Sara, Marina, Patagoina

Today I made the mistake of buying a fish empanada (a questionable decision in the first place) and bringing it to the Botanic Garden. Have I mentioned how the cats are like squirrels there? In case you were planning on experimenting, massive amounts of cats + eating a fish empanada on a bench = bad idea. Anyway, these are the types of things that I’ve been doing recently in an effort to conserve money and spend time in the sun. I’m currently in a strange place between tourist and resident, wanting to see everything before I leave in a month, but having to study and be a person as well.

So about a week ago I traveled to Ushuaia and el Calafate in Patagonia. I would call it a vacation, but I don’t know if you use that word when that’s kind of what’s been going on for three months más o menos. First we went to Ushuaia, el Fin del Mundo. As far as I’m aware, it’s as far south as you can go before Antarctica. Of course the weather at the “end of the world” is much more bearable than in Minnesota. go figure. The landscapes were beautiful – I felt like I was in Narnia most of the time. Marina and I went on some fun excursions, many involving arctic animals and we were blessed with mostly clear skies our whole trip. The people seemed like the kind that you would find at the end of the world, a weird mix of residents, travelers, and Argentines who seemed to have gone there to escape something else. There used to be a prison there that’s now a museum. It’s kind of like Alcatraz in the sense that there’s not really anywhere to escape to. The town was essentially built by prisoners.

view from the end of the world

Ushuaia is also interesting because they are very touristy but also very open about their history with the indigenous people of the area, that is to say, how the arrival of the “white man” (museum words) was responsible for wiping them out. This really only started relatively recently, like late 19th, early 20th century. Before a lot of modern technologies, basically no Europeans dared to go down there. The Yamana were incredibly adapted, naked even in the winter because their natural oil was better protection from weather than clothing. There is apparently one hundred-year-old woman who remains from the Yamana. oops, colonialism.

sea lions

El Calafate seemed more like the end of the world, landscape-wise. There are some parts that are kind of flat plains land nested between snow-capped mountains. There are also lush moss-covered forests and then, out of nowhere, there’s a freaking massive glacier. so Marina and I spent one day staring at and “contemplando” the glacier climbing around on these passage ways that they have to view it and then we spent the next day “mini-trekking” on top of it. It was so much fun. In case you weren’t sure why blue Gatorade was called glacier ice, it’s because glaciers are effing blue. It’s insane. They tried to explain the blue-ness in terms of science, but I could care less – it’s unreal. The glacier is also constantly moving (due to some other scientific phenomenon that escapes me) and once in a while a huge piece will fall off and it will sound like a gunshot or cracking thunder and then you see this massive splash. I never knew I could like glaciers so much.

big glacier
small people

The town of El Calafate is pretty sparse and very touristy. Every time Marina and would go into town though, we would be followed by at least two dogs. When we would go into a shop, they would lie outside, wait for us and then follow on to the next destination. At our hostel the cook was nick-named Mono (monkey) and we tried to find out the story behind his name. I told him that my dad’s name was Grape so it couldn’t be that weird, but it turned out Mono’s name was given to him by a friend who passed away when he was living a very “fast” life in Buenos Aires, so we never heard the whole story. He did tell us about how he came to Calafate to escape that fast life and had never cooked in his life before because he was really a carpenter. He’s now building a house there for him and his dog. I don’t know why but he was a really memorable person. He had a head full of a dreadlocks and a Bob Marley tattoo, which was funny to me because of the cliché amount of reggae that was playing in the hostel at all hours. Some things are almost universal it seems.

When we got back to Buenos Aires, we checked out the Natural Science Museum here, in continuation of our whole discovering Argentine nature adventure. If you think scientific words in English are confusing, try deciphering them in Spanish. They had a really cool shell exhibit and some sweet rocks from all over the country. The room was bizarrely lit though, and by that I mean not really lit at all, so you had to kind of squint to see some things though the old glass. There were also more stuffed animals for my personal taste, and no dioramas – sad. So not quite up to par with the New York one, but it had character and was definitely worth the three peso investment.

It’s details like that that remind me that this country is still developing in a lot of ways, which it’s easy to forget in Buenos Aires. Last night the power was off for a while and Cynthia was telling me that her family’s house in the country just got power a year ago. They only go there once in a while I guess, but there are people who live there who literally still don’t even use power she said. Obviously you know that exists, but that kind of living is so many light years from Buenos Aires it seems. Of course it’s way better for health, the environment, piece of mind etc, and probably how we all should be living…

So sorry, Mother Nature. Thanks for being good to me in the past few weeks.

Love, Sarah