construyendo!

so finally i am attempting to add some pictures. in the huge bag of electronics that i brought, i didn´t bring the charger for my camera, so i won´t upload pictures until i´m home. so these are ones that i´ve stolen from vida, but hopefully they will give you an idea.

The first one is a picture of the foundation of her house. it´s in the form of a spiral (caracol or snail, as they say here).

the next one is four of us hauling logs that will support her house from her fields to the house site. the road to her house broke (its a dirt road, and there are a couple places where concrete tubes go underneath for the acequias (irrigation). when one of the delivery trucks drove over it, the concrete tube broke. she fixed with with a woodent bridge, but for now the heaviest deliveries come to the field and we carry them in from there.

the next picture is me and Katie, and it´s taken from the top of the truck that belongs to the well men. it´s weird to watch them making the well because i saw the movie ¨there will be blood¨, all about an oil man, right before leaving the states, and it looks really similar, especially today when the well started spurting out water.

today i think they will finish the well, which is good. right now vida and her neighbors have no water, so we hook a trailer cart to the back of a bicycle, and bike about 10 minutes to a municipal tap to get water. so even though the well water will have to be tested, it will be nice to be able to shower in it and just go to get drinking water.

the last picture is of bertrand, one of the other guys working on vida´s farm, and the architect adriana, in the middle ofmarking off the foundation. it´s been really cool to learn about the house, and bertrand has a lot of good techniques for building things by hand. today i was building acequia doors, to open and close different parts of the ditch irrigation. things take so long without electricity, but it´s really cool to see the most simple designs work to get everything done.

yesterday we made tons of plum jam...until the gas ran out. so we went to the neighbors for dinner. the neighboring farm, madre tierra, has a LOT of volunteers. right now only about 7 but in the height of the summer they have about 20. so today we will finish that and start on peach jam.

we have also been drying a lot of stuff (tomatoes, grapes, plums, pears and herbs) . check out her secadora!

hope everyone is doing well!

building musculos

So after 2 days in tunuyan, i´m definitely getting back my soil-moving-muscles. vida´s building an amazing house on her land. right now they´re working on the foundation. she has two argentinians, fabio and manuel, and one belgian, bertrand, who are all working on it. but it´s really new to them because the whole house is in the design of an oval with a spiral inside, so none of the walls are straight. right now, the foundation is like a whole series of trenches, and they are pouring concrete into them. meanwhile, the other volunteers (katie from US and Peter from belgium), are working on moving the dirt they dug out to make the trenches to fill in all these holes in the rest of her yard...so it´s a lot of wheelbarrowing. but otherwise we´re also putting up a ton of food - drying grapes, pears, tomatoes and plums, and tonight katie and i spent about 4 hours slicing plums to make jam.

last night we went out for a beer in tunuyan. it´s great, about a 15 minute bike ride from the farm, and EVERYONE here rides bikes. it was the last day for one of the volunteers from the neighboring farm, so we caught the end of the caracas - real potosi soccer game, had some quilmes beers, ate some lomitos (i don´t even really know what it is - some kind of meat egg mayonaise sandwich?) good times.

you can´t see the andes from vida´s farm because of a bunch of trees in the way, but you can poke through and see them so well from the next farm over. they´re beautiful. to get htere, you cross the acequia, which is the commonly owned irrigation system. everyone has a schedule for when they can irrigate, so we walked upstream and turned it on by putting a log down in the main branch to divert some of the water to vida´s farm. it wasn´t our turn, but vida´s well ran dry a week ago, and she has a whole team of guys out building her a new, deeper well. it´s slow. they came by a couple times at 5 pm to say "we can´t work today". finally yesterday they arrived at 1pm, worked for 30 minutes while one guy set up a big asado (grill) and then ate for 1.5 hours, and then worked another hour. today again they came about 1pm, ate, and then worked until 5. kind of crazy, but definitely explains why things here take so long. always an adventure...

