Day 20

Yes, you mathematician counting my addition, I know that it is no longer Day 20. But. I was going to publish this yesterday, but didn't quite finish it (I was too busy doing nothing). So, I will just publish this today and pretend that I finished it all yesterday. So, shh. Don't tell anybody. Here's what I wrote between yesterday and today:

I have some big news to share: I was in an earthquake. Everyone here is fine, though, don't worry. We only felt a tremor of the earthquake in Chile. But besides that (I'll apologize in advance for this) earth-shattering news, this week was a little (not much, but a little) slower than last week. We're settling in, I guess. But don't worry. I promise this post will be just as long and dry as the last four.

Alright. Wednesday. Wednesday we did nothing but go to a movie in the afternoon. We saw "Día de los Enamorados" (Valentine's Day). Thankfully, it was subtitled, not dubbed. Unthankfully (is that a word?), it was a chick-flic. Oh well.

Thursday was Adriano's birthday. We didn't do anything all afternoon (except update our lists of books we've read and compare--and guess who's read 27,208 more pages than his sister in their lifetimes!). We arrived at 9:30 (to a four-year-old's birthday party!). We were the first ones there. At the party was Mercedes parents, her brother and his girlfriend, a couple with a baby (I'm not sure how they know the family), a friend of Mercedes, Nestor, and his son Nico, one of their neighbors, and us. Pablo also had some friends in his room. We got Adriano a dinosaur and car for his birthday. The dinosaur was missing a tail, an arm, and both its legs before he went to sleep that night. Dinner was a barbecue cooked by Mercedes's dad. And the meat tasted great. There wasn't much with it, but that is a custom here: meat, meat, meat, and little else. Vegetarianism is not very popular. The kids' meals were even more meaty than the adults'; where in the US, the kids at a birthday party would get macaroni-and-cheese or pizza with a glass of milk or juice, or at least Gatorade, the kids here got two big slabs of beef from the grill, and a Coke. After dinner, I was invited by one of Pablo's friends to join them in his room. For a while Pablo and I played a soccer video game on the TV while his friends played a video game on the computer. After a while though, Pablo joined his friends and I played by myself, then one of his friends, then Pablo played the soccer game with me again. It was a little awkward. I wasn't sure if they really wanted me there of if they were told to invite me back. And that's where I was until we left at 2:30.

Friday was begun by picking Maggie up from her sleepover with Chiara. And then we didn't do much until the evening (Mom and Dad were awarded their grant for their summer program on Friday, though). In the evening we went to a restaurant with Karina and Daniel. That was fun. As always, the meat was fantastic and everything else was pretty decent (the pork from the skewers Mom and I shared was amazing! It probably had something to do with the also-amazing amount of salt they put on them).

Saturday, yesterday, was when the earthquake hit early in the morning. We were far enough from the epicenter that we didn't feel anything when it struck, but later, in the afternoon, when I was reading and Maggie was napping and Mom was working on the computer and Dad was at the grocery store, the house started to jiggle. What I first noticed was the TV stand because I was facing that direction. It's not very stable, so I wasn't surprised it was shaking. And then I realized that it wouldn't normally be shaking with no one near it. And that's when I suddenly realized we were in an earthquake. Mom realized a moment later when I got up and asked her what we should do. Maggie came out of her bedroom awoken by the shaking. The four of us then walked out on to the porch and the shaking stopped. All of this only lasted 10 or 15 seconds. It was our first earthquake, and it was not how I expected it to be. I expected not knowing what was going on, and then hating the feeling of being shaken, like turbulence in a plane. But I figured out right away what was happening, and actually kind of liked the feeling, for some strange reason. I was suppressing a smile the whole time it was happening. When Dad came back from the store, he said that things were falling off the shelves and people were running out of the grocery store. But none of that happened here. Anyway, life went on. We had a picnic with Mercedes and family at a river. Before that, actually, we went to a statue of Jesus on a hill, and were going to picnic at the river under it, but Mercedes was concerned the water was too fast for her kids, so we went downstream a little. We ran around in the muddy riverbank and ate the snacks we had packed for a few hours. It was fun. That night we went to their house and had pizza (corn, it seems, is a pizza topping here) along with Nestor and Nico and Nico's tennis team. Nestor, I don't think I said above, wants them to emigrate to Wales for life. This time, I spent most of my time running around with Maggie and Chiara and Adriano. They play some of the same games we do (Rock, Paper, Scissors is popular, as is tag), and some we don't (like one game of finding people in the dark, and one confusing one that involves hiding and touching a chair before someone else does). Like on Thursday, we left at some very late hour in the early morning.

