1 month

Well I’ve been in San Ignacio for 1 month now, and it feels like much longer, in a good way.  I really like it here!  When going someplace new you never know what to expect, and you start imagining what the work will be like, what your host family will be like, how you’ll make friends, what the town will be like, etc.  You create ideal situations and worst case scenarios in your mind, and you hope that reality will be closer to the ideal, but you caution yourself not to expect too close to the ideal, because you know that isn’t realistic, and you don’t want to be disappointed.  My original plan when I came to San Ignacio was to stay until the beginning of December, travel a little, and then go somewhere else for a few months.  But I’m really considering coming back here after traveling in December because basically everything here is ideal, or quite close to it.

The work is great, the host family is good but I have a curfew and will probably post about that at some point, and the town in great.  But what I really want to write about is the amazing friends I’ve made so far.  I love the welcoming culture of so many Latin American and African countries!  Anyone I ever meet here invites me to stop by sometime to drink some mate: the librarians, the people that work at the phone store, hostels, the tourism agency, relatives of friends that I’m randomly introduced to, and so on.  And when I stop by for mate, I get invited to other things.

For example: I went to a nearby hostel and introduced myself to the woman who was working, Karina.  We talked for a while and she invited me to come back and have mate with her sometime.  She doesn’t live in San Ignacio, but she told me I should come back in the afternoon because Silvia, who would be working then, was closer to my age and lived right nearby.  So I went back another afternoon and was like, “ Hey are you Silvia? Karina said I should meet you.”  Silvia immediately apologized for not offering me mate, but explained that she had a cold so she couldn’t share (just in case anyone was concerned about the drinking rod sharing mentioned in a previous post), and invited me back to have mate anther time.  She also invited me to her cousin’s birthday party that weekend, which I went to even though it started at midnight, which is already past my preferred bedtime. 

The party was a lot of fun, and I met Silvia’s husband, who happens to be Australian, and several cousins.  Everyone at the party was either a cousin (or significant other of a cousin) of Silvia, and they all danced with each other and with each other’s significant others.  Now unfortunately I haven’t had many opportunities to hang out with just a bunch of my cousins all together, but if we did I can’t imagine that it would be too similar to this party.  Everyone tried to teach me the different dance moves for cumbia, samba, and whatever else they were dancing.  It was a lot of fun, and obviously the cousin who hosted it invited me to stop over for some mate sometime.

That was about two weeks ago, and by now I’ve met at least 20 members of Silvia’s family.  She and her husband live next door to her cousin.  A few more cousins live just around the corner, and around another corner is her aunt’s house, and across the street from that is her grandma’s house.  It’s really interesting to see how the giant-family-all-living-nearby-and-stopping-by-all-the-time lifestyle works.  And it’s even more interesting to hear about her Australian husband’s opinion of it.

And just in case anyone thinks that my several mentions of mate is an exaggeration of reality, I want you to know that I have actually under-written about it. 

Pop Culture

Everyone who knows me knows that I’m not exactly up on pop culture knowledge.  I don’t know who many celebrities are, and I certainly can’t recognize them in pictures/movies.  I usually don’t know which actors are in which movies, and most of the time I haven’t even seen the movie or heard of the show.  I get Carrie Underwood and Katy Perry (and a lot of other female singers) mixed up.  My mom knew what twirking was before I did.  When I was in Africa no one else knew anything about pop culture either, so that was fine.  And back in the US I had the excuse “I lived in Africa for the past few years,” which usually got me off the hook, or at least changed the topic.  But here in Argentina everyone knows all about everything, and I have absolutely no excuse.

The other day I was playing Trivial Pursuit with 4 Argentinians.  It was an Argentina version, so there were all sorts of questions about Argentinian authors, presidents, and singers, and I didn’t know any of those answers.  At one point I managed to land on a few science and sports questions, and I got a few in a row right.  Then I landed on entertainment.  “Oh, you’re so lucky, you got a good one for this,” the person reading the questions told me. “In The Simpons where does Marge Simpson (or maybe Bart-I can’t even remember now!) work?”  I had absolutely no idea.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen an entire episode of that show, maybe just a few short clips at random times.  All 4 of the people I was playing with knew the answer, and watched The Simpsons regularly, and were appalled by the fact that I had never seen it.  They later mentioned jokingly that half their knowledge of the US comes from that show, so I really wish I’d seen a few episodes to know what they think of us.

