Dispatches from...

South Africa - 6

2010-05-19T18:29:00.000-07:00

I got into Johannesburg in the afternoon, a Sunday. I called the hostel and they told me a driver was waiting there at the airport, about to leave. They said his name was Jamma. He was wearing a blue shirt. To hurry up.

I found him. We walked back and he called to a skinny blond girl sitting on a bench. She picked up her hiking bag and Jamma took us to his Explorer and we got in and he drove into the city.

The girl was Polish. Her hair was greasy and pulled back into a ponytail. Her eyes were blue. Her face was sunburned. She smiled when I asked her questions. She’d been living in Scotland for four years, living on an island and taking care of horses and working at a restaurant. She took a couple months off for the winter and was going on an overland tour in a converted truck from South Africa up to Kenya. They’d stop at the big nature reserves and camp-out at night along the highway. There were a dozen other people going. The truck was leaving from the hostel we were headed to, from the Backpackers’ Ritz.

There was some traffic.

We got to the Ritz. It was at the end of a lane of big mansions and offices-inside-mansions. There were black metal fences and electric wire around each place. You could see off into the hills between each place. The hills were all trees.

There were two gates to enter the Ritz. Two fences. In between the fences were thick coils of razor wire, wrapped through bushes and tree branches.

The Ritz was in an old mansion.

A tall fat white-haired guy was working the desk. He had a scratchy low voice. When the girl and I gave him our passports he laughed at our pictures and asked what we’d been on. He explained where everything was in the hostel, how to get stuff, what was nearby. He said it like he was reading a list he’d had to read too many times.

There was a kitchen but the guy said there wouldn’t be any dinner, that he’s the cook but hasn’t felt like cooking for a while.

There was a pool in the backyard of the place, down by a guest house. The water was green. There were a few kids sitting around on the grass drinking beer. Some of them were on the same overland tour as the Polish girl. I walked down there and sat on the grass and didn’t know what to do. There was a girl lying off by herself on a higher part of the lawn. She had dark hair and dark eyes. I thought maybe she was from South America.

I walked up and checked my mail to see if my friend C. had made any more plans to come visit. She hadn’t written.

I walked out to the front porch. That same girl was sitting there smoking a cigarette. I went back in and bought a pack at the front desk.

She was French, it turned out. She was doing an internship in Jo-burg and was waiting to get picked up by a brother in this host family she’d stayed with for a couple weeks. A tall skinny Scandinavian guy came up and said something to her. He had short gelled hair and was wearing tight white jeans and an undershirt.

I left and walked back down the lane to a busy street. The bakery and the fruit stand and everything else was shut in the shopping center to the right.

There was a lot of traffic. A lot of nice cars. Only a couple people on foot. It was warm, balmy. They said it was safe around there.

I walked to a BP station. I bought some biltong – cured spicy meat – and a Mail and Guardian, which comes out on weekends, a couple potpies and a Coke.

I walked back.

The potpies had been sitting out at the BP and were cold. I heated them in the microwave. They got hot and soft.

The Ritz is at the top of the hill and you can see almost to downtown Jo-burg. I went to a picnic table in a garden and ate my pies and watched the sun go down and listened to an episode of Entitled Opinions.

My mom gave me a call from the U.S. I told her Frithjof was supposed to be getting into South Africa today and that I hoped we’d meet up the next day. I called the two numbers he gave me to call: the taxi driver Mike and the innkeeper Richard. Mike referred to Frithjof as the professor. He said he’d tell him to call me.

I was sleeping in a big circular room at the top of a tower of the mansion. There were a dozen bunk beds along the wall but only a couple people staying the night. The windows were dusty and some of the latches were broken. Only a couple opened. The ceiling was curved and the floors were wood. You could hear echoes of your voice when you stood at the right spot. The air was thick and hot when I first walked in there and put my stuff down.

I hung around the lounge after it got dark and kept reading The Wretched of the Earth. A girl came up to me and pointed at the book and said it was great. She walked out to the front porch to smoke.

I walked out there.

Her name was Lia. She was from Italy. She said she’d read Wretched of the Earth in French for a class in Paris. She’s doing a Masters on transgenderism in Africa. She took mini-bus taxis everyday from the Ritz to Wits University downtown to research in their library. She’d spent a while in Nairobi working on the same thing at a university there. She had brown hair and skin whose best description was…stereotypically…olive oil.

She told me to check out Andre Brink. That she’d read A Dry White Season and liked it. I told her about Waiting for the Barbarians.

I went up to the dorm to go to bed. I got under the covers and lied there. It wasn’t so hot anymore. Then a mosquito hummed by my ear.

I didn’t sleep much. The mosquitoes started biting. Then a couple people checked in late and unpacked their bags and got into their beds. Then a couple people checked out early and packed up their bags and left their beds.

In the morning there was a lady working in the kitchen. I ordered toast and beans and orange juice. The toast was white bread with some butter. The beans were heated up from a can. The orange juice was a concentrate powder mix.

I took my plate back to the picnic table and ate outside again. It was sunny and humid but not too hot yet.

I went back inside to read. The fat man from the day before was lying down on the sofa in the lounge. He was watching a history show on Scotland. He said he should get some work done and got up and sauntered out to the patio and smoked a cigarette. He had a dry hard cough while he smoked.

There was a chalkboard on the wall. It was supposed to list dinner on it. It said instead Thought of Day: The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like Prostitutes…

A couple backpackers came to check-in. The fat man made fun of their passports.

I was going to go the mall and the bakery and wait for a call from Frithjof.

South Africa - 5

2010-05-02T21:08:00.000-07:00

A driver named Malcolm picked me up the next day. When I tried to leave the hostel the key code for the gate didn’t work. They said they changed it and gave me the new combo.

Malcolm brought me back to the consulate.

He wasn’t allowed to park in the lot. He dropped me off and said he’d be waiting in a strip mall and to just give him a missed call when I was done.

I met with a large man in a red and white Hawaiian shirt. He led me down a hallway that had a very large and original Roy Lichtenstein painting on the wall.

There were a dozen TVs in his office, stacked on metal shelving, muted, playing news and commercials and daytime talk shows. A few of them were showing Tony Blair being questioned on the invasion of Iraq.

I wasn’t able to offer much help about the thing I was brought back to talk to him about. The man in the Hawaiian shirt said it was OK.

He led me outside. It was windy and sunny. He said he didn’t care. Whatever. I gave him my e-mail address. He gave me his card.

I called Malcolm and we got back on the highway. We drove past Khayelitsha again. There was a prostitute waving a yellow flag. The oldest game in town, Malcolm said.

There was a big brush fire ahead off the road. Fire trucks were pulled up near it. The flames were blowing close to the shanties.

I got back to the hostel. One of the American study abroad students called and wanted to meet with me.

I walked onto campus. A colored guy came up to me and mumbled something and sort of put his hand out. I thought he was asking for money but just said huh? He pointed at his wrist like asking for the time. I looked at my watch and told him and walked away and felt guilty but also suspicious.

I met the student. He had a bag of laundry with him.

We went to a place next to The Nook and got a table outside. He got an Appletiser. I got a cappuccino. The tables had white tablecloths and blown-glass vases with roses in them.

He wanted to show me a documentary he made the semester before. He took out his Macbook. It was red. It was the same red as his Lacoste polo.

A toothless black homeless man came up to us and put out his hand for change. We said we didn’t have anything. He walked away.

A little disheveled black kid came up selling long-handled wooden spoons and feather dusters. We also waved him off.

There were some Afrikaner girls sitting at a table across from us. One of the girls was slouched against the booth, laughing, sipping a milkshake. She had on the same kind of sandals that my girlfriend in Argentina spent several gratuitous hours shopping for in Buenos Aires a day before I flew home to Chicago.

He showed me the documentary. It was about a school in a colored township. There were interviews with a few kids and one of the administrators of the school. There were shots of the township. They were shot from inside a bus as it drove through the neighborhood.

We finished our drinks and got the bill. It came in a cigar box.

I walked to the art museum. There was a permanent collection of a lot of European-style painting and an anthropological section on African tribes from the region.

One of the captions on the wall read: “Young Thembu men dressed in their beaded finery and decorative head-cloths on their way to intlambe: a formal gathering of their peer group organized as an age association, which has important socialization functions and to which any initiated males and marriageable females belong.”

I walked upstairs. There were a lot of gray-haired white people looking at drawings on the walls. There was a new show opening of illustrations done by a couple early European settlers of Cape Town.

I was looking at a portrait of some Cape Malay slaves. An old lady came up next to me and said the slave girl’s hairstyle was very modern, like the mannequins in the fashion stores today.

The only non-white person was a kid on the museum staff helping set-up chairs.

It was a gathering of the Friends of the Museum. They took their seats and a younger man started explaining this illustrator and how gentleman in those times would be able to draw quite well and so on.

I stayed back from the chairs and just kept looking closely at the drawings.

A lady started coughing and staggered out to the hall. Her continued hacking echoed from the hallway back into the hushed gallery. Her cell phone then went off with the familiar Nokia tune and also echoed back into the hushed gallery.

I walked past the crowd and tried to get out. A lady, one of the Friends’ organizers, asked didn’t I want to stay for the talk?

I looked at her, paused. She said oh go on no you don’t.

I walked back to the entrance of the museum. There were a few monographs for sale. I saw one on Willie Bester, the sculptor. The guy at the front desk gave me a copy. I paid. Then I asked for a second one, for my friend C. who told me she was going to come visit me from France.

I walked a couple blocks outside of town, to a creek. The sidewalks ended.

I walked back downtown. I took a picture of a shadow of a tree on a white wall and noticed some guys down the street looking at me. I walked past them. One of them was selling mangoes. I asked for two. He wanted to sell me a whole box. Then he offered four with a fifth thrown in free for twenty Rand. I asked for two. He said five for twenty. I walked away.

I went to a Pick ‘n Pay and bought a couple pot pies and a big slice of watermelon. At the checkout the guy in front of me took out an old yellow plastic bag. The cashier took it like she expected to and put the groceries inside. I got up and said I’d use my backpack. It didn’t seem to be a big deal.

I walked back to the hostel and re-heated my curry beef pie in the microwave and ate it with the watermelon at a picnic table in the shade. I read some more of Waiting for the Barbarians.

A couple was in the kitchen near me. The wife asked where the milk was. Her husband said it’s in a plastic pouch next to the water!

I walked to a park. There were a lot of black people barbequing and hanging out. I didn’t see any white people. I got looks when I walked past.

I walked along a trail, under some trees, past rock sculptures. There were wildfire warnings on signs. I took some pictures, read. I saw some graffiti that said ZEITGEIST, which I’d talked about in a lecture in Argentina.

That night the undergrads called me up and invited me to an informal gathering of their peer group. It was a barbeque, a braai. Their dorm was down the road from my hostel.

I called them when I got there. We walked past a couple other dorms. A bottle was thrown out a window and smashed on the ground. There was hooting and yelling and people talking loudly and happily.

There was a security door to get into the dorm. It was a thick glass sliding door that opened in the middle and shut after a few seconds. It made a merciless whoosh when it closed. It seemed like the doors to a pressure lock of a spaceship or underwater research station.

The girl who met me said Bradley spent like several minutes with them emphasizing that these doors will hurt you very badly and you just have to be calm and step right through and not mess around.

We got up and stepped through and walked to the courtyard.

There were a lot of study abroad students milling around. One kid from Mexico. One from Iran. A lot of Americans. There was boerewors and potatoes and ostrich meat on the grill. There was some wine in plastic cups to drink.

A couple students came into the courtyard. A girl was pushing a metal grocery cart. She heaved it aside and they walked upstairs to a room.

We ate. Talked. I was going on and on to this one girl about this friend of mine C. who seemed like she was going to come visit me. I hadn’t seen her in person for almost a year and a half, and even that last time was just for a few hours.

This girl and I got to talking about relationships. She’s from a farm town in the Great Plains and said if she marries a lousy husband then that just must be Christ’s plan for her.

The Iranian kid was talking to an American about how big America is and the American said five thousand kilometers and the Iranian went “Five thousand kilometers…wheeumph!”

The American talking to him had long blond hair slicked back and held down with a sweatband. I asked him what he was doing at Stellenbosch. He said he’s in Arts, so he can do anything.

I left. The girl I was talking to walked me out and opened the threatening sliding door for me and gave me a hug and said bye.

I got back to my hostel and took down my clothes from the hangars and folded up all the paper and brochures and maps I’d gotten since I’d arrived. I was leaving for Johannesburg the next day.

I was going to there to meet up with Frithjof Bergmann. He was flying to Jo-burg from Germany the day after I’d get there. He’d sent me a couple e-mails with the numbers of the taxi driver and of the private house where he stays. Though he said I couldn't stay at the house because it's sort of a brothel.

In Stellenbosch they’d kept asking if I had accommodations and an itinerary with Frithjof. I just kept saying it’d be taken care of.

I made a reservation at the Backpackers’ Ritz, a hostel in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg. The biggest thing it's closest to is the Hyde Park shopping mall. They were going to send somebody to pick me up from airport.

Bradley had given me some laminated in-case-of-emergency contact info cards. I put one in my notebook, one in a pocket of my backpack and one in my shoe. I charged my phone. I got into bed and finished Waiting for the Barbarians.

I went to sleep.

South Africa - 4.2

2010-04-12T17:05:00.000-07:00

We walked around the corner to the Slave Lodge, which is now a Cape Town museum about slavery in South Africa. The Keiskamma Altarpiece was there in the entrance hall for a few more days.

Bradley checked his watch and said we must’ve missed the noon canon, which is a canon that gets shot off at 12:00 and used to be a way to set your clock or watch but now is traditional and tends to frighten visitors and children.

The Keiskamma altar is in the style of the Issenheim altarpiece, which was made in France in the 1500s. It was made at a monastery that was treating people with ergotism. Ergotism in those days came from eating bad bread, with a fungus in it. Symptoms of the disease are divided into the convulsive and the gangrenous.

The Keiskamma piece was made mostly by women in Hamburg, which is a South African village in the Eastern Cape. The village is poor and a good number of people there have or have died of HIV/AIDS.

A girl from the village was working at the museum as a guide for the altarpiece. She told us all about it and with Bradley on one side and her on the other opened the heavy wide panels and showed all the scenes of the altar. She said all the books about the altarpiece were sold out but this video playing on the small television set on the pedestal to her left explained how it was made and was (the DVD) available for purchase. She said the altar’s been touring around the world but is almost done now, but that it’s too big to be put in the church in Hamburg.

We walked into the slavery museum but there was a rather unreasonable and ocularly-fatiguing amount of text on the walls and we got tired of reading and walked back outside into the sunshine.

We walked down Government Avenue, a leafy sidewalk away from traffic that goes past the national library and parliament and one of the president’s houses. Bradley and I talked about President JZ. We agreed that while he may well be a convicted rapist and doesn't know much about AIDS, he at least doesn’t disdain and talk above the poor people who’ve elected him – unlike his predecessor.

A flock of schoolchildren came at us. School’d gotten out. They were wearing baby blue blazers with some complex school crest over the breast and baby blue vests and ties. The boys were wearing wool slacks and the girls skirts. Most of the kids were coloured or black.

We waded through the children. I asked Bradley what language they were speaking. …English, he said.

We passed the Company’s Gardens, which was made by the VOC to grow food for the passing ships. It’s a public park now that’s lush and quiet and has a lot of tourists and homeless people sitting and hanging out and walking around inside it.

We got to the end of the path, back to a busy street.

I asked if we could get some coffee.

We walked down the street to the original Vida e Caffe, which is a chain all over the country now. It’s a simple chic café, with a big red awning out front. The design of the signs and menu have a like “Keep Calm and Carry On” British royalty PSA aesthetic. The logo’s a shield with a cross inside and a crown on top.

It’s near the art school of the University of Cape Town and near a lot of design and media studios. There was one kid sitting at a table inside with a greasy pompadour and a checker vest. On the wall was a big slab of cork with the Vida e Caffe escutcheon carved in bas-relief. There were designer t-shirts and bags for sale in the back near the bathroom. It was standard hipster fare: faded bright colors, precocious child-type illustrations.

Bradley and I got cappuccinos at a table out front. I faced the street and could see Table Mountain. The clouds had cleared and it was blue and clear and warm like a fleece blanket.

The coffee was served in a white ceramic cup that had the red emblem stamped onto it. It came on a white saucer with a tiny spoon and a square of Lindt dark chocolate.

There were some kids next to us at a table looking at fashion sketches and thumbnail photos in an album. The girl with the book had horn-rimmed Ray-Bans up on her curly hair. She was wearing a dark purple plaid shirt and black short shorts.

Bradley and I talked about what he studied and how he ended up in South Africa and how he did his PhD in Cape Town. The traffic was noisy. We had to speak up.

We sat in the shade and lounged and I looked at this enormous stone mountain glowing in the sun and thought how tiny Mount Royal in Montreal looks compared to this thing.

We walked back to Gov’t Ave. and went to the National Gallery. There were three shows on. The first in the front hall was a solo show on Alexis Preller, who was a 20th century white South African painter. His stuff is a cross between like Diego Rivera and Juan Miró and Thomas Hart Benton, but based on a lot of old African culture. Most of his paintings are portraits of objects that look wood-carved, with a lot of arcs of color floating around.

The next show was a photo exhibit on the four South African Nobel Peace Prize winners: Albert Luthuli, Desmond Tutu, FW de Klerk and Nelson Mandela. There were paintings and sculptures and photography by recent South African artists, too.

There was Mashego Segogela’s little wood sculpture-tableau “Satan’s Fresh Meat Market” – which has got black demons eating various human body parts and an angel in white filming things with a camera and a green shack with more limbs dangling as if to dry and cure and another demon working inside.

There were sculptures by Wille Bester like “For Those Left Behind”, which is a sculpture of a fat white police officer at a machine gun with a pit bull behind him, its mouth in a harness. They’re on top of a wheeled pedestal. The whole thing is made of old metal machine parts, soldered together.

The last show was called Dada South? and had some recent SA art along with the best European Dada stuff – like a sculpture of a Prussian officer with a head like a pig’s, dangling from the ceiling. They had some of John Heartfield’s photomontages for AIZ magazine that he made in the 1930s in Germany. They had the one called “Hurray, the butter is gone!” that has a German family sitting around their kitchen table all happily eating bolts and bullets and bike parts. There’s a portrait of Hitler in the background and the kitchen wallpaper has Swastikas on it.

The museum was closing at five. Bradley and I left and walked out to the gardens in front. The Southeaster wind was blowing but the afternoon was clear and bright.

A little kid ran past us. He’d dropped his green plastic lunch box and it was getting blown down the path just out of his reach. He kept running after it. It got blown underneath the fence around a statue. He squatted down and tried to reach for it but couldn’t. Bradley and I laughed and continued walking.

There was a hill straight ahead of us, in the distance, about a third as high as Table Mountain. I asked what it was.

It was Signal Hill, Bradley said. You can drive or hike up there and watch the sunset.

We drove up and walked around. You could see the new soccer/World Cup stadium near the ocean. There was a red ship in the harbor that goes and back forth to Antarctica. Another ship had printed on its side “PEACE BOAT”, and is apparently a floating NGO. Bradley said the Semester-at-Sea ship stops here too. One day he was near the waterfront and felt there were just way too many American girls everywhere so he looked near the docks and saw their large and entitled S-a-S ocean liner.

I asked him what he thought of the movie “Blood Diamond”. He said it was all filmed in South Africa, actually, even though most of it supposedly takes place in Sierra Leone. For the city scenes they just went to the parts of SA that look a little more run-down and black and typically “African”. The scene with Jennifer Connelly as she gets a cell phone call from a mortally-wounded-but-spiritually-redeemed Leonardo DiCaprio was shot at the V&A Waterfront, which was where Bradley and I’d be headed for dinner and a movie.