And Sunday we have done nothing. Literally. We haven't gone outside all day. But we have done plenty of fretting about school tomorrow.

And now, in the spirit of that chain of facebook notes I never took part in, here are 19 (I tried to think up 25, but couldn't get that far) random facts about the place where we're living right now:

1. The trash is not taken out in barrels. It is set in strange little baskets that at first I thought were mailboxes, which are outside of every house and look like metal baskets held up several feet on poles. It is, I think to keep the dogs from them.

2. Salta has very few street grates. The streets become rivers when it rains.

3. It is very rare to have drying machines. All our clothes are hanging on clothes racks on the porch now.

4. Keys are all old-fashion style. Like the keys in Harry Potter.

5. The Spanish letter Ll, usually pronounced like a Y, is pronounced "zh" in Salta. So are the letters Y, J, and Rr.

6. I have yet to see recycling in Argentina.

7. Everyone here absolutely hates the government. I don't know why.

8. Salteño bathrooms have not only a toilet, but a bidet. If you don't know what a bidet is, google it. I'm not going to explain it here.

9. Salta is almost in the tropics. It is a latitude equivalent to (and opposite from) Miami.

10. There is graffiti everywhere. Even on our house in our nice neighborhood.

11. Bubbled water is so popular here that you have to order "agua sin gas" to get water without bubbles.

12. To my endless annoyance, unlike the rest of the Spanish world, which uses "tú" to mean "you", Argentina uses "vos". Every conjugation I have ever learned is now wrong.

13. Salta is just underneath the Andes mountains. You can see them from just about anywher in the city.

14. Peanut butter is impossible to find. It doesn't exist here.

15. English is the first foreign language of the country, but, often because of their embarrassment at how much they know, they refuse to speak it.

16. Despite being three hours ahead of Minnesota, we probably eat dinner after most of the people at home.

17. Argentines write weird looking 9s. It took me forever to figure out what they were writing.

18. Meat in Salta is really great. All of Argentina is known for its beef. The deserts, though, are unfortunately subpar.

19. Unless our toilet is in a strange polar-magnetic vacuum, I'm pretty sure that water does not spin clockwise here.

Day 15

Ok, I'm a little behind. But I do have some exciting things to say. Where did I leave off? Last Friday? That is a long time. Well, last Friday we went clothes shopping at San Juan (basically Salta's Target) for our uniforms in the morning. Shirts and pants and skirts and socks and ties. Yawn. I required a nap afterwards. And that was pretty much all we did during the daytime. It's so hot here that, at least, I get tired every time we leave in the morning. Then our day really started around 8, when Maggie left. Mercedes picked up Maggie so she could hang out with Chiara and the boys. Maggie was more nervous than I can say for this. She was going to be at the house of someone she barely knew speaking a language that wasn't hers. But if you have ever met Maggie you already know the end of this story. Maggie suddenly became best friends with Chiara and has since gone over many times. This playdate (as with so many of Maggie's playdates) somehow became a sleepover. Chiara and family live outside of the city in a gated neighborhood (which is, I think, more common here than at home). Friday night (or really, Saturday morning) there was a neighborhood barbecue, so Maggie got to meet (she is so excited!) girls her age. Maggie has since spent hours trying to friend them on facebook. When Maggie and Chiara got back from the barbecue, they completed all the sacred girl-bonding rituals of weird hair-do's and painting fingernails... so, basically, Maggie had a good time.

