Coast to Coast to Coast to Coast

As April draws to a close I am ashamed at my lack of posts. This is not due to a lack of activity, on the contrary, the month did not dissapoint. A few weeks ago I was under the impression that my schedule was pretty set in stone. Monday and Tuesday I would wake up early and head over to the school down the street to teach English. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday I would trek across town to La UPLA and sit in class, trying to pay attention. I have a hard enough time paying attention to classes back at Midd but during a lecture in Spanish it is impossible not to let the mind wander to things that I can actually understand without an Espanol-Ingles dicionario.

This was all upset on a normal Tuesday when Sage, another student here from Midd, explained to us that the following week would be the week of Mechones, a week celebrating the first year students. She informed us that there would be no classes after 11 A.M. each day and that she planned on traveling. With this my mind began to wander. If I left Thursday after my last class I could have ten days before my next class. My own personal spring break was thus formulated and set into action. Two days later Molly and I sat on an overnight bus peircing the Andes at death-defying speeds; cheap wine and steak ahead of us, Valparaiso behind us.

We spent two days in Mendoza and sampled the fruits of the region. One day we rented bicycles and cruised through the vineyards, stopping to take tours and sample wines. At the last vineyard someone took Molly's bike and switched it for a bike with a flat tire. The ride back was long and unbearably uncomfortable as I felt every pothole and rock under the bare metal rim in my crotch. As I was peddling and sweating profusely I heard someone yell, "Go home Jacky" as a Moped cruised by. It took quite a while of confusion until I finally realized that he had not confused me for his thin female cousin but had recognized me for the patriotic, red-blooded, live free or die, American that I am. I wish I had been able to inform him that in reality I support the Mets.

We arrived in Buenos Aires on Sunday morning and spent the day walking through the San Telmo Antiques Market, a giant gathering of mimes, clowns, artisans, antiquers, tourists, Tango bands and dancers, and more people trying to sell mate gourds than there are monedas in Argentina. To explain this simile: there are no coins in Argentina and thus Molly and I spent the week hording as many as we could get our greedy American hands on. I've been told it is because the metal is worth more than the actual value of the coins so people take them to Paraguay and sell them. In reality, nobody knows. In spite of this, Argentina now lacks more pesos. Booya.

We spent the week taking advantage of the economically unstable country, fueled by copious amounts of dead animal, wine, and mate. We met up with other Midd students and went out in style. On Monday night we went to La Bomba, an excellent weekly concert of a large percussion band. They played for two hours as the crowd rejoiced over music and the two dollar-a-liter beer.

We went to the zoo on Wednesday with Forrest. I love animals, even if they are in cages and presumably miserable, so I had a great time. That night we also noticed a strange scent in the air as we left a bar around two in the morning with Pujan and Will. It smelled like smoke; how strange.

The next day we went to El Tigre in the delta region north along the coast of the Rio del Plata,

the largest river in the world. We took the public transportation, a sick old wooden boat, to one of the islands where I ate more steak and we walked into a field of spiders that were probably raised by Hagrid and grew up eating intruding wizards in the Forbidden Forest.

When we returned to the city we could barely see anything through the thick smoke that had blanketed Buenos Aires. It turns out that the farmers in the delta are protesting the price at which the government was planning to buy their crops. In Argentina products are exported through the government, the idea being that the farmers will receive a fair price and the government can take a nice little treat for itself. This year however, when the price the government set was lower than normal, massive protests ensued. At first the farmers blocked all the roads into Buenos Aires and then they began burning all their fields, literally suffocating the country's capital. By the end of our week it was miserable outside. I felt like I was in a seedy bar the entire time; I never saw the sun, my eyes were watering, and my throat felt like an ashtray. I was actually excited to get on the 24 hour bus on Sunday and get the hell out of Malas Aires for the cloudy, dreary skies that were waiting for me here on the other coast in Valparaiso.