There was a partridge and her cheepers walking on the hill near us. I asked Bradley if he remembered how to say “happily ever after” in Spanish.

We drove back down and passed through Bo-Kaap, which is a Muslim neighborhood at the base of Signal Hill known for pastel-colored houses and hilly streets. On the radio there was speculation that Tiger Woods was in Cape Town for sex addict outpatient therapy.

We parked and went to the V&A Waterfront. It’s a luxury mall/hotel/office/apartment complex. Dubai World bought it a couple years ago for a billion dollars. Dubai World is about $60 billion in debt, these days.

We walked up to Primi Piatti, an Italian restaurant chain that, so it says of itself, “embraces creative exchanges and Urban Energy”.

We sat at a table that was outside the restaurant, as it were al fresco, but still inside the mall.

A waiter came over and took our order for some Sauvignon Blanc and a pizza with chicken and broccoli and sun-dried tomatoes. Another waiter came over and asked if we were being served. Their uniforms were day-glo orange jump suits.

We got our bottle of wine in a day-glo orange plastic pail filled with ice. A third waiter came over to see if everything was OK. The second waiter brought the pizza. Later the first waiter started clapping and bobbing his head and dancing around slightly. We were there early and the other tables were empty.

Some of Bradley’s students came up to us. They’d been at the mall shopping for the J&B Met, which is a big annual horse race that’s also kind of an informal fashion show where you’re supposed to dress either expensively or cleverly to the theme, which this year was In Full Colour. The Met is, so it says of itself, “A spectacle of glossy vibrancy and intense exhilaration enveloped in a cauldron of sensual excess that sets the pulse racing.”

The girls said they were having a hard time finding dresses. There was a compromise-suggestion of colorful scarf-wearing.

Our table was near one end of the mall and its big bay windows. You could see Robben Island, the old prison colony, in the distance, from where we sat on day-glo orange cushions, sipping our Sauvignon Blanc.

We finished and walked to the movie theater and met all the study abroad kids. We saw “Skin” a new feature-length South African film about a lady named Sandra Laing, who was born to white parents but had the darker skin of a coloured person. She grew up during apartheid and suffered all sorts of absurd racist things. In one scene her father – played by "Jurassic Park"’s Sam Neill – returns home after trying to get his daughter re-classified as white and sees her by the banks of a stream and stops on the other side of the stream and shouts, in close-up, “You’re white again!”

It was unclear just why the mother of the family was giving birth to coloured-looking children. The film made it seem like that it’s a possible genetic fluke, as if the recessive genes of an ancestor can just pop up from generation-to-generation. It really seemed like the mother was just having an affair with a coloured person but never got found out nor brought herself to admit it.

The movie got out and some of the undergrads wandered off to buy things and we had to wait for them to be herded again. A van came and picked us up and brought us back to Stellenbosch.

Joe had come and said he’d interviewed Carl Lewis that afternoon on his radio show.

We got back to Stellenbosch and the undergrads got dropped off at their respective dorms and were asking each other if they were gonna go out or what they were gonna do Friday and responding that no they had a big day and had a lot of laundry and some reading to do etc.

I got back to my hostel and shut the windows so the mosquitoes wouldn’t get in. I went to bed.

South Africa - 4.1

2010-04-07T10:41:00.000-07:00

Bradley picked me up at quarter to nine. He was taking me to the U.S. Consulate and downtown Cape Town. They’d invited me there because of the video contest I won. The State Department had paid for my whole trip.

We drove in on another sunny clear day, past the vineyards and farms, past the ostriches and horses, past the prostitutes, past the still-being-built hangars of Cape Town Film Studios.

I told Bradley about the sand on the highway the day before. We turned off onto the N2, one of the big highways that go downtown.

We got in to the city, past the two big cooling towers of the old power plant, past a golf course. Bradley pointed out the neighborhood he lives in. Its old name used to be Driekoppen, which means “three heads”. A white colonist was murdered there in the 1700’s by three slaves. The slaves were caught. Their heads were put on pikes as a reminder.

We drove south around Table Mountain and got to the consulate by ten. We called ahead to let them know we were getting close. I said now they could light the sparklers for our arrival.

We pulled into the lot and got waved to a parking spot. A guy in a uniform came over and made us pop the hood. They call the hood a bonnet in South Africa. A lady came over too with a shammy cloth and stroked the trim of the car door and the handle.

We got out and I tucked in my shirt and Bradley put on a sport coat. We walked up, got buzzed in, emptied our pockets, went through the metal detector. We slid our passports to a man behind a glass panel. He gave us laminated clip-on badges. We had to leave our stuff, cell phones too, in little wood lockers in the entryway.

Our meeting was short. We sat at a circular table in the café/canteen, in a tall bright geometrically-arrayed-wood-design decorated atrium.

I was offered coffee. I refused. The person who offered seemed confused. How about a glass of water, she asked. I said OK. A couple other people came and talked with us. One man gave me his card. Another man ordered a panini and sat with it while we spoke then wrapped it in napkins when we finished.

I tried to explain why I was there. Who Frithjof Bergmann was, what he was doing, why I was going to Johannesburg to find him. I wasn’t able to give a simple answer, and they didn’t quite seem to buy it.

I talked about the video I made, for the contest I’d won. They said they hadn’t seen the video; it wasn’t coming up on their computers. Flash wasn't working.

They asked the person I came there with a lot of questions about what he was up to, where he was living these days, who he’s working with.

They invited me to come back the next day and meet with somebody else there. The man who’d given me his card said let me you give my card and gave me another one. I said OK I’d come back.

We were led out and opened up our lockers and got our stuff and traded our ID badges for our passports.

We drove back to the city center. The Table Blanket cloud was settling over Table Mountain and covered the sun and made it a gray day.

We drove through a rich neighborhood on the east side of the mountain, where even some European royalty have homes, where some other consulates are. Bradley said the Italian consulate’s in a mansion in this neighborhood. The street it’s on is one letter different from the street he lives on a few miles away. He said very regal and wax-sealed envelopes sometimes show up in his mailbox, especially around the holidays. He’s tried to say something to the post office, but it keeps getting messed up.

We drove up to Kirstenbosch Gardens, a big botanical garden at the base of the mountain. It’s got trails that slope up toward the mountain with beds of flowers and grasses and trees from around the country. We hiked up to the fynbos section, which is shrubland that only grows in the Western Cape. It’s so diverse that it forms one of the six floral kingdoms. Fynbos has got so many so many unique species it’s diverse as tropical rainforests.

We walked up to a lawn. A tour guide was coming down a trail with a few hikers. Bradley knew her. If clouds come up over Table Mountain the tours get cancelled and the hikers have to come down emergency routes.

The sky was blue and clear away from the mountain. The lawns of Kirstenbosch were trim and tidy and psychotropically green.

We walked back down and past a music pavilion. There’s a summer music series – sunset concerts on Sunday nights. There’s a big pitched lawn running down to a band shell. The concert that Sunday was going to be Lira Molapo with HHP and RJ Benjamin. Bradley was bringing his study abroad students there for it.

The place reminded me of Ravinia in Highland park, near Chicago. For the second time in Cape Town I felt like I was in the North Shore of Chicago.

We left and drove into the city. There were guys selling complex reptilian beaded sculptures at the stoplights just outside the garden.

We got lunch at Mariam’s, a Cape Malay Halal restaurant. We got salomis, which have got curries baked inside roti, a flaky flatbread.

I asked Bradley where the bathroom was. He pointed me to the back of the place. I walked in there and saw a sink, then a floor and some mats. No toilet. It was the prayer room. I walked back out and sat down.

We ate lunch and made a plan for the rest of the afternoon. Some of Bradley’s students were taking the train into town and were going to meet us at night to see a new movie that’d come out at the V&A Waterfront theater.

We were thinking of going to Robben Island but we called and tickets were sold-out. We left and headed for the Slave Lodge.

South Africa - 3

2010-03-15T15:07:00.000-07:00

Cezanne picked me up in the morning in a VW rented from Budget.

We drove out of Stellenbosch on the R310, through wine country and green hills and stone mountains, past ostrich and horse ranches. There were prostitutes standing along the N2 junction, out in the sun, wearing bright short tight clothes, waiting.

Khayelitsha came up on the right. There were thousands of shanties made of corrugated rusty metal and faded cardboard signs and concrete and wood. You could see more of them all the way to the horizon. Wood telephone poles and concrete light posts were the only things sticking up above the houses.

The highway rose over a hill and we got near the sea. It was turqoise, streaked with lines of waves coming in. Sand was spilling onto the road from the dunes and the wind and we had to swerve and slow down.

It was getting overcast and rainy. Surfers were on the water, bobbing.

We drove down the east side of the peninsula to the national park, to Cape Point. We drove to the gate of the park. It was drizzling. The lady at the gate said it probably wasn't going to get much nicer.

Cezanne drove fast through the fynbos to the tip of the park. We parked at the stairway to Cape Point. There were dozens of big tour buses and vans and hundreds of tourists in shorts and hats and sunglasses. We walked up the stairs to the old light house.

Cezanne said he's done some TV commercials. He's never starred, but has been in the background. He did a Heineken one, recently. When he was little he was in a commercial as a tennis player.

I took some pictures in the fog and the mist. We walked down and drove to the Cape of Good Hope, the southwestern tip of Africa. I waited my turn and took a picture near the famous sign. We hiked up a trail and sat on the side of a cliff while the sun came out and the water turned a deep shining true blue.

We drove out of the park. We didn't see any zebras or ostriches or baboons or seals. I saw a lizard that I took a picture of, and people.

There was a stand set-up by the back gates with wood sculptures of giraffes and lions and other safari animals. There were different sizes of each sculpture, small enough to fit in your hand, or too big to fit in your car.

We drove up the west side of the peninsula, past seaside towns. There were don't-feed-the-baboons signs everywhere. There were more roadside vendors selling the same sculptures we'd seen before.

We drove along the M6 into Hout Bay. It's a toll road, along the cliffs. It gets closed sometimes because boulders fall down and crush peoples' cars and kill everyone inside while they're driving and sightseeing.

We drove past the look-out points and didn't stop. The sky was clear now and the sunlight bright and dense. My left arm was getting sunburnt while I sat shotgun.

We got into Clifton, a lavish South Beach-type part of Cape Town. It's a narrow strip between the sea and Table Mountain. Cezanne was listening to KFM, the pop station. A new Alicia Keys song about New York was getting a lot of airtime. I felt kind of trapped and suffocated as we waited in lunch hour traffic with the sea on one side and a wall of mountains on the other.

We got into the city bowl and parked near Long Street and walked to Greenmarket Square for lunch.

We went to a place called Kauai. It's a Hawaiian-themed wraps and salads and smoothies healthy fast food place. It's a South African chain. I got a Peanut Bliss smoothie delight and a chicken Moroccan wrap. Cezanne got a grilled oriental chicken salad and a Mango Bang fruit smoothie. We sat under an umbrella at a table out front along a pedestrian mall.

Cezanne got up and went to the bathroom. I heard a woman sitting nearby talking in a clear composed voice about why she lives in Cape Town and what she likes to do here and what she's looking for career-wise. There were two guys in matching grey tucked-in golf shirts sitting with her. One had a clipboard and was on the phone. The other was listening to her.

We got our food and ate. The waiter came over and asked if I was still busy. Yes, I said. He came back a while later but stayed near the entrance and looked to get my attention. I looked and he gave two thumbs up with a look on his face. I gave him a TU and he smiled and walked back in.

The girl who was talking had brown curly hair and pale skin and freckles and light eyes. She finished talking and the guys said they'd be in touch and now the other one was talking on his phone and they got up and left. She got up and went the other direction.

I asked Cezanne if you can tell the difference between a coloured person and a black person in South Africa. He said it's easy and started pointing out people nearby. But then it's more complicated than that because there's English-speaking coloureds and Afrikaans-speaking coloureds, and then blacks with all sorts of different origins.

Cezanne is an English-speaking coloured. He said his parents named him Cezanne because they were watching an arts show on TV about the French Impressionists after he was born and they liked the name. He said he's trying to get into the arts more now, feels like he should.

We drove back to Stellenbosch and I got dropped off at my hostel.

I laid down for a while then went and met Joe after his afternoon broadcast.

We met at The Mystic Boer and got Carling Black Label beers. I got a pizza with avo (avocado) and feta and bacon. Joe said South African's have a thing for feta cheese and avocado pears. We talked for a couple hours til after dark. We said bye and I walked home and went to bed.

Bradley was picking me up early the next day to go back to Cape Town and go to the Consulate.

South Africa - 2

2010-03-07T19:20:00.000-08:00

A driver named Calvin was waiting for me at the gate of the Cape Town airport. My flight got in on time at 11PM.

We left, heading for Stellenbosch.

A little kid wearing a canvas jacket was standing on the median at a stop sign, his hand out. Calvin shook his head. The kid sat down on the curb and picked at his hair with a comb.

There was a Christian talk show on the radio. It was going back and forth from Afrikaans to English. The host was talking to call-in guests about how long they’ve all been serving the Lord.

I asked Calvin what Stellenbosch was like. Very conservative, he said.

We drove past walled neighborhoods, then out to a winding road through black hills. The only lights were out over the triumphant gated entrances to vineyards.

We got into Stellenbosch after a half hour.

Calvin slowed as some kids were walking down the street. He shouted "ahoy" at them.

We got to Banghoek Place, the hostel where I was staying.

Calvin walked to the gate with me, leaned his head close, and whispered the password for the keypad.

The front doors to the lounge were locked. There were some kids eating and one got up and walked outside and opened another gate for us.

Calvin led me in and pointed upstairs to number eight, my room, and gave me the key.

I didn’t know what kind of room I’d be staying in. I figured it’d be a shared dorm.

I opened the door.

It was a single room. It had its own bathroom, a queen-size bed with high thread-count white sheets that you really had to yank at to untuck. There were animal pelts on the floors and designer lamp shades made with recycled soda cans on the nightstands.

There was a brown gift bag on the bed.

Inside was a new cell phone, granola, juice boxes, a carton of milk, dried fruit, biltong (dried meat), peanuts, a bunch of bananas, and a signed welcome letter from Bradley.

I washed up and got into bed. A mosquito came in and was flying by my ear and keeping me awake. I turned on the lights and saw it on the wall and killed it with my slender edition of "Waiting for the Barbarians". There was blood on the cover.

I went to sleep.

* * *

In the morning I ate breakfast and read and drank some complimentary rooibos tea, which is grown in the Cape.

I looked around the place. A concrete wall surrounded the hostel. There were four wires suspended above it. It was an electric fence.

Bradley came at 10. I had been sitting on a sofa, waiting, looking towards the front gate and the street.

I saw a tall guy walking up. He was in the shade of a tree. I thought he was black. Then he got a little closer and I thought he was coloured. Then he came into the lounge and I saw he was white and tan. This was Bradley.

We walked through campus to his office. There weren't any sidewalks until close to the university buildings and student housing.

School had just started for the year. It was bright and hot and crowded. There were shorts, dresses and sandals. The buildings and lawns and students looked clean and well kempt.

Stellenbosch is one of the few South African universities that still teach in Afrikaans. The campus signs are in Afrikaans and English.

Bradley took me to his office and served me some more rooibos tea. He teaches geography at the University of Cape Town and works at Stellenbosch for CIEE.

He gave me a short version of the study abroad, welcome-to-Africa tips and rules. He went over my itinerary for the week, with some trips to Cape Town and some free time to wander through Stellenbosch.

Bradley had spent time in Latin America, too. I asked if he still read any Spanish lit. He said he liked post-coup Chilean stuff. He said it fast and it sounded like “Postkoochelean”. I remained quiet and nodded my head until I parsed the phrase and figured out what he meant.

We left to go eat lunch with one of his assistants, a recent-grad named Joe.

We went to a café called The Nook, a place painted what I guess would be Tiffany Blue and had thin chrome chairs on the patio and Death Cab for Cutie and Iron and Wine playing on the speakers. I felt like I was in the North Shore of Chicago.

The waitress came. Joe ordered a Thai chicken sandwich. I ordered a Thai chicken sandwich. Bradley ordered one, too. He made a joke about there being enough for three. The waitress didn’t get it. None of us looked at each other.

We sat and ate and talked. Joe studied philosophy, like me. Unlike me, he did what a self-respecting philosophy student should do and studied Greek and Latin. He’s written journalism, too. He’s thinking of doing a Masters in linguistics next year.

He’s the co-host of a popular afternoon-drive radio show. It’s a sports show where every so often the hosts go out and do something and bring listeners with and let the sponsors come on air and talk about what the hosts used as they did some interesting and amusing athletic outdoor thing.

We finished our sandwiches. We got more drinks. Me, a latté. Bradley, a cappuccino. Joe, another coffee with a side of honey.

Bradley left and Joe took me through the downtown.

The buildings are whitewashed and glow in the sun. Many of them are Cape Dutch style, with thatch roofs and tall curling gables.

It’s a tourist town, with big buses passing through the narrow streets. There’s Italian gelato, gourmet hamburgers, an Ernie Els restaurant called Big Easy, used bookshops and home ware stores and art galleries. One shop had large black women seated out front in traditional dress working on looms.

There’s old historical buildings still, like a magistrate’s court with a rose garden in front and the original town cathedral, called the Mother Church.

Joe took me to one of the campus bookstores. I couldn’t believe all the Routledge philosophy editions they had there. More than I’d ever seen in the U.S. or Canada.

We left and went to a bar Joe spends a lot of time at called The Mystic Boer. It’s got a lot of nostalgic Afrikaner stuff nailed to the walls like a TGIFridays in America. He said he DJs there sometimes, with CD turntables.

Joe left and I walked back to my hostel. Bradley came at six and got me for dinner.

Joe’s radio show had just ended, he said. We drove back downtown and parked and a guy in a neon vest came over and helped us pull-in. That was the car guard, the guy who tries to make sure no one steals your stuff while you’re eating or shopping or whatever.

Bradley said that a lot of car guards in Johannesburg are immigrants from other, usually Francophone African countries. He said they’re often well-educated and get brought here by recruiters for “job opportunities”. Bradley said there he just speaks French to them.

We went to the gourmet burger restaurant and met Cezanne there, another assistant.

Cezanne was a champion junior tennis player but blew out his shoulder just before university. He studied accounting but is now trying to get to Brazil to teach English.

Bradley said Brazil’s like a Creole South Africa.

Cezanne got to talking about tourists and how they expect there to be huts and tribes and spears and lions when they get to South Africa. He said he’s never been to a tribal village his whole life.

Bradley said people might complain how here across the street for instance there’s a Cape Dutch building next to a Victorian building, but that is just what makes this place what it is. And that there’s a Porsche SUV driving down this street, but shanty towns ten minutes away.

We drank white wine and ate our gourmet burgers and our French fries served in slim metal canisters.

Bradley asked for the bill. He said never let anyone take your credit card in South Africa. Even if you pay at a restaurant they’ll bring a machine out to you.

The waiter came out with the machine. We paid, said bye to Cezanne, gave the car guard a few coins and left.

Cezanne was coming in the morning to drive me to Cape Point, the southwestern tip of the continent.

I shut the windows so the mosquitoes wouldn’t get in.

South Africa - 1

2010-03-03T08:49:00.000-08:00

I left for South Africa at the end of January.

The trip was a prize for the Exchanges Connect video contest that I won last year, for my short "A Friend in Nanjing".