Meanwhile, outside of girldom, Mom, Dad, and I had gone back downtown for the night. First, we walked down the pedestrian mall, looking at shops. When we had walked the length of it, we saw what looked like an Amerindian tribal dance in the middle of the pedestrian mall. About a dozen people were dancing and chanting with a circle of people around them. They were wearing animal skins and horns and masks (that looked, um, plastic--not what I would have expected) and were dancing to drums and chanting something. One of the youngest dancers--just a toddler--walked over to his mother standing at the edge of the circle and asked for cotton candy. She gave it to him and he kept dancing--full regalia and dance steps and all--with a handful of bright pink cotton candy. I don't think that was part of the dance... (Or maybe I've just never seen an authentic tribal dance). By the time we left the cute dancer and the ped mall he was on, it was 10:30. Despite Dad's protestation that it was too early for dinner ("only tourists eat dinner this early"), Mom and I decided it was time for dinner. Friday night was the night we decided to try a peña, the local version of a nightclub. Well, kind of. Less drinking. More eating. Dancing done by performers with a few volunteers. Brighter lights and quieter music. More traditional music. More touristy. Actually, it wasn't really a nightclub at all. But that was the way it had been described to us. It was fun, but none of our feet ever left the floor. It was dinner with a show. At one a.m. I was exhausted and asking Mom and Dad to go back home and sleep, so we did, even though the show went on later.

Saturday went much more slowly than Friday. At two, we three went to pick up our fourth and were going to go on a day trip North to Jujuy and Humahuaca (pronunciation guide: that's who-WHO-ee and OOM-uh-WAH-kuh). But we got to talking and playing at their big country house, and two quickly became seven. Oh, well. We can go North some other day. Not much happened Saturday night. We ate in. I don't remember what.

Sunday was aptly named. Maggie and I are still bright red from walking around the artisan fair that morning. Needless to say, we now have a large collection of salteño handiwork from every store Mom found interesting (I can't, though, complain about our grape honey; that stuff is delicious). Four siestas later, we met up with Karina and Daniel and they took us to a quebrada (river running through two mountains [yes, as it turns out, Spanish actually does have a word for that. And now you know it.]) where salteños (people from Salta) often visit. The restaurant next to it was called "El Duende de la Quebrada" Karina explained that a duende is a small, ugly, old, mythological person who finds missing things for people in exchange for candy. Mom and I debated for the longest time whether this meant troll or leprechaun. Or a dwarf? Turns out it means goblin. Karina and Daniel next took us to the top of a hill like the one Maggie and I climbed where we could look out over the nighttime city. Spread out below us was a vast array of yellow lights framed by the distant Andes mountains. Pretty. The six of us dined at an Italian restaurant. Mom and Dad and I all got carbonara. Comfort food. After dinner we came home and slept.

Monday was a busy day. It was also, I am excited (/nervous) to point out, my last Monday of Summer vacation. School starts next Monday, the first. In preparation for this, we started our day by going to our school to ask questions and pay. We couldn't pay, because it turns out we need passports to do that (who knew?), but we did meet the priest, and Dad asked him a whole list of questions. I was going to record the list here with answers, but unfortunately Mom threw it away. So here is a partial list of our Q&A:

Q1. Where/when/how do we eat lunch?

A. There is a lunch counter where students can snack during one of their breaks, but school ends at one, so (he didn't actually say this--I'm inferring) students have a larger lunch when they get home.

Q2. Do we need to buy gym uniforms?

A. Yes.

Q3. Do they need to get textbooks?

A. Their teachers will tell them what they need on the first day.

There were more questions than this, but I don't really remember them. But I will tell you all I now know about our school. School starts at 8, but on the first day, we will have to be there at 7:50 for the beginning-of-the-year assembly. We have (as in Minnesota) seven classes every day, but unlike in Minnesota, they change by days of the week. Classes for Maggie and I include (this is from vague memory, so I'll probably be very wrong) Argentine history, mathematics, Spanish, English, philosophy, religion (!), gym, computer something-or-other, and economics. The first two classes are 40 minutes long, followed by a 15-minute break (there's no break between the first two classes, so I don't really understand how we are supposed to walk from one room to another), then two more 40-minute classes (again, no break between them), then a 10-minute break, then two 40-minute classes, then a 5-minute break, then one 30-minute class. That ends at 1:00, and then our school day is over. I (and my entire grade-track--we have all our classes together), however, have an early-morning class on Tuesdays at 7, and no 7th hour. I haven't seen much of the school, only the courtyard off of which are the two school entrances and the director's office. I haven't paid much attention to it, though. It has some kind of sports court (basketball, maybe?). Most of the times we've gone in, the courtyard was filled with uniformed summer school kids. At the end of each school year, everyone takes a test, and if they fail it, they have to take summer school. If they fail summer school, they have to retake the year. I won't have to take that test, but the strictness makes me anxious!

