Things I've noticed in Argentina

OCT 27th

• No free refills at restaurants. All drinks come in bottles.
• No stop signs or traffic lights in the cities.
• Some things like cheese and wine can be really cheap in the groceries store. ($1.50 for cheese, $5-6 for wine.
• Main meals are lunch ( around 2 pm) and dinner (around 10 pm) with breakfast (morning) and merienda (around 5 pm) being light and consisting of pastry or bread and coffee
• Drinking mate is social tradition. Drank everyday and on long car rides.
• Refer to most people  from the US as Yankees. Which is interesting because unless you are from NYC or northern state I would assume you don't consider yourself a Yankee.
• Argentinean tend to not like Donald Trump
• People drive on their motorcycles while they hold their helmet in their hands.
• The homeless dogs are really sweet and well behaved.
• Music in English is really common
• People wear shirts with English words (I wonder if they know what it means)
• Taxi rides are very cheap ($5 for I decent distance)
• Asado is also social tradition and consists really good different cuts of meat
• Its free to see a doctor 
• At 2 pm to 5 or 6 pm business's close for siesta and then open again 6 pm to 10 pm
• Gaucho shoes and garb is common and fashionable... our version of cowboy
• The only people of color  here are seem to be actually from Africa and here to sell stuff on the street. 
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Tucuman.. Rdo de Tafi del Valle.. Salta Cafayate

10/25

Tucuman was awesome and especially Cafayate. Sofia and I took a 2 hour bus ride to Tucuman from Santiago where we stayed in a nice apartment in a brand new building. Tucuman was clearly bigger then Santiago but still had its own unique charm and a lot of big buildings. I got to meet Sofia's Aunt who invited us over to dinner where I had the best empanadas (ie. turnovers) I have had this trip. The following day we went to have lunch at a hotel in the hills outside the city. We took a bus up a a mountain on this very winding road. Our bus driver was wiping it around the bends and it was more thrilling then most Disney World rides honestly. It was foggy out so the world around us was all white, which was kind of unfortunate because the view was spectacular of the city (I got to see it a little on the bus ride down the mountain.) We Sofia told me to look for the big Jesus and that would signal us to get off. We didnt see any Jesus and she went to talk to the bus driver. We had missed the stop so we got off the bus and calculated that we were a 1 km away from the hotel we wanted be. At this point we were on a back country road completely vulnerable. I have to admit I was a little scared at first that we were this vulnerable. We started walking (most of it was up hill). Sofia said "There is the Jesus". No wonder we missed it. We finally made it to the hotel.

It was interesting because on our trips in and out of the hotel grounds we had a different homeless dog escorts.

The bus was supposed to come at 8 am and the next bus wasn't until 2:15 pm (which didn't arrive until 3) so we hung out at the bus for a little over an hour as to not miss it. To pass time we played with the homeless dogs.

Our favorite and most protective of the bunch.

 We had a rotation of 3 dogs with us at first but at some point I looked out and saw about 6 dogs some with very big builds all running toward the bus stop. Fortunately we were not attacked. All the dogs ran away and finally the bus came. Later that day the same Aunt we visited the night before had a party for 2 of Sofia' nieces. Apparently this is common in Argentina. Party for the sake of party without it being a birthday or any special occasion.

Tucuman from Aunts Rooftop patio.

After 2 nights in the hotel we embarked on a road trip with a married couple who were Sofia's long time friends. There was another girl with us whose boyfriend lived in Cafayate so it was a group of 6 of us. They were all really sweet people who did speak some English so communication was pretty good. We drove two hours passing fields of sugar cane and landscape. I wanted to stay awake to look out the window but I fell asleep and I don't regret it because I needed it. When I awoke I was amidst probably the biggest mountains I have ever seen. (Defiantly) Also I saw the biggest cacti I have ever seen and a lot of them. Every time I see a surface of stone, brick, or any thing, I think about how it would make a great back drop for a photo shoot. Seeing the cacti makes me want to to a all cactus photo shoot. I think photography is definitely something that I enjoy and would We stopped at the little city of Rdo del Valle and got gas and shopped around. I bought typically Argentinean gaucho shoes and a sweater as well as some gifts to take home.  We walked up to an overlook and ate pepperoni and cheese. One direction, the north, look dry as a bone with the mountains brown, while to the south, the landscape held a layer of fog and the mountains held vegetation. We drove again another 2 hours and arrived at our campsite in Cafayate where we spent the night after having merienda in the plaza, drinking wine, playing guitar and charango and casually plucking meat from an asado. I was hoping to see the stars from our campsite but it was too well lit which was probably for the best. The following day we went to a vineyard for a wine testing. In hind sight I should have paid a little and sat through the 3 minutes of Spanish I wouldn't understand just to try the wines but instead I opted to sit with Sofia on the porch of the vineyard and soak in the sights. It was so gorgeous that I don't regret it either. The mountains in Cafayate were dry but covered in large cacti. The view was truly reminiscent of heaven.

