The third river

It’s been a long time since I’ve slept with a night light. But when sharing a room with an 8-year old who’s afraid of the dark, there’s no other option. For more than week, I had the incredible experience of living with an Argentine family in a town that has seen only a handful of tourists since its founding.

Mario and his nephew, Lucas, playing basketball. If I had enough room in my backpack, I would bring this kid home with me. Such a sweetheart! And so patient despite my repeated requests that he repeat what he'd say.

My friend Mario, who I met in Bariloche, invited Ian and me to his hometown for Holy Week and Easter. Because of Ian’s classes, he was only able to join us for the weekend, so I got to be the sole mysterious foreigner in the town for a week beforehand. In smaller towns, I am growing accustomed to the doubletakes my blonde hair and blue eyes elicit, but I hadn’t yet experienced the fascination I met in Rio Tercero.

Most fascinating to me was the hot water machine outside a gas station where you can fill up your mate thermos. These Argentines are serious about their mate!

During a tour of the first home built in the town, a tour guide played her seniority card to lead our group upon learning I was from the U.S., despite the younger guide’s ability to speak a little English. And she insisted I sign the guestbook before I leave and be sure to note that I was from the EEUU (Spanish acronym for Los Estados Unidos). On more than one occasion, when Mario and I were walking down the street or in a store and someone heard us speaking English, they’d immediately inquire what language we were speaking and where I was from.

So needless to say, the last week plus was very good Spanish practice, which I quickly realized I sorely needed. There’s nothing more exhausting than trying to piece together the theme of a conversation among the white noise of a table full of an Argentine family. The first couple days my head would be nodding by 11 p.m. wherever we were as I tried to eek out what little energy I had left to stay awake AND understand what was being said around me. After that, however, I was able to understand the topic of conversation with a little less effort and respond to questions on the first go around rather than asking that the question be repeated one, two, maybe three more times.

The freakishly large grasshopper Mario and I encountered in the twilight-zone town of Embalse. Around the lake, the Peron administration in the 1950s built seven enormous hotels so that lower socio-economic classes could have the experience of a nice vacation. A great idea, but one or two would have provided ample space. They are huge hotels, and more or less empty, even during Semana Santa. But it costs only 22 pesos per night to stay here, food included, so long as you make a 6+ day reservation. The thing is, there's not enough here to occupy more than a couple of days. By comparison, the decent but affordable hostel where I'm staying in Cordoba, breakfast included costs 30 pesos a day.

The town I visited is named Rio Tercero, and though you won’t find much about it mentioned in a tour book, it’s an incredibly interesting industrial town with a couple of chemical factories, agricultural factories, and an army base where bombs were once made and stored. However, in 1995, the military factory exploded, leveling nearby neighborhoods and launching searing-hot shrapnel into the streets, melting the concrete that still contains the embedded metal. As Mario and I were walking through a soccer field, we found a piece of shrapnel about 1x2 inches, which has probably added another kilo to the weight of my backpack. Amazingly, only seven people died in the explosion, the cause of which still remains unsolved, though many an assertion has been made that it was an attempted cover up of the illegal sale of bombs to dangerous countries when an audit was ordered on the factory. And so the phrase “La pasamos bomba,” a phrase denoting a good time had, takes on a darker significance here. But so goes the humor of Argentine people when it comes to dealing with darker moments in their history.

The remnants of a bomb from the explosion of a military factory in Rio Tercero in 1995.

I was deeply touched by the kindness and humor and patience of the people I met and spent time with over the last ten days. I am committing to memory the sayings and raunchy insults Mario’s friends taught me, uploading the countless photos that result from a camera falling into the hands of a group of kids, and hoping very much that the appreciation I’m radiating right now ripples through space and time to be felt by those who opened their homes to me and shared their culture, their language and their day-to-day lives.

My favorites and me in front of a waterfall in La Cumbrecita. We went to the Sierran town during Semana Santa, and for a town famous for its distinction as the only completely pedestrian town in South America, you wouldn't believe how full the streets were. Getting to this waterfall was something like being part of a pilgrimage to a holy site.

Muchisimas gracias.

The kids and me at the family asado.