The other day, okay, last week (but really... what is on time here?) I went on what is fondly known in the Study Abroad world as a 'day excursion.' This is a quaint little misnomer usually used as an excuse to bus 200 U.S. college students to one place and try to give them a 'cultural' experience. So off we drove, in three charter busses to the 'rural' outskirts of the city to experience a "Dia Del Campo" or Day at the ranch. Now before you get any ideas of bull fights, spurs and rodeo clowns let me clear one thing up. The gaucho lifestyle (yes gaucho like the pants), is a highly romanticized yet important part of Latin American History. For hundreds of years, the gauchos had their own ways of governing, organizing, and just overall living. And they still do. But one thing that is certain about Argentina is the cyclical nature of it's economy, and with more and more tourists looking for authentic venues, (You're forgiven Anthony Bourdain) many of these larger ranches have revised their weekly gaucho duties to include hosting large groups of tourists and leading them through a true gaucho experience. Our hosts did a fine job of showing us a representative form of gaucho life. What we really did was eat, watched dancing and horses, chased peacocks, and took a carriage ride around a meadow. It was fantastic. Asado vegetables, handmade pasta, and birds for days. So what is it like on a real gaucho ranch? To be honest, I have no idea. It was a beautiful day, and a fantastic venue, and I had a lot of fun, but I have already accepted the fact that there are many avenues of life I will never be able to fully appreciate, and this, I now know, is one of them. The gaucho lifestyle is more than a tourist trap, it is a slice of history, and an ongoing story of a people who were forced to write their own journey, fight westernization and create new lives for themselves in the aftermath of invasion. They were warriors on a battlefront of injustice on their land, and those same people, learned to capitalize on things the nation came to rely on: meat, yerba, leather, soy. The beautiful part of this story is that they are still out there. They have positioned themselves as an iconic part of Argentine identity, and it is because of this, they also must preserve it's integrity.
I had a wonderful time anyway, and as I told my friend Preston, while trying desperately to convince him that a 10 min carriage ride was worth his time, "Sometimes you just have to be a tourist."
So long story long: here's a video and some pictures:
This was the church we stopped to see. It was pretty. We were there for an hour.
Those are gaucho pants, Ladies and Gentlemen
Cayotes, they taste like cucumbers.
This gives a new meaning to the term Chicken Run.
Las Floras
Hungryyy
Quack
Bahaha
A big thank you to Andrea. Half of these pictures belong to her and her wonderful photo skills.
Back to homework, there seems to be no end to it these days.
As always, Besos
Hil
No comments:
Post a Comment