The trip was supposed to be two weeks, but I extended the flight to be there five instead.

I'd been in Chicago a month since getting home from Argentina and my Fulbright grant before Christmas. It was cold and dark and bleak and I was ready to leave to go somewhere warm.

I chose South Africa - of the other countries I could've gone to - because: One, it's far away and justifies a free flight; Two, it's in Africa and I'd never been; Three, it's English-speaking and gives me some reasonable chance of getting to talk to people there unlike other far-off places like Nepal, Russia, Egypt, etc.; and, Four, I was trying to track down a philosopher, Frithjof Bergmann.

Bergmann was really the big reason South Africa loomed in my mind over other choices.

He's a German/American philosopher, a retired UMichigan prof who roams around the world trying to create what he calls New Work.

I studied New Work with one of Bergmann's former students - who's now a UIllinois phil. prof. I studied this in spring of 2006, just before I took my first study abroad trip, to China.

So this trip to South Africa wound up as this sort of grand - and grandly disappointing, in some ways - culmination, termination of a lot of things that began in 2006, or, to put it in a bit more general bildungsroman/coming-of-age terms, that began when I was an eager and confused and inexperienced student, and then resolved when I was a more cyncial, clear-headed, worldly young professional.

These thing I'm talking about that...came to term...were: deep personal relationships, a certain intellectual curiosity, a succession of traveling and scholarships and wandering through various continents.

* * *

I left on a Sunday morning. My mom dropped me off at the airport before church. She dropped me off as she had almost a year before when I left for Montreal, and soon after that when I left again for Argentina.

I was flying South African Airways, first to Washington, then to Johannesburg with a stop in Dakar, and then a last connection to Cape Town.

My first week in SA was planned by a study abroad director, Bradley. He works at the University of Stellenbosch, which is in a small city outside Cape Town. Bradley's also from Illinois, from a farm town west of my city, along I-80.

My flight from O'Hare was delayed and got me into Dulles with ten minutes to connect. After a long wait for the people mover to drive across the tarmac and get me to the right terminal, I had to run to the gate. I didn't check any luggage and just had a hiking backpack and a school backpack. I used to be self-conscious about wearing the school backpack in front, on my stomach, maybe thinking it looked weird or evoked pregnancy in some way, but it's just too convenient particularly when you have to run through an airport with two moderately-packed bags.

I brought a few books with me and a fresh Moleskine notebook my sisters gave me for Christmas. I brought Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth" and Coetzee's "Waiting for the Barbarians", both of which had been sitting on my shelves in my bedroom for a couple years. I also brought Shaw's "Man and Superman" and Greene's "The Power and the Glory", though wondered if I'd read them as their socio-cultural relevance to South Africa was eyebrow-raisingly low.

The SAA flight was uncrowded. People had rows to themselves. My seat was next to two large women wearing puffy dresses who were talking on cell phones and didn't look at me. The stewardess told me I should move somewhere else. I went for seats by the window.

The pilot greeted the passengers in English and Afrikaans. On each seat was a blanket and pillow and a clear plastic zip pouch. Inside was a pair of brown socks, a brown nylon eye mask, a snap-together two-piece tooth brush, and a small tube of Aerodent toothpaste.

We took off in the late afternoon. Dinner was meatballs and rice, a roll, a butterfly-shaped cracker, cheddar cheese, a salad with raisins and beef, mint ice cream cake, and a Kit Kat bar. I drank ginger ale and mineral water.

I watched "District 9" on the in-flight, in-seat monitor. It's a South African film, funded by Peter Jackson, in which anthropomorphic crustacean aliens come to Johannesburg and are penned into a township quite obviously the same as those used against blacks and coloureds during Apartheid.

The film starts off nicely, using a verité style, in which all the footage is as if recorded right there in the world itself. But then that stops and the movie becomes some mild-mannered white guy trying to stand-up for the oppressed ugly dark things, with a lot of gun violence and immigrant jokes and an unfulfilling and ambiguous conclusion.

I tried to watch Steven Soderbergh's new movie "The Informant!", but the cabin was too loud and the headphones too weak to clearly hear so I turned it off and read and slept.

We got into Dakar early in the morning. The plane crew was swtiched and Sengalese airport workers wearing neon vests with large X's on them came on to clean the plane.

We waited on the runway for an hour. I got up and stretched and an American guy from San Diego started talking to me. He was working for a evangelical missionary business that does work all over the world. It was his first time in Africa too, though he'd be coming back in a few months to go to Kenya.

We took off at dawn. Kids were playing soccer in a dirt field along the runway. There were dull plain apartment flats near the airport and golf courses and pools and tennis courts near the mansions along the ocean.

In accordance with an unexplained WHO ordinance, the pilot said the plane had to be sprayed. He didn't say with what.

The flight attendants walked up the aisles, blue aerosol canisters in each hand, white clouds hissing out. The spray faded and evaporated into the air like the pilot's own explanation for such a measure.

We were sterilized. The cabin felt like the smell of fabric softener.

We were served breakfast. We got folded pancakes, a wedge of sausage, a hot tin of syrup, a cold croissant and butter. A fruit salad of an orange wedge, blueberries and raspberries. A sealed plastic container of orange juice, a container of berry yogurt, and a cup of tea.

The flight attendants spoke a prim, tidy English, while offering us drinks and meal choices and tea or coffee refills and duty-free shopping. They all wore perfumes and colognes, the odor of which trailed behind them and grazed your face like a long delicate scarf. I wondered if they did it on purpose, to reassure you of their presence and/or to counteract in its own highly chemical way the stale, airplane-food-flatulence-soaked cabin air.

We flew along the west coast of Africa, over deserts and beaches. I slept, and when not sleeping read "The Wretched of the Earth". There seemed to be something both appropriate and disgusting - or appropriately disgusting - that I was reading such a book seated in a jetliner, coasting above the clouds, being served food and drinks and multimedia entertainment, flying towards a really-not-much-more-than-a-glorified-vacation-getaway to Africa.

The pilot said turbulence was ahead, so lunch would be served early. We got a cold bowtie pasta salad with chickpeas, red peppers, and olives. A hot bowtie pasta with chicken and mushrooms and cream sauce. Some crumbly bread and Kiri cream cheese. A roll. An eclair for dessert.

We got to Johannesburg in the late afternoon. The city and the tall buildings were off in the distance, away over the hills and the suburban homes and their walls and swimming pools. The air was hazy and orange.

I had a couple hours to wait until my flight to Cape Town. I sat down in the red plastic chair of a Vida e Caffe, a new coffee shop franchise in SA.

A woman came up to me who'd seen me on the flight. She asked if my bags arrived OK. I said I hadn't checked any.

She said hers didn't come, and she's worried because the Tambo airport has a reputation for theft. Her bags wouldn't come until the evening, on another flight. She'd come from Iowa, where she was visiting her daughter.

She asked what I was doing, where I was going. I took out a map of the country in my Lonely Planet guide.

She pointed to Johannesburg and said "This is a terrible part of the world."

She and her husband live in the country, in KwaZulu-Natal province. They're not city people she said.

One of the VeC workers was dancing and strutting to some Afro-Latin music. She looked at him and shook her head and said he wasn't a Zulu.

She gave me her name and her number and said to give her a call if I pass through. She went back to her table, finished her coffee, and walked off without looking back.

I read some more, waiting, then got on the flight to Cape Town. It was the last of the evening.

Summertime is the rainy season in Jo-burg and storms usually build-up in the afternoons.

The plane took off into a thunderstorm. Lightning shone into the cabin as we gained altitude.

I was seated in an emergency exit row and sat next to the door and its large red tempting handle.

I started "Waiting for the Barbarians". I got tired and closed the book and fell asleep.

20: "To the country: Part 2"

2009-12-01T07:58:00.001-08:00

Sole and I slept in til noon on Saturday. We were going to the country, to a farm outside Maciá that her uncle José takes care of.

It was hot and windy and humid. We left her grandma’s house and walked down the main street. We stopped at a kiosk to see if they had El Uno, one of Paraná’s daily newspapers. An article of mine was going to be in it. I had been writing what I called portraits of contemporary U.S. culture. This week’s was going to be on David Foster Wallace.

We didn’t see an Uno. We asked the lady and she said it doesn’t come to Maciá.

We passed an office building, the only one on the street. It had black tinted windows and was surrounded by a tall dark fence. There were delivery trucks in the parking lot.

This was the headquarters of Huevo Campo (“Country Egg”), which is one of biggest egg distributors in MercoSur. The Roths are the family that own the company. They’re the richest people in Maciá and their son went to Harvard. They own a school, and an evangelical church, too.

On the website of Huevo Campo it says "producido por familias que creen en el Poder y Amor de Dios" (made by families that believe in the power and love of God).

We got to the edge of town after walking a few more blocks. We passed some speed bumps. A warning sign called them donkey humps (lomo de burro).

We walked under a tree, to wait in the shade and try to hitch a ride to the farm. Sole’s aunt, Dioni, and José were cooking an asado for us, with chicken and sábalo, a big river fish. The food was almost done and we should’ve been there already.

A couple of cars and trucks came by on the gravel road. Sole stood up and put out her thumb but they just looked at us and pointed down the road and kept going.

They were going to work at a recycling plant, she said. The plant was a quarter mile down the highway. You could see it from where we sat.

I took some pictures and Sole and I drank from a bottle of Sprite she’d bought. We drank with a straw. That’s usually how they drink from plastic bottles in Argentina.

She called her aunt and they came and picked us up in her uncle’s new used car.

We got in. They told us we should’ve gotten up earlier, that no one’d be headed out this way so late in the day.

We drove along the highway. A guy on a horse was coming in the other direction. He was wearing baggy brown pants and a white shirt and a flat brimmed hat. He had a knife hanging from his belt.

I asked if that was a gaucho. I said it was the first real one I’d seen.

That’s José’s son, Sole told me. José’s a gaucho, too, she said. José was wearing an aqua blue polo and khaki slacks and moccasins and glasses.

We got to the farm. We pulled up to the house and got out and a pack of dogs came up and barked at us.

In the yard of the house was a cage with a couple of parakeets. They were squawking and screeching when we got close. Dioni said they do that with strangers. She came over and talked to them and they quieted down. She got them to repeat what she’d say.

Behind the parakeet cage was a big pen with ducks and roosters and chickens.

Sole went inside and got a plastic pitcher and we went to a big mulberry tree in the front yard to pick berries.

She stood on a plastic chair and I held the pitcher. The ripe ones fell from a touch. The juice stained our fingers and hands.

The food was ready and we went inside and sat down to eat.

The sábalo had a lot of bones and you had to feel the meat in the front of your mouth, with your tongue and your teeth, carefully, so you didn’t swallow any.

There was a tomato and onion salad, squash, and homemade bread. We drank a knock-off lemon lime soda.

Dioni served fruit salad for dessert.

After lunch Sole and I left the farm and walked on a path through the monte, to a creek.

There were cows grazing in the forests along the way. We walked past an electric fence that wrapped around another field.

We saw the nest of a bird up in the trees. It’s made of dried mud and is called an hornillo, which means little oven. It’s got an entrance on one side, like a cave.

There were ducks in the creek. They had a blue in their feathers that glowed in the sunlight.

When we headed back the cows stopped and turned and stared at us. We stopped, then walked ahead, slowly. The cows relaxed and some turned away and some kept looking, but none of them moved.

We got back to the farm in the late afternoon.

We sat down at a picnic table under a portico, in the backyard, to eat some more fruit salad.

José took a sheep from a pen and brought it close by and strung it up by one leg from the mulberry tree.

Sole got nervous and started breathing hard and telling José no. She turned away and covered her eyes.

I kept eating the fruit salad and turned to look at what José was doing.

He cut the sheep’s neck and let the blood pour onto the ground. It was thick and steaming and splashing into the dirt and the grass and the fallen berries.

The dogs came close and waited with their tongues out.

The sheep kept kicking after the blood had drained.

José began butchering it. He cut off the hoofs and tossed them to the dogs. You could hear the crunch while they chewed them. There was blood and wool on their snouts.

I was taking pictures. I had never seen this before.

Dioni called me over. She was posing with one of the dogs. It was up on its hind legs and had a cap on its head. I took a picture then turned back to the sheep.

José stripped and pull off the wool, then split the stomach.

José was talking to Sole and I. He took out the kidney. It was bright blue and wet. It’s the kidney, he said, just like you have. He tossed it into the grass and a dog went for it.

He pulled out the rest of the organs in one big bundle – the stomach and intestines and all that – and threw them onto the lawn.

The dogs ran for them and chewed and ripped them apart.

A black cat came by and tried to nibble at the organs but a collie growled and it backed away and had to watch.

Each dog took different parts. The collie took the stomach. It split it open and green mush oozed out and didn’t smell good. It was partially-digested grass, José said.

A tiny black lab was eating the small intestine. The stuff inside was splattered on its paws. It pulled at them like spaghetti.

The dogs looked happy and focused.

José was wearing the same clothes as earlier. There were big dark stains on his pants now.

Dioni took me and Sole into the barn, past big tractors, past sacks of feed and fertilizer. We went into one part that was dark and stuffy. There was a cardboard box on the ground. It had a half-dozen puppies in it. They were feeding on its mom.

We shined a flashlight inside and the mom – a tiny, short-haired dog – looked up at us. Sole took one of the puppies out of the box. It fit in her hand. She put it back and we left.

We walked into the chicken coop and Dioni and Sole collected the eggs. José came by and threw seed to the birds and they all came by and started pecking and fighting.

The day was getting late and we were going to head back into town. José had butchered the sheep for somebody and had to drop off the meat.

Dioni took the parakeets out and put them into a tiny cage to bring them with. They´ll bite everyone but her, she said.

We got into the car and drove down the road to the gate. I got out and opened it up. José drove ahead but then Sole shouted that I’d left my door open. They stopped and shut the door, then I closed and locked the gate.

Well, I did something on the farm, Sole said.

We got into town and walked to Sole’s mom’s house. She made empanadas for us. Sole didn’t like them much and got out the leftover perdix from the night before.

We went back to Toni’s for ice cream afterwards. Toni served us again.

We went home and changed and then went to one of the two social clubs in town and had a couple drinks with some of Sole’s old high school friends.

* * *
Sunday we slept in again then got up and walked to Dioni’s house for lunch. José made tallerines, which are a pasta like spaghetti, from scratch.

We got there late and they and Jose’s son - the gaucho - had already finished eating. They served us plates and we sat and ate while they had seconds.

José´s son didn´t speak much. Sole said he´s studying biology in Paraná and hitchhikes back and forth from Maciá every week. He works on the farm on the weekends. His hands were so big the fingers looked swollen.

We finished and left and stopped by to see Sole’s friend Diana. She was working at an ice cream parlor. Along the way we passed a nice two-story house that had the same black fence around it as the Huevo Campo office. Sole said it was one of the Roth homes.

We got to the ice cream parlor. It was connected to the house of an old couple, who own the store and make the ice cream there.

When we went up to the counter I could see through into the living room. The curtains were drawn and an old man was sleeping in a recliner.

We got two-scoop cones and played a card game. Nobody came in. I did a magic trick that I’d learned when I was in middle school by taping and studying a David Blaine TV special. He’d done it for villagers in the Amazon.

Diana’s shift ended and we walked together to go see another old high school friend. She was with her baby – a boy who was about a year old. We drank tereré, which is mate served cold with fruit juice.

The sky was getting dark and we headed back to Sole’s grandparents’ house to pack our bags. We had to buy bus tickets to go back to Paraná. Since it was Sunday we had to wait for the station attendant to show up at 7:00 PM. The bus was coming at 7:40 and we had to meet it at a highway junction 10 miles outside Maciá.

José and Dioni came by to say goodbye and take the key to the house. One of the dogs came with them in the car.

Another dog came up and got into a fight with José’s and he threw a rock and it ran off.

Sole and I said bye and left and got to the bus station. Her brother Pepe was going to give us a ride to the junction. He had to get up at 3:00 AM the next day to do his mail route.

The bus station attendant wasn’t there at 7:00. We waited as the sun set and the sky looked stormy towards where we were headed.

The guy finally showed up. He was bald and sweating. He got the computer turned on and we asked for the tickets. He said there were three seats left. We bought the tickets as Pepe showed up in his station wagon.

I rode shotgun and Sole sat in back. When we got up to speed he asked me if I wanted to put on my seatbelt. Argentine’s don’t wear seatbelts.

We got onto the highway. It was a two-lane road. There was no shoulder, just a strip of grass and then fields. It was windy and Pepe went into the grass a couple times. There was lightning up ahead and it smelled like rain.

We got to the exchange. A couple other cars and a couple other people were there, waiting for the same bus.

We got out and it was breezy and cool and you could see the storm close-by but it never started raining. I took a few more pictures while Sole talked to her brother.

The bus showed up and we got on. Our seats were in the way back. We drove into the storm and the rain and lightning.

We got back to Paraná around 10:30.

19: "To the country: Part 1"

2009-11-07T09:19:00.000-08:00

My friend Sole is from a farm town in the middle of Entre Ríos province. It’s called Maciá. It’s got a population of 10,000 and is surrounded by soy and sorghum fields, and pasture. Sole said the population´s really not quite 10,000, but they like to round-up.

The land there is rolling and green and dry. It’s called monte, which is a mix of prairie grasses and bushes and creeks and rivers. There’s palm trees, and a lot of thorn trees called espinillos.

Sole is short for Soledad, which means solitude. She moved out of town after high school. She left to go to Córdoba with her then-boyfriend who was finishing a thesis on Amartya Sen. Córdoba’s the second biggest city in the country, and is hundreds of miles west of Maciá.

She moved to Paraná this year, a few months ago. She’d been studying law at the University of Córdoba, which was founded in the early 1500’s. She’s dropped that major and is looking for a new one, to study here. The way Argentine university’s work is you have to start over, from the beginning, if you change majors.

She’s been looking for work since she moved here. Her mom got her a job working for an ambulance company, selling their emergency service to businesses in town. She had been working for a law firm, but her old roommate was dating the boss, as well as dating a guy who was also going out with Sole’s cousin. Sole told her cousin. The roommate told the boss to get rid of Sole.

She moved away from that roommate and lives in a girls’ boarding house with Flor, an old friend from Maciá.

She has a lot of free time now. She does gymnastics. She sleeps a lot, and reads a lot. She likes Ray Carver and Charles Bukowski and John Cheever.

She sprays her books with perfume so they smell nice when she turns the page. Her Ray Carver anthology smells like lilac and bubble gum.

* * *

Spring is ending here. The days are longer than the nights. We went to Maciá during a heat wave, when it was humid and breezy and near 100º at midday.

We left Friday afternoon. It was a three-and-a-half hour bus ride. We stopped in a few other small towns, including one where people still speak German. They call the Germans here Rusos, which means Russian.

Sole and I got off at a highway junction. The buses don’t stop at her town in the afternoon.

You could see the horizon in every direction. There were some barns nearby, and others far off. I felt like I was in Champaign, in Illinois. It was late afternoon and mellow and quiet.

We walked down a highway. She called her brother, who lives in town. He said his kidney hurt and he couldn’t come pick us up. A puppy came up and played with Sole while she smoked a cigarette.

We waved down a cattle truck that had stopped at the junction. The cattle had plastic tags on their ears. Some of them looked at us as we walked to the cab.

Sole asked the driver if he´d take us down the road, to the turnoff to her town.

Sole threw her bag in the back of the cab and climbed up and then took my backpack and I got in and we pulled out.

The driver’s name was Omar. He had Gauchito Gil stickers and Virgin Mary prayer cards stuck to the dash, and red Chinese tassels dangling from the ceiling. There were cases of CDs and a pack of cigarettes and a lighter by the steering wheel. He was 21 he said, and started trucking after high school, because his dad did it.

