Iceland: Before I Go, Part 1/4, a Dangerous Country

This summer, I’m going to Iceland for a week with my family. And so, I’ve been reading up.

Iceland is Number One Threat to Icelanders

Deadly

Iceland’s known for Vikings and the musical kids show Lazy Town. It’s also, I'm discovering, a country that fate never wanted to exist.

Let’s look at the facts*:

In the 12^th century, a volcano erupts three times and blankets a third of the country in its ash. Then there’s a mini ice-age. Then the Black Death kills off half the population.

Still, some people keep inhabiting Iceland. This is what we call Not Taking the Hint. In 1783, more eruptions release gas that poisons the air. A quarter of the population and more than half of the livestock die. Everyone still alive continues not taking the hint.

Even when Iceland isn’t actively trying to bury its people in ash, it still gets back in passive aggressive ways, like simply refusing to grow food. Other countries have had the privilege of letting taste influence their culinary tradition. Iceland founded its food choices on the prime question, “does this have enough nutrients and calories to keep me alive?” Which is why we end up with things like putrefied shark fin, ram’s testicle cake, and boiled sheep’s head. (I’d give these the benefit of the doubt flavor-wise, but from all I’ve heard, they really don’t deserve it).

Part of why Iceland is so beautiful is that it’s full of glaciers and lava formations and black sand beaches. Which doesn’t leave a lot of room for growing crops. Soil erosion is a problem even today, and the frigid winters place a sharp cut off on the growing season.

What plants that do grow are pretty stunted and the country’s forte seems to lie with moss and fungi. This leaves Iceland eating a lot of seafood, birds, and sheep (and even the sheep aren’t indigenous).

That said, it sounds like much of Iceland outside the big cities is farms. I suppose it makes sense: if crops are sparse, you might as well dedicate everyone you can to growing them.

Not so Deadly?

Despite all this, Iceland somehow has a high life expectancy rate, great healthcare, and almost no crime. 

* Where am I getting these facts? Mostly from my 2010-edition Lonely Planet guide book, supplemented with the odd internet search. 

Language and the Grand Return

I’m back in the US now. I arrived back December 14^th, to a startling lack of snow. I never really had culture shock coming to Argentina, and I haven’t had it returning. For a while I was startled by the realization that when I speak on a bus in English, anyone –everyone- can understand me. I had to start paying some attention to what I said. While on the farm, only Stephanie and I spoke English; we never had to adjust conversations for young ears, we just had to not switch into Spanish. It was almost equally startling to realize how easily I could understand strangers. Though I now speak Spanish fairly well, I always had the assumption, that when a stranger began to talk to me, I’d have to put in some effort to understand.

            As for language itself, I’ve had to check myself from putting también at the ends of sentences. That’s the only word that slips through. Whenever I want to say, “this was cool, too” or “I’ll need this, also”, I keep wanting to use “también.”

There are also a few phrases that Argentina just does better, linguistically. Sure, it’s my opinion, but 3 other English-Spanish abroad students agree with me (as did an ex-Argentinean who moved to Canada). One is the phrase “tener ganas”. It’s a way of saying you want to do something, you have a desire, a hankering to do it. Even when thinking in English, it’d often slip into my thoughts: “I don't really have ganas to rock climb today”. The other phrase is “no vale la pena”, “it’s not worth the pain.” The phrase just sounds more right, more meaningful than the English equivalent of “It’s not worth it”, or, “it’s not worth the effort”. The Spanish phrase offers a clearer vision and prediction of the situation.

-       Why won’t you date her?

-        I’m leaving in 2 weeks, it’s not worth the pain.

In this example the phrase suggests that whatever good came from the relationship, it wouldn’t outweigh the pain of breaking up, or that the wonderfulness of the relationship would make the pain of breaking up even worse. “It’s not worth the pain” seems to me to explain the why, while “it’s not worth it” seems callous and leaves you asking, but why isn’t it?

More on language

My creative writing teacher admired a few English words. Notably “hyphen” (“guíon”) and “moon” (“luna”). Moon, he thought, was perfect, because the roundness of the letters and the sound mimics the roundness of a full moon. Luna, I find, evokes the shape of a crescent moon, although I may simply be associating the two because of the crescent shaped food called medialunas. “Butterfly”, my teacher thought, was horrible. Milk fat and an insect do not draw up as pretty an image as the Spanish “mariposa”. 

