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.