Alive and sleepy

Here I am after a rather long day of travel.

The flight from NY was worse than expected -- due to some cancellation elsewhere in the system, they weren´t honoring seat assignments -- and I ended up in a dreaded middle seat, with a woman from Monmouth NJ sitting next to me, who had all the egocentric volubility of my Grandmother Soph without any of her charm or intelligence. She told me in great detail about the ¨Princess boat¨ her husband and she were about to embark on, with opportuntities for ¨real old'style tango¨ as well as a chance to ¨wear jeans¨ and ¨be cowboys.¨ She had great confidence in her ability to bridge any cultural divide, as many Central Americans lived in New Jersey. ¨Real hard workers. A lot of Mexicans too. Some good people, some not so good.¨ After I ostentatiously took a sleeping pill, unfurled my travel pillow and closed my eyes, she whipped out a collection of People magazines, informed me (and everyone in a 10 row radius) that normally she only reads such magazines ¨on the pot¨ and proceeded to give a running commentary on each page. (On Britney Spears: ¨She´s not very smart. That guy knocked her up two times and was out drinking and partying and now she goes out partying not wearing any underwear and the black girl he knocked up, twice, is going to take him back and Britney´s money too.¨ On Dreamgirls: ¨They were supposed to be Diana Ross and those other girls. It was a Black picture, but so beautiful. I have two Black women neighbors, professors at Rutgers, as nice as can be.... ) Not being able to kill her, and tiring of muttering to myself ¨As god is my witness, I´ll never fly economy again,¨ I wrapped my scarf entirely around my head, burka style and made extreme yawning noises, which FINALLY got the message across...

Navigating the various Buenos Aires airports was uneventful. The city looked intimdatingly large, and its inhabitants as glamorous as rumored, but I didn´t do anything other than exchange for some pesos, and eat a suprisingly yummy made-to-order airport pizza. I met a nice young Japanese couple on the flight to El Calafate, who frightened me by putting dulce di leche on their ham and cheese sandwiches.

Landing was startling. The airport is about 10 miles outside of town, and as you fly in, there are no signs of human habitation. The landscape is vast and grayish-brown, little vegetation, except in a scrubby Scottish highlands kind of way, but then you come upon startlingly blue glacial lakes that look artificially colored. I THINK my cab driver told me that the lake outside of town, Lago Argentino, is having its 130th birthday this Sunday, though my Spanish wasn´t up to understanding how a natural lake has a birthday, especially one with only 3 figures. I DID understand perfectly though that the birthday would be celebrated with a midday fiesta in town, featuring a barbecue of cows and lambs, and special sweets. I may not speak Spanish, but I do speak food!

I managed to stay awake long enough to eat a succulent steak accompanied by beef fat flavoured yellow pan roasted potatoes at the hotel restaurant. Being a hotel restaurant, they tried to decorate the plate with an annoying swirl of overly sweet syrup (I´m beginning to see dulche de leche behind every corner!) but nothing could take away from the beauty of the meat itself, which danced on my tongue, happily proclaiming, as many others have noted, its feed-lot-free origins. I started with a delicious squash soup, squash being one of the oldest indigenous Patagonian foods. I was looking forward to reporting to Josh that vegetarianism has its rewards in these parts, but then I began to be suspicious of the startlingly rich undertones of the soup. My waitress confirmed -- caldo di carne. :( Perhaps a vegetarian here just has to adopt a don´t ask, don´t tell policy....

The hotel computer is smart enough not to let me upload photos. I´ll try again later at an Internet cafe in town.