Los Chalchaleros

A really cool Argentinian band of gauchos that has been in existence for 60 years..of course the members change, sons of original members take their father's places. Never have they performed not wearing their gaucho uniforms. Really awesome.

Today was a great day. We went to San Telmo, a really great little bohemian district with amazing antique shops and little cafes. Every Sunday in San Telmo there is a street fair where vendors sell items that range from beautiful vintage lace to antique guns to pieces of old chandeliers to crazy antique telephones. Needless to say I was like a kid in a candy store. There was also a great vintage shop where I bought some little wonders including an amazing Italian jumpsuit and a gorgeous red vintage robe that makes me feel like a 1950s show girl.

The great little store:


The Awesome Jumpsuit:

A Day at the Estancia

Yesterday our program took us on a trip to an "estancia," a kind of countryside/ranch place. It was very beautiful, and actually looked a lot like Texas. There were plenty of horses, cows, even some llamas. And on this particular estancia there was a hotel. We arrived, were fed amazing home-made empanadas de carne, and then walked around the grounds. It was so relaxing and peaceful. Gauchos were cooking meat on huge outdoor grills, and others were taking groups for rides on horses. After a while we ate lunch, which included blood sausage. I was almost positive this was a kind of scare-tactic, you know calling it blood sausage when it actually contained no blood. So I asked the gaucho what was in it and he replied, very nonchalantly, "Sangre." I laughed and me and Ariana decided we had to try everything, so why not. It had a very unpleasant texture to say the least. After that we saw a series of traditional Argentinian dances performed on stage and then the dancers came out and chose different people to come up and dance with them. I was chosen by one of the gauchos to dance a polka which was pretty fun. After that we were taken outside to a kind of short race-track which just spanned up and down about the length of half a football field. there was a wire suspended across the end of one side of the track, and from the wire hung two small pipes with little rings attached to the ends. We had no idea what these were for, nor were we warned about anything, when all of a sudden a gaucho came running on horseback at light speed and stood up in his stirrups, and attempted to put a pointed metal stick through the tiny ring. His first try was a fail. :( But after he and his fellow gauchos succeeded at removing the rings from the pipes every other time, we realized that this fail was probably just for show. It was incredibly cool to watch and at the end, the gauchos gave their little key-rings to different girls in the audience. haha, never to the men which I thought was funny and probably custom. After this bit of entertainment we were free to lay in the grass or play soccer or ride horses again for a while before we boarded our bus and took the two-hour ride back to Buenos Aires.

Some Lovely Sites on the Estancia:








The Crazy Races:

Wolves are On My Mind

Little Red loves Lavish Cloth

A recent spread in the September issue of Vogue made me a little nostalgic for storytime and jealous that I wasn't sitting next to a Big Bad Wolf of my own:

Protests and Pudding

Today was another very long day. It began when we woke up at 7:45 to get ready for the beginning of our orientation week. Our building where classes are given is actually very beautiful. It looks European-ish. It's very small but then there are only about 60 students in this program. Anyway we had a routine "This is Buenos Aires. These are the rules" kind of talk which made Ari and I very sleepy. So, we went home, took a nap, and then ate some chocolate pudding. :D That was nice. Then we went back to school for a tour of the city..which is now tour number two. The cool thing about going on this tour is that because it was during the week there were protests in front of the Pink House. There was one going on for the veterans of wars that went unrecognized by the state and we were told that every thursday there is a march done by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. I really need to go into detail about this one because it's something that I hadn't known about before and thought was incredibly sad and interesting. The Madres de Plaza de Mayo is an organization of women who work to find the identities of their children,(thought to have been political dissidents) who were victims of "forced dissapearance" in the mid-seventies during the "Dirty War" in Argentina. These people, who were mostly students, were believed to have been heavily drugged by the military and thrown alive out of airplanes over the Atlantic Ocean. Without a body, the government could easily deny that these people had been killed or had ever existed. There were thousands of disappearances during this time, and this organization of mothers pulls for several causes that they believe their children were fighting for. Learning about this was probably the most interesting part of my day. A new friend told me that there's a movie that's all about this time in Argentina called "La Verdadera Historia" or something of that nature. I'll double check tomorrow.

signs from the veterans' protest:




One location under a now-highway where many bodies of "the dissapeared" were recently found buried. It has now been decorated to mark the spot and honor those found:

Unpacking is Hard to Do

Thought I'd just post a little diddy about our wierd unpacking experiences. Ariana and I brought way too much...about 3 suitcases each. Miraculously, we managed to maximise space enough to where everything fit in our various drawers and cool little closets :D here are some pictures documenting the event:


Ariana discovers my fur beanie:




Creeper in the closet: