October 2

Hmm... I have not been inclined to write here lately, even though I travelled halfway across the country. I don´t remember what I did last week.

Okay so Jujuy. It started out pretty straight-forward. We went to the aeroparque (which is what they call airports when they aren´t international) at 5 and didn´t actually leave the airport until sometime after 11. Apparently the plane was delayed. They gave us dinner though, which wasn´t too bad. While I was sitting in the food court and got into a conversation with the three argentine men sitting behind out table. They were very nice and we talked about Alaska (of course) and what we were studying, and then I was talking about the college culture in america and about the time I got to binge drinking the FLACSO kids that had been spending the previous hour and a half drinking wine, beer, and whiskey (continually getting louder and sillier, mind you this is like 6 pm on a Wed.) managed to spill a bottle of wine and then one of the guys proceeded to slurp the spilled wine up off the table. It was gross and I was incredibly embarrased. I don´t have a problem with drinking, as you all know, but I feel like when you are an American travelling abroad you might want to take the opportunity to improove the image of Americans rather than solidify the stereotype. Sigh, oh well.
We got to the hotel in Jujuy at about 3:30. They insisted on giving us dinner, again, before letting us go to bed. We then had to wake up and be on the bus by 10 am. We took off but got stopped at the border crossing to the next province because we didn´t have all our names on the right lists or something like that... I think we were there for a couple hours, we didn´t get to Tilcara until after 5 anyway. So we missed the museum and went straight to the Incan ruins where we saw some llamas and some old clay buildings and such things. The mountains, with which we were completely surrounded, were very pretty, not brown and covered in trees but dusty and blue, green, yellow, red, burgundy, purple, and turquoise all mixed together. And the sky was the most blue I had ever seen. And lots of cactus.
From there it basically went: market, fried bread, food, sleep, breakfast, bus, rocks, bus, lunch, market, spending lots of money on cool stuff, bus, more money on stuff, meeting foreigners (I´ll come back to this), dinner in town (this too), sleep, breakfast, bus, bus, big salt mine (this too), bus, lunch, more market (no money), bus, nap, dinner, party in town, walk drunk man back to the hotel, sleep, breakfast, bus, airport, and now unfortunately I´m back in Buenos Aires.
The Foreigners: I met them because I noticed how fancily indigenously dressed they were and was absolutley shocked to hear them speaking english. So I asked the lady where she was from. She's from england, had children and grandchildren and in her words "now it´s my turn." She was really nice and fun to talk to. She told me that when I go to England this summer I should visit Stratford and Yorkshire. Apparently they are the good nature places. The man was from Belgium and obviously very educated and eccentric. He was actually quite intimidating. He had large diamond encrusted Jaguar head earings on...
The free night we had to eat dinner in town was fun. My hotel-roommate Eli and I went to a Peña that had live traditional music and we shared a couple dishes of llama, just to try it. It was a lot like steak. Not my favorite thing in the world. And we got to go home relatively early. The cool thing was that I got to spend some cuality time with Eli who is really cool and I´m glad I got to know him.
The salt mine was cool: basically just a almost never ending plane of white stuff that it actually salt. It was cool, though I´m not sure it was worth the 2 1/2 hour drive both ways.
The drunk man, I´m not at liberty to discribe in detail... but after an evening of feeling completely alone and isolated, walking (half carrying) with this person who had never talked to me before who started telling me about his life made me realize that I am blessed blessed blessed. I KNOW that I have people in the world who love me, even if I can´t see them right now. And even though this guy apparently has lots of friends here, he honestly doesn´t believe that anyone, in the world, cares about him. It made me sad about the state of the world, but also I realized the smallness of my own pain. And that is what I really want to do. I want to help alleviate that kind of pain in the world. That´s the point. I don´t know if I helped him. But I tried.

Monday was not a good day. But I have not the energy to talk about it now. Maybe next time.

You are special.
You are loved.
I know this because I have seen you.
I loved you then.
And I love you still.