Mendoza: Bicycle Tour

 The land of bikes and wine is a nearby town called Maipú. (Having lived in Buenos Aires, I started to realize that Argentina obsessively recycles street and town names. No, towns don’t have a main street. But they almost all have an Uruguay street, or a Maipú, or a Yrigoyen. Every province and town pulls its name from a very limited set of sources: Argentinean presidents, nearby countries, and Argentinean provinces. Occasionally I’ll be surprised by a John F. Kennedy street, but never something so useful as School Street, or even anything as descriptive as Fountain Road. Someone, somewhere, is just not trying).

Visiting places dedicated to getting you tipsy, or at least show you a good way to get tipsy later, and in between traveling around on a vehicle entirely dedicated to balance sounded charming. And it was. Fortunately, the travel time between wineries was long enough that I never got really affected, though some other tourists did. (For the most part, Stephanie and I biked around alone, though occasionally we met up with other tourists making the same popular trip. Being foreigners together makes people amazingly friendly).

The places to go

            1. Our first stop was Museo del Vino La Rural, a free museum that gave us a tour of the history of wine making, their own groves, and finished off with a glass of their home-made (well, museum-made) wine. This sweet red wine was one of my favorites from the trip. Both informative and experiential, with a lot to see, this museum was a good place to start of the trip. Especially because I didn’t drink wine often, and really didn’t know anything about it except that it somehow makes you classy.

History

Here’s what I’ve learned about wine (from Museo del Vino La Rural and Familia Di Tomaso tours). Wine – and grapes – came over to Argentina from Europe, notably with Jesuit missionaries in the 1560s. The Spanish brought the first wine, but the French brought the grapes used to make Malbec, Argentina’s most famous variety.

Originally, grapes would be picked by hand and collected in large leather sacks, which didn’t coddle the grapes very well, and let a lot get smushed, and the remaining grapes would be juiced by being stamped on. Later, around 1850, they upgraded to scissors to cut grapes off the vines, and hand-cranked machines to crush the grapes and extract the juice.

            It takes about 2 kilos of grapes to make one bottle of wine, although of course, the amount varies by the type of wine. Red wine uses both the skins and the juice, while white wine only uses the juice (hence the light color). Nowadays the left over skins are used as fertilizers or to make oils.

Is it good?

Wine quality varies based on how the ratio of skin and juice used, how much of the sugar’s been let turn into alcohol (you can rate on how sweet it is, how smooth it is, and on how fast it gets you drunk), and what kind of oak (if any) has been used to age it.

Growing

Roses are planted at the front of each row of grape plants to act as basically the canary in the mine. If the rose plant starts to die, chances are you’ve got a pest that will attack your grapes next. One grape plant, at least in regards to Malbec, is good for 50 years. After that, it loses its sugar content.

Aging

Argentina has no oak of its own, and imports from the US and France, and, to a lesser extent, China. Wine ages as it is allowed access to air, which is granted by the space between the barrel’s slats and by the pores in the cork. (This is why wine bottles are stored pointing down, so the wine stays in contact with the cork). Admittedly, the more it’s exposed to air, the sooner it turns to vinegar, but with barrels and corks, the affect here is negligent. If you deliberately don’t want wine to age, you can use a plastic cork. Don’t think you can dump your wine in your basement then pull it out decades later. Malbec wine only last 3-5 years before it becomes vinegar.

The oak also gives extra flavor and aroma to the wine, which really does a lot for the experience. To give a smokier flavor to the wine, wineries might toast the wood. French oak adds flavors of tobacco and coffee, while American offers vanilla and coco. (French oak is actually stronger and harder than American, another tidbit useful in distinguishing them). Some makers will mix the wood in their barrels, alternating slats of each tip of oak.

            Proto-wine, my term for the juice (and perhaps skin) mixture that hasn’t yet become a drink, needs to sit until 25% off its sugar becomes alcohol. It takes about 20 days for white proto-wine to mature to real wine status, and needs to be kept at 10 degrees Celsius. Red wine ferments in about 10-15 days, at 20 or 25 degrees Celsius (room temperature). The temperature of the wine rises during fermentation.

The process seems interesting, and if it didn’t take so long/cost so much (I wouldn’t bother if I didn’t have oak), I’d try my hand at wine-making.

2.             We next stopped at Entre Olivos, which had tastings of olive oils, jams, dulce de leche, and other spreads. Many of their spreads were fantastic, especially a coconut dulce de leche. The place also included liquor tasting in the price. Some of the flavors were nicely sweet and thick, but we were surprised to realize they went down a little rough. The best (smoothest) liquors we tasted in Mendoza were offered at just a random artisanal booth in a median in the city street.

