Category Archives: Argentina

It’s really common to see a bottle of water – partly filled – sitting on top of a parked car. Someone once told me it was an Argentine folk belief that such a practice would keep the inside of your car cooler. Uh, okay. But now it’s the chilly autumn and I still see them around a lot. Today I learned the real story: it signals that the car is for sale.

Dog walkers extraordinaire, large insects on display, and night lights around the big obelisk on the main drag.

After lunch we wandered uptown to the Japanese Gardens. These were established in the late 1960s as a gift from Crown Prince Akihito and Princess Michiko. A nice oasis in an otherwise bustling part of the city. The koi are grotesquely overfed. Reminiscent of Marlon Brando in his later days.

Guest Post by Julia I. Sinton

Almost every house in Argentina has either a cat or a dog. We give names to the animals we see a lot. Some have homes and some are stray.Ralphy is a dog who has a home but he dug a hole under his fence so he can get out. He likes to go around the neighborhood and this makes other dogs bark at him.

Bruce is really a girl but we gave her that name before we figured it out. Bruce is a very sturdy and fat dog who lives downtown. She’s a stray but she’s well-fed.

Shadow is also a stray but not so well-fed. Sometimes Dad calls her Lucky because she’s lucky to be alive. But Eric and Mom named her Shadow because sometimes she follows you around town when you’re walking. One time Dad let her inside our gate so she was on our property and gave her some food.

Daisy is our family’s favorite. She lives down our street and has a home. She is playful and energetic and always wants some petting. You don’t see her all the time because she’s inside her home a lot. She jumps up on the fence and wants to be pet, then she runs down to the next section of fence and wants petting there too, and then the last section of fence, even though there she has to get behind some prickly bushes to get her head to the petting place.

A couple of blocks down from Daisy’s house is a rundown house we call the Crazy Cat House. The Crazy Cat House has six kittens and four older cats. We give the cats food but they don’t let us pet them.

Cheetoh is an orange cat that has a home but wanders around the neighborhood. She loves to be petted and she doesn’t mind dogs.

Cowhead Jr. and Skittles Jr. are named after our cats in California. They look almost exactly like them. They love to be pet but we don’t see them everytime we go by. These cats even like to be picked up and put on Emily’s lap in her wheelchair.

This is the story of the animals of Argentina.

On Monday morning we helped to stimulate the Argentine economy by doing our fair share of shopping, then it was off to the mountains. Some clouds but none of the rain that had been forecast. It all looks a lot like the US Southwest – desert, red rocks, snowy mountains. On the morning news I’d heard about the mountain highway being closed to traffic because of a large snowstorm (something that often happens at the Chilean/Argentine border, like after this storm last year), and sure enough, at some point we were stopped by a highway patrol officer. But at that point we were all the way up in Upsalatta, a small town without much more than a mountain-base of the national guard, and it was getting dark, and the wines were waiting. Later that night we enjoyed a tasting at The Vines. I’m no good at remembering details of how each wine tasted, except that they were good and Kevin took a lot of mental notes. Eventually we made our way to a well-known Mendocino restaurant that was as busy as ever at 11 pm.

The massive agricultural strike ended; meat and milk are back on the shelves. Now the still-grumpy farmers have united in an interesting act of ecoterrorism. Hundreds of farmers synchronized their watches and agreed to all burn their fields at the same time. Traditionally field-burning is done on small scales to clear vestigal remains of harvested materials and return nutrients to the soils, but this (they say) is to clear additional land for cattle grazing now that their old grazing fields have been usurped for soybean production. The areas just happen to be directly upwind of the capital. The result? Smoke on the water, fire in the sky. I feel like I’m back in Southern California in October 2007 when the wildfires drove us indoors. The Buenos Aires airports have cancelled most of their flights today, the massive city bus station has shut down, and the PanAmerican Highway is blocked for great distances. These are pictures from our house at 8 am today, and for more info you can find stories and images from the Inter Press Service, BBC, Time, and NASA. Maternal worry of the day: I hope Eric’s asthma is under control out where he’s camping…