Going Out

October 17th.

It is crazy that I only have a little over 2 weeks left in my visit to Argentina. I have had a lot of fun this past weekend. Friday night we celebrated Sofia's birthday and went out with 2 of her friends to 2 different bar/clubs. We started  the pregame at her house at about midnight and didn't leave to the the first club until 2 am. I gained a new perspective on this late night behavior. A lot of people don't really want to stay up that late, they just do because that's the only time things are "lit" or alive. Up until 2 am or a little after people are sitting. The music is, what people from the US are more used to, hip hop or dubstep. Later in the night you hear Latino music with a cumbia beat. I had went to the club in Cordoba too and I had a much less of a  good time even though I really tried. It was so crowded that I couldn't dance. People seemed to just take over your space as if you didn't exist . When I resisted this it seemed like more of an offensive move then the intended defensive one I was aiming for. There seemed to be a constant flow of people walking through our group. Friday night however we were not as crowded. Sofia's cousin who worked at the club even gave us a whole bottle of Smirnoff. I had never had alcohol at my disposal like that at a club. We danced until about 4:30 AM and then went to a hotel restaurant for lomito. A steak egg and ham sandwich with mayonnaise. Saturday night went and got Sushi to celebrate Sofia's sisters birthday. whose birthday was Sunday. The sushi took over an hour to get but it was really good once it came so it was worth it. Serving at restaurants here is much different then in the States. Here it the server doesn't come to you a lot. Just the essential times like to order and to dispatch food and the bill.

The 3rd week drop.

October 19th
Yesterday I felt a little home sick. I find this to be normal for me as the idea of going home to my own room and not living out of a suitcase becomes starts becoming sweeter. I know, however that once I do go home, after a day or so I will be ready for another adventure. So I am going to keep the mindset that as I finish out my journey. My previous experience has shown me that around week 3 of a trip and the initial excitement is over that this stage sets in. It is only temporary though and the end of my trip will rebound. The language barrier has been getting to me a little. Conversations that are social I participate in parts of and I am left out of business oriented conversations. I understand though.. It is up to me to adapt. I find I can only listen so much to people talk words I don't understand. I understands words here and there but I miss whole pieces of sentences and I'm sure many nuances of conversations. I do think that I am getting better at listening and deciphering  actual words instead of gibberish when people speak. Sofia ordered food for me in the hotel and when I went to pick up and pay for the order. It was clear that did not speak Spanish. When the delivery guy left he said "entiendo nada" and I replied "entiendo un poco" feeling slightly insulted. I have been in a hotel the past 3 nights because Sofia's apartment, I was staying in, needed to be rented. The hotel is frustrating because I cannot log onto the WIFI. If there is one thing that really needs to work for foreigners in a different country it is WIFI. I asked the guy at the desk and he told me that it was better to work from the lobby after a fragmented conversation in Spanish. The other thing is that the shower leaks water onto the bathroom floor. I feel like I am complaining like a first world spoiled brat but can you blame me? I just want the basic things to work like my WIFI and my shower. Tomorrow I leave the hotel though so I am not too too worried about it. Sofia and I are going to the Tucuman. We are going to go camping and I am very excited to see the landscape. Tucuman apparently is a little bit bigger of a city then Santiago but I hope to see mountains.

A life time's meat and potato's

October 14th
I have been reflecting on a conversation I had back in Cordoba with a member of the band Power Sexy, Guanma. Sofia and Power Sexy did a cover of Barbie girl that was really good and I filmed it for Instagram. I accidentally stole Guanma's shirt because it was under my jacket so the day following the recording he invited me to go on some errands with him and I gave him back my shirt.We walked through the beautiful and unfamiliar Cordoba and talked about how his band had made it viral through a video but that it was not enough to constantly strive to make viral hits. As an artist, or artists  you need basic material. The analogy I thought of immediately was meat and potatoes vs. the ice cream. The ice cream is the viral videos that make it big. But a meal can't be all ice cream or it isn't any good (at least not nourishing) a meal requires meat and potatoes or real content with substance. One thing I have learned while creating this blog is how time consuming it can really be to do something well. I am came into this blog with no real expectations of it but to reach the bare minimum of blog still has required time and real content. I find my mind still drifting toward the idea that I could write a passage that would acquire many views and be really enjoyed by people and be really good. This is a trap fall I feel that I have and probably a lot of people have been absorbed in. Writing a really good blog is not to come all of a sudden. I need to work up a lot more meat a potato's and share those meat and potato's a lot more before I were to break through to the ice cream. This meat and potatoes metaphor has me thinking differently then I did before about careers. Those 8 hours a day people go to work is what primarily determines the content or meat and potato's of their life. That's why it is so crucial to do what your passion is and what will make you great in those hours. So when you are older you can look back at your life and see more then just time spent making money but time spent making you great. Here is some meat and potato's in the form of a Lomito I had in a a restaurant called Budda in Satiago Del Estero. 