3.  Our next stop was Familia di Tomaso, recommended to us by the bike rental place. This stop was particularly great because, in addition to a brief tour of the winery, which seems to have been in the family for generations, they sat us down and showed us how to taste wine. First, they brought out an un-aged Malbec. Smell it, then swirl it around and smell it again, our guide told us. Now you’ve released the alcohol scent. Our guide described the Malbec as a fruity red wine, with a light flavor of plums and other fruits. They followed it up with a Malbec aged 6 months, which simply had more to it. The scent was spicier and the flavor fuller, smoother, and more subdued, with darker undertones. In one of the other wines, he told us to notice the tannins. This compound, found in the grape skins, dries out the inside of your mouth. I did feel a dryness or a puckering inside my mouth, but that could easily just be due to drinking so much wine. We also tried a dessert wine, which most of the tourists loved; to me it tasted like the cough syrup I had as a kid.

4.  We stopped by a few others, but at some point, all wineries seem the same. They all offer tastings of the classic wines like Malbec, and a tour. We decided not to explore many of the wineries, as we’d already got a fair education in.

 We stopped at just one more winery (I think it was Trapiche). This one gave us 4 full glasses of wine to split. I jotted down notes as I tasted, because for me, I process the experience better and pay more attention if I’m trying to explain it. Merlot was a dark red wine, thicker than Mablec, with a richer, although bitter flavor. It was less fruity than Malbec as well. For comparison we tried a light purple wine called Syrah. The flavor was lighter as well, lighter than Malbec, and acidic and citrusy. None of the wines we’d had that day had been white, so we ordered Torrentes and Chardonnay. Torrentes we were obliged to try, because it’s unique to Argentina. I didn’t particularly like either of these; they just seemed to have less flavor than the reds (but Stephanie insists these were poor samples). The Torrentes was a light gold, and bitter. It had a weaker flavor than the Chardonay, which tasted slightly acidic and smelled slightly fruity.

5.  Our final stop was Historias and Sabores which did not have much in the way of historias, but held through on the sabores (flavors) promise. I was still curious in liquors so we stopped here to try a few and try their spreads. It was a picturesque little place, with a patio outside the small storefront, and a view into their garden and grape vines. Their most interesting item: a thick syrupy Malbec spread.

All in all, I feel like my Mendoza trip was a lot of trying food, and wandering outside. A nice relaxing break after farming, and a nice way to end my time in Argentina. The next night I spent on a bus back to Buenos Aires, then I hit the airport insanely, irrationally early, and returned to the USA on an overnight flight.

Travelers’ Tips:

Bicycle Tour

Mendoza is famous for its wine, and, in the tourism world, almost as famous for its biking-wine tours. There are a few ways you can go about this: you can pay your hostel to “organize” the trip, or you can go straight to the nearby town of Maipú and do it yourself. Back to useful information: at least with my hostel, what you get when you pay is a car to come pick up you (and anyone else paying for the same service) and drive you to Maipú, pick you up again the end time the service has chosen, and rent you your bicycle. It’s honestly just a waste of money. Your other option is to take a normal city bus  (number 173) to Maipú (costing about AR $2), and once there, rent the bike yourself from one of the numerous shops. It’s been a while since the trip, so my memory for prices may be off, but I believe the organized trip cost about AR$90 and the bike rental itself only AR $25.

I rented a bike from a place called Mr. Hugo, which is immediately across the street from the bus stop. The bikes were pretty good and the seats relatively easy to adjust by yourself. I saw helmets there, which I presume they’ll give if you ask; I honestly just forgot. Some bikes had a basket in the front, so if you didn’t bring a backpack and want to pick up souvenirs, that’s a good option.  They give you a glass of wine at the end of your trip, and a brief map of places at the beginning.

Most bodegas (wineries) cost AR $20 for tasting and a tour.

If you’re hungry for empanadas, stop by the Beer Garden off of Mitre street: they’re made fresh and in meat and vegetarian varieties. Be prepared to wait though. 

Mendoza Day 1: Wining, Dining, and Generally Touristing

Plazas, Sundays, Parks, and Snakes

After a few weeks on the farm, Stephanie and I made for Mendoza city, the province’s capital. It’s a remarkably liveable city: unlike the endless Buenos Aires, whose borderlines seem more the stuff of legend than of reality, Mendoza is easily walkable, and adds to that more open and green space, and notable tilework in the plazas. When we headed for the city there was only one thing on my to-do list: bicycle wine touring. Which meant we were at a bit of a loss for what to do with our other day and half there. (If we’d planned further ahead, we could have taken advantage of rafting, hiking, or adventure sports in the area). As it was, we turned out to be pretty lucky.