Back to our Monday. We went shopping in San Juan for school uniforms, for the umpteenth time. We also went looking for thread and a needle (and when salteños say "a needle", they mean it; we bought a single needle) to sew our school seals onto our uniforms and ended up in a toy store where we bought a present for Adriano for his fourth birthday tomorrow. We also bought school supplies (in the most minimal sense of the word--a notebook and pencils), and ate downtown. Mom and I decided to find out the difference between an hamburguesa (hamburger) and a lomito (also hamburger), so we ordered one of each. An hamburguesa, as it turns out, is an American-style hamburger, while a lomito looks as if it was a hamburger that has been rolled out with a rolling pin to make it much skinnier and shaped like a large oval and is served on flatbread. Making either of these "completo" means adding ham, cheese, tomato, lettuce, and mayonnaise.

Came home, napped, Maggie went out with Chia

ra. Dad and I both got our hair cut. I got mine cut especially short for school starting (there are hair requirements, app-hair-ently), but better than that, Dad shaved off his beard! This is the first time any of the three of us have ever seen Dad without a big beard. Dad picked up Maggie, and then we had dinner at home.

Tuesday, we returned to school and paid, this time with passports (I don't remember the figure, but school was incredibly cheap). Then we went to San Juan (how many times is this now? we're spending our whole lives in this store) and bought gym clothes and guardapolvos (lab coats, but literally, dust-guards) for our uniforms. Our uniforms are now complete. Thank God. Tuesday night when Mercedes, Chiara, and Pablo came to pick Maggie up, Mercedes invited me, too. I accepted, wishing I had hidden in my bedroom to avoid the awkwardness of going to the mall. We first went to Chiara's doctor and waited in the car while she went in, then we went to the mall. Chiara immediately took Maggie to buy some jewelry and Pablo went to McDonald's (the only one is Salta), leaving Mercedes and I to awkwardly make and not make conversation while we waited for them. It wasn't that bad the whole time, though. We didn't split up again. We went looking for a present for Adriano, then had a snack in a sandwich shop, and finally went to a movie (an American one [Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief], which unfortunately for Maggie and I, was dubbed, not subtitled. That was OK, though; we understood the great majority of it [I think I understand much more Spanish when I know the context rather than when it's question out of the blue--that way I can fill in what the person must have said]). When we got home, Dad offered dinner, but Pablo couldn't be convinced into it. So we ate steak and hamburgers by ourselves.

And that leads me to today. Like so many other blog days, I don't have much to say about today because you just read my day's work. But who knows. It's only 4:30. I might do something really exciting tonight.

In the meantime, I have nothing planned for the whole afternoon. And if you just read through every little detail of my life the past week, I must have your undivided attention. So I'll tell you about our house. Our house is on the corner of Avenida Los Molles and Los Juncos (not really sure what those mean, but every other street in our neighborhood is named after a tree, so those are probably both trees). The inside is T-shaped. At the point of the T is a cabinet where we keep all our stuff. On the left side of the T is the dining room table and the kitchen. Leading off the kitchen is a roofless gallery to the laundry room. On the right side of the T is the living room with a TV. Our door is on this side, too. We have a gate, which we are supposed to keep locked along with our door (it has an intercom system, too) and sometimes do (we live in a safe neighborhood, but salteños are very cautious [house-locking-wise; seat-belting-wise--not at all]). At the base of the T are our rooms and bathrooms. Dad, for what reason I have no idea, decided that Maggie should get the big room with the trundle bed and I should get the room with the toddler-sized table and flowery bedframe. Otherwise, the bedrooms are very ordinary. The bathrooms, however, are not. Firstly, because the sink is outside the actual bathroom in its own little nook. And secondly, because we have a crazy-looking little toilet-thing used to clean yourself after using the normal-looking toilet. A bidet, it is called. I haven't tried it. On top of the T is a porch and and garden and garage all enclosed by a wall. The garage is cool-looking. It's not completely enclosed like US garages. It's just a part of the porch/garden that's paved for a car and has stairs up to it (we live at the foot of a big hill, remember, so it's not flat here). We have a tile roof, like all of Salta, and no up or downstairs. So, that's about it for our house. Tune in next week--or, hopefully, sooner--to "Under the Andes". Only on Blogspot.

