Mingas y Puerto Varas

So Wednesday i went to the Minga, or community work day, at Blanca Rosa´s house. Vero and Zoe and I went and met up with about 12 other people. Jacob, a guy from Oregon who´s been in Argentina for a year, showed me how to make a mix of 3 buckets of mud (arcilla), 1 bucket of water, 4 armfuls of straw (paja) and 9 buckets of sand in a concrete mixer, and we used a pulley system to get buckets of the mix up to the second floor. The straw in the mix is the insulation, and it keeps the house warm in the winter. You smack handfuls of the mix on a wooden wall where you´ve wedged a couple of sticks (this helps to hold up the mix). I mostly worked on filling in the gaps between the walls that had been built and the window frames. At lunch, Blanca showed us a powerpoint of all kinds of natural building projects in Argetina and in the states, from similar ones to how people reuse empty wine bottles as windows, to green roofs. Her grandchildren made pancakes (really crepes) for us with dulce de peach, cherry or apple, and we had coffe with cinnamon sticks.

I stayed and talked for a long time to Philippa, Jacob-s girlfriend whos also been in argentina for a year and zoe and lauren before we walked back to fedes house. Thursday morning, zoe and i walked down to el bolson and i figured out a plan really quickly to get on the next bus to bariloche and off to puerto varas, running! made the bus just barely, but the next bus was 2 hours late so spent a good long time reading Atlas Shrugged in Bariloche bus station. but arrived fine to Puerto Varas after a lovely snack of 3 ham and cheese sandwiches, each on a different kind of bread, and watching Rambo dubbed into Greek with Spanish subtitles. i love these buses. I went over and had coffee with Jorge, and spent the evening watching some sort of Chilean dancing with the stars with his sister Daisy and her friend, who are back from school in Chiloe for the Semana Santa long weekend (which was also why i was so lucky to get a bus ticket...pretty much every ticket i bought was the last seat on the bus). today im doing a bit of shopping and will walk around the lake a bit on the costanera, and eat some more kuchen. theres also a feria de chocolate in town with about 75 kinds of chocolate easter bunnies which ill check out next!