Here where I’m living we get a few American movie channels on TV.  A week or two ago I walked in to the living room and Ramon was watching a movie.  I paused and watched for a few seconds, and then asked him what movie it was. 

“The third one.”

“The third one of what?” 

He turned and stared at me with a weird look.  “Jurassic Park.”

(To be fair, there were no dinosaurs in the part I had been watching.) “Oh.  I’ve never seen any of the Jurassic Park movies.”

“Not Jurassic Park 1?”

“No.”

“Jurassic Park 2?”

“No.

“Not Jurassic Park 3 either?”

“Nope.”

“Sit down.  You have to see this.”

So I sat and watched the rest of it.  At least now when I come back maybe I’ll have a slightly expanded knowledge of American pop culture, and for anything I still don’t know I can always use the excuse, “I was traveling throughout South America.”

My Days Off

There’s a surprising amount of things to do on my days off here.  On my first day off I went to “Playa del Sol,” a beach on the river that’s about 3km from here.  It wasn’t a particularly hot day, so no one else was at the beach, and it’s not that big, so I didn’t stay very long at all.  On the way back I stopped every so often to take pictures, and when I got back I went to the plaza and sat on a bench a read for a while.  My first day off also happened to be my birthday, and when I went home, Lili and Ramon surprised me with a cake!  After lunch I went to visit my friends that work at the hostel here, and they had also made a cake for me! 

On my day off this week I went with Yami and Pablo from the hostel to a national park nearby.  It was a 7km walk to get there, then we walked up a mountain, down the mountain, and around the mountain, and then 7km home.  At the top of the mountain there was a nice lookout that had a great view of the Rio Parana and Paraguay.  I should also mention that the “paths” up and down the mountain were more like weaving between trees and brush over the same course that apparently a few other people had traveled lately.  We also went swimming in the river, which was nice and refreshing since it was a moderately hot, but gorgeously sunny day. 

There are some people I’ve met several times at the hostel who are living with some artists out by the park, but come to town frequently, so we went to visit them.  Wow! Talk about living off the land!  The artists’ home, which they themselves built, had clay walls about 4 feet high.  Then there was a large gap between the walls and roof, which was made of sheets of plastic (like plastic trash bag material), and the floor was just dirt.  There weren’t doors or separate rooms really, just gaps and openings in the clay walls, making three divisions.  The three people that I knew have been living out there for about 2 months, and each have their own tents, which are spread out in the general area.  The artists have planted a lot of food randomly nearby, but don’t particularly have a garden per se.  They also have about 5 dogs that look absolutely starved; you can see their ribs so clearly and their entire bodies are way tinier that I would have thought possible for survival.  Someone was making some bread, and when some flour dropped on the ground the dogs fought over who got to lick it off the dirt.

There artists were very nice, interesting, generous people, and to a certain extent I think their lifestyle is interesting, but there was one thing in particular that was just too much for me: the bathroom.  There wasn’t one.  Not even like a specified zone.  Now I’ve lived in Africa and I’ve been camping and I’m fine squatting and digging and whatnot, but this was a bit extreme.  Even for pooping they just went out in the woods, and didn’t bury it.  And I guess peeing isn’t a huge deal, but I feel like you could easily dig a small hole and have everyone do it in the same place.  And their 2-year-old son (who didn’t wear diapers and was a little potty-trained but not really) would just pee wherever he was, including on the dirt floor inside their house.  He didn’t wear pants or underwear some of the time, and then the pee would just run down his legs.

But to end on a non-disgusting note, their home and the area around it was decorated with dream catchers and hand-made wind chimes, and there were several hammocks hanging around.  They were also all really good musicians, and had various guitars, drums, and harmonicas, and they played and sang a lot.  They also had handmade benches made from branches and boards they had found, and were in general really creative, resourceful, and crafty with everything in their lives.  It was definitely an interesting experience, to say the least.