DONE. FINISHED. TERMINADO. Yesterday, after weeks of researching, translating, and waiting for my host mom to correct my horrific translating mistakes (i.e. "what are you trying to say here?") I turned in my final 16 page paper (monografia) for my UBA class. I wrote about tango and Argentine identity in cinema and compared American and Argentine movies. One of the points I made, for example, is that in one of my personal favorite movies, Evita, tango and a slew of other dances are shown but the truth is that Eva Peron was a horrible dancer and never danced the tango. hmm.
Wrapping up bird class was the horrible weekend three weekends ago that would never end. Friday we had to present projects on birds, Saturday we had to watch birds, identify birds, and get tested on birds, then Sunday we had to watch birds some more. But it's over. I think I passed.
For my Spanish class we had to write a 6 page paper about Argentine rock. I wrote mine the day before about rock and democracy in 1982 since before the military regime censored a lot of lyrics, bands etc. It's interesting I guess, but I bored my class to death presenting it.
If you're wondering what I did for Thanksgiving (obviously there is no Thanksgiving in Argentina), Mario the COPA director had everyone over at his house to eat and it was delicious...turkey, stuffing, pumpkin pie, everything! Thanksgiving wasn't really the same of course without family, but it fared ok.
Soooo this past week I went to the end of the world. Seriously. I will provide a map.
This trip was something I really wanted to do and unfortunately or maybe fortunately, given the time I have left here, I traveled sola. I made a triangle (parallelogram?) with 3 stops by plane. Since I have a student visa I was able to get a really good deal on airfare (i.e. pay what the Argentinians pay). Because keep in mind, these places are FAR. My first stop is 60 hours by bus from BsAs.
Stop #1: Ushuaia - the southernmost city in the world
My plane left at 5:30 a.m. Which meant I had to be at the airport even earlier. Which led to my decision of...sleep? Nah. So I pulled an all nighter. I slept like a rock on the 4 hour plane ride (didn't even wake up for the drinks) and drank lots of coffee during the day. I made it through. In the morning I did some touristy things in the city. It has a really interesting history, in that it used to be a penal colony (penal in that the government sent prisoners there in the early 1900s since it was uninhabited and so that they would be able to declare it Argentine territory instead of Chilean, then Peron got rid of the jail in the 1950s). The old prison is now a huge museum with little exhibits in every room. Ushuaia is pretty much the closest thing to Antarctica, so there was a lot of boring exhibits that my dad would have liked about the Argentine navy and expeditions to Antarctica.
In the afternoon I did a 6 hour boat ride through the Beagle Channel, which runs between Argentina and Chile. It's surrounded by the Andes mountains on each side. We stopped at little islands to see wildlife. First sea lions and some birds, then penguins!! Magellanic penguins.
The next day I had half the day to kill before my flight so I went to Tierra del Fuego (Land of Fire) National Park. One cool thing about the national parks I visited (3 total) is that because I have a student i.d. from an Argentine university it looks like I am a resident, so I got to receive the resident student price which was about 30 pesos less in each park. To get into the park I decided I would take the disgustingly touristy "Train at the End of the World" which is old fashioned and runs on railroads that the prisoners built. Then in the park there were some pretty lakes and a cool sign that says you are basically super far away from Alaska.
If you think about it, Ushuaia could possibly be the beginning of the world. I'm not sure who was the first to designate which way was north and which way was south, probably European navigators, but if you flipped a map upside down Ushuaia would indeed be far far north. Overall the town of Ushuaia was my favorite on the trip.
Stop #2: El Calafate
El Calafate is the portal that 150,000 tourists visit each year to go see the famous glaciers. For this reason the downtown is horrible. Tourist agencies. Souvenir shops. Restaurants. That's about it. The next day I did an all-day excursion into the Glacier National Park to of course see the glaciers. Being on a boat for 11 hours isn't as bad as it sounds. We navigated through Lago (lake) Argentino. The water in the park is AMAZING. It is a beautiful shade of turquoise that somehow is turned the color it is from the glaciers. Unfortunately we couldn't get to the biggest glacier in the park, Upsala, because there were too many icebergs in front of it. I did end up seeing it from the plane though! But the icebergs were humongous. Sailing by them by boat felt like being on the Titanic. We saw some big pieces of ice fall off which was exciting, they make a really loud popping noise. One thing I didn't realize was how blue ice is. Again I forget why this is, something to do with the sun reflecting the ice etc. But they were really beautiful. We passed to big glaciers before we got to the most famous one, called Perito Moreno.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perito_Moreno_Glacier
Seeing the glacier was kind of like seeing a celebrity. You've heard lots about it, you're excited to see it in person. But then when you really see it, it's not all that you expected it to be. This is not to say that it wasn't worth it to see the glaciers. It absolutely was. And yes they're huge and beautiful, but it's a big piece of ice.