            Our first night in the town we found a rock concert to raise attention to AIDS and sexual health taking place in the main plaza. For dinner we sampled the wine Mendoza is famed for, and got perhaps the most stereotypical meal possible: steak cooked in wine. (Another dish on the menu sounded like Argentina’s response to the Atkin’s diet: pizza with a steak instead of a crust.)

            The plaza is a very active place, and, it being Argentina, home to some impressive crafts stands. On a later night, we stumbled across a live tango orchestra, celebrating the famous tango singer Carlos Gardel’s birthday with a show. Audience members of all sorts, some dressed elegantly, some wearing sandals and street clothes, paired up to dance.

            Our first full day in Mendoza was a Sunday, an unfortunate mistake. We wanted to visit some wine tasting places, but most shops shut down on Sundays. (Speaking of wine, for those of you who would rather eat your drinks than drink them, consider trying Malbec ice cream, a flavor that came in season in my last few days).  We flipped through my guidebook and decided to check out a huge park in the area. It’s quite pretty, with many nice places to walk, and dotted with playgrounds. If you’re looking for a picnic area, a way to occupy young kids, or just want to see some nice nature, it’s worth a stop.

            Now, what we were looking forward to next, was seeing an ancient aquarium. My guidebook described it as an “underwater freak show” of preserved oddities from the sea, and suggested that the aquarium was likely unchanged since its installation in 1945, save for the level of algae on the glass. With a description like this, I couldn’t resist. Reality, however, could. We had chosen to come the year that someone finally decided to renovate the aquarium and it was closed to the public. Across the street, however, was a little snake-etarium, hosting a variety of snakes, a few large spiders, and other reptiles. Much of the charm was in the posters, which disproved snake stereotypes I had never heard of (snakes do not, in fact, drink cow’s milk, for example) and underlined that the only way to deal with snake venom is to get treated with an antivenom (do not try to suck out the venom, don’t apply a tourniquet, don’t cauterize the bite, drink alcohol if you want but don’t expect it to help . . . ). A few interesting facts I gleaned are that snakes are deaf, and that to make an antivenom, a scientist injects a small amount of diluted venom into a horse, removes some of the horse’s blood, and separates out the antibodies.
       We also made a stop by the Modern Arts museum (Museo Municipal de Artes Moderno) , located in the plaza. It was tiny, about 1 room, with a few nice wood sculptures, some obvious photoshops, and a less-than-inspiring very abstract movie. Not worth your time.

--

Traveler's Tips:

Guidebook

I have a Lonely Planet guidebook, which has been rather useful. The latest edition doesn’t include street numbers in its maps, and is usually off on price listings, but has handy details like phone numbers and street addresses. Everyone in my study abroad program owned Lonely Planet, which suggest its either good, or trendy.

Snake-etarium

There is some more exact and legit sounding name for this place, but I don’t remember. It’s worth an hour or so, and is cheap, only AR $7, if memory serves.

Farming Part 3

A Shit Day

One day we were assigned to clean out the pig pens, i.e. shovel shit. It was somewhat like cleaning out a diaper from the inside. For this sort of task you can’t help but swear constantly, and every swear rings oddly literal. At first, as we raked the pig droppings on top of the pen’s earth floor, it didn’t seem too hard a job. That was before we realize it was shit all the way down. Our first pen was packed, dry waste. Our second pen was only 1/3 a thin peninsula of earth; the surrounding sea was wet and stinking. It took us 6 hours, and what we moved was the build up of 1 month.  

            To be honest though, it wasn’t that bad. It was disgusting, and I was appalled by my own smell, but it was also funny. And neither as hot nor as tedious as weeding.

On Usefulness

One thing I really liked about working on the farm was that at the end of the day it was obvious I had done something tangible and worthwhile. It also meant that I didn’t feel oblidged to talk much at meals or be entertaining, because I felt  like I had already contributed. One reason there may be less depression in developing nations is that they feel useful even if they have bad jobs. Luis teased his son that if he didn’t pass his exams he’d have to be a train driver. That’s still a lot more valueable to society than the crap jobs I’m used to seeing like telmarketing, working at McDonald’s, or being a clothing store salesperson.

I was also a fan of not having to look nice. Being on the farm and camping, clothes only mattered for function; I felt like I’d done well if I just showered or brushed my hair.

Farm Summary

The sort of tasks I did were weeding, harvesting garlic, planting beans, harvesting lima beans and peas, shucking garlic, feeding animals, raking compost, distributing compost, shoveling out a pig pen, washing dishes, deepen irrigation channels.