Day 9

I have a school now. Yaay. We returned to the first and third schools we looked at (Santa Theresa and Belgrano) on Tuesday morning, as we told them we would. We didn't return to the fifth school (San Agustin), because Dad heard from someone he met in a store that it wasn't a good school (and he has yet to tell them that we won't be going...sigh). Santa Theresa told us that they had room for Maggie in Educacion General Basica nivel 8 (the equivalent of 8th grade), but not room for me in Polimodal nivel 2 (the equivalent of 11th grade). So, that probably would have been a little problem. At Belgrano, they told us a little about the school, then, like the day before, told us to come back tomorrow at 8. We walked to the city center, the plaza 9 de Julio (July 9--Argentina's independence day), which didn't look very different than an American square--a statue of some general surrounded by grass and pavement and people. We ate at a museum restaurant on the square. It was pretty good. We had empanadas and tamales. After lunch the four of us tried to get phones from a phone store, but, apparently, we need our passports for that for some reason, so we couldn't. After that, we came back home for a siesta. In the evening, we went back to the plaza 9 de Julio and Dad and Maggie got two phones, which is pretty exciting, (though I don't think they can call out of Argentina, so they can basically only call each other) while Mom and I got dishes for the party we had yesterday. In the evening, we went to a gigantic supermarket that Dad calls "Hiper", even though its real name is something completely different. Calling it a supermarket, though, is not really accurate because this was far bigger than any supermarket at home. And it had everything you could possibly buy in it. It even had a whole mall of other stores inside it. It was humongous. After we spent a very long time buying everything Mom and Dad could thinkof that we need for the house (I should have just stayed home from this; my legs were killing me from standing up so long), Dad decided to drive to the pescaderia for some fish (which is very uncommon here, it being so far from the ocean), but got lost on the way. We ended up driving through the bad parts of town, and Mom says she saw a drug deal in progress. Dad ended up driving the wrong way down several streets looking for a street sign. We did eventually get home, thankfully. We locked all our doors Tuesday night.

Wednesday went a little better than Tuesday night. In the early morning, we went to Belgrano and found out we were accepted to the school. Yaaay. The school has 1400 students, and teaches, I think, the equivalents of 7th to 12th grades. Maggie will be in EGB 8 (8th grade) and I will be in Polimodal 2 (11th). Mine is called "Polimodal" because it has various tracks for students to specialize in (I chose Humanities over Sciences and Economics). Maggie and I both will have to wear uniforms. Other than that, there's not much I know about the school. It starts on March 1. After finding out that exciting news, we went to the pescaderia (and made it this time) and got fish for the party, then went home and cooked and cleaned. At 8:30, guests began arriving. The people who Dad invited were the three realtor friends he made looking for a house and families. The first people to arrive were Mercedes and her four kids, Pablo (12), Chiara (9), Francisco (6), and Adriano (3). When people greet in Argentina, like in Europe, they kiss (or, really, just touch and make a kiss sound) on the cheek (as I learned by being kissed by all my prospective principals). I knew, at this point, that I was supposed to kiss Mercedes when she kissed me, so I did. And I quickly figured out I was supposed to kiss Chiara, when she leaned up to me. So when Pablo leaned up to me like Chiara did, I kissed his cheek, too. But he didn't kiss mine. Apparently that's a huge faux pas in Argentina. Boys don't kiss boys. Oops. Very embarrased, I didn't greet Francisco or Adriano (not that they greeted me), and hid in the kitchen while Maggie and Dad showed them our house. It went better with the rest of the people who arrived: Karina and her husband Daniel (this time, I was smart enough to wait until he stuck out his hand to shake), and Patricia and her 7-year-old daughter Augustina. The thirteen of us all spoke on a wide spectrum of only English to bilingual to only Spanish, so during our extremely late dinner (11:30ish!), conversation switched between English and Spanish with only one half of the table speaking at a time. Dinner was fish (as I already said) or hamburger, fruit salad, garden salad, and Dad's grilled peaches ("mi experimento"). I had fish, fruit, and peaches (which were not actually as bad as they look written down here), but the Argentines were aghast that Dad would set meat and fruit next to each other (flashback to England!). I noticed none of them took any. While Maggie and everyone younger than her played inside (they had already eaten hamburgers inside), I and everyone older than me ate dinner outside (when the fish was done). We/they talked mostly about the cultural differences between here and home--mostly how Argentines kiss hello and goodbye (girl-girl and girl-boy, but apparently never boy-boy), and North Americans almost never kiss. Meanwhile, Dad opened the carbonated juice we bought ("kid-wine", as we call it in Minnesota) for the kids. He gave the first glass to (three-year-old) Adriano, who spat it out immediately. When he was pouring some for Karina, she pointed out to Dad that the juice was 3% alcohol. Good thing Adriano didn't like it.