After the boat tour I came back to my hostel to find that I had a room all to myself WITH private bathroom, which was wonderful. The next day I had the option to trek on the glacier itself for $130 among other things, but instead I decided to visit the town on the northern side of the park three hours away called El Chalten. I took a bus early in the morning to get there and did a 3 hour hike to get to a little lookout point. It was really beautiful with snowy mountains and a river with that same turqouise water. El Chalten is a huge tourist site for camping and trekking. I passed a lot of hikers with trekking poles (which means they're really intense), Merrell logo shirts, zip off pants, etc. The day I went was hot! Even though it is summer here I thought it couldn't get that hot with the glaciers being down the road, but I think the temperature made it past Buenos Aires' that day.
Stop #3: Puerto Madryn
The last stop on my trip was mainly to do one thing: whale watch. The day I flew in, which was actually through a little city called Trelew, I decided to do something a little different first. I took a taxi to a town called Gaimon, which is all welsh-influenced and a lot of the people there still speak Welsh. There I went to a casa de te, teahouse, which Lady Di (the princess of Wales after all) visited in 1995. They still have all of the dishes and tea cozy she used displayed in a little case. The property was beautiful with an outdoor garden and fountain. The tea was good but way too much food for one person. It ended up being my entire lunch the next day. They had bread and scones and little samplings of cakes. Unfortunately the way things worked out I still had my suitcase with me at this point which was a pain to carry around. But then after two bus rides I made my way into Puerto Madryn to spend the night.
On my last day of the trip I did an all-day tour of Peninsula Valdes, about an hour away from Puerto Madyrn. The first stop was whale watching. December 15th is about the end of the season that whales breed and give birth near the peninsula so our boat had to go a little further out than usual to see the whales. I have to say this was the coolest part of the whole trip. I used to really like whales as a kid but seeing them in action in person is something completely different. The type of whale we saw was the southern right whale. We saw mamas and babies but now that I'm looking at my pictures I can't tell which is which. The whales have gross crustaceans on their heads and seagulls actually jab at them to eat their blubber. So we saw them get a little annoyed. But at one point one of the whales looked right at the boat which was cool. They got pretty close. I don't know if the captain of the boat says it on every excursion but he said we had luck with the proximity and jumping etc. that we saw. No one knows why whales jump. All I know is that it is actually extremely scary. I thought I was going to die because they were so close and the boat was so topsy-turvy with the waves that they made. But so cool. Really amazing to see them and worth the trip out of the way to the peninsula.
The rest of the day around the island wasn't as good as the whales but still fun to see. We went to the beach where there were some sea lions being extremely lazy and napping which wasn't that great to look at, then we saw some more Magellanic penguins.
The great thing about traveling in the airports where I went to is that security/timeliness does not exist. Most of the airports only had 2 or 3 gates and boarded maybe 10 minutes before the flight was supposed to leave. They didn't even check my passport/id to verify that I was myself when I checked in. I had luck with Aerolineas (since they have issues with strikes, etc) and all my flights were on time and served meals. Can't say the U.S. does that for domestic flights. Another random note is that I hardly met/heard/saw any Americans traveling through Patagonia. Maybe it's a little early for travel season but everyone was European. The men all looked like my dad but with super trendy eyeglasses. There were also a lot of Chinese tour groups there. They all smoke.
So now I am home, only to leave again tomorrow night for my last trip to Mendoza and into Chile.
The exchange rate when I got here: 3.01
The exchange rate Citibank gave me today: 3.46
perhaps one bright side about the bad economy at home?
