hanging white paintings on white walls.

Rosario´s attempt at curating a museum show...I know I sound pretensious but that is what my education earned me.

Alternately, the 'most highly regarded fine arts museum of Argentina' here in BsAs had a great collection of Argentine and Latin American art spanning the last 500 years -- we especially enjoyed the contemporary art which lent itself to our better understanding of the local culture and how it differs from that which we are used to seeing in contemporary European and States art.

Two more ways in which we have embraced the Argentine culture is through lounging and dancing, and then dancing some more. Last week we went to a drum circle concert called 'la bomba del tiempo' that everyone (including us) from the States must tell their friends to go to, rightfully so, because we haven't heard so music English spoken since we began our travels. The concert was amazing although we were initially turned off by the idea of paying to go to a drum circle and being surrounded by hordes of dreadlocked kids and the wafting scent of patchouli. We danced and danced and then Jess and I joined in the all-male mosh pit finale because 1) we were the only girls big enough not to be mauled 2) girls that aren´t from the States just don't act like that. It was exhilirating and we emerged triumphant with raspy voices and dirty feet as our only casualities. On Jess' birthday we went to an 'after-office' party which are particularly popular on Wednesday nights and are the perfect place to go if you are interested in having middle aged men in suits breathily whispering sweet nothings on your neck and carressing your hair as you walk by. Needless to say, we soldiered on and danced, danced, danced.

For the weekend we headed West a few hours to Rosario -- a city often preferred over Buenos Aires for its slower pace of life and more manageable size; it is also home to the Stalin-esque monument to the national flag, which was undeniably impressive. Rosario is also well-known as it is situated next to the Rio Parana where we did much lounging in parks and on the beach (just for the cultural immersion, of course). The beach was really beautiful as it sits on the periphery of an undeveloped island on the opposite side of the river as the city. While in Rosario we danced (noticing a trend?), continued to observe that youth culture is pretty much the same regardless of country, and empanadas are easy to make and delicious to eat.

I will abruptly end this posting as we have actually already eaten our delicious dinner and must continue on with our exhilirating lifestyles!

A face that only a mother (and her two best friends, and the world) could love


Looking sagacious (because I am now 23) in a tree that is far older and more impressive than I am

Just before the birthday dinner!

for Marcus: jca 30 world 8!

Oh, Sweet Dirt! By: Katy Jane

(Here is a picture of us and Edith in the bus station leaving Florianopolis. We've been unable to upload photos until now.)


First of all, today is Jess's birthday. She is 23, which oficially makes her a nonna like me. Soon, I will become a bisnonna, but that's not for a few months, so we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

Secondly, Obama won!!! We cried and cried and cried and even sobbed a little bit as Fox read us his acceptance speech from her Blackberry as we toiled in the fields under the hot Argentine sun. We're super excited and hope that he makes good on all his promises/ambitions.

Third, we have recently arrived back in Buenos Aires after nearly two weeks of working on an organic farm a few hours northwest of Buenos Aires. With some Hare Krishna's. Ideally, we hope to write a novella chronicling our time at Nueva Vrindana, but we'll give y'all a little taste of what we we've been up to for the last little bit.

We found the farm through a work exchnage program called WWOOF, Willing Workers on Organic Farms. The way the program works is that you buy this cheap booklet over the internet that lists, by country, a bunch of organic farms that want workers. Then you choose which farm you want to go to (some are dairy farms, some are fruit farms, some are vineyards) and then you write to them, tell them when you want to come, and then you get invited and then you go. And then you work. For eight hours a day. Under the sun. In a field. The reason we decided to do this is that in addition a desire to learn about organic farming, WWOOFing is a work exchange program, which means we work in exchange for room and board, i.e. it's free.

So, we decided to farm just outside of Buenos Aires, for proximity reasons, where there were only two farms (both run by radical relicious groups), one by Hare Krishna's and the other by a group called The 12 Tribes. We chose the Krishnas, and made our way our of BA by train, bus, and taxi out to their place. We arrived to find Sol, who ended up being our mama, but didn't speak any English, and she showed us to a little thatched roof casita, which was to be our home for the next few days. Almost immediatly, but only after a delicious vegetarian meal made by Mama Sol, we got to working in the huerta (vegatable garden). And thus began the toiling.