We got up to speed. There were stripped cowhides in a ditch on the side of the road.

We got to the turnoff and he stopped and we climbed down and said thanks.

We waited a few more minutes. A lady got dropped off at the corner. She was waiting for a ride in the direction we came from.

I took some pictures. One car drove past without stopping. Sole said that’s bad manners. A lumber truck stopped and the lady got in and it drove away.

Another car turned the corner and came past us. They stopped.

It was a girl Sole knew from high school. They hadn’t seen each other since.

We got in. They had a German shepherd in back that barked and put its teeth against the glass as we got close. It won’t bite her mom said. Her dad was driving.

I sat in front while Sole was in back saying what she’d done since high school. The other girl had spent a year working in New Zealand picking kiwis and apples and studying English.

We drove past barns and houses as the sun was getting lower and the green of the trees and fields was glowing.

We got dropped off in the downtown, which is one street that runs for five or six blocks. The dog hits its face against the window and growled again when we got out of the car.

We walked towards her grandparents’ house, which is empty now that both of them have passed away. Sole found 20 pesos on the ground, on the sidewalk. For the beer, she said.

A lot of people were sitting outside on the sidewalk, in lawn chairs, in front of their homes or stores. Some were drinking mate, others beer. Some of them stared at us. Sole said adios or chau to most of them.

Her aunt and uncle were waiting for us at the house to give us the keys.

Her aunt married late because her father was protective and jealous. She married a man named José, a few years ago, whose wife had died. He’s a tenant farmer and works on a piece of property outside the town that’s owned by somebody else. The owner’s called the patron.

The property’s got both pasture – for sheep and cows – and farmland. José also has some chickens and geese for himself and his wife and sons.

I sat in the living room with José while Sole’s aunt was showing her the house and the room she made up for us. We were watching TV.

They were showing clips of a school employee getting punched and slapped by parents and other people standing and looking. He had touched some of the kids, apparently. They interviewed him with his face bleeding. He went inside the school and a woman shut the door behind him and kept the camera out.

Sole’s aunt gave me a glass of water. It tasted like something and had white flakes floating in the bottom. Sole said the town’s water’s been contaminated, that it’s got a bunch of minerals and other stuff in it and they buy bottled water mostly now.

Her uncle asked if we wanted to shower. Sole opened her bag and touched-up her makeup and sprayed deodorant. Her uncle looked at her and raised his voice and said just take a shower. We’re just going to keep sweating, she said.

We all left the house and got into José’s car that he’d just bought used. We drove to Sole’s brother’s house. His name’s Pepe and he works for the Argentine post office. There was a white Correo Argentino pick-up in the driveway. We got out and walked around to their backyard.

His little daughter was there with a friend, and a couple big dogs, and he and his wife were sitting in lawn chairs. Pepe had his shirt off. They were drinking mate. You could see big grain silos off beyond their brick fence.

Pepe´s brother talks like Marlon Brando. He called me maestro.

His wife used to teach Italian, but just stopped. She’d been to Italy, too. She also teaches in an elementary school in a village outside of Maciá. It was too much work doing both.

She said the elementary school doesn’t have running water, so the teachers have to bring it with them each day. She said it was a disaster that day, with the heat, and they had to ration it for the kids.

There’s not even running water for the bathrooms, she said.

Sole and I left and said bye. We walked along gravel roads, then paved roads. The sun had set and it was getting dark.

We passed a slaughterhouse, where Sole said you can hear the braying at night when the cows are lined up and killed. She said they were taken there in elementary school once, to see how it works.

We went to Sole’s mom’s house. She lives by herself. Her ex-, Sole’s dad, lives in Paraná, now.

Her mom said there’s a lot of discontented women in Maciá, and that she’s a threat because she’s so active. She has a green belt in Tae Kwon Do and does Arabian dancing and works with the women’s national basketball team, which she played for a long time ago.

We left and walked back downtown.

We went to Dani’s, an ice cream parlor. There’s three on main street. One’s corporate, but Dani’s and the other are local and have homemade ice cream made with fresh local milk.

We got ice cream cones. I got dulce de leche and white chocolate. Dani served us. A cone with two big scoops cost less than a dollar. Sole said you could tell the ice cream was fresh because it was so smooth. She asked and Dani said it was made that morning.

We sat outside and ate and then went back in and washed our hands at a little plastic fountain by the bathroom.

Clouds were blowing in and the moon had a halo around it. We thought it might rain.

Sole’s roommate Flor was back home, visiting, too. Her boyfriend lives in Maciá and owns a clothes shop. We went there and Flor came out with a shirt she’d tried on and they shared a cigarette.

Sole and I went back to her mom’s house. She’s turned her house into a medical office, for specialists to come to from outside of town. A doctor from Rosario was doing an exam and we had to be quiet so we walked to the backyard and waited for dinner.

There was an old empty concrete swimming pool. There were weeds growing in it. We sat on the edge and talked. She said spiders and scorpions live in the pool, now. I told her about how there was a scorpion in the shower with me right after I got to Paraná, in the professor’s house I’d been living in.

I said I didn’t really know it was so poisonous when I saw it and just sprayed water on it, which seemed to do it. But then I came back after I dried off and it was still alive and killed it with a squeegee and washed it down the drain. She said I shouldn’t have washed it down the drain.

Sole’s mom made perdix for dinner, which is a partridge that lives in the monte and is common to eat. It was marinated in a vinegar sauce and served with carrots and onions.

Perdix is Spanish are called perdiz, or perdices, plural. Children´s stories end with the line "Vivieron felices y comieron perdices", which means "They lived happily and ate perdix".

Sole’s mom has three phones, which were on the table while we ate. One is a cordless landline. The other two are cell phones.

We finished and left and went home to shower and change.

We went back out and walked along main street.

There’s two big bars in town. They’re called social clubs and are wide, bare halls with pool tables and a bar and tables on the sidewalks out front.

I saw her uncle sitting at a table drinking with a few other people as we walked by on the other side of the street.

Kids cruise around back and forth on the main drag at night. The rich boys have expensive new pick-up trucks and call girls to give them the privilege of going for a spin.

We bought two bottles of beer at a corner store with the money from the sidewalk.

We walked to her friend Nigel’s house, who she went to high school with. He and a few other friends had barbequed and were watching concert DVDs of Pink Floyd and the Traveling Wilburys and Rammstein.

We sat on the driveway and passed around bottles of beer and Nigel and another friend called Fausto played guitars and sang John Lennon and Ray Orbison songs. Fausto played an acoustic and Nigel an electric. The amp was in the living room but he played outside.

Fausto asked me if I like rock and roll. I said yes.

He’s about 30 and is tall and has curly, fluffy hair and teaches music in an elementary school in town.

He was pretty drunk and telling me about the fundamental basis of life in the country; that being surrounded by so much green calms people down, that the people are hardworking, and so on.

He said the U.S. has got something in that the states don’t fight with each other, the way the provinces do here.

I went inside and took a sausage and a bun and made a choripan. The meat had been sitting for a while and was dry, and the bread was dry. It was tough to chew but it was OK.

The breeze was steady and the night got cool. We got up around 2 and said bye and Sole and I walked back to her grandparent’s house.

The next day we were going to the country, she said.

18: "To the north, to the jungle: Part 2"

2009-10-29T17:41:00.000-07:00

I got up at 7:45, before my alarm. I left my dorm and went to the hostel lounge and ate breakfast. There was no one else there. I took a couple of trips to the buffet and filled up on sweet bread and coffee.

I packed up and left and walked to the plaza to take a bus north to Puerto Iguazu. There were parents walking their kids to school, carrying their miniature backpacks for them, holding their hands.

I got to the plaza and saw the same kid as the day before. He was sipping a mate. He waved to me and raised his head. I waved back.

I sat in front of the souvenir stand and waited with some locals for the bus. I saw a man greet an old lady and give her two kisses, one on each cheek. I’d never seen that before in Argentina.

They didn’t show any movies on the four-hour ride. It was quiet and bumpy and relaxing. We drove through rolling, green countryside. We passed yerba mate factories and pine tree farms. Misiones used to be famous for its jungle. It’s got a subtropical climate. Now, most of the forests near the highway have been clear-cut, scorched.

We got into Puerto Iguazu, where the ground was orange clay, like in Georgia.

I got off the bus and walked around a few blocks looking for a hostel.

It was too late in the day to try to go to a national park and see Iguazu Falls, so I walked down through town to the river, to the Paraná. It was overcast and humid.

Down at the port of the river there’s boats that go downstream to Paraguay. Across the river is Brazil.

I walked past the port, across a creek, to a grassy corner near the bank. There was a picnic table under a tin shelter. There was a big boat rusting, grown-over, in the weeds.

I sat down under the shelter and it started to rain.

I listened to an Entitled Opinions on Kurt Weill and wrote postcards for friends in Canada and Israel, for my grandmas in the U.S. I read some more of Brief Interviews. I took pictures as the rain stopped and the sky lightened. There was an empty, rusting oil drum in front of the shelter, in the grass. It was Shell; red and yellow.

I walked back up the hill, to town. I looked up the addresses I hadn’t brought with me and walked back down the hill, downtown, and mailed my postcards just before the post office closed. I stopped at a tourist restaurant and ordered a pizza and a Coke. I was the only one in there.

I came back to the hostel and wrote a blog entry. There was a girl at the computer next to me looking at her pictures from Machu Picchu. The Internet wasn’t working and every few minutes someone would come in, check, see it wasn’t working and leave.

I sat out on the patio lounge and read and borrowed a cigarette from a girl sitting across from me and wrote. There were only a couple other people sleeping in my 10-person dorm. They left before I woke up the next morning.

* * *
I got up late. My alarm didn’t go off.

I went to the bathroom. The toilet wasn’t flushing.

I went down to eat and sat and was reading. They served coca tea and buns and toast with dulce de leche and jam. The girl I borrowed a cigarette from the night before came down to the kitchen and took her plate of food and looked for a seat. She sat at my table.

She’s from Asturias, in Spain, but lives in Barcelona and is a civil engineer. This was her first time in South America. She pronounced her s’s and c’s with a lisp.

I left. I took a bus to Foz de Iguazu, to Brazil. We crossed the Argentine border and we all had to get off and get our passports stamped. We crossed the Brazilian border and some people got off but most stayed on and I stayed on. We drove into the city, which is bigger and more cosmopolitan than Puerto Iguazu.

I got to the bus station and bought a ticket to the national park. I didn’t have any Brazilian reales, and didn’t have any small peso bills. The guy at the gate converted the bus ticket for me. I think he ripped me off.

We drove back out of town, back past the road to the border crossing, and down to the park entrance. I got off the bus and bought my entrance and a salami sandwich. I said obligado like I learned in Sao Paolo.

I got on a double-decker bus and went to the upper level where the plastic drape windows were pulled back. We drove to the waterfalls. The breeze made people zip up their coats and cross their arms and tuck their chins.

We got off. I could see a glimpse of the falls down through the trees. I followed the path to the first overlook. I stopped, stared. I leaned against the railing, gazed. The waterfalls were coming from everywhere, from the forest, from cliffs. The part I was looking at wasn’t even half of all there was.

I continued on along the concrete path, stopping and staring, looking at other people looking. The din from the falling water would fade away then come back again when you realized how loud it was.

I walked onto a concrete overlook. I saw a pair of pants floating down the river, away from the biggest, most violent falls.

They were black, fanned out. They looked like slacks or maybe cargos. No one else seemed to notice. They bobbed around, were turned in the currents, and kept going down the river, through the rapids. I didn’t see anything come after them.

I walked along the trail to an overlook that stretches out over the crest of a waterfall. You can look right down on top of the void. The railings seemed well-built, but had gaps in between each other. People were posing for pictures, getting soaked by the mist from other falls higher up. Others stood off on the main trail, looking nervous and waiting for their friends or family to come back from out over the water.

Some people had plastic ponchos on. I zipped up my coat up all the way.

It was nice to be so close to something so dangerous, to something loud and old and that would destroy you in an instant. I felt like the narrator in a Poe story, like in Descent into the Maelstrom, awestruck before some terrible, enormous thing.

I walked back to the main path. There was a concession stand and a gift shop and photo booth, and an elevator to go to another observation deck. The employees had that amusement park employee stare.

I left the trail and walked to the park restaurant. There were coatis wandering around everywhere. They look like armadillo mixed with raccoon. They say they’ll bite if you feed them. Some people were feeding them. The park employees would chase them away when they’d creep towards the picnic tables.

I ate a sandwich and drank some water. The day was overcast and cool.

I walked on the waterfall trail again. The clouds were parting and the sun came out and there were rainbows, like they say there’s supposed to be, and butterflies.

I took a bus back to the main gate and listened to an Entitled Opinions with Paul Ehrlich on the fate of the earth in the 21st century. It was finally sunny and bright while he was talking about population disaster and the earth’s carrying capacity.

I got back to the bus station and got on to go back to Argentina and Puerto Iguazu. When we got off at Brazilian customs they stopped me and said I hadn’t gotten a stamp when I crossed that morning. I told them I’d read that one-day visitors didn’t need visas. I was speaking Spanish. They were speaking Portuguese. I couldn’t follow them.

The girls stamping the passports called for a manager. He was a young guy, probably 20 years old. He said they’d let me go just today but don’t do it again or there’ll be a fine. I said tudo bem and tried to give a thumbs up and left. I waited in the late afternoon with some Australians for another bus to come by.

I got back into town. As I walked to my hostel I saw the Spanish girl with her backpack heading to the terminal. We didn’t say anything to each other as we passed.

I ate pizza again at a different tourist restaurant, then came back and wrote and read. The Internet still wasn’t working.

I went to bed.

The next day my alarm worked and I got up and ate breakfast and packed my bags and stored them in a closet and then headed out. I bought cheese and bread and a tray of fruit and took a bus to the Argentine side of the falls.

It was a clear, warm day. I walked along all the catwalks and trails and stairways that wind through the jungle and over and around the falls. I saw monkeys and coatis and a toucan. The highlight of the Argentine side is something called the Devil’s Throat, which is an overlook above the most intense part of the falls.

There’s a miniature train that takes people out to that point. I walked along the train tracks, on a mud service road, to get there. It was a mile or so and quiet, except when a pickup truck or a train would come by. There were all sorts of butterflies along the way. A few other people were walking on the trail. I saw a big bullfrog squished flat. Its body was in the trail of a tire.

The Devil’s Throat is this big half-circle waterfall that’s probably a couple hundred feet high and wide. The overlook is a concrete platform with two sections to it. There’s photographers who stand-up on ladders and wear ponchos and take portraits with the falls in the background. They have clipboards for you to fill out forms and a poster board showing examples.

Big clouds of mist fall down on the platform every minute, soaking everybody. It’s like standing on the walkway over a flume ride at a theme park.

You can’t see to the bottom of the falls, there’s so much steam and mist. It’s an abyss, I guess. I thought about that Nietzsche quote of looking down into the abyss and only seeing yourself.

I took some pictures when the mist cloud wasn’t there so my camera wouldn’t get wet. I left the platform all wet and dried off in the sun and walked back to the park entrance. I took a bus back to town, grabbed my bag, and headed to the bus station.

The only bus going back overnight to Paraná was a luxury busline called Espreso. I bought the ticket anyway. It was about 40 pesos more than usual.

After we’d gotten out of town we were stopped at a police blockade. Some national guard people got on the bus. One guy came up, looked down at me. He asked to look through my bag, then see my passport.

I gave it to him.

He looked at it, then me. He was about to hand it back, then took it and sniffed it and looked at it again. He gave it back and said thanks and left.

I listened to a radio show about the historical Jesus as the sun went down over the Misiones hills and tree farms and what’s left of the jungle. Flocks of white birds were flying around and glowing in the twilight.

I got back into Paraná early in the morning.

17: "To the north, to the jungle: Part 1"

2009-10-21T14:57:00.000-07:00

I had another week off school because of board exams. Sunday night I’d gone to the Paraná Costume Party, dressed as Tintin. I was writing an article about the party for 054, a travel magazine from Buenos Aires.

I’d gotten back at 3:00 in the morning and went to bed. I woke up Monday, wrote my article, packed my backpack, and went to the bus station for an overnight ride northeast, to Posadas, the small capital of Misiones province.

They served us dinner after the sun went down. First they gave us a plastic-wrapped Styrofoam tray. Inside were a plastic knife and fork, wrapped with a single-ply napkin; a toothpick, wrapped and sealed in plastic; a roll; a chocolate alfajor snack cake; crackers; and a lemon-flavored lozenge. Next they brought out tiny foil trays with our main course.

Inside were steamed rice and chicken rolled up with hard-boiled egg and vegetables. The windows on the bus steamed-up when we opened our foil trays.

The steward poured us Pepsi in little plastic cups, like they have at the dentist.

I was listening to old episodes of Entitled Opinions. First one about Proust, then one on Thoreau, then one on Virgil.

They started playing a Kevin Bacon movie on the overhead TVs. I think it was called Death Sentence. He played a vengeful father. There was a lot of stabbing and beating and running people over with cars deliberately and swearing, too. The TVs were turned way up.

A guy sitting up front had a loud message alert on his phone that you could hear through the whole bus. It played the first half-dozen notes of a Cumbia song; a trumpet and an accordion and a shaker all starting-up.

That guy kept getting messages every few minutes.

It was hard to listen to the radio show.

My seat was in front of the coffee and water dispenser, which is in front of the stairs down to the lower level. After they’d turned the lights out and most people were covered with blankets, a guy came up to the console and leaned against it to steady himself. He took a plastic cup from the cup dispenser, had a drink of water, then put the cup back into the bottom of the dispenser. He returned to his seat.

The guy with the noisy phone sneezed three times in a row up into the air. His phone stopped making so much noise, at some point.

* * *

We got into Posadas at 7:00 in the morning. It was gray and cool and drizzling. I sat in the bus station café and had a cup of tea and a croissant. I bought a bus ticket for San Ignacio, a village north of Posadas that’s got some Jesuit mission ruins and the old home of Horacio Quiroga. It’s along the highway to Puerto Iguazu.

I got into San Ignacio by 8:30. I got off the bus with a couple other people in the main plaza. It was humid and cool and still overcast. There were only a few people out.

A pasty blond-haired kid came up to me, carrying a mate and a notepad. He asked if I was looking for a place to stay. He told me about a hotel down the road, his brother-in-law’s place. He said they can sell me bus tickets there, and watch my bags, too. I asked him the bus schedule for the next day.

He seemed nice, like he wasn’t trying to take something from me.

I left him and walked toward where a Hostelling International place was supposed to be.

An old man was standing on the porch of a souvenir shop and stopped me and asked where I was headed.

He said that there was a cheap, nice hotel in the other direction. 25 pesos he said. I asked him how much the Hostelling International place cost.

He looked aside. 100 pesos, he told me.

I said no thanks and got to the HI place. It was 35 a night. I had a four-person dorm and a private bathroom all to myself.

I dropped off my bag and walked back to the plaza and bought some bread and cheese and apples. I walked to the Jesuit ruins. The site’s called San Ignacio Mini.

It was the middle of the week, and the end of winter. Most of the souvenir stalls were shuttered. It was quiet and damp. I sat on a bench under a tree and made a sandwich and ate a mandarin orange.

I entered the ruins.

A tour had just started so I hurried and caught up with them. The site was one of several in the region that was founded by Spanish Jesuits. The missions were havens for the Guaraní, havens from the other Spanish who wanted to kill them, make them leave, etc.

