URGENTE! beep de beep beep dede beep beep
civil unrest in the capital!
some protesters are getting out of control down by the casa de gobierno. (wait, am i in NYC?) rubber bullets and tear gas.
luckily my jobs are all in my barrio this week, i'm not going downtown again until thurs.

and my brother is still in thailand!

wow! after a year in the desert, religiously speaking, i have been inundated with jewish love and sunshine! shabbat was awesome, awesome.
mariela and i met up on friday afternoon. she is in her last year of residency, and we became good friends. i was working friday afternoon doing my weekly cow and rawhide report, and i happened to be on the same block as her house. also this is her last shabbat before a three-month trip to the US. she was convinced that hashem had sent us to each other. and she told the story to each and every person we met over shabbas! ha!
the people were all absolutely lovely, it was the nicest community. they were all shocked that i had spent so much time here and never found any shabbas love. the weekend was filled with conditional verbs....if i had known that you were here, i would have invited you antes....if we had met before, i could have taken you to this synagogue, and that class, etc. etc. it is a very difficult tense to conjugate in spanish, si hubiese sabido que estuvieras aqui, te habria haber invitado...complicated.
anyway, the important thing is that i did find them, and i won't leave BA thinking that the jewish community is cold and unfriendly. i already have rabbis calling me for the next two shabbats. next week i'm going to spend it in belgrano in a synagogue that sounds like what i left in washington...very young, friendly, hospitable.

oh and the family of the five brothers...they weren't out of some jewish fairy tale, there were just 5 siblings, but in spanish it's "hermanos" and that can mean males and females both.

this weekend i got two count them TWO invitations for shabbat. i had a choice!
i'm going with the cousin of my favorite english student, she's my age and a doctor, who is taking me to her sephardic synagogue tonight, then to dinner at the house of 5 brothers. tomorrow there is lunch at the rabbi's house, and a shiur. i'm really excited about this.

last night i had dinner at the casa de queso, and today my stomach hurts.

last week edgardo's marcos graduated from engineering school. it lasts 6 years and is somewhere between college and a master's. he presented a final project and we went to hear the presentation. afterwards, all marcos' friends and family threw food on him. this is a graduation tradition. he was covered head to toe in flour, raw eggs, coca-cola, and yerba mate. it was bizarre. i'm going to try to get pics from him to post. and everyone is surprised when i say that we don't have this tradition in the states.
afterwards we went to his family's apt. for dinner and stuff. their apt is one of the nicest i've seen here.
other than that, a pretty standard weekend. went to our usual parilla friday night. saturday night had peruvian food and went to the bar i always go to, salvame maria.
it's cold and rainy here. i went on a government -sponsored walking tour on friday, of carlos gardel's haunts. the tour guide is really good, he's led tours i've been on before.

would you all think less of me if i said that i saw I, Robot (or Yo, Robot as we call it here) and i loved it?! and i want to see it again??!

here's some more pics.
wine2.jpg

this one is of a group of mexicans that were on our tour. they were hilarious! mexican spanish has much different intonation and a lot of different vocabulary but i could understand them pretty well. you can tell who is from the US by her white sneakers.
mexicans.jpg

a closeup! eandr.jpg


these are called alamo trees, alamo.jpg, i don't know what it would be in english.

bus.jpg sitting on the bus. i didn't fall asleep on the bus once, can you believe it?

almost falling into the creek. arroyo.jpg

a natural bridge called the puente del inca. inca.jpg

we thought about climbing aconcagua but then we decided to choose life.
nice mountain view!
montanas.jpg

we visited some hot sulfur springs
termas2.jpg

we rode down a hill in a big tire - very fun! tires.jpg

it was a typical argentina excursion. the group had fights about whose soccer team was the best, the van broke down, and we opened a bottle of wine.

more photos to come soon.
wine.jpg

what a fun day we had today! we took a bus to maipu, and visited the Lopez winery, Lopez is a wine that we drink a lot of in Buenos Aires. When we take these winery tours, they give us statistics like, 75% of this wine is consumed in Argentina, or, we only export 10% of our wine, they rest is drunk by the people of buenos aires, specifically edgardo bruzzone.
we had an hour to kill before the tour, so we went into a little cafe-restaurant, very local, with old guys drinking wine and watching the news on tv. the owner of the place was this old old man, shuffling around. he took our order about 4 times, then was so surprised when we told him that he brought us the wrong food! but we ate it anyway, and enjoyed the whole experience immensely.
afterwards we walked into maipu, not a whole lot goign on. we wanted to visit a wine museum but we didn't know how to get there. we asked some policemen who were sitting in their car in the street, and they drove us! i had to sit in the back behind the grill. the seat was just metal, didn't have cushions. i wasn't very happy about that. edgardo said he really regretted not having a camera at that moment. the wine museum was in a beautiful old house, and an artesenal winery. the tourist matierial here isn't real elaborate. we have no idea what anything will be like. we have to just go with our instinscts and trust our luck. sometimes you get a great tour guide that makes everything really fun and interesting. sometimes you don't.
tomorrow we are doing an excursion to the andes. in any case we are really, really enjoying every minute.

brrrr from mendoza where the air is clear and dry but sort of cold!!! especially in a youth hostel where you have to go outside to use the bathroom (grumble grumble)
last night we poked around town, went in the really fancy hyatt here, 5 stars, it has a casino, and a lovely spa. we had dinner at a unique little restaurant called azafran. we shared the goat ragout and the trout-stuffed ravioli. there's no wine list. you get to go in the wine cave and pick out your bottle! so cool! a steward told us all about the wine and helped us pick out one to match our food. we picked out a nice syrah, not too expensive, 25 pesos. today we took a tour of the zuccardi winery, which included a wine tasting lunch in their beautiful solarium, mmm it was so nice. we tasted 5 or 6 wines. the whites were viognier and torrontes, and then tempranillo, a delicious oaky malbec roble, bonardes, sangiovese, and a tardio, very sweet dessert wine.
and then i needed a nap.
tomorrow i want to rent bikes in this huge park in the city, it has a zoo and a lake and lots of monuments.

well it's not thailand but i have arrived in mendoza, the napa valley of argentina. we took a bus overnight to get here. i couldn't sleep (que raro!) and listened to my brazilian songs and watched the sun come up over the cordillero, the andes mountains, very high and very beautiful. we plan to go on excursions to little towns nearby, wineries, and mountain tours. our hostel has free internet so i hope to post blogs a lot. disposable cameras are way too expensive but i'll probably just bite the bullet and buy one.

i decided that before i leave buenos aires, i want to use a bidet at least once. because when else in my life will i have the opportunity?

my brother is in thailand!!!