Everyone left this morning at 1:30. I thought it was a pretty fun party. Well, I don't have much say about today. I've been at home all day (but Maggie is out shopping with Chiara now) procrastinating writing this post (/trying to figure out how to use the mouse on this teeny computer).

Day 6

Salta, Argentina

Ok. I have seen a toucan, a capybara, Capuchin monkeys, and dozens of coatimundis this past week. In the wild! How cool is that? But let me back up. We didn’t have internet access in our hotel room, so I’m going to try to cram all the week’s events into one post. We left Northfield at 10 a.m. Tuesday morning just after a blizzard that cancelled school, and hired a van to the airport. From MSP, it was a 2-and-a-half-hour flight to our layover in Atlanta, and then 10 hours to Buenos Aires, which I slept very little of. At the Buenos Aires international airport (after some confusion when Mom’s chair was given away to another passenger), an airport worker escorted us from the gate to baggage claim and then to a taxi stand, apparently hoping a husband would meet us at the airport. We left the international airport in the cab of one insane taxi driver (worse than the taxis in New York!) to the domestic airport of Buenos Aires, where we met Dad, who had just taken a plane from Salta.

We left on a plane a few hours later, to where we just were: Iguazú Falls. Iguazú Falls are a gigantic set of falls (think Niagara times three) at the corner of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. When we got there late afternoon (it’s Wednesday at this point; somewhere between Atlanta and Buenos Aires the day changed) we checked into our hotel (which is actually in the national park and has a good view of the falls [pictured below]) and tried to go see the falls, but the paths were closed, so we headed back to the hotel and, sweating because of the heat and humidity, jumped in the pool. We swam for a while and then ate a buffet dinner at our hotel. Completely exhausted after two days of travel, we went straight to bed. Except Mom and Dad’s room was inaccessible. So Dad talked to the concierge and had their room changed. And then we went to sleep. Finally.

The four of us woke up Thursday morning excited to see Iguazú Falls. Well, actually, Maggie and I woke up cranky that we had been dragged out of bed at 8:30 in the morning on our vacation time. But we were excited once we had fully woken up. We had breakfast in the hotel and then walked out to the trails. On the path right next to our hotel we saw a whole pack of coatimundis, which are strange-looking little animals that, because of feeding, aren’t at all afraid of humans.

Coatís, as they are called in Spanish, look a little like raccoons, except they have small anteater snouts, and long tails that make them look a bit like weasels. They weren’t shy of us people at all, and even came up to us hoping we would feed them. The first trail we walked was The Upper Circuit, which snaked along the rim of the falls and gave views of the valley below.

The trail was, luckily for us, completely handicapped-accessible. It was filled with beautiful butterflies, as, I found out, the entire park is. At each little fall, we could see water falling down hundreds of meters right underneath our feet before it disappeared into mist at the bottom and we could see the entire river valley and across the river to Brazil. The next trail was the trail to the largest of the waterfalls, “La Garganta del Diablo” (the Devil’s Throat [to the right--you can't tell at all, but there is water falling all around; the camera couldn't take a picture of something that bright]).