They say it was a flourishing a project, for the few decades it lasted. That the Guarní mixed their culture and style with that of the Catholics, and in exchange for a few not-so-bad compromises, got to live in pretty well-built, well-run, mostly-autonomous communities.

You can see that in the façade of the church, that’s got Catholic figures sculpted in a pre-Colombian style.

After the tour ended I hung around the ruins some more. There weren’t more than a couple dozen people in the whole overgrown, spread-out site. The main plaza - now just a grassy field - would´ve been a good spot to throw a Frisbee, I thought.

I went to the souvenir shop in the main plaza, where they were selling a lot of Guaraní-style wood carvings. The lady working there liked my hat, one with a knit llama pattern I’d gotten in Jujuy, in the northwest. Her son was sitting there listening to his MP3 player the whole time, not talking.

I walked out of the town, past an army base and down a flooded mud road to get to Quiroga’s old house.

Horacio Quiroga is one of the best-known Latin American writers. He was born in Uruguay in the 1870´s, but spent most of his life in Argentina, and especially in the Misiones jungle.

His best stuff is short stories. He’s influenced a lot by Poe and Maupassant.

It started raining as I got to his house. After you buy your entrance you have to walk down a narrow path through the forest, through a lot of bamboo, to get to the house. There’s signs that explain Quiroga’s life and have quotes of things he’s said about writing and art.

One of his best short story collections is called Tales of Love, Madness, and Death.

Quiroga’s father was killed in a hunting accident when he (Quiroga) was a little boy. Quiroga’s step-father, who he got along well with, committed suicide when he (Quiroga) was a teenager. Quiroga found the body.

When he was a bit older, he killed one of his best friends in a hunting accident like what killed his father.

He married a couple of times. The first wife he brought out to this house in the jungle in San Ignacio, where they were raising their kids. She couldn’t stand the isolation, the heat, everything, and swallowed poison and killed herself.

Quiroga committed suicide when he was in his late 50´s after he was diagnosed with cancer.

There were two houses Quiroga built, by himself, at this place in San Ignacio. The first house has been re-built, but the second is original. The lot is up on a cliff that used to look down to the Paraná River, the same river I live on further south in Entre Ríos province.

Now the trees and bushes have grown and blocked the view.

Inside the house there’s a lot of Quiroga’s actual stuff – his writing desk, his insect collection, a big snakeskin, his radio, his tools and workshop.

There wasn’t anyone else there when I went through the house. I thought I heard people coming along the path but they never showed up. I took some photos, walked around, tried to conjure the atmosphere. There was a sign in one corner of the yard that said “Place of Inspiration”. Next to it was a trail leading into the forest.

I followed the path. I thought there might be a lookout to the river. It got overgrown quickly and I had to turn back.

I left and walked back to my hostel. When I got back into the town a horse-drawn cart came down a sidestreet and turned a corner in front of me. A fat man was driving. He whipped the horse on the side to make it go faster. He keep hitting it on its leg. The horse tried to hurry and trot down the street. There were no traffic, no cars. It was empty, quiet. He drove on down the road and I turned a corner to another street.

I slept a few hours then got up, walked to town, ate a milanesa sandwich at a big empty tourist restaurant. There were some French girls at one table, but they left. Then it was just me and the waiters, standing around. I was reading an article in Ñ by JM Coetzee on an anthology of early Beckett letters. I came back after dark. There weren’t many streetlights and it was hard to see the road.

I read some of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, then went to bed early, about 9:00 PM.

16: "To the north, to the desert: Part 5"

2009-09-24T13:44:00.000-07:00

Lucy and I got into La Serena just before sunrise, Saturday morning. We took a cab to her house up on a hill high up in the city. You can see a peninsula in the distance lit with hundreds of street and house lights. Next to that is the ocean. It was the first time I saw the Pacific.

A lot of Fulbrighters were coming to visit Lucy that weekend. There was Sam and her boyfriend Lucas, who were already there when we got there and asleep in bed. There was Andra and her boyfriend Andy, who were staying in a nearby apartment. There was Matt, who got into town just after us. The next day more would be coming.

We slept a few more hours then got up for breakfast.

Sam cooked eggs. I had some cheese leftover from the day before. The paper it was wrapped in had gotten wet and stuck to it. I peeled off the paper and washed the cheese and threw it into the skillet.

Andra and Andy brought Nutella and mandarin oranges and bread.

We sat and ate and drank tea and juice.

Matt showed up. After he got into town he took a shower at the bus station and was feeling good and decided to walk around town and try to find a Laundromat. He’d just gotten back from Peru and a village in the Andes and his clothes smelled.

After breakfast, Andra and Andy took a bus out of town to a valley, to visit a vineyard.

The rest of us walked down through town to the beach. I felt like I was in southern Spain. The sidewalks were continuous and unbroken. There were big clean chain superstores and big smooth parking lots and a lot of cars. There were billboards for luxury apartments and luxury apartments being built in a field near the ocean.

We got to the beach and stopped to eat at a Lebanese stand. I got falafel and an empanada and a Pepsi and a Nestle ice cream cone. Sam and Lucas got a schwarma sandwich.

We went to the beach. It was sunny and clear out on the water, but misty down the beach and to the mountains in the distance. The silhouettes of horses and their riders were coming to us out of the haze.

We walked along the sand and I was talking to Lucas about the University of Illinois and its Chief mascot and how I’ve been reading a lot of David Foster Wallace recently who grew up near Champaign and how I identify myself with him through that.

Lucas looked at me and said, “Dude, I went to Pomona.”

DFW had been teaching at Pomona College in California until he hung himself last year.

Lucas said he’d thought of taking one of his classes but they were hard to get into and he didn’t want to take a spot away from someone actually studying writing. He had studied geology.

Lucas said he was actually in the middle of reading Infinite Jest, and that him and Sam had a couple DFW anthologies down here with them that they’d been reading.

We sat down on a circle of boulders and talked about DFW and sports journalism and Dostoevsky and 9-11. You could see snow in the peaks of the Andes from where we were on the beach. It was warm and breezy and the sun was getting low and mellow and orange.

We left the beach and walked to a big mall. I said this reminded me of southern Spain. Lucas said southern California. We stopped to check our mail then walked back up into town to Lucy’s place. I explained to Matt a long essay I’d just written, about wonder and interpretation and how it’s all based on this Walt Whitman poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”.

We stopped for ice cream cones and I kept going on about this essay and the point I was trying to make about interpretation and wonder not being opposed to each other.

Andra and Andy came back and we went to an Italian and Sushi restaurant for dinner. I got spicy tuna rolls.

We came back. I packed my bags and said goodbye and walked to the bus station. I got on an overnight bus to Santiago.

* * *

I got into Santiago just before sunrise, Sunday morning.

I sat in the bus station café and read and drank coffee and ate a pastry until it was light out.

I walked along Alameda – the main boulevard – to get to a hostel that Sam and Lucas had stayed at a couple days earlier.

Nobody was out. Everything was shut and locked. It was grey and quiet and cool.

I got to the hostel. It’s in an old, preserved medieval-looking courtyard. There’s no sign on the door, just one for a café upstairs.

I rang the bell.

Nobody came to the door.

I turned away, thinking I’d walk around for a while.

A man opened the door. He was bald and thin and wore gym shirts and a fleece and looked tired and impassive and annoyed. He spoke quietly and asked what I wanted.

A woman was standing back in the foyer, looking at him and me.

I said I’d called the night before for a bed.

He let me in and showed me a bed in a dorm. He walked with a hard, slow limp. I tossed my backpack on the bed. He told me don’t put my backpack on the bed. It’ll make the sheets dirty. We left the room and he gave me a map of the city and told me some things to do and see.

I left.

I got to the center of the city and walked into the cathedral and stood by the entrance to a chapel and watched the mass. A priest was at the altar blessing the Eucharist and chanting his prayers. There were Chilean flags behind him.

I left and sat on a bench and finished reading A Scanner Darkly until the Pre-Columbian museum opened up.

The museums are free on Sunday in Santiago. The Pre-Columbian one has just one floor of cases and displays, but it’s got good interesting stuff from almost every early culture from Mexico south.

I spent a few hours there then walked back to the hostel.

There was a group of French kids sitting around the table in the lounge, cooking breakfast, talking, stepping outside to smoke.

I went to a computer and checked my e-mail. I finally got a response from Frithjof Bergmann, a philosopher I’d been trying to get in touch with. I’m trying to go to South Africa in January and spend some time with him there and see these community projects he’s working on.

A couple of French kids were having sex and making noise in the bedroom across from the computers. The door was cracked open.

A hunched old lady came out of another bedroom and said her watch was missing, that she’d gone to take a shower and put her watch down on the bed and now it’s gone. She was telling this in English to a French girl who tried to help her look for it.

I sat down in the lounge and talked to Paola, who was the woman in the foyer when I arrived.

She had made a dessert of rice mixed with raisins and cream and apples and cinnamon. She scooped me a bowl and warmed it in the microwave and we sat and ate from our bowls on the sofa while the French kids took all the seats at the table.

She’s from Santiago but has spent a couple years in Europe. She’d met an Italian guy at an airport. He was a figure skater who was performing in Peter Pan/Magic on Ice all through the continent. They met and fell for each other and she got to go with him to Turkey, to the Netherlands (she hated Amsterdam and all the bikes), to Venice (she hated it there in the winter, too humid).

Now she’s back here and working at the hostel and living with Scott, the owner, who’s an ex-pat from Minnesota. He was the one who answered the door.

She said he’s in a bad mood because the French kids were up ‘til six the night before playing music and drinking and partying, and because he’s got gout in his leg.

Paola said she has seasonal affective disorder and in the winter takes medicine for it.

A lot of French and Japanese tourists have been showing up lately. Too many. She told me how she asked a Japanese girl if she’d ever seen her parents kiss and how embarrassed the girl got.

I finished my bowl and got up and left.

I walked back downtown to a cinema at the Catholic University and saw Kim Ki-duk’s Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring. I’d seen Time, another one of his movies, at an art cinema in Granada two years earlier.

I stopped at a diner and read and had a cup of coffee.

I walked back to the hostel.

The French kids were sitting all around the table, making dinner, chopping onions, slicing potatoes. There were big liter bottles of red wine and sausages boiling in the kitchen. They stepped outside for cigarettes. They were talking and laughing.

I made sandwiches with bread and avocado and salami and cheese.

Scott, the owner, was sitting in a chair in the lounge, next to a gas space heater, telling people to please shut the door so that the warm air in there wouldn’t go out.

I sat down and tried to talk to him.

He said he hasn’t been to the U.S. in ten years. Even when his dad died a few years ago he didn’t have the money to fly home so he didn’t go back.

He’s always owned a hostel in Santiago, though he just moved to this building a year ago.

In the U.S. he’d been a carpenter, working in the South, taking winters off so he could be mobile and move around and travel when he wanted.

He’s got a brother who just retired from the State Department. He had done the Peace Corps in Brazil, then was in Vietnam for several years, then went to Africa.

Now his brother owns a flower shop in the U.S. with his wife, but his health is bad and he has to takes pills every day for diseases he got in other countries.

Scott’s got two little girls growing up here in Santiago. They live with their mother.

Someone came in and left the door open. Scott pulled himself up and limped to the door and shut it and limped back to the chair.

He said being a hostel owner’s not for everyone, that you have to be a giving person. He nodded his head towards the French kids.

He said with this hostel he only made $3000 profit, last year. He just wants to have enough money to get his teeth fixed before they all fall out.

Even the clothes he wears – a black fleece, yellow t-shirt, nylon shorts, hiking shoes, wool socks – are left-behinds from backpackers.

A French girl asked us if we’d like some of their food. I said no, I’d already eaten. Scott said no, he couldn’t, because of his leg, the gout.

The girl asked him that he couldn’t eat because of his leg?

No thanks, he said.

I was telling him about Frithjof Bergmann and his philosophies of freedom and working and these New Work centers he’s started around the world and how their ideal is that people can work less, divide their work, so they have more time to pursue what really matters to them.

Scott said that if people were working less they’d be more selfish and lazy and all the progress and development that’s been made in the past century would disappear. That the last thing anyone needs is more time off to indulge themselves and take vacations and be selfish.

That all any person wants is pleasure, which is really equal to power, which is really equal to freedom, the freedom he felt when he would be on a plane leaving the U.S. to get away and travel and he could breathe deep and know his time traveling was only beginning.

A French kid turned his head and looked at us talking.

Scott said everybody’s instinct is to be selfish, that that’s biology, that’s machismo and power – like in the Middle East where the travelers say everyone’s so hospitable and caring but that’s really just them men protecting their egos in front of other men – that that and wanting to have sex and enjoy yourself and be happy is all we care about. That there used to be community in the U.S. but money ruined it and more vacation time would just indulge people even more. That Ghandhi or Mother Teresa have such simple and true messages no one can deny but no one wants to follow. That kids down here idolize Che Guevara but Che wanted to kills tens of thousands of people and is disgusting for that.

Scott said his carbon footprint is one-third to one-fourth less than the typical Chilean’s, and one-twentieth than the typical American’s. He doesn’t own a car. He shops at a farmer’s market that he walks to. He recycles. He used to have a compost pile at the other hostel.

These Europeans that come here burn as much fossil fuel flying to Easter Island way out in the Pacific as they did crossing the Atlantic to come here. Maybe he’d go to Easter Island if he were already traveling west to Asia. But it’s all a huge disaster for the flora and fauna of the island, people just going there to see these statues that are a testament to human ignorance.

He could be kind of impressed by a cathedral, but couldn’t help but think of all the people who died building it.

The U.S. is headed for disaster, downfall. He’s got no desire to go back.

He could show me the good hiking routes through Patagonia in Chile and then into Argentina, the next morning, Monday, before I left, if I wanted.

Maybe, I said.

It was 10PM. I got up and left the room and went to the computer. It’s clock said Tuesday, February 24th, 4:54PM.

Scott had put me in the same room as the old lady.

She came in the front entrance, hobbling, wearing a beret, with a man who called her mom, who dropped her off and said he’d be back in the morning.

I went into the room to get my toothbrush. She saw we were in the same room and said in other hostels the women are in one room and the men in another. She had several pairs of low-heeled shoes lined under her bunk.

I went back to the computer. She walked out then returned with Scott. She said I was a stranger to both of them.

Scott winked at me and helped move her bags to a new room.

I brushed my teeth and washed my face and went to sleep by myself in the six-bed dorm.

I woke up at 9 the next morning. The hostel was dead. The computers were off and the wine bottles were empty. The hot water hadn’t been turned on.

I ate bread and an orange and drank tea and read.

The phone rang. Scott limped into the kitchen and picked it up and said “Good day” in Spanish. Nobody was there and he hung up.

He came into the lounge and told me to please shut the door so that the warm air wouldn’t go out. The space heater wasn’t on. I got up and shut the door.

I was thinking of leaving without paying. I put my backpack on and was double-checking my room. Scott showed up again.

I paid him the 5000 pesos. He asked didn’t I want to hear about the hiking routes in Patagonia? I said I had to get going.

He brought me over to a map on the wall and told me about a route he took, that the Chilean side is beautiful and the Argentine side is ugly and has got nothing until you get far south.

He gave me fliers for the hostel and told me to e-mail him about Frithjof Bergmann.

I left and walked to the bus station and drank a Nescafé. I got on a bus to cross the Andes again and pass near Aconcagua and then get to Mendoza. From Mendoza we went to Cordoba. We got in before dawn. I got off the bus, bought a ticket to Parana, drank a cortado, then got on another bus to get home by midday.

It was cold and grey and raining when I got into Parana.

My trip north had been a big right triangle. It lasted two weeks. I covered 3,000 miles.

15: "To the north, to the desert: Part 4"

2009-09-09T19:36:00.000-07:00

Lucy and I got up and went to a café. I got coffee and pancakes with manjar, which is the Chilean dulce de leche. In Chile the coffee is almost always Nescafé. Nobody seems to no why. I said maybe it’s got something to do with Pinochet.

We went and bought some groceries then stopped at a tour agency and booked a 6,000 peso sunset visit to the Valle de la Luna. The town of San Pedro is a few small blocks of tour agencies, restaurants, cafes, hostels, and souvenir shops. The population’s supposed to be a few thousand, but you see tourists – from Europe and North America and South America and Asia and Australia – before you see Chileans.

We went to the archeology museum, which is devoted to the Atacaman culture that lived here before the Europeans came. It’s a nice museum in the shape of a wheel – with a central hub and spokes that extend out.

Because the desert’s so dry a lot of things survived that would’ve rotted in other climates – tapestries, pipes, baskets.

We walked out of town and sat down near a creek. There was a lot of trash - bottles and wrappers - but we found a clean spot. We made sandwiches with avocado – of which there are dozens of varieties in Chile – and cheese and tomato, and ate oranges for dessert.

We came back to town and called Brad – who’s also a Fulbrighter in Chile and whom we bumped into the day before in San Pedro – and he said he’d come with on the sunset visit.

I ran back to the museum and its outdoor market and bought an ocarina and a decorative tray. Shamans used the tray to gather ground-up cebil seeds and snort them into their noses and hallucinate. The vendor asked me if I knew coca and he gave me a few leaves from his pouch.

I put them in my cheek and we got into the van for the sunset visit.

There were a dozen of us in the van. The driver and the guide were Chilean.

We floored it out of the city and stopped off the highway at the edge of a valley. The mountains near San Pedro are made of soft rock. With sandy wind and thousands of years, they get shaped into ragged and strange ways.

We had ten minutes, the guide said.

We got out and took pictures and he explained some things.

We got back into the van and went to the Valle de la Muerte, where there’s a couple tall rock walls that come so close together a wind tunnel was formed. The European who named this valley originally called it Valle de Martes, which means Mars Valley. There was some confusion and it became Valle de la Muerte, Death Valley.

We squinted and covered our faces and hiked around there, keeping the sand out of our eyes.

We got back into the van and drove to the Valley de la Luna.

We got out and looked at some rocks that looked like people praying. There’s a border around them so you can’t get too close. A few years ago a lady walked up to one of them and put her arms around the neck of the rock to take a picture. The head fell off.

The rocks are at the top of a plain. There’s no plants or shrubs or trees. Just red rocks and white salt that looks like snow. Clean, smooth sand dunes are in the distance.

We got back into the van and drove to a cave. We walked through the cave then climbed out and walked on the side of a hill then came back down and got back into the van.

We drove to the famous spot at the Valle de la Luna. We had thirty minutes ‘til sunset. We had to get back into the van by 7:00PM.

We hiked up a sand dune to the lookout spot. There were dozens of groups up there, taking pictures, looking, walking around, turning about. One guy was dressed up as Superman and, as Brad pointed out, took it very seriously.

We watched the sunset and zipped up our coats as the shadows came down on the sand and the mountains. We took pictures. We got back into the van.

The driver had taped a piece of paper to one of the dome lights saying they appreciate tips. He turned on the light and the piece of paper was lit up and glowing as we drove back to town.

We said bye to Brad. Lucy and I left a tip for the guide and the driver and got dinner and went to bed.

* * *
The next day we went sand-boarding.

We rented the boards and some bikes and packed a picnic and rode out of town to dunes near the Valle de la Muerte.

There were a few other people there, sand-boarding.

We stood at the base of the dune and watched.

It wasn’t going well. They could go a bit, then fall. Then get up and try to get going again but fall down again.

One guy hiked way up high on the dune and waxed his board a long time. He looked like he knew what he was doing.

He got up, jumped into position, got going, then lost his balance and fell into the sand. He got up, then fell again. It took him a few minutes to get to the bottom. He tried to get going one more time, but there wasn’t any momentum left.

