We haven't done too much in Mendoza over the three weeks we've been here, other than going to the zoo (where, of course, we took lots of pictures), running and spending entirely too much time watching tv. It makes me feel so decadent. Courtesy of the public library and its (rather pitiful) collection of English books, my brain also managed to not rot completely, since I finally decided to take up one of David's favorite science writers.
It's been a tough year in many ways. We've each sustained unexpected injuries, which, if we or the situations had been different, may have ended the trip early. But we are in astonishingly good repair compared to some of our stuff. We've lost, ruined or damaged most of our equipment and because we're about to fly back, we thought it would be fun to share the list of everything so inflicted.
No, this post is not about my shoulder. Although it could be, since having an injury to such a major joint does make me sometimes feel like a sack of meat and bones. No, my shoulder is healing well, but this post is about Argentina´s staple food: meat.
I shouldn't be, but I'm always amazed at how much easier it is to pay attention to what is going on in a country when we're actually there. Especially when we have access to a television and spend time using our pitiful Spanish trying to decipher the news: Buenos Aires has been covered in smoke due to farmers clearing grassland for grazing. Unrelated to the fires, but related to the strike that derailed our train journey (why yes, I am the daughter of a shameless punster), the youngest member of Cristina Fernandez´s cabinet, Argentina's first female president, is resigning. And he looks so earnest in the photo. Poor thing.
We heard some very good news yesterday, from Taylor (Eleanor, to those of you who've known any of us for years) and Megan, her partner, my not-sister-in-law. I'm just so excited! Ah, to be an aunt: all the bonuses of parenthood, with none of the drawbacks.
You may remember the post about the scree field. Well, I haven´t had a fast enough internet connection to upload the video I took from the bottom of that valley until now:
I dislocated my shoulder. The morning we left for Mendoza I went running by myself. For most of the time I ran my intervals along some patches of grass near a culvert, but for the last few minutes, I was running back to the hotel on some broken sidewalk decorated with bits of trash and random debris. While dodging a crowd waiting for a bus, I tripped on a hoop of discarded wire and fell on my left wrist and shoulder. It took me a few moments to get up and look back to understand what happened. My wrist was scraped and my shoulder was clearly out of place.
I spent most of the other week in New York. I arrived around noon on Wednesday and headed out. First, to my bagel place. It doesn't have the best bagels, but it does have a signed photo of Mel Brooks. I then walked over to Bryant Park, which is the backyard of the main branch of the New York Public Library. You know, the one with the lion statues, Patience and Virtue in front. Then I hopped on a subway to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and spent an insufficient amount of time on the Gustave Courbet exhibit. I then meandered through Central Park over to Lincoln Center and had late lunch with a friend. I had forgotten how much walking is required in New York. But it was a good thing I got some walking in, because the rest of my time was spent in a darkened theater (at NYU's Cantor Center to be precise) watching a wonderful array of orphan works during the 6th Orphan Symposium.
First, a note to explain the title: in Argentinean Spanish, called castellano, the word for tent is carpa. This is in contrast to the word found in a small, used visual dictionary we picked up in Buenos Aires, which provides the español word: tienda. Not to be too simple, tienda is also, apparently, the word for a ¨shop¨ in español and castellano. How many words must be different before a dialect becomes a new language? Discovering a more (presently) useful word for tent has considerably smoothed communication.
From India through New Zealand, we spent the last six months in former British colonies. Not that we planned it that way. In fact, as embarrassing as it is to admit this, I was unaware that Malaysia was a former colony of any country, until we got there. (This is why you should read about the places you're going to visit before you get there. It saves you from some awkward conversations once you've arrived.)
Itinerary for April 1, 2008:
I think this picture pretty much sums up what would have otherwise been a quiet day of reading in the tent.
I received an email from a friend that made me realize my last post is a little ambiguous. Especially if you lead a very busy life raising two precocious children while being in your most difficult semester of nursing school and so therefore have limited internet-reading time. We're not actually "home," yet. Instead, we're settled in a small village, Villa General Belgrano, enjoying the Argentine countryside while carping about overly touristed places. (Everything here in this faux-German village, where several of the residents are descendants of survivors of a wrecked German U-boat from 1939, is a tad twee.)
But we do, finally, have tickets back to the States. We leave Buenos Aires on the evening of May 8 and arrive in Los Angeles the following morning. Five weeks from now. I can't quite believe the year is almost over.
All of the hotels and hostels were full when we arrived in Cordoba because, it turned out, there was a road rally for the three days we were there--possible the biggest rally in the Americas. Aren´t we lucky. Our fall back is, of course, to camp, so we bused out to the municiple campground, which happened to be near the road rally, and settled into the spacious grounds with it´s sad, decaying facilities. The next morning, I set out in some drizzling rain to buy food and fuel for the stove.
Helena, who has decided to spruce up our posting by asking questions she wants answers to (feel free to ask any you want to know, too), tossed another one our way, asking if we miss "home," or if that word has meaning for us. I've thought about it for a couple months now, and here's at least a partial answer.
I don't miss home because I don't feel as though I have one to miss. When I'm talking to David and say something like, "When we're home we can...," I'm only ever refering to being back in the US. The US is "home" in the sense that it's familiar and we understand the subtext and undercurrents of every conversation/interaction, something that is easy to take for granted until you miss it by having that understanding impinged on in some way, like traveling. But, if based on that definition, the US is increasingly less and less a "home" because we miss out on so much pop culture and current events by being out of the country for extended periods and not having a television when we are there. Ultimately I think "home" is a state of mind, and one I can enter into, not quite at will, but almost anywhere, once we've been there a couple days to feel familiar with the area.
I do miss family and friends, though, both in the US and abroad. Missing people can be really difficult, especially because lots of people are terrible about emailing since everyone has their own lives to get on with. But even then, I don't get lonely in any real sense, because David is always around. Traveling with your best friend has the definite perk of assuaging loneliness. Especially since we talk, all the time.
