Back to Patagonia

I have ruined the elegance of my journey- I´m back in Patagonia. In Chile, in fact. Tomorrow I will hike the 9 day cuircuit of Torres del Paine. Woohoo!

Mmmm...Ice.

Before yo crucé la frontera, I visited El Calafate in Argentina and its amazing Glacier Perito Moreno. Wow. I have seen a few glaciers by now...this one was unlike anything I´ve ever seen. It is hard for me to describe accurately. What looks like an infinate flow of ice looming before you, measuring 50 meters high in the front, where the glacier is crushing in on itself. I saw it calve into the lake around it, silently ("Like the perfect dive" said some guy standing nearby), and heard little pieces of ice falling down the glaciers ravines with loud crashes and cracks. 

Glacier Perito Moreno

The ice becomes blue when the sun goes away, because the light refracts inside of the really compact, ancient water. It glows blue! I walked on the glacier, and it just added to my awe. I would like to say that, as I stood by this ancient, awesome, fluid rock of ice, I realized how small and temporary and beautiful my own existence is. But I didn´t really realize that. At least the glacier reminded me to try!

San Telmo

Animals at the Buenos Aires Zoo

Buenos Aires. Well, if you are someone who knows me, you know that I love Gabriel Garcia Marquez. You might also know that he is from Colombia...and, I started this trip (with Molly!) in Colombia, looking for the source of GGM´s genius, with some success (yellow butterflies fluttering around people in a jungle river).  

Mom with Butterflies at the Zoo

But the other day at the Sunday flea market in San Telmo, I felt like I was wandering the Gypsy carnival that opens 100 Years of Solitude. Tango is everywhere, and the sexy, made-up, young dancers are overshadowed by the middle aged man on the corner of Plaza Durango, who wears two-toned shoes and a matching suit, and dances with all of the pretty woman who crowd around his little plyboard platform, as his beauty-marked, cleavaged, eye-lashy wife passes around the tango hat.

Down the road a bit, there is a 15 piece band, with five acordians, a stand up bass, and even a real piano on the street. The singer is amazing: I find tango can be cheesy, unless the singer is good, and then it is the embodiment of painful longing love! I tear up when everyone starts singing along, which happens often, anywhere, any time. Then everyone relives their old heartaches together for a few abandoned minutes. Very healthy! Did you know that Buenos Aires is the city with the most psychiatrists per capita (I think...)? I think that these two traits must be related.

Tango at the San Telmo Flea Market

Meanwhile, the market...Plaza Durango is a nest of little antique stalls, specializing in anything from old water fizzers to heavy, smooth locks, to art deco jewlery, to silver and gourd mates. Tourists swarm the tents, and the vendors don´t pay much attention to you unless you touch something. Last time I was there, all of the vendors were preoccupied with a rat that they were trying to squish by foot under a plyboard.  It kept on emerging, less and less alive, only to be covered with the thin sheet of wood again...There is a man that sells a wooden frog with a ridged back, which makes a load, echoey croak when you run a wooden stick along it. Another man has what look like dixy cups hanging from strings off of his fingers, which somehow produce a very convincing chicken cluck...I haven´t stopped to investigate.  Yet another man is painted white and dressed in white tango atire, so white that his eyes look pink. He leans in a door frame and winks at little girls when their parents aren't looking.  Another man has a small puppet theatre, and he leads his hobo marionette through an anguished tango song, acting out a sad drunken street scene. 

Another has a hand organ with two little parrot cages on the top. The parrots pick out a fortune with their beak from a little drawer beneath their cage, and then authenticate it with a bite. But their wings are drastically cut and they look sad to me. In short, the place is full of characters on a Sunday, and, when the sun is shining, they all seem to swing into my consciousness one by one, like a chaotic movie.

Bougainvilla seller

Buenos Aires has been like this for me.Tigre, land of rivers full of broken boats

Maybe because I have been traveling for six months now, it has been very easy for me to ease into this city´s life. I try to blend in, I try to find a routine. But the sun, or the rain, falls on certain moments a little more strongly, and I realize, suddenly, that I am here, and that I am so curious about the people and places around me. Why is the botanical garden, with its marble statues and viney wrought iron conservatories, over run with stray cats? Why do all of the women (including super sexy presidenta Kirchner) have long hair? This city has amazing Art Deco and Art Noveau buildings. There is a subburb on the Rio Plata delta where the roads turn into canals, and the only indication that you are 20 minutes away from a huge city is the skyline in the distance, over the brown river. At night, the streets of the city are full of whole families going through the trash, systematically looking for bottles and cardboard. And the avenidas of Palermo flooded up to my waist the other day when it rained torrentially for a few hours. There is no point to going out before 2 am, even on a Monday night. And people don´t drink very much. So elegant!

I have learned a lot here, about elegance and honesty and spanish.

Cira, professor of elegance

I wrote this after drinking more than an Argentine would.Peace across the River Plata, in Colonia, Uruguay