We took off our shoes and hiked the dune. We waxed our boards then tried it. We fell down. We got up. We fell down again.

We ate the same picnic as the day before, then walked down the other side of the dune and found a flat spot and threw the Frisbee. There were big volcanoes and big clouds and the desert and blue sky off in the distance.

We rode back to town and booked a 15,000 peso sunrise visit to the geysers. We bought a bus ticket for the next day – Friday afternoon – to head south to La Serena, where Lucy’s working and living.

We ate dinner and went to bed.

* * *
The next day we had to get up at 4 for the sunrise visit. Lucy’s alarm didn’t go off but she woke up anyway and we got up and went to the front entrance of the hostel to wait for the van.

We got picked up and the driver said it’s a two-hour drive to the mountains so go back to sleep and relax. We would be going up to 4,300 meters elevation.

Lucy and I went back to sleep.

We got up to the mountains and the geyser fields. The moon was out and the sky was just blue. It was below freezing.

We got out of the van and the driver said don´t run around and don´t smoke. Everybody went to the bathrooms.

We got to the geysers and the sun rose up over the bare fields and we looked at the steam vents and the bubbling water and the weird colorful bacteria that grow around them. It’s the third biggest geyser field in the world, behind Yellowstone in the U.S. and another park in New Zealand.

The geysers only work early in the morning, before it gets too warm. We walked around and took pictures and then huddled around a plastic table and ate biscuits and drank coca tea for breakfast.

We got in the van and drove to other geysers and a thermal pool.

We took off our clothes and hustled into the pool and kneeled down and scooted around in the water. It was lukewarm and hot. Some spots burned you and others made you shiver.

I was wearing the boxer shorts with the big ink stain from that night in Salta.

We got out and toweled off. I laid my boxers on rocks to dry while we looked at more geysers. When we headed back I grabbed my underwear. The big stain was gone. I wondered if the water was special.

We got in the van and were driven around the high plateau and stopped to look at animals. There were rabbits and llamas and alpacas and vicuñas and some ducks by a pond. We’d shout stop when we saw something and the driver would stop and we’d slide open the windows and stick out our digital cameras and take pictures and then look at the animals.

We got out a couple times to take pictures of the ducks or the llamas and walk around and look at the big empty plateau and the volcanoes in the distance. We stopped at an Atacaman village where they sell food and there are their houses and a tiny chapel they built. The driver said don’t take pictures of the Atacamans. They think it’ll steal their souls.

I went into the house where they were selling fried bread and tea. The driver said the tea is an aphrodisiac. He made a joke about two guys in our group drinking it. An Atacaman girl was working and had headphones in her ears, listening to an iPod. I wondered if that would steal her soul, too.

We drove back to town. Lucy and I waited around a couple hours then got on our overnight bus to La Serena. I started reading A Scanner Darkly as we left San Pedro. I was hoping I could finish it before morning.

13: "Party: Part 1"

2009-08-22T18:20:00.000-07:00

Saturday morning the doorbell rang at 8. It was Pablo, from Buenos Aires. He’d come to work at the Howard Johnson and wanted to shower and leave his bags at our house.

I let him in and went back to bed. I gave him the key to let himself out. I heard him trying to slide the key back under the door when he was leaving. Sounded like it didn’t fit.

I feel back asleep.

* * *

That afternoon I was sitting in the kitchen, writing an article for Barriletes about my university and how it has to share space with primary schools and the plans to construct a new building and campus outside the city. My dictionaries, a news clip, my notebook, were spread on the table.

Daniel came home with a few men. They stomped up to the terrace. They came back down and hustled out. Did I know we’re cooking tonight, Daniel told me.

Daniel was running a big event at UNER – the annual conference for the National Network of Alternative Media (RNMA). It started Friday but people started showing up the day before. Some would stick around Paraná and our house ‘til Monday.

Claudio had gone home for the weekend.

I walked downtown in the evening to a bakery. I finished my article and mailed it off. I was thinking of going to see I’ve Loved You So Long, which was playing at 9:00PM at the big cinema.

I went back home to drop off my laptop. There was a stack of wine boxes and beer crates and a big bag of rolls in the corner by the computer. In the kitchen the fridge was filled with beer and soda and wine and dozens of sausages.

I decided to stick around.

The same men came back, this time without Daniel. They were going to get the fire going and start cooking. The others were coming around 10. 40 people were coming.

Three guys had come over, including a (“the”) Cuban. The Cuban took off and I stayed in my room awhile listening to a Kings of Convenience album I’d just gotten from the owner of Elefante Multiespacio.

I went up to the roof to see how things were going. One of the guys was coming down the stairs, his shirt off, his pants hitched high, his chest thin with a lot of white hair. He was sweating and looking for a bowl.

Another guy was at the grill, turning over the sausages. He had a shaved head and a white goatee and a calm voice. This was Pablo, a writer from Buenos Aires. He showed me a couple of his books in Daniel’s room. He had his shirt on.

The other guy came back up. This was Roberto, also from the capital, where he’s a host of a morning radio show.

We got to talking. They said it must be easy to get girls here, being the blond American. I said not quite, and started talking about love and relationships and Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.

Pablo took some sausages off the grill and one of them burst and squirted grease on his pants.

He asked for salt.

I said there was salt downstairs.

We went downstairs and he took the box of fine salt and dumped some on his pants and the floor.

He said salt helps, but only when it´s grease.

I reached under the sink for the dustpan. He turned around and went for the broom.

We went back upstairs. The neighbors were on their terrace. The dad had his shirt off. He was lighting newspaper under a pile of kindling in the grill. A grandpa was up there and the little quiet girl I see up there sometimes, too. The men were smoking.

I held a flashlight for Pablo as he grilled the meat. We drank wine and waited for the others to come.

They came at 10:30, just as the sausages were finished. The roof was slick near the grill, so much grease had been squirting and leaking.

Pablo said two sausages per person, until everybody’s served.

I got my sausage and re-filled my cup of wine. I recognized some girls I’d met the day before, who came to our house to meet Daniel. One was from Tucuman, one from Santiago del Estero, both in the northwest. They had come in together on an overnight train. The train’s cheap, they said, but slow and awkward and your seat’s a plastic bench.

I started talking to a janitor from Cordoba. When I said I was from the U.S. he asked if I could bring home some messages for Obama. He turned to somebody else and said the messages would be very clear and not so nice.

This was the first time he’d come to the conference. He said the presentations we’re too tied up in theoretical points, which is a rather Argentine tendency.

I said I was trying to write a blog that doesn’t give any opinions, any prognostications. I mentioned Hemingway and trying to write with nouns and verbs and getting rid of elaborate language.

He said but one should know that a message has to be tailored to its audience and if the message isn’t proper for the audience there can be a misinterpretation and misunderstanding. He asked if I got him.

I said something about the autonomy of the text.

He said he had to get some wine and walked away.

Some of Daniel’s friends that I’d met in Santa Fe awhile back had come to the party. I bummed a cigarette from Martin and asked how things have been.

I saw Emilia, who Daniel’s in love with and who has a friend who’s going to Granada, Spain, in a couple months. We’ve been trying to get in touch so I can talk to her friend and tell her about Spain and calm her down. It’ll be the first time she’s left the country.

Emilia asked me about Obama and about “the famous crisis”. I told her what I thought, that I’d just read an article in The Point that said we could believe in progress again, as if the 18th or 19th century. She asked if electing a black president was real progress.

I went for more wine. We were all out but they were passing a hat to buy more.

I talked to a guy named Diego, who´s also from Buenos Aires, who also hosts a radio show. He works for a station called “El Colectivo”. I asked what kind of programming they’ve got. He said they have one show about subway workers, who have a bad rap because they fought for and earned a six-hour workday and because they have so much control over the city when they strike.

Subway workers come on and talk about the things they do with their two extra hours. Some of them are musicians, artists, writers. The show’s called “Two Hours Less”.

Diego was wearing a black t-shirt with a bus on it and the name of his radio station.

The Cuban came back. He was wearing a soccer jersey with a Cuban flag on it.

They brought more wine and Coke and Fernet – an Italian herbal liquor. There weren’t enough cups to go around so some kids took knives and sliced the Coke bottles and filled the tops and bottoms with Fernet and Coke.

There were a couple guys and a girl near the drink table. I told one short, curly-haired kid I was from the U.S.

His eyes widened and he craned his neck and looked at the crowd and said something about me and coming from somewhere and imperialism and this gathering of people.

I started talking to the girl. She gave me a cup of Fernet and Coke. I asked if she was a student. She said she’s a psychologist.

Psychoanalysis? I asked. Pretty much, she said. I said I’d studied it a bit, but more as philosophy. I asked if she knew of Zizek. She said no.

I was telling her about how I think it’s interesting, psychology in Argentina, that at the University of Illinois there’s an important and big and well-funded psych department yet it’s impossible to find a class that teaches Lacan.

She turned and refilled her cup and stopped listening.

I had put my flashlight near the stairs to the roof, to light them up a bit. I went to the stairwell. The flashlight had been moved, the back taken off, the three batteries out. I took it down to my bedroom. Daniel came into my room to get a chair and told me to bring it back, that it helps.

I put it in a different place.

People now were singing and chanting and shoving each other around. A lot of songs from the seventies, about Peron. I recognized some from that night in Santa Fe.

I stood to the side and watched.

Somebody brought out a guitar and started playing folklore songs and girls and women began dancing, stalking around each other, bobbing, snapping their fingers in the air.

A couple UADER students, a guy and a girl, showed up, ones I hadn’t seen in a couple months. They remembered my name.

The guy was talking and pulled up his shirt. He had a bloody gash along his side.

Dog bite, he said.

I asked if it was one of the street dogs.

No, belonged to somebody. Ran out of a house. He put his shirt back down.

I asked Roberto if this is how parties are in Buenos Aires.

Yeah, he said, but sadder. You know, tango, everything.

More melancholy? I asked.

Yes, more melancholy. He said.

I started talking to a girl. She’s a documentary filmmaker from the capital, though she´s only made short films ‘til now.

She just made one about Patagonia and the land problems there, that there’s a few people and groups that own most of the land, that the residents and natives are oppressed.

She mentioned Benetton and the thousands of acres they own there.

Then she mentioned Marcelo Tinelli and how he’s been buying land there recently.

I asked who Marcelo Tinelli is.

She laughed and looked at me when I asked and said I don’t know anything about Argentina if I don’t know who Marcelo Tinelli is.

He’s a media mogul and TV star in Argentina. He started these popular TV shows called Videomatch and Showmatch. Now he hosts the Argentine version of Dancing with Stars (which is a national disaster, she said). He’s been getting into real estate and buying a lot of land and forcing people off it.

She asked if went to the conference.

I said no, nobody invited me, nor gave me the schedule.

She said that was a waste, that this conference is only once a year and here it was in Paraná and I didn’t even go.

I said that is sad, that I live with somebody who does a lot of the same work I do, yet it’s like we´re in parallel worlds, sometimes, and don’t share our stuff and what we’re up to.

A girl was offering candies from a plastic bag. I took one and sucked on it ‘til it was gone then drank more wine.

There was more singing and dancing.

During the day it’d been hot, near 70 degrees. Warm air blown in from the north.

The winds had switched and were chilly and from the south. They were putting on coats and sweaters.

Some kids were shouting about going to Santa Fe, that it’s boring in Parana. One of these kids got in my face and kept asking me if I understood. Down below a few others were leaving and somebody dropped a bottle and it shattered in the street. A car was coming but drove just right and missed the shards.

I went down the stairs. The flashlight was on the ground, shining into the wall. I went to my room to listen to music. Other people were coming downstairs to head out and go back to the hotel.

I stood outside my room as the crowd filed out. That one kid came down and got in my face again and kept asking if I understood. I said you can’t keep asking these black-and-white questions, that it’s all shades of grey.

A lady told him to take it easy. She put her hand up to her mouth and made the drinkie-drinke motion. The Fabulous Cadillacs were playing on the stereo.

There were kisses and hugs and handshakes and everybody left.

I went to the bathroom. Somebody had messed-up the flusher and the toilet wouldn´t stop running. There was vomit on the floor. A cockroach was on its back, its legs squirming trying to push itself against the wall and flip over.

I took a long-handled squeegee and hit it a few times.

I brushed my teeth, drank water, and went to bed.

The kid tried to come back in the house and punch me and fight me. They held him back and he didn’t get in.

The next day Daniel said what a great thing it was to get all those people together, what a space of possibilities there is when you can bring so much talent to one place.

Next year’s conference will be in Tucuman.

12: "Dinners with Élo: Part 2"

2009-08-14T12:04:00.000-07:00

I sent an e-mail to Élo after I got back from my trip north, just before the new semester was starting.

I asked if she was staying in Paraná.

A few days went by. No word. I told Daniel I thought, maybe, she’d split and gone away with her boyfriend.

She wrote back, saying she was still in town, and that her friend was visiting, and that we should go canoeing on the river sometime soon. I said we should make dinner and make plans.

I went over to her apartment Tuesday night. She lives on the first floor of a rehabbed colonial building. Her tall and narrow front windows open to street. You could stick your head in from the sidewalk, if you wanted. The first floor’s got the kitchen and a living room. There are maps of France and Torres del Paine and Bariloche on the wall. The bedrooms and the bathroom are on the second floor, up a spiral staircase.

Mónica was over, one of her students from the French department. Eva was there, too, her friend from France. Her roommate Martin was upstairs studying.

Eva´s from Lyon. She speaks a little Spanish and no English, so Mónica and Élo were going back and forth to French, telling her what we were talking about.

Eva had just quit a job in a bronze workshop. The job was too heavy – the fumes and the dust and the noise. She’s going back to school after this trip, to study art therapy.

This was her first long trip. She’d visited Spain, England, Switzerland, but never anything far away, nor more than a few days. She was spending three weeks in South America.

Élo had gone to Peru for the break. She took a bus from Paraná to Lima – 40 hours direct. She had an awful headache when she got into the capital. The bus had gone from sea-level to 10,000 feet without stopping.

Her and her boyfriend and some others hiked through the jungle and visited Machu Picchu and were in Lima during a big public holiday. She said they got three bottles of rum and three bottles of Coke for just a few dollars. They drink hard in Peru, she said. The hangover’s awful when you’re that high up.

She went to Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. Said it looks like the ocean. Water to the horizon. You can’t see Peru on the far side.

Martin came downstairs.

He’s at the end of his university work. He’s passed all the classes and just has to finish his thesis to graduate. He studies bioengineering at the national university. He said, ideally, he’d like to work in hospital administration, in managing technology. But he said the government’s not giving enough money and support for medical development and it’s hard to get jobs like that if you don’t know the right person.

Élo was frying broccoli and onions and carrots and garlic in a wok. She grated nuez moscada – a walnut that smells like ginger – into it. Potatoes were boiling in a pot. She was going to soften the potatoes, split them down the middle, stuff the fried vegetables into them, sprinkle cheese on top, bake it all in the oven.

Martin was serving cold leftover asado, putting a bite of beef on a fork and passing it to the table, taking back the empty fork, sticking on more and passing it back.

He said he’s hyper-carnivorous. That and he loves sleeping the siesta.

We were drinking beer and Coke Light and listening to Marvin Gaye and smoking cigarettes. Élo doesn’t smoke. Neither do I. We say.

It was a warm night. The front window was wide open and Élo and Eva were in short sleeves. Martin said it’s unusual to be so warm this time of year – the equivalent of February in the north.

Dinner was served and we ate, sprinkling oil and salt and crushed peppers onto the potatoes.

Mónica told me she’d spent a year in France as a language assistant.

Her and Élo got into an argument about the price of things in France and Argentina, that you could buy four bottles of beer and a bottle of coke and vegetables, in Argentina, for the same price as just a couple bottles of beer in Europe. Mónica was saying that but, in nominal terms, 1000 pesos would be worth a lot less than 1000 Euros. Élo and I looked at each other. I said it’s a question of purchasing power. Martin agreed.

We got to talking about clothes. Élo said sometimes she uses the microwave to dry her underwear. As long as there’s nothing synthetic in them, you can put them in, five seconds, whatever, and they’re dry and warm and nice to slip on right there. It’s good at hostels, if they have a microwave, instead of hanging your clothes on the line and waiting all afternoon for it to dry.

We finished up. Another helping of potatoes was served. Eva made coffee on the stove. We talked about canoeing on the weekend. Mónica said it’s better to go with a guide. The currents on the river can be strong and unreliable and hard to navigate. Élo said, Saturday night, no drinking, just a movie and Coke and early to bed. She didn’t want to be hung over Sunday, canoeing.

Martin went upstairs to bed. Mónica got up to go. She invited us to a movie night at the Catalan cultural center. She speaks Catalan and is a member of the center and said there’d be short films and food and a couple other things.

Élo poured me an aperitif that Eva had brought with her. It was strong with anise. Élo mixed it with water and I drank it and we got up to go. They needed cigarettes. I was going home to keep working on my website.

Élo poured the aperitif into an empty Coke bottle, mixed in water, put the cap on, and carried it out. Her and Eva were going to the river with the bottle and the cigarettes. Élo said she hardly ever goes out this time of night. It was 11:30. We kissed goodbye and said we’d be in touch for the weekend.

11: "To the north, to the desert: Part 3"

2009-08-09T10:29:00.000-07:00

I got up at 8, showered, packed my bags, and walked to the terminal in Jujuy for my bus to Chile.

I saw some other travelers there. We’re easy to spot. I’d thought I was being unique, being way up north in Jujuy.

The Pullman bus came late. The driver opened the hold underneath. It was stuffed with all colors of hiking backpacks.

I got into the bus. It was almost all Europeans and North Americans. More together than you would ever see at any moment in Jujuy. My seat was next to an old Chilean man.

We passed through the Quebrada de Humuahuaca then drove up switchbacks to the top of the puna – the high plateau.

I finished Typee. My pen was open, the cap off, to mark notes on the pages.

I saw ink on my shirt, then on my jeans, then on the seat cover in front of me. I looked right. There was ink on the old man´s pants.

My pen was bleeding. I figured it was the altitude. I put the cap on and put it away, trying to be discreet. The old man’s pants were navy and the small stain would be hard to spot.

The shirt I stained was a button-up I’d gotten at the Dump and Run garage sale at the University of Illinois. I got it the last day of the sale, when everything’s free.

It´s an Abercrombie and Fitch girls´shirt. I´d never had a shirt that buttoned right-over-left before. I took it off a rack along with a Faded Glory plaid shirt. Faded Glory is a Wal-Mart brand.

That shirt got stained in Montreal, with the same kind of blue Pilot pen, when the pen was open and I tossed my shirt on my desk before I went to bed.

I had stained a pair of boxers a couple days earlier here in Salta, when I was writing notes in bed, in the top bunk, and fell asleep with the pen open.

We reached the salt flats. There were vans and cars and motorcycles stopped, people out looking at the white, bright fields, taking photos. There were mounds of salt piled-up, and heavy lifters and a building where they bag and prepare it for sale. There was a restaurant, there, too. We were at 10,000 feet.

On the far side of the flats we saw llamas. The old man nudged me, pointed out the window. When he saw I saw them, he nodded and winked.

We passed a hotel, a place with a few rooms, Direct TV on top, a big gas tank in the parking lot. New and big and clean SUVs and pick-ups were parked there.

We passed a makeshift tourist stall. A few women and children were sitting on the side of road, at the crotch of a sharp, high turn, with a sign and tables and blankets, selling knit clothes, indigenous souvenirs. There were a couple cars stopped, tourists in Gortex and sunglasses looking.

There were more llamas near there, alpacas, too. These were bigger than the others and had polychrome yarn tassels pierced into their ears and tied around their necks.

