Spanish living

Let's see, to update:

My Spanish is getting better. It inevitably does, just by hanging around and talking to people. Even if you spent your afternoons here speaking English (and I don't) I don't think you could help but absorb the language from street signs, movies, and conversations in the street. That's one good thing about being in a Spanish-speaking place - almost every activity can be excused as studying, almost everything is. If, like this past Saturday, I spend the afternoon playing ping-pong with some guys from Cordoba, I'm studying. Even if I sit on the couch and watch the Lord Of The Rings Trilogy in Spanish, I'm studying, more or less.

Of course I have been doing more for my spanish than watching movies and hanging out. Two big educational activities have been reading and traveling. The other day I spent the morning reading "El Principito", The Little Prince. Last week I finished going through a short series of middle school detective novels in Spanish, the "Lucas Lenz" series.

The back of the Lucas Lenz books say for 12 years of age. So apparently I'm at a very awkward age in Spanish. That explains the feeling of a lot of my conversations here, i.e. yesterday I described a rubber band as "the little circles that stretch". I'm at a point where I might describe myself as "good" but still end up saying ridiculous things like this morning when I asked, "Sir, could you show me the little batteries of three a's?"

I've recently developed a love of Tango, specifically the work of the late, great composer Astor Piazzolla. By the time he was a teenager he was an accordian prodigy and fluent in Spanish, English, French, and Italian. He then spent his life composing the majority of the classic Argentine tangos, and is now something of a cultural symbol - to many, a hero. It's funny, knowing just this much about the Tango culture here is like a password. It gets you in to some real Argentine conversations. Just this weekend I was in Esquel (more in a minute) and found myself talking to the owner of a small hotel next to my campground. I happened to mention that I'm studying tango guitar here and that I'm enjoying Piazzolla, and his face lit up and he took my by the shoulder like an old friend. He sat me down, we shared mate and food, and just generally chatted for a while about "the crisis", 70s rock, and American movies.

Now, maybe I'm likeable enough without a secret tango password - like I've said before, Argentines make the warmest strangers - but it definitely doesn't hurt.

Today's collection of pictures will be from a hiking trip in Esquel, a medium-sized city about 500 km south of here. The bus ride is really comfortable. I got to sit on the front row of the second story of a double-decker bus, so it kind of felt like I was in an airplane cockpit. The good news is that I could easily understand the Spanish-dubbed movie on the loud TV directly in front of me. The bad news is that the movie was Baby Mama, so I spent the whole 2 hours wishing I couldn't.

I have seen exactly 2 days of rain in my 6 weeks here. Rainy day numbers 3 and 4 happened to come during our hike in Esquel. The first half-day of serious storming was pretty exciting as an extreme little weather novelty. I got to actually see the storm's sheet of rain blow into the valley in front of me, and at one point we actually had to stop hiking because the incredible Patagonian wind was threatening to blow us off the trail. Note that these hiking stories are not exaggerated to make me seem like a competent wilderness survivalist taking on the harsh Patagonia (though I'm not saying that I'm not). I took off my pack and jumped into the air and landed like 3 feet away. We rushed down the mountain for fear of lightning up there.

Night 1 on a deserted sand beach, then the second night at a nice campground fit with bathroom shack. The hikes here tend to be unpredictable like that. We hid from the rain and cooked in the bathroom, with all our wet clothes hanging from the stall doors. The downpour reminded me of Alaska. I slept wet, but it was really fun.





During the storm, from campsite 1. Thankfully my camera is waterproof.