Our duties on the huerta seem pretty standard: desjujando (weeding); ponendo la aqua (watering), cubierto (mulch), y compost (compost); transplantando (transplanting); hacemos heramientos y cartillos (used farms tools and wheel barrows); y apremdemos algo de Castellano (learned some Spanish). Laura, who has never had any Spanish instruction, has put her Italian to use, picked up some key words, and will be soon be able to get by quite nicely in Spanish.

So we worked for four hours in the morning, siesta-ed four hours through the hot part of the day, and then worked for four more hours in the evening. Second to our routine of working and napping was our constant speculation about Krishna life, farm life, and how the two related. We like to think of our near constant specualtion as making good use of our liberal arts degrees, ie, we theorize about a situation, observe said situation, and put together the empirical data to draw some sort of decisive, and credible, conclusion. We win! In such a manner, we were able to answer all our own questions about life at Nuevo Vrindana. For example, why don't the toilets flush/where's the hot water? Is this a monastery, a farm, or a resort? What do the pretty virgins do all day and who are they texting? Is that really Hare Krishna themed rap music we hear? Isn't the food supposed to be delicious? Why are the sunsets so good here? Do they hate us, or just not speak English very well? What is the difference between the biointensive, biodiverse, and permaculture styles of farming? How does one sucessfully herd two large oxen from one space to the next without ruining the nearby playground? Why are puppies SO cute? Why are these Hare Krishnas so different than the ones we've come across in the US?

All of these questions were asked and some answered. Over the two weeks, we were forced to reconsider alot of our judgments, reconfigure our boundries, and reassess many things we thad hitherto taken for granted. One such example is cleanliness. As you might imagine, life on a farm isn't so clean. Life on a farm where you garden in bare feet and there is no soap in the bathrooms is dirty. Life on a farm where the water is sometimes cut off for no reason and you have to flush the toilet with a bucket of water is so far beyond what we generally accept as 'pleasantly rustic' that it actually made me cry one night. Our experience on the farm was not always easy, and we all had low moments where we cursed the farm, cursed the Krishnas, cursed the trip, and cursed our filthy dirty finger nails. Soon after, however, the Krishnas would make us some delicious juice, Sol would take us to her house to play with the 7 darling puppies her dog has just had, and we would sit on the porch of our little casita and watch the fireflies come to life over the garden with such vigor that the sight was like flying into New York City at night - a hundred thousand dancing lights blinking on and off.

Paradox marked our time on the farm, which can be summed up in two words: sweet dirt. When it came time to leave, we were both sad and ready. We learned a ton about biointensive farming, a system where ones puts the most amount of vegatables in the least amount of space to make optimal use of soil and water. We met the neighbors who have a dairy farm and fed us a delicious dinner of pizza with fresh cheese. We learned about Bahkti (devotional) yoga, mud ovens, Krishna-style vegetarian cooking (which, unfortunately, was not exaclty what we ate), some about the philosophical differences between Eastern and Western thought (in the West, we're obsessed with physical matter whereas in the East they are obsessed with consiousness), and of the breadth and variety of Hare Krishna themed music (rap, techno, singer-songwriter, indie, chanting). Also, and often in the forfront of our experience, the ever apparent differences between Northern and Southern American attidtudes on buisness/money management (we don't yet get the system here).

And now, for some pictures!

Here is the thatched roof casita where we lived, napped, and engaged with the local wildlife (ie, flies and mosquitoes, and other unmentionable things that rhyme with smockroaches).


Here we are with our Mama Sol on the last day. Notice our greasy, rugged complexions. We are obviously real farmers now.


Here we are watching the beautiful sunset.

Here we are driving into town ... in the back of a hippie VW van mixed in among the vegetables.
Happy and healthy

More evidence of the beautiful farm ... complete with a shot of the Hare Krsna temple.Jess and Katy toiling in the huerta.
farm life! complete with oxen.



And so goes the trip. More later. We apologize for the delay in posting, but have obviously been away from the internet for a while. We hope everyone at home is well and we love and miss you all. So be in touch! We're in BA for a few more days and then head north to Rosario for the weekend.

Love and hugs and kisses,
j, k, l

ps. for Marcus, us 23, world 7