We were handed our customs declarations. We stopped at the border crossing, at 13,000 feet. There was a pay toilet there – 1.50 Argentine pesos, 200 Chilean pesos. The attendant gave you a fold of toilet paper after you paid.

There were two wooden kiosks up there, too, selling what kiosks sell: soda, crackers, chocolate, water, gum, potato chips, mints.

We got back in the bus and headed higher, to 14,000 feet and the end of the plains. It got grey outside, then began to snow. The land was red, just rocks and sand and hills and mountains. No trees, animals, or bushes. The old man was catching his breath.

The bus was warm and comfortable and steady. I took off my hoody, to cover my lap and the stains.

We passed volcanoes – sharp, even cones, covered with snow. The tallest is Licancabur, 18,000 feet. There´s also Sairecabur, Lascar and Putana.

We got back into the sunlight and away from the snow, heading down to the Atacaman valley.

We got to San Pedro de Atacama and were dropped off at a customs office. There´s no bus station there.

I met my friend Lucy, who’d gotten in a half-hour earlier from Calama, Chile.

We found a hostel and put down our bags and walked to the edge of town. You could look back across the plains to the volcanoes and to where the highway runs up into the puna. Where I’d just come from.

The Andean passes close at night. It got dark out and Lucy and I watched the last cars and trucks come down the highway.

At first, they’re so far away they look like stars. They´re just one bright light. They drift down, in a silent procession, one following the other. Like a constellation falling apart.

The light stays simple and bright and one, getting closer. Then the light splits in two. Then the car or the SUV or the semi pulls up to junction and brakes and is heavy and makes noise and turns left or right and goes on.

We walked back into town and got dinner. We went to a restaurant that was serving chili, which she said no one really eats in Chile.

I got the chili, and a pear smoothie. Lucy got lasagna. We sat next to a fireplace. It started to rain while we ate.

10: "Dinners with Élo: Part 1"

2009-08-06T13:59:00.000-07:00

My roommate Daniel’s got a friend named Martin. His mom’s a French professor at UADER.

One day he told me that Martin’s mom wanted to get me in touch with Élodie, a French girl who’s doing the same thing here as me but in the French department.

So I got her e-mail and we made plans to meet for dinner.

This was back in June, before winter break, yet.

We met in front of the Escuela Normal. She showed up late, in spandex and sweats and headphones and her curly hair tied back. She’d come from the gym, with that damp musk of a workout, with a French accent on her Spanish.

I can tell my Spanish is getting better. I can hear accents now – French, American, German – and dialects – Spanish, Chilean, and within Argentina, Porteño, Cordobes, Correntino.

We went to Live Rock, the only big sit-down restaurant with long hours, a long menu, and a generic 80’s pop rock motif.

I got a Calabresa pizza – that’s with mozzarella cheese and salami and olives. Élo’s a vegetarian and got a pizza with Roquefort.

We had a long dinner and a long conversation. She talked. I listened.

She studied tourism in France but could care less about the place and doesn’t want to go back. She said Europe’s old and racist and got no jobs.

She’d spent a year in Mexico before getting a government grant to come here as a language assistant. Before the grant she traveled through the Southern Cone with her boyfriend. They hitchhiked through Patagonia, down to Tierra del Fuego, then back north through Uruguay, Porto Alegre in Brazil, and Iguazu Falls on the border with Argentina.

Now he’s in Paraguay and Peru, backpacking, and she misses him and is really thinking about giving up the grant and getting away from Paraná and dull rural Entre Ríos province and getting back to him and going up to Mexico.

She was frustrated with the inconsistent school schedule, that even though we get days off – for teacher strikes, plumbing problems, board exams, new public holidays, flu pandemics – usually there’s no announcement and she can’t make plans to travel.

She’s bored here, having to work only a dozen hours a week, with too much free time and not enough to do. She reads – Zola’s her favorite author, though now she’s reading a long book by a Greek writer. She said she’s never read any North American literature. She asked me if it's any good.

And she works out, cooks, prepares her classes – though even that’s a frustration (one professor told her just, simply, to talk about Montesquieu – she asked how: politically, philosophically, historically). And then there’s not much to do in the province – no mountains, oceans, forests. There’s a big river but nobody goes in it, out on it. And they hardly ever eat the fish that come from it.

She went to the thermal springs in the countryside – but that was really just a hot swimming pool.

Her head’s telling her to stay, to finish the grant, to keep working with her French students – she’s been teaching radio production in one class and they’re working on a yearlong project to write and record and produce a show. Her heart’s telling her to go.

We finished our pizzas and talked til midnight. We left and walked home. Turns out we live a few blocks from each other and she walks down my street every day on the way to the gym. Baucis is an old, preserved, historic street – narrow and brick-paved and with murals and poems painted and posted at each end.

We said good-bye. We’d see if we’d ever see each other again.

9: "To the north, to the desert: Part 2"

2009-07-31T10:16:00.000-07:00

I got into Salta after dark.

I got to my hostel, ate some fruit, wrote, talked with a receptionist and a Porteña who was there on vacation. We were talking about Swine Flu.

I showed them the photo I’d taken of Cristina Kirchner. The Buenos Aires girl liked it, fawned. The receptionist started swearing and pretended to stab my camera. He said the U.S. has got it figured out, that the three branches of government are separate, clean, apart from each other. He said here it’s all mixed together.

I went upstairs to the bar where they were playing The Rolling Stones, Daft Punk, The Clash…standard hostel fare. A blonde Scandinavian girl was working the bar.

The receptionist came upstairs with a couple of his friends, who were going horesback riding to the mountains tomorrow. They’d ride up there, cook an asado, take naps, practice lassoing, ride back down by sunset.

I showed them the photo of Kirchner. They shouted and flicked their lighters at my camera.

I drank a Quilmes, wrote a bit, while English and Australian and French kids talked and played foosball. When I went down to my room to sleep, a Chinese kid had fallen asleep in my bed. I grabbed a couple blankets and made up the one free mattress and went to sleep.

The next day I walked to the center of town. There’s a famous archeological museum in Salta that has some child mummies found in the Andes. They were a sacrifice, apparently. The museum was closed because of the Flu.

I hiked to the edge of town and up a mountain, along a stone stair trail, past monuments for the Stations of the Cross. At the top was a park, with a restaurant, waterfalls, a trim and green lawn, benches, shops, and a big building to haul in the gondolas and the riders that rise up from near the bus station at ground level.

I went to a quiet part of the peak, sitting in the shade under a tree. I ate an apple and some biscuits I’d got from the bus. A gardener came over and told me to move, that I could only sit on the benches.

I got up and moved. I saw him go to somebody sitting at the base of a statue, telling her to get down and move to a bench.

I hiked down in the afternoon, passed through the central plaza again, then got on a bus for Jujuy.

Jujuy has a quarter million people and is in a valley of the Andes. It´s the last big city before Bolivia and Chile. It’s an Argentine city, but the people begin to look different this far north – with roots more Andean than European.

I wandered around the city after dark, looking for a place to stay. The first hostel was full. The second was out of business, just a dim outline of where signs used to be on the walls and doors. I stayed at a place near the bus station – decent, tiny rooms, no windows though.

Near the bus station is a big market. There’s vendors set-up in cramped stalls selling…clothes, choripan, quack medicine, hot dogs, cookware, kebabs, plastic toys, unlabeled spices…a lot of it looks imported from China. A clothes store near the market had a window display with three mannequins. One was wearing a respiratory Flu mask. One had an American flag bandana tied covering his face. One was wearing a gas mask.

There are restaurants here too, little dives with tile floors, scattered metal tables, florescent lighting, plastic curtain doorways and cheap, good, greasy food. Spicy, too – the first I’ve seen in the country.

The next day I went to a café – the archeological museum here was shut, too. I passed through an artisan market, an art space with a Jujuy painting competition on display, and over the little, dry Rio Grande and the shantytowns on its banks.

I got on a bus for Humahuaca, the oldest settlement in the Quebrada de Humahuaca – the valley of the Rio Grande that’s got polychrome desert mountains and ancient ruins and sentinel cacti.

Humahuaca’s a tiny town – 9000 people or so. I got in at 8pm. It was dark and chill and moist. I hiked out of town to my hostel. I took a wrong turn and started walking on a trail up and out to the desert. The stars were bright and shining and sharp. I could see the Milky Way just like on the beach in Brazil.

I backtracked, found the right way, got chased by a dog that squeezed under its fence and ran out into the road, and got to the hostel. I checked in, put my bags down in an adobe cottage with a cane-thatched roof, and went into the lobby to sit and read Typee and warm-up by a space heater screwed on top of a tank of butane gas. The guy working the desk said I couldn’t shower in the morning, that it gets so cold at night the water can freeze and it’s too hard to heat it until the strong sun during midday.

The next day, Sunday, I got up for breakfast, which was the standard toast and jam and dulce de leche and tea, though all nicely, carefully, quietly served in ceramic jars and plates and mugs and dishes.

I headed to town, through the market. I heard people speaking Quechua, saw old ladies wearing flat, long-brimmed black hats and men wearing knit ponchos. The people were soft-spoken, with less gesture, strut, than most Argentines. I bought bananas and oranges, then bread and cheese and bottles of water, and headed for Coctaca, a village 10Km out in the desert, along a gravel road, where there’s pre-Columbian ruins.

I was walking alone most of the time. Every now and then a car or motorcycles would pass, coming or going. I could stop and look around and see nothing but hills and mountains and cacti and brush. No shade. No clouds, nor trees. No other people. A few birds and bugs flying around. I could hear my heart beating.

One moment I could hear water running. There was a shallow creek that ran away from the town and crossed the road a few kilometers out. It flows down the valley to meet the Rio Grande, which runs south to Jujuy to meet the Rio Xibi Xibi. When I got up there, there was ice and snow in the water. It was midday, clear, bright sun.

I picked up some snow. The crystals were long and sharp, white, shining needles that looked like they would cut you. I held it in my hand, felt the cold wet burn, then threw it at a cactus. All the snow in the creek had melted when I came back in the afternoon, on my way home before dusk.

Approaching Coctaci, I passed tiny ranches, one with a few cows in the pasture, each place a couple low brick buildings, some with clothes hanging on the line, one with smoke coming out the chimney. They had thin thatched roofs held down with big stones along the edge.

I got to Coctaci. There was a soccer field, dusty and covered with rocks. Around the main square were just a few houses, a little chapel. There were a couple kids out but they didn’t come talk to me.

I got to the ruins, looked around, sat in a line of shade from a cactus, and ate my lunch. It got chilly in the shade.

I climbed higher up the terraces and lied down and took a nap in the sun.

I woke up, brushed the grass off my clothes, headed back as the day got late. A couple people were washing a mini-van in the creek that runs through town. They had pulled it up over a bed of rocks and were wiping it with rags.

I listened to M83 on the way in. At night I ate at a little restaurant in town, like one of those florescent, quick, cheap dives in Jujuy. I got a plate of rice and chicken and potatoes, bread, and spicy sauce for less than three dollars.

The next day I wandered through town, past the dozens of stands and vendors and tables all set-up to the parade of tourists, of foreigners and Argentines who feel like foreigners, who come to buy a trinket or bibelot, a striped bright table cloth, a llama figurine, a poncho, a sweater. It was the same stuff at each stall, and the same stuff in Jujuy, and in Salta. Guides were leading travelers past the church, past town hall. People were walking with their camcorders in front of them, turning this way and that, recording as they went through the narrow brick-paved streets.

A couple guys were selling these metallic oblong magnetic things. When you throw them in the air and they touch, they buzz and rattle. I saw the same things, heard the same noise, at Sun Yat-Sen´s tomb in Nanjing.

I got some coca leaves at a grocery store and walked to an overlook above the town while they soaked in my cheek.

I got on an afternoon bus back to Jujuy, to cross the puna – the high Andean plains – the next day and then cross the border to Chile. I stayed at the same hotel. New room across the hall. Still no window.

8: "A Sunday"

2009-07-28T13:55:00.000-07:00

Sunday, July 26th. Last weekend before school starts again after winter vacation.

I slept-in until midday. Claudio fried milanesas – breaded chicken or beef that’s fried in sunflower oil…very popular here. He put some mozzarella on top, and served it with pasta and bread.

We went up to the roof after lunch. There had been a rare cold spell the past few days, with overnight temperatures between 10 and 20 degrees Fahrenheit. It even snowed in some cities like Cordoba. The newspaper said it was colder in northern Argentina, near the desert, than at the research base in Antarctica.

It was nice out, though. I sliced apart a navel orange and gave half to Claudio. Their friend, Pablo, from Buenos Aires, was spending the weekend with us. He lives in the capital, with his family downtown near the Obelisk, where he’s studying public relations. He comes to Paraná every couple weeks to work daycare at a Howard Johnson. They pay the 80 peso, 6-hour bus ticket, so the few hours he can pick up here and there are worth it.

It’s that hard to get a job in Argentina. A six-hour commute for a few paid hours is worth it.

He had just got back from the hotel and came up to the terrace as we ate our oranges and sat in the sun.

We got to talking about social groups, cliques – tribus, as they call them here. Pablo was telling me about some of the ones here – like floggers, that are teenagers who use online photo logs (flogs) and social networks and wear tight jeans and bright colors and have androgynous, messy, parted hair cuts and do this kind of jig-dance with their feet.

Cumbio is the most famous and powerful flogger in Argentina. She’s sponsored and gets paid to attend parties and events. The Times did a profile on her a while back, after which her homepage was hacked.

He told me about another group that was all about the Rolling Stones - the rollingas, they were called, in which you wear rock band t-shirts or Stones shirts and bandanas tied around your neck and talk with this kind of melody and put your hand up to your face and shake it up and down when you say certain stuff. And just in general move around and peck and strut like Mick Jagger. It was a movement in the early 90´s connected with a lot of BA bands. Cofler chocolates made a satire of the thing, how to play the role, in an old TV commercial.

I asked Pablo when he was going back to BA. He said he wasn’t, just yet, that he was going to Gualeguaychu first, a small city in southern Entre Ríos province.

He was going to see his girlfriend, who lives there, although they met in the capital.

It was six years ago and Pablo went into an Internet café and saw this girl he liked. So he looked at the screen of her computer and saw her e-mail address and wrote it down.

He sent her a message later that day, saying how he thought she was pretty, all that.

She responded, and they started chatting on Messenger.

They went out on a date in Buenos Aires, going for a walk somewhere.

Soon after, her mom died and she returned to Gualeguaychu, her hometown.

Pablo had moved to Paraná because of a girl. Many people – myself included – asked him if it’s worth it to trade Buenos Aires for a girl. He spent a couple years here in that relationship.

They broke up and he had to go to Gualeguaychu for a job. He was working doing antique auto show promotions.

He got into town and called 110, the information line. He asked for his old girlfriend´s last name. There were 11 listings but the operator said she’d only give him two.

He called the first one and asked if Jessica was there.

“Hold on,” the voice on the phone told him. The first one he tried. It was her house.

So he asked if he could drop off his luggage there and they got back in touch and started dating again. They’ve been going out for the past four years, now.

I asked, again, when he was heading back. If he was going back that night to Buenos Aires. He reminded me, again, that he was going to Gualeguaychu, first. But he said no, what’s the rush? He said he’d cook an asado (beef barbeque) that night. He’d go to the grocery store – nothing else would be open on a Sunday afternoon – and buy everything, the meat, wine, everything.

I went to Facturity, the bakery and café I’ve made my regular place. I got a large cortado (which is still smaller than an American small) and a croissant filled with dulce de leche. I finished reading Mrs. Dalloway, which I’ll be talking about when I do lectures on The Hours in August for Literature II.

I left and headed to Elefante, for the Sunday night Cine Groove cycle. About 20 people showed up, sitting in wood folding chairs in the main room, smoking cigarettes, filling cups of beer with big Quilmes bottles, drinking wine. They played Justice’s Cross album while we waited for the film. I bumped into Valeria and Martin, two friends of Daniel I’d met in Santa Fe. It was her first time there, but Martin had come before.

They showed Walter Hill’s The Warriors. Claudio texted me early in the film, during the big, citywide gang conference. He wanted my Swiss Army knife to open a bottle of wine. I had the knife with me in my backpack.

I walked home after the movie, quickly saying bye to Valeria and Martin. The bells of the cathedral rang ten when I crossed the plaza. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.

The asado was almost done when I got home and up to the rooftop, where we have a brick grill. An asado barbeque is almost always done over wood, instead of charcoal or, god-forbid, gas. He was grilling chorizos (beef sausages) and ribs. They don’t put anything on the meat – no sauces, no seasonings – just a little salt. It’s good, grass-fed meat, and a long, slow time over wood coals that get out the flavor.

Pablo asked me if I believed that men have walked on the moon. He said Danny showed him a video earlier that had a lot of damning evidence...like photos with no stars in the background and shadows that go the wrong way. I remember I had tried to watch a conspiracy theory show like that on Fox when I was a little kid. I think it was on my birthday but nobody else wanted to see it. They were also going to talk about bleeding Christ statues.

Pablo said a lot of people here believe it was a Cold War hoax and that Stanley Kubrick was hired to direct it. July 20th is now Friendship Day in Argentina and a lot of countries around the world - though not the U.S. - celebrate it. It was in honor of the moonlanding. He said Friendship Day is very significant to be attached to something that could´ve been political hoodwinking.

A thin, waxing moon was rising in the west. It looked like a white grin over the apartments.

Pablo´s question reminded me of my friend Martin in China, who asked me if the videos of the Tiananmen Square protests were real or fake.

Downstairs Lisandro, the friend who’d worked in Bariloche, was making a salad.

We brought down the meat and because we only have three chairs in the house, pulled up two big, empty paint buckets. We were short a knife so Daniel used a butcher knife to cut his meat. We passed around the sausages first, then got into the rib meat. You have to eat it fast, while it’s still hot and dripping and tender and gets wedged in between your teeth. When it gets cold its too hard to cut from the bone.

Meat, salad, red wine, bread – the Argentine asado. We finished eating, smoked some cigarettes, drank the rest of the wine, washed-up. It was midnight.

Lisandro took off early. Pablo had a bus at 6am to Gualeguaychu, so he went out to find a bar and have a drink and pass some time. I looked at some scenes from Children of Men, which we’d all watched the night before.

7: "To the north, to the desert: Part 1"

2009-07-22T13:00:00.000-07:00

Winter break came two weeks early because of Swine Flu.

Monday, June 29th, I was supposed to give a talk to Language II about a video I’d made. I got a text in the morning from my adviser: because of the flu, school was cancelled. She wrote back later in the afternoon – the school’s been closed for winter break, no classes til July 27th.

Entre Rios province shut all its schools early, as a health measure. That weekend, the clubs and bars were also closed, along with church services and any big public gatherings. The newspapers were referring to it all as a “psychopandemic”, as there was no national consensus on how to respond, on the extent of the outbreak. Each province reacted as it wanted to.

What really made things bad was the resignation of the president’s minister of health just after the June 28th midterm elections. The replacement declared a few days later that the number of Swine Flu cases in the country weren’t a couple thousand, as they said before, but one hundred thousand.

I stuck around town for another week writing, reading, cooking, eating, going for walks, sleeping.

Tuesday, July 7th, I set off with my backpack, some Melville and Woolf and Philip K Dick, pens and my notebook. I had a date to meet a Chilean Fulbrighter in the northern desert in a week´s time.

I took an overnight bus to Tucuman, a big city in the northwest, near the Andes, that’s like a miniature Buenos Aires.

