Guerra de los Suegros

A few weeks after university started, I started going to circus classes with Circo en Acción (I feel silly translating cognates, but that's Circus in Action.) It's two hours three times a week of Winnarainbow style goodness like spanish web, trapeze, partner body postures, handstands, and juggling. It's tucked into the back corner upstairs of a building that starts as a kiosk, so it's a little tricky to find the first time. I had fun pictures of all the toys equipment, the space, and the people using it, but I lost my camera, which also had the pictures of the city in general that I was planning on sharing here. Oh well. Anyways, part of what makes circus class so great is that it takes place in Argentina rather than the US. For example: I didn't have to sign any sort of release, or ANYTHING, to start class. I just kind of started showing up, and after a while they were like, "Dude, you should probably give us some money." So I did. A couple times now on the free days when we're not getting instruction in anything specific we've looked around and noticed that there are no supervising adults, not that they really stop us from doing much while they're around anyways.  The group, which is mostly minors, are totally trusted to get up on whatever equipment they feel like using without needing one of the people who run the circus to help them out or breathe down their neck.

Speaking of which, in April my parents came to visit me! That was fun because I got to feel all competent and in my element while they stumbled around like blind ducklings. Also because I got to see my parents for the first time in about six months. It was really cool to see them go through the same little discoveries and mind trips that I went through when I first got here.  It reminded me of a lot of the little differences that I'm totally used to and don't even notice anymore. We spent four or five days in Río Cuarto. They got to know my host family, they came to the university and briefly met my classmates (dad of course started a hackie sack circle) came to circus, got ice cream, went shopping at a few stores that sell traditional Argentine stuff, met the other exchange students, and basically got to know my life here a little bit.

My host family lent us one of the cars so we could go check out the hills of Córdoba, which are really close and very pretty. They're a popular place for people from Córdoba capital and Río Cuarto to go during summer vacation since they're relatively cheap and easy to get to. Basically, the population centers of the province of Córdoba are in really flat, boring agricultural land, and the hills are pretty and green and have lakes and rivers and are fun. As we were trying to leave the city we were stopped by the police twice in rapid succession, not because we were doing anything particularly shady, but because they had road checks set up. The first time they told dad he needed to turn his lights on when he's outside the city, and claimed he needed some sort of international license to drive in Argentina, but then didn't follow up in any way on that. He turned his headlights on, but I guess not to the proper setting, because the second guy gave him a ticket for not having the lights on right. He didn't say a thing about the license.

Eventually we did actually get where we were going though, and had lunch in a town called Villa General Belgrano. Villa General Belgrano was theoretically at one point a german settlement, but now it's a tourist town centered around the idea that at one point it was a german settlement. They have an annual Oktoberfest and sell German foods and all sorts of gnome paraphernalia. Of course, the obsession with gnomes seems to be a broader Argentine phenomenon. After that we went to La Cumbrecita, which was slightly less kitschy but was still totally tailored to tourism and no longer has any escaped nazis living in it. The draw was less about the nazis and more about the spectacularly beautiful place that it is. We hiked up to a great view of a waterfall over the valley and drank some mate. Yum.

The next day we bussed up to Córdoba city. My parents got to meet Pablo, who's studying there, and we spent the day wandering around the city and checking out the old buildings. We spent the whole afternoon in a craft fair, which reminded me a lot of Oregon. Nothing that was being sold was remotely Oregoney, but Río Cuarto doesn't have any fun quasi hippie stuff like that. We were only in Córdoba for the day, and took the night bus to Buenos Aires.

Oh great, let me see if I can even remember what we did in Buenos Aires at this point. I know we actually crossed to river to Colonia, Uruguay pretty quickly since my visa was going to expire within the week. I know I've talked about Colonia before, when I went there with the Rolandis right before Punta del Este. But to reiterate: it's adorable, the roads are cobbled, there are old cars on the sides of the streets, many of which have been modified to have plants growing out of them or some such thing, and there's a really cool old stone wall that dad drooled over for a while. Probably the most noteworthy thing about the trip to Colonia, for me at least, was that it was where I finally found my Destiny Mate. Dammit English... by mate I mean of course the gourd for drinking yerba mate.

Something cool from the first day in Buenos Aires was that we got to see a tango band playing live in the street. They were surprisingly good. I don't choose to listen to tango music, but I was totally content to sit there and enjoy it while my parents made plans to go to the milonga that the band was playing at that night. Oh, right! We went to this bookstore that used to be a theatre. The ceiling is covered in paintings of angels, and the stage is still there. It serves as the little coffeeshop section of the bookstore. My mom, of course, went straight to the children's section to try to find good books in Spanish for school. Dad, also predictably, wanted to find a book about Argentine wildlife or horses or traditional crafts or something. Oddly, I don't know that either of them accomplished their goals. I say oddly because that place was HUGE. To get to the bookstore we used the BSAS subway system, which isn't super extensive, but definitely good enough to be functional and is remarkably cheap. I think it was a little over a peso per ride... so maybe 30 cents US?

I'm not remembering all the specifics, I just know that we spent a lot of time wandering around the city and that my parents were impressed by almost everything because they're total geeks. In the best sense of the word, of course. I also know that the last thing we did before I caught a night bus back to Río Cuarto was a walking tour of downtown Buenos Aires. We saw the biggest theatre in South America, the Argentine congress, an enormous, beautiful plaza San Martín (yes, a plaza San Martín. He's a George Washington-esque figure. Military leader in the revolution and all that business. Just about every city has one, and I can only imagine that Buenos Aires has more than one.  This plaza was impressive enough that it's probably the main one, though.) We went most of the trip without being targeted, but when we were almost to the congress building we got ripped off. Someone sprayed gross goo on us, and then someone else told us we had pidgeon poo on us. He tried to help us clean it off, and then another woman tried to get involved, and then they split and a wallet was missing. The moral we should be taking from the story is, of course, that if you're from a small town traveling you should adopt a sort of sociopathic mistrust for humankind, at least when you're in public areas.