highlight = hearing techno music with accordion.

hasta tunuyan

So Saturday night, Patrick and Filip and I went to palermo to eat. palermo reminds me a lot of the nice parts of Polanco (in mexico city). we walked about an hour and finally sat down to eat at 11, and it was my first chance to have bife de chorizo here. wow. it was...amazing. That night Patrick and I joined a big group from the hostel and went out to a club called pacha, and got in for free by turning our wristbands inside out so they looked like the white ones of people who had already paid. between that and finding 50 pesos on the ground, made for a pretty cheap night!

sunday i watched some soccer, walked with henrique to manzana de las luces, the oldest church in buenos aires, and he helped me fight the pigeons off my breakfast at an ouside cafe. then i tried to go to recoleta cemetery but i missed the stop on the bus and ended up back in palermo, so instead i went to the museo evita peron, before heading off on the bus to tunuyan.

the buses here are amazing. i got semi'cama, so top floor of a double decker bus, where the seats lean pretty far back. and when you get on the bus, they play bingo. on my bus they were giving away a kids toy but according to vida they also give away a bottle of wine sometimes. mmmm. So I got to tunuyan monday morning and eventually found a taxiflet (pickup truck as a cab), who had NO IDEA where the street was. so after a couple calls to vida and the driver saying he couldnt make it further down the dirt road, i convinced him that for the sum of 10 pesos, about $3.50, he would keep going.

vida´s farm is looking good! she has a couple volunteers and a couple employees helping to build the foundation of the house. last night, I worked with Katie, from california, and peter, from belgium, to make pear chutney, canned pears with ciruelas (plums), and melon chutney. it´s a little different canning here where you cut everything outside and cook it over a fire with the pot propped up on a cut=off oil drum. but we´ve been eating well. we worked on the foundation of the house this morning, and then make lunch around noon, have some mate, then siesta time until 430 (hence i´m in town at the internet cafe), and then we´ll work again until about 9.

highlight = seeing the pleiades with the naked eye over the andes last night!

Dias 2 y 3

Friday, I went to retiro station and took the commuter rail out to chilavert
and walked around papa's old neighborhood. they changed the numbers on the
street and i took pictures of the two that it could be but neither of
them listed the old number, so it was a little guess work. i did get
a pict6ure of his school. i can't upload pictures here but hopefully
at the next p[lace....

then i went to the museo del inmigrante - argentina's 'ellis island" and looked up pless. didn't
find an erich from germany, but i DID find a dorothy pless from USA
who arrived in buenos aires in 1930.

Met up last night with 3 guys in the hostel: Enrique from Brazil who is teaching me bits of por5tuguese, Patrick from Holland and Filip from Sweden. so far I have learned how to say hiccup in three languages: "Hic" (dutch), "hiccup" (swedish), and "soluso" (portuguese, not sure of spelling).

today we went to la boca, toured the stadium and had chorizos, walked into a free rock concert in a park on the way back, watched some tango in san telmo, and went to the antique market, where i tried again to find the book "el tragapatos". no luck, but now they know the book i'm asking for. caused a little fender bender on the walk back (i don't have the argentinian timing for crossing the street down, so the first guy stopped for us, and the guy behind him hit him. so we kept walkikng) tomorrow i will try to go to recoleta and then i take the bus overnight to tunuyan!

Primer Dia

Day One. I arrived today and the first thing I did was to watch the march
of the madres de la plaza de mayo (they are the mothers ofpeople who
disappeared in the dirty war, and they march at the plaza de mayo
every thursday), walked down calle florida (the main shopping
street),struck out 3 timeslooking for tragapatos, a children's book
fromthe 1930's, but through it i got a great talkwith an older
gentleman who runs a store just for old books, and I had coffee and an
"alfajor", a sandwich cookie with dulce de leche inthe middle and
coconut on the outside. I missed the trip to the soccer game tonight
but i'mhopeful for either sunday or when i comeback through buenos
aires on the way back.