The most positive negative thing I have ever experienced.

October 13th
Yesterday during our merienda date, we had coffee and juice and merialunas(croissants), Sofia's eye started bothering her. There was a heavy fan blowing on us so she thought that I was drying out her eye. Fast forward to after her birthday dinner her eye was still bothering her. She gestured me to follow her, I did and we were off to the hospital. We took a taxi to maybe 3 minutes down the road and pulled up on a semi dark building. Sofia had told me that her friend who is an eye doctor was working the night shift and she had texted her and her friend was waiting for us. The lobby of the old building was empty besides one man sleeping on the chairs. We moved forward to the next room. Both were lit in a dull blue glow that felt abandoned or out of a sad movie.  Front help desk area was dark and the walls were old brick and covered in old bronze plaques. Then Sofia's eye doctor friend comes out from the door to our left and welcomes us both with a hug and kiss. We go back into the room and she explains to me that this hospital is only for the eyes and that we were in the emergency room which is not crowded at night but is in the morning. She gets right to work helping Sofia with her eye. She uses a numbing eye drop on her eye and starts looking and sees a tiny foreign body in her cornea. She lets me look into the the microscope where and tells me to look. Honestly I don't know if I saw the foreign body or not but her eye looked so cool through the light. It was like looking into a honey nut cheerios commercial. Her brown eye glowing like a pool of honey. It was awesome how informal that the whole process was and not to mention hasty. A trip like this to the eye doctor at 11:30 at night I would imagine would never happen In the US. The only place that would be open would be the actual emergency room and the trip would be far from fast and I would have never been explained details and allowed to look through the lens. Sofia's friend used a q-tip and and swabbed the foreign body out of her eye. All together I felt bad that Sofia had to spend the final hours of her birthday at the hospital but I thought it was really cool that I got to see some of the Argentinian health care experience in such a unique positive light. Besides the actual lighting of the building.

Cordoba

October 12. I spent last Wednesday through Sunday in Cordoba the second biggest city in Argentina.This is a picture of me in front of the Cañada a famous canal which was right out front of our appartmen It was beautiful and clean. One thing I noticed is that there are no stop signs. The bigger road gets the right away but this does not always seem obvious. The big intersections do have traffic lights. There are also no speed limit signs in the city. As far as I can tell people go whatever speed they desire. there is alot of pedestrian traffic crossing streets. I am very careful crossing streets and I makes me nervous so it took some time for me to get the hang of it. I am not supper familiar with city life but this city is reminiscent of something you could find in the US. Plenty of high rise buildings.  There was a pretty big mall that was nice and very expensive.  Sofia and I got lazy one night and we got McDonalds for dinner in the mall. I was curious if the meat would be any different. It was.. it definitely tasted more like real ground beef.  I swear it was not right away that I ate the Mcdonalds  I have eaten a lot of other foods like empanadas ,lomitos. choripan. (which is their drunk food; it like a flat sausage sub that you get all kinds of peppers and good stuff, we got it from a food truck and here is a picture of me eating it with the view behind me.) Also I ate medialuna and factori which are for merienda and special to Cordoba They were like biscuits. I am still dying to eat asado which is their BBQ cookout..UPDATE I had asado for lunch today it wasn't BBQ but rather smoked meat. It was served and it traditionally eaten with french fried with eggs. In the city I got an entire sub for 50 pesos ($3.25 usd) this sub was really good with plenty of toppings and cheese. that was probably the best value I have gotten so far. Also there has been a lot of homemade mayonnaise that were, honestly, really good. (I don't like mayonnaise probably because it was ruined for me as a child by taking a normal bite and getting a huge amount of mayo in my mouth.. people love it too much). A lot of the restaurants (everyone I've been to so far) has served some type of bread or crackers at arrival. When its bread it comes with their homemade mayo today with the asado it was garlic mayo so I pretended it was garlic sauce made with egg and oil. The  things seem to be a little cheaper here especially going out to restaurants but things still add up. I am not nearly through my money as I counted today and still have over $1000. At an expensive restaurant for 2 people getting a entree and a beer ends up being about 550 pesos. Every 100 pesos I calculate to be around 6.50 usd. Their 100 peso bills are kinda like our 20 bills except they go through them quicker obviously. Overall, around 35 dollars for a 2 person dinner at a nice restaurant is pretty good. We went to see some of Sofia's friends perform at a restaurant called the "Rooftop". Surrounded by Spanish speakers I was embraced by the familiar English songs played by Sofia's friends. Not just a couple, but every single song was English. 90% of the songs I have heard here in general, whether be in stores or live, has been in English. It is crazy how universal a language is through its simplicity and domination of pop culture. On Sunday at 12 we left the apartment and took a bus north to Santiago del Estero. The bus was very comfortable and I would rate it high on my bus travel experiences. The bus ride was 6 hours and the all of it seemed to was farmlands or dessert and you could see very far.. As we got closer to Santiago I saw many shacks and small houses. People were outside gathered around a table from adults to kids. I wondered what would it would be like to live a life like that. One with probably no tv and only the company of your relatives not to mention hard days on a farm working. 