I got into town early in the morning. I walked downtown, to the morning rush. A waiter walked by on the sidewalk, balancing a polished tray, carrying a cup of coffee, a glass of seltzer and a plate of toast. I stopped at a café for a drink. I saw men wearing three-piece suits, talking with their hands, their faces exaggerated, just like Porteños (Buenos Aires natives). Women were wearing high leather boots, tight pants, sweaters.

I walked to a shop that sells old magazines, books, fliers, comics, instruction manuals…all sorts of stuff piled up on metal tables, with hardly any space to walk or turn around. On the way I saw a woman and a little boy. She guided him towards a garbage can, put her hands on his waist. He started peeing into the corner, as the crowd flowed by.

I walked towards the main plaza. A red light stopped traffic. A group of old people, retirees, walked into the street, stretching out a long banner – “Retirees of the Plaza” – it said. They were protesting for the rights of the retired, who have been losing government benefits.

One old guy was blowing off fireworks. The light turned green and they didn’t move. The cars, the trucks, the taxis, started honking, drivers leaning out the windows and shouting or throwing mean gestures with their hands.

The retirees made a loop around the plaza and finished near the congress building.

A line of riot cops waited for them, behind metal barricades.

The group approached, and one old guy, wearing a canvas hat, carrying a shopping bag and a flag, pulled down the fences. The riot cops formed into line and put up their shields. A big, bald, dark and nasty guy – wearing a wool overcoat and a grey three-piece and a red tie – stalked around in the front of the cops, holding a walkie-talkie, staring at the retirees.

The old people hung around there, passing around the bullhorn, smoking cigarettes, talking, shouting. They chanted too, sometimes profanities. Another group protesting something else – relatively younger, wearing powder blue caps – came from behind the retirees, along the plaza, and formed into the mass.

I took some pictures and went to a bookstore and then a Chinese buffet for lunch.

Later, I met up with Fareed, an ETA living in Tucuman. I hung out with him during a conversation group he’d arranged for his students.

The next day, July 9th, was one of Argentina’s Independence Days. I walked downtown and saw a crowd gathered around a white adobe building. They were waiting behind barricades, looking towards the fresh-painted, shining blue doors of the place. I got in with the mass to wait and look. Thoughts of Swine Flu were far from our minds.

The president, Cristina Kirchner, was going to talk in Tucuman that day. I thought it was probably for her that we were waiting.

She and her entourage made their way down the street, towards the white building. The crowd got happy and eager and amazed when she walked by. One little girl tried to hand her a hand-written letter.

They proceeded through those blue doors into that building, filing in, photographers and bodyguards and local politicians and accomplices. A journalist got locked out of the place, lingered around too long and had to knock on the big doors a few times before they opened them again and let her sneak in.

I didn’t know what the building was. Some private meeting place I thought. Turns out it was the House of Independence, where declaration was signed in 1816. I passed by there later that afternoon, after the crowds and celebrity had left. I paid 5 pesos and got to go in and see the old rooms and a museum there and some quiet courtyards.

I took a bus north to Salta late in the afternoon.

6: "To Sao Paolo, via Buenos Aires"

2009-06-21T12:48:00.000-07:00

The past two weeks have stretched out and felt like two months.

Friday, June 5th, I gave my second public lecture. “How I Wonder What You Are”, I called it. A response to an argument I’d had with my cousin, while sitting on the cut grass of a backyard at a family reunion last summer. We had been talking about films…“Wall-e”, “Bringing Up Baby”, “Four Months, Three Weeks, and Two Days”, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”, among others.

We got to talking whether it’s worth it to analyze films, to talk about them at all, instead of just being quiet and trying to feel wonder, awe. He showed me Walt Whitman’s poem, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”.

The lecture I gave put together a lot of different things I’d read or seen in the past year.

I gave it in the Complejo Perón. About 25 people showed up. They liked it and followed it much better than the first one.

That night I went to a peña at UADER, with Daniel and some of his friends. The next night I visited Santa Fe, across the river, for the first time. I walked through the downtown, the pedestrian mall, stopping at some book stores and a Havana café, then spending the night at a professor’s house, with Daniel and his classmates, eating pizza, drinking, playing guitar, singing, talking. We took a 5AM bus back to Paraná.

* * *
I’d been assigned the cover story for the July issue of Barriletes, to write 2000 words about the Wal-Mart protests and reclamos and criticisms of the store in the U.S.

Because of classes, cooking, listening to new music, drawing, and…waiting, I didn’t get started on the story til Wednesday night.

Thursday morning I took a bus to Buenos Aires, for a Fulbright ETA conference in Sao Paolo, Brazil.

In the afternoon I walked through Palermo and stopped by Papelera Palermo, to buy some notebooks. I spent the night at Kathryn’s, again. Her mostly French roommates made a Christmas-in-June dinner. We started at 11 at night, eating cheese-stuffed dates and bruschetta. Then we had salmon stuffed with cream cheese and a starchy, crunchy vegetable. Next was the main course…roasted duck, in a sweet sauce with carrots and onions, served with rice and a baguette. Then some creamy brie cheese and bread. Then a lemon cake and cream. Then chocolate truffles.

There were long pauses in between each course, time to smoke a cigarette, chat, take pictures, drink some red wine. Everyone exchanged gifts afterwards. The best one was a second-hand black sweater with “Memento Mori” poorly stitched into the chest in white yarn.

We finished eating at 2. Kathryn and I went to bed by 4, waking up at 7 to go to a hotel and meet other Fulbrighters.

I wrote the first part of my piece at Kathryn’s Friday afternoon. At night, Hallock and I got dinner together, then tried to see some Buñuel shorts at an art theater. They were cancelled because of projector problems, so we walked around and talked instead.

Saturday we flew to Brazil, spending the night in a hotel near the airport, eating dinner at a steakhouse where they hurry around with the meat on skewers, placing different cuts beside you every few minutes.

Sunday we got to downtown Sao Paolo, our hotel a block away from where they’d had the Gay Pride Parade, the largest in the world. By the time we got there the parade had ended. Thousands of people were still around, drunk, wild, screaming, happy, pleased.

Barricades were knocked over. Girls were kissing girls, guys kissing guys. People were passed out on the ground, or sitting with their head between their knees. Vendors were selling corn-on-the-cob and beer and drinks out of Styrofoam boxes. Some people were dressed up in costumes and in drag. Others were topless.

There were some police around, making sure nothing got violent. It smelled like piss and vomit in a lot of places.

I went back to the hotel, to my room up on the sixth floor, and finished the rough draft of the Wal-Mart piece.

Monday we visited the U.S. Consulate and had some bureaucratic meetings and video conferences. That afternoon we took a bus up, over the mountains, through the jungle, and to the ocean. We stayed at a resort on the sea for the next four days.

There were ETAs from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil, and most of the time was spent presenting what our trip’s been like and what we’ve been working on.

They pampered us, serving us big meals and coffee and snack breaks every hour. We had nice cabanas, freshly painted, solidly built, hammocks in front, and more beds than people in each one.

The hotel was a short walk from the beach, which was surrounded by the green mountains, and looked out to an island in the distance.

I had long talks some of the other Fulbrighters, hearing where they’d come from, what they were up to, where they were headed.

B___, from the east coast, had been writing for the AP and the Wall Street Journal before he came to Chile for the grant.

M___, from the south, grew up on a commune, has hitchhiked through South America, and has now started a music project in a Brazilian prison with support of the Minister of Justice of her host city. She also teaches music lessons and plays her flute with a band of elderly men. She’s also translating a book of poetry by a Chilean author.

M___, now from Chicago, studied physics and philosophy at Yale, has been living with Carmelites in Hyde Park, and is thinking of joining a seminary.

B___, from California, did a Peace Corps tour on a farm in Nicaragua and is now in Brazil working with an NGO.

R___, a Fulbright director from Washington, had done two Peace Corps tours when he was young – one in Ecuador and one in Panama. He and a buddy drove motorcycles home from Panama to Ohio when the latter tour finished.

They served us rice and beans, roast beef and fish, potatoes and salads, and fruits like mangoes, bananas, passion fruit, apples, kiwis, papayas, melons, and grapes, and many others I can´t name. And coffee. And guarana soda. And desserts of flan, quiche, pineapple sprinkled with lime, fruit salad, chocolate mousse.

At night you could see the milky way up in the sky. The sand and the water had phosphorescent algae that glowed when you shook your hands and feet. Lightning bugs were flying around, too, making us think we’d seen shooting stars. We stripped down and went into the water in our underwear.

On Thursday we took motorboats to the island. We played catch with a Frisbee, swam in the ocean, ran along the shore trying not to let our feet get touched by the waves. Stephen and I climbed up some rocks and took pictures and looked out to the ocean, seeing other islands – with their forests and mountains – nearby and far-off on the horizon.

We danced a lot, too, at a local bar, and with a guitarist who came to the hotel, and with a capoeira group the final night. A lot of the locals showed up when the music started playing, kids and adults. They were nice to us, patient with us, trying to get us to move, to show us Samba and other steps. They looked a lot different, talked and acted differently, than Argentines.

Friday we took a bus back to Sao Paolo, to the airport, and said goodbye. I spent another night in Buenos Aires, tried to catch-up on some writing in the afternoon, then got on a bus back to Paraná Saturday night.

5: "It´s All Shutdown"

2009-06-09T20:28:00.000-07:00

I moved last Sunday.

That afternoon, after packing, taking a cab down the street, and unpacking, I went to a concert at Elefante – a hipster art space a couple blocks from the pedestrian mall.

There are drawings and paintings on the walls, a painted mannequin torso on the floor. They play Cut Copy before shows start. They’d been screening John Waters and Russ Meyer films Sunday nights.

Juanito el cantor came from Buenos Aires.

After the show I walked to my old house and returned the key. On my way home, along plaza San Miguel, I ran into Gabriel. He was the union member I’d talked to at a Wal-Mart protest a couple weeks back. We had met once to talk about the recent protests – reclamos. I was working on a new article about it for Barriletes. I had called him the past week to get together again, but he hadn’t gotten back to me.

This happens a lot in Paraná, bumping into people, especially when you want to see them. The downtown is so tiny and dense that, even with 250,000 people, you´re always saying hello to somebody.

We planned to meet Tuesday, after my classes.

I had two lit lectures to give. One class heard my final lecture on Huck Finn. In the other, I compared Bradbury’s “Usher II” story from “The Martian Chronicles” with Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”. I said that Bradbury’s story takes a psychopathic, decadent Poe character and turns him political, has him give a polemic on censorship, book burning, all that.

I went to a café to read and wait for Gabriel. I sent him a text, telling him where I was.

He called me, said he couldn’t come. They were at Wal-Mart. “It’s all shutdown,” he told me.

I rushed home, changed clothes, took off my watch, put on my boots. I grabbed my camera and notebook and recorder and hustled to the store, past my old house.

I could hear the explosions, the fireworks, as I got close to the store.

I got to the end of the neighborhood, over a rise, towards the shantytowns. There were two clouds of black smoke rising between the afternoon sun.

I got up to the protesters, found Gabriel. The entrances were blocked with burning tires. No cars were let in, only foot traffic.

The chief of police was there, wearing a striped sweater and aviators. The head of the SEC – the service-workers union – was there, too. A big, bald, clear-eyed guy named Rupert. He said there were complaints because they were blowing off fireworks so close to a gas station.

“But that’s a secondary concern,” he said.

Seven people were fired that morning, including a pregnant woman.

The SEC picketers were going to spend the night out front. A truck pulled up and a metal barrel was hauled up to the line. I asked Gabriel what it was for.

“Choripan,” he said. That’s chorizo served in a bun. To eat. To feed everybody. He made a joke about roasting marshmallows over the tire fire.

I headed home after dark. My new roommates are Claudio and Daniel. A friend of theirs who had just got back from working in Bariloche, a resort town, came over to eat.

I cooked for the first time in the new apartment. I brought my laptop into the kitchen, put it in on top of the broken refrigerator, and listened to MGMT as I chopped tomatoes and carrots and onions and garlic. My mom had sent me her minestrone soup recipe earlier in the day. Zucchini is out of season here, so I used a squash called zapallo anco, instead.

We sat down, the four of us, to eat, at 11PM. The way my mom makes it is to toast some bread, cover it with mozzarella, then put it in the base of the bowl and pour the minestrone over so it all melts.

Claudio and Daniel washed up. Their friend went home. I ate a pear for dessert and wondered if I’d be going back to Wal-Mart the next day.

4: "To Córdoba"

2009-06-03T12:05:00.000-07:00

Holy Week was coming. I decided to travel.

I called another Fulbrighter in the province, Amanda. We got a hold of Hallock, the ETA in Córdoba province.

I figured they’d be up for camping, hiking, doing something outdoors. Amanda had done bee research in the Mexican desert. Hallock had been a sled dog guide in Alaska.

Amanda came to Paraná from tiny Gualeguay Wednesday night. We got pizza and drinks near the bus station. She was the first Fulbrighter I had talked to since we had all left Buenos Aires and begun working.

We took an overnight, six-hour bus to Córdoba, the second big city of Argentina.

We got out of the bus terminal and walked downtown, to the main plazas and the Jesuit quarter. The sun was rising, the sky lightening. We stopped in a café and talked for a couple hours.

We met Hallock at lunchtime. He had taken a bus from Río Cuarto, the city where he works. We ate at a Lebanese restaurant then got on a bus for La Cumbre, a mountain village in the Sierras outside the city.

We arrived after dark and hiked to the edge of town, to a campsite at the foot of a big, lit-up Jesus statue. The next day we took a trail that runs behind the the monument, over a couple dry, grassy hills, past a ranch and a creek, and down to a dam. We got a ride back to town in the back of a pick-up. We had clear, warm, bright weather.

We took another afternoon bus, to Capilla del Monte, a mountain village that´s had a lot of UFO sightings. We stayed at a municipal campsite, crowded with holiday travelers.

Saturday we got up at 9. The sun rose and made the tent too hot. We took a cab outside town, to Uritorco, the tallest peak in the range, about 2000 meters high. The cabbie said a Buenos Aires family bought the mountain and charges admission.

We paid the 20 pesos entrance and hiked to the top. It took us a couple hours, with a steady pace. We stopped for a break now and then, to drink some water, look around. At the top we ate crackers and cheese, salami, and apples and oranges. We took pictures. We talked about college, about what we’re doing now. The breeze dried our sweat and cooled us before the descent.

We camped one more night, then returned to the capital in the morning. Hallock left early. Amanda and I stayed another night, checking out museums, going to “A Woman Under the Influence” at an art theater in the evening. It was Easter Sunday. The bars were crowded. People were out.

3: "Thursday Philosophy" [Now With More Paragraphs!]

2009-06-03T11:27:00.000-07:00

I met Sergio soon after arriving. He studies philosophy at UADER, a third-year student. He’s from a small village in Entre Ríos and rents a room from a family here in Paraná. He works construction on weekends to help with rent. Our classes are in the same building – the Escuela Normal – so we’ve been bumping into each other here and there.

Last weekend he went back home to help his family get ready for winter. He said they slaughter a cow and preserve the meat, making salami and such. I asked if I could go with next time and see it. He said sure, they’d be doing more in the next few weeks.

We’ve gotten the habit of meeting on Thursdays. I have a conversation class at three in the afternoon, then literature at four. He has mythology at seven, so we’ve been meeting in between, drinking mate, eating churros, talking. His friend Darío has come along, too. He’s another phil major who also has mythology at seven o’clock.

The afternoons are getting cooler as the fall’s coming, and it’s hard to find a warm place to go where you don’t have to buy something. But it’s still enough to sit outside in the patio of the school. They’ve brought a chocolate liquor the past couple weeks, to sip on between the yerba. Maybe that helps.

This week I brought a translation I made of a Times op-ed, a letter from Mark Taylor at Columbia. It’s called “End the University as We Know It”.

It says grad school is the Detroit of academia, that grad students are being duped and ripped off and hyperspecialized off into irrelevance. Taylor wants to mix everything up: end tenure, create alt dissertations, have problem-solving programs instead of discipline-centered departments.

Sergio really liked this when I mentioned it to him last week, so I wrote up my Spanish version of it. He read it aloud, fixing my rare or wrong usage as he went, snapping the sheet of paper in skeptical delight when he got to line about “ever-increasing specialization”.

He brought the Argentine version of Le Monde diplomatique – el Dipló, as it’s called. It’s got translations of the French and some local articles and notes. He showed me an article about a six-day sit-in in Chicago last winter, at Republic Windows & Doors.

I had never heard about it.

I talked about my ideas for the lecture I’m giving in a week, about interpretation and wonder, about what happens when we stop beholding something and start thinking about it, abstracting it. When we got up to leave I asked a question that’d struck me lately – that if the lack of Spanish philosophy has something to do with the Inquisition and kicking the Protestants out of Spain.

2: "Friday Lunch"

2009-06-03T11:25:00.000-07:00

My class schedule runs from Monday to Thursday, so I've always got a three-day (if not often four-day) weekend. I had met a student of the National University a few weeks ago, after a screening of a documentary while we hung out at the AGMER union hall. Daniel and I bumped into each other again, at the Barriletes community center, again for a film screening.

He lives off the same street as me - La Prida - but on the other side of downtown, where it becomes La Paz. He lives in a house with Claudio, a social sciences student at UADER (Daniel studies communication), and Guillermo, a pediatrics doctor in residency at the hospital down the street. The house is spartan, with peeling, unpainted walls, light bulbs dangling from holes in the ceiling. It's got a patio on the first floor, and a big rooftop, with a brick barbecue. The PC in the front room can play music that reaches through the bedrooms and into the kitchen, where we eat lunch.

I woke up at 11:30, about my usual time these days. I got dressed and left, arriving a little late, past noon. Daniel was cooking. The past couple times Claudio had cooked, making pizza from scratch, frying it in a skillet on the stove as their oven doesn't work. Martin, a friend from UNER, was over, too. The food was ready - bow tie pasta with a sauce of tomatoes, squash, and onions, and a baguette on the side.

We ate. We talked. Claudio had loaned me some music last time. One of the groups was Sumo, a short-lived rock group from the 80's. I asked Claudio if he'd ever listened to Joy Division. He said there was some link between the bands, somebody had a girlfriend or boyfriend between the two. Martin asked me about Obama, about the perspective of Latin America from the U.S., about academia there. We finished lunch and ate bananas for dessert, then smoked some Marlboros and cleaned up the kitchen. Claudio boiled water and filled a bottle for his yerba mate, to bring with him to afternoon classes. I left with Martin. We live near each other and walked home together.

Dispatches from the Provinces of Argentina

2009-06-03T11:16:00.000-07:00

I am in Paraná, Argentina, the capital of Entre Ríos province, a city of 250,000 that overlooks the Paraná River. This part of the country is called the provinces – las provincias – as opposed to the capital, Buenos Aires, the cosmopolitan life. I have a Fulbright ETA scholarship for 2009. I arrived here in late March and have now settled and gotten used to being here. I work at the Autonomous University of Entre Ríos (UADER), which was once a “terciary” school – a teacher training college – but was recently turned into a university. It is the only provincial university in Argentina; the rest are national.

My blog posts will have four paragraphs, and maybe a photo or video. This will keep my posts short, and make them easier, simpler to write. Maybe the brevity will do something for my style.

I am not going to explain much, then, in these posts. Who is who or where something comes from. That will just have to come from reading each entry over time. Instead, I’m just going to relate some things I’ve done, seen or heard.

My life has been quiet here – I live in a house a few blocks from downtown, with a professor, her husband, and their 5 year-old son. But I’m also one of the only foreigners in town. Every day I’ve been here I’ve only been with other Argentines. So though much of what I do might be…daily, routine, it’s a routine of another place, people.