To get to La Garganta, you need to take the park’s three-station train system, and from the train, it’s a long hike across a platform running over the Upper Iguazú River to the fall that is furthest from our hotel. (On the walk one pretty butterfly stuck itself to my hand for a long time. Maggie and I named it Pablo.) But once there, it’s worth every step. At the end of the path is a platform right next to the gigantic cascade. And from the end of the platform, billions of gallons of water are falling off the concave cliff in every visible direction. It kinda beats Northfield’s 4 foot dam.

Back at the hotel, I watched a little Argentine TV and then siesta-ed with Maggie. The telenovela I watched was possibly the wierdest and cheesiest bit of television I’ve seen. In the three or four minutes I was watching, the star discovered that she had a lost twin and that her long-lost mother knew where she was, her friend fell in love with a boy she met in a library, and an old man (not sure how he was related) gave his deathbed speech to a little girl. After our long afternoon siesta, we swam in the pool and drank piña coladas from the cantina and sat underneath the warm sun that’s missing in Minnesota. I kinda like Argentina. In the evening we took a taxi to the city of Puerto Iquazú. The city isn’t very large; the downtown was only a few blocks long. First we went into a souvenir-y shop and just looked around, then we went to a restaurant called El Quincho de mi Tio Querido. The food was pretty good. I had gnocchi. After dinner we took a taxi straight back to the hotel and went to sleep.

First thing Friday morning (after breakfast, when we met a nice German couple and their three-year-old daughter) we took the train the opposite direction to the park center and looked through the museum (it was very uninteresting, so I wont even bother to describe). Maggie, Dad, and I walked on the Macuco Trail for about half an hour. Mom was feeling sick, so she stayed at the park center. The Macuco Trail is where tourists can see jaguars, tapirs, capybaras, toucans—all kinds of cool animals. Unfortunately, we didn’t see anything except some gigantic ants the size of ping-pong balls. So, we took the train back to the part of the park near our hotel and walked down the Lower Circuit, which runs parallel to the Upper Circuit, but is below the falls, looking up at them. On the way, we saw a group of Capuchin monkeys up in the trees eating fruit.

We couldn’t see them very well, but we got some pictures to prove it. The Lower Circuit starts from near our hotel, winds around some tall waterfalls, and ends about 20 feet right in front of a mid-sized waterfall (relatively speaking—this is still an enormous waterfall by Minnesotan standards), which left us all soaked from the mist rising up from below up.

After this, it was siesta time for Maggie and I, while Mom and Dad were at the pool. That evening, we took a taxi to the city and ended up eating at the same restaurant, but this time, we were serenaded by live music (which our cab driver said would be folkloric, but turned out to just be American songs).

On Saturday morning, we went to the park center again, and on the way, we saw a toucan up in the canopy, which Mom had been wanting to see all trip long. Once we got to the center, we parted ways again. Maggie and Mom shopped in the outdoor mall, and Dad and I walked the length of the Macuco Trail. On the way, we saw a capybara crossing our path. The capybara was the cutest little animal I’ve ever seen, I must say. It was basically just a ball of fur with another ball of a head and little legs that it waddled around on. Sadly, it waddled away too fast for me to be able to catch it and bring it back to Minnesota as a cute, fuzzy pet. Dad also claims to have heard a tapir on the trail, but I’m not completely sure if I buy that. The four of us had lunch at the hotel, and I began to write this blog in the hopes that I could finish during the day we had internet in our hotel (clearly, I didn’t—I only got to Thursday). We didn’t go out Saturday night, we just watched an American movie with Spanish subtitles (The Sum of All Fears, I think it was called), and then watched some of the Olympics (Maggie and I rooted for the Latvians because they had the coolest color suits—maroon!).

Sunday (yesterday) was our last day in Iguazú. We walked the Lower Circuit again (this time we were smart enough to wear swimming trunks), and then checked out of our hotel. We boarded a plane to Buenos Aires (I got pretty airsick on this one), and then a second to Salta (but this was fine). We arrived at our house last night, unpacked our suitcases, and went to bed.