The Final Leg Angst

October 4th 9:00 am - I am not in the US anymore...

October 4th 7:00 pm I made it to the last leg of my journey. Brazil has already taught me a lot in the past 12 hours I have been here. Well, I have 2 more hours to go but that seems like nothing, but feels like forever honestly. The language shock hit hard as the undertone of my 9 am post...It felt weird not being able to speak in ingles to anyone and get results. As it was I kind of did that. After a point I decided I was going to ask people if they spoke English in Spanish before rattling off statements at them. They often said they spoke a little. I didn't think to learn any Portuguese but I found the little Spanish I know did the trick so it wasn't worth worrying about the detail I didn't know the actual language. So far today I've seen a total of 3 English speakers since Ive been in Brasil. I imagine that this kind of solitude wont go away in some ways but will also get better once I am with Sofia. I cant believe that I will ever arrive. And that I will be with Sofia. Oh! they accepted my US dollars and I bought a sub for 7 dollars which i consider a fair price for an airport but I wonder what value I would have gotten had I converted. I would love to get some amazing bang for my buck while I am in Argentina. Now I am praying my checked luggage makes it through to Cordoba. Every person I have asked so far has seemed to think it would happen but there has been no definite "yes, you don't need to pick it up your baggage". 12 hours is too long a layover.. Thank goodness it is not the same on the way back.

October 5th - PS. My luggage made it! If it had not my ending journey would have been double in length as I would have looked for it forever and then had to report it missing. I went through 2 checks and was on my way down large hallway with glass walls where I knew I would find Sofia waiting. I couldn't help but smile. I had made it and I was about to see my long lost lady.

The journey begins

October 3rd, 2016
I sit in the airport ready to go on an extremely unique trip that was only ever possible through my unique situation and stage of life. I am going to visit a beautiful Argentinean woman in her home country. I don't have a job as I just graduated college. I did a summer internship which extended my time to settle down with job from my degree. That turned into planning a trip to follow my internship. I need money so I sought out a job through a connection I made doing kayak tours with my internship. Connections have taken me so far when I step back and think about it. It is always worth it to be friendly and talking to people. Being shy and stuck in your own head is a waste of time. Especially since most of that time is not fully enjoyed. Talking to people is how I ended up with a foreign girlfriend and on the way to a country I would have never guessed I'd go to 6 months ago. I am fortunate enough to be able to live with my parents which helped me save promptly for this trip. I also worked hard though. My landscaping job I was paid 10 dollars an hour and worked 10 hour days. I thought I was going to be able to learn all the tricks of the trade of landscaping especially in the making of patios and decks. Ultimately the language barrier I feel prevented this from happening so I mainly just watched him like a hawk when I could. It was nice to be able to listen to my fellow workers speak the language even though the Mexican Spanish supposedly way different then the Argentinean and I they did teach me some knew things to say. I have been practicing Spanish through the app duo-lingo and a little through books.We'll see I'd like to learn a lot of Spanish while I am there with Sofia as my primary teacher. When my internship and job had ended I had a a solid 1,500 dollars but my goal for the trip was 2,000 dollars. I made a deal with my parents to put in a patio for them before I left on the trip. This would give me the extra $500 I wanted to take on the trip. Although I wasn't a pro patio builder, with a little bit of research and few phone calls to my previous employer I was able to build a whopping 12 by 20 ft patio in my backyard. My parents and I finished laying the bricks yesterday. I am so excited to be reunited with my woman I haven't seen since May 18th where I cried like a baby at 5 am when she was gone. I had never cried like that in my adult.. even teenage life. So I figure it is a good sign that I really like her. I am going into this vacation with out any real expectations about us and our future but rather just try to see how it goes. I will try to reevaluate when I am back in the States. I think that is the best way of making sure my thinking is stable. But is our thinking ever really stable as human beings? I am planning to pursue my passion of music on this trip and record a lot of songs onto Instagram with Sofia.