Now that brings me to today. This morning the four of us began looking at schools. Dun dun dun. So, apparently, public schools in Argentina are very bad. So, we will probably be in private school. Roman Catholic private school. Maggie and I were dreading what the directors would ask us. Maggie, before we left, even asked me to help her practice the Spanish for an interview. At the first school, we apprehensively walked in, and Dad asked a woman who to talk to to see if we could come to this school. An English-speaking woman came over and talked to Dad. After some conversation about why we were here and how long (Dad, for some reason, feels the need to tell everyone we talk to our entire life story), the woman told us that she would see whether the school had a vacancy, and that we should bring back transcripts for her. So, we agreed and left. On to school #2: do the kids speak Latin and Greek? School #3: the director is in a meeting. Come back tomorrow. School number 4 said a flat out “no”. They don’t accept students for part of a year. At the fifth and last school, we spoke first to the vice-director (who, after a long and painful Spanish conversation, revealed that she was fluent in English and was the English teacher), and then to both the director and vice-director, who told us that they did have space, and then helpfully explained the Argentine school system and where we would be placed. Schools visited, we ate lunch at a sandwich shop downtown, then came back home. While Mom and Dad began Spanish lessons with their tutor, Maggie and I tried (unsuccessfully) to stream the latest episode of Community in Argentina, and then tested out our neighborhood heladería (ice cream shop). I think it passed. When we got home, the tutor was leaving, so we all went to the grocery store (for our own groceries and for a party we are now having on Wednesday to introduce Dad’s realtor friends to the three of us who haven’t been here for two weeks). Mom and Dad slept through the afternoon (it just occurred to me as I write this that a different set of the four us have siesta-ed everyday we’ve been here—all of us on Thursday, Maggie and I on Friday, Maggie and Mom on Saturday, nobody on Sunday, and now Mom and Dad today), while Maggie and I climbed the hill by our house. The hill is really bigger than a hill; it’s somewhere in between a hill and a mountain. And do we have a view. From this big hill you can see for miles around. To the East is more hills and pampas, and to the West you can see the entire city below you, framed by the Andes mountains around the West end of the city. Sadly, Maggie was crabby, so we had to leave right away. But there is no way I’m not going back up there again. It was absolutely beautiful. I have nothing quite as exciting to report for this evening. It was mostly spent enjoying the fact that we now have internet. And then, a few hours ago, I set down to catch up with my blog. And now I have. Phewphta!! It’s harder than it seems to write four Microsoft Word pages about what you’ve done the past week, even if it was as interesting as mine was. Well, it’s tomorrow now. Actually it’s after one, though it’s still yesterday for most of the people reading this. And we have an Argentine maid coming in the morning (!), so I should probably go to bed. Goodnight. Hopefully my future posts won’t require quite as much effort to write (and read, for that matter) as this one did.

Day 0

Northfield, Minnesota

Seeing as you found this blog, you probably already know that I am starting it because for the next three months, my parents, sister, and I will be moving from Northfield, Minnesota to Salta, Argentina. But just in case, I will tell you anyway: my parents are both on sabbatical from teaching this spring, and decided to leave the country with Maggie and I for three months. Dad went down to Salta three weeks ago to find us a place to live, and Mom, Maggie and I will be leaving tomorrow. We picked Argentina (my idea, originally, I would like to point out) because it is a Spanish-speaking country (Maggie and I have been taking Spanish immersion since first grade, so we would get to keep learning Spanish, and, hopefully, language wouldn't be too much of a problem), it is not a third-world country (which means Mom can get around), and none of us have been to South America before. As a part of the sixth semester of my high school English requirement, my now homeschool teacher, Professor Mom, has decided that I should write a blog to keep family and friends (and anyone else, for that matter) updated on our travels in South America. But back to the present. Right now, I am sitting in my living room. I just spent all morning shoveling 5 inches of snow off our long driveway and in front of the mailboxes, and somehow the snow keeps coming. I'm going to have to go back out before dark and shovel another half a foot. As much as I love Minnesota, I am very excited to leave this state and go to an 80-degree Argentine summer.