The plants grown on this farm included: apples onions, two types of garlic, carrots, raspberries, lettuce, zaptillos (a type of Latin American pepper), cucumber, berries, artichocke,  quinece (a type of fruit resembling a large pear), chives, oregano, sunflowers, parsley, and corn. They raised pigs, rabbits, chickens, and sheep.

Farming Part 2: Pigs

Boisenberries

We started working once we arrived. Laura assigned us neating up the boisenberries. The  twisting branches of the plants were twined around weeds, and we had to straighten them out and tie them to a frame for easier harvesting. We spent that afternoon stabbed by the thorny branches and bitten bloody by flies. (Stephanie advised me to pull the thorns out with my teeth; I never got the hang of this, but trying to bite the thorn hepled because my teeth would depress the skin around the thorn, making it easier to then grasp).

Efficiency

What impressed me about the farm was it’s efficiency. We spent 6 or more hours a day weeding (so much that I have callouses), and all the weeds went to feed the pigs, rabbits, and sheep. The animal’s waste and leftovers from our meals went into compost.

Even our own waste was used. For a bathroom, we had a sort of dry outhouse. After using the toilet, you’d dump woodshavings/sawdust down the hole to trap odors; it was bascially a litter bin for humans.The hole of the toilet emptied into a large metal bin, which Stephanie and I had to empty on our last day. It was a two person task to pull the bin out from under the outhouse and carry it over to the compost pile to dump it. (For some reason human waste always seems grosser than animal waste, though its essentially the same thing).

Pig Food

It had surprised me that pigs could eat grasses, but apparenlty, pigs will eat anything, including each other. When we first arrived we saw one small pig penned off from his fellows. This one was a pig set aside to be killed. The farmers had cut off his gentials because it would sour the meat to kill him while they were still attached. He had to be kept separate for a while because if pigs smell blood on another pig, they will eat him alive.

The genitals and testicles are removed 7 months before killing the pig (they usually kill pigs in winter so the natural cold will help preserve the meat longer). The famer either cuts the genitals off with a knife or fastens an elastic around the genitals and keep it their until they fall off within a few days. Either method sounds intensely painful. (Trying to refer to the pig I accidentally called him “el chancho castigado”, which does not mean “the castrated pig”, but rather “the punished pig”. Laura loved this term).

Escaped Pigs

Sometimes pigs would be lefted in a pen in the fields to eat the weeds and roots there and thus clear the ground for planting. This was actually a dangerous idea, because sometimes the pigs would escape. On my eleventh day at the farm, a piglet got free in the field. Everyone in the field gave chase. I ran over in time to block one path of escape and the pig wheeled around, racing, terrified. Luis was furious and threw a hefty stick at it. He missed, grabbed his stick, and finally closing in on the piglet smacked it in the back until it’s legs gave out. Then Luis kicked it. The piglet tossed it’s mouth open and screamed. Luis grabbed it roughly by the ears,  hoisted it into the air, and carried it back to the pen, where he threw it on its back. For several minutes the piglet still couldn’t stand up. It was horrifying to watch.  

For some reason, loose pigs, unlike loose lambs, are a problem. I think the fear was that it would mess up rows of plants (presumably piglets step harder than lambs), and that it would not return (pigs aren’t exactly loyal to a herd).  Yes, the pig was a threat to their livelihood, but there are other methods of recovery. I’d seen Luis carry another pig back by the arms and legs, not the ears, and they catch large pigs with a collar on a rod that they hook over the pig’s head.

The relationship between a farmer and an animal is intensley disorted by the fact that the animals are meant to be eaten. Pigs are intelligent creatures, and I don’t doubt they could be trained like a dog could. Instead of trying to beat pigs into submission, it occurred to me that Luis could try to train them not to leave the pen. Then I realized that, given that the pigs will be eaten in some years anyway, it’s probably just not worth the effort. When a dog bites, humans try to understand what factors caused this (stress? illness? bad training?) and in some way negotiate with the dog, be it through a punishment-reward system or through removing the stressor. When a pig bites, they just kill it next.

Pigs are Awful

People have tried to tell me that English idioms slight pigs. No, English idioms are right on.  “Being a pig” is a perfect metaphor. Pigs who had just been fed and still had a pile of weeds next to them would try to eat their neighbors food if I placed it too close to the shared wall. Once a little pig even jumped through the gap in a wall to steal food from a bigger one, and pigs paired together to mate would fight for access to the food until one was beaten into submission. 

Farming Part 1

Before going to the station to catch our the bus to Mendoza , I dropped by the dormitories where my co-WWOOF-er to be, Stephanie, lived.  

            As one of Stephanie’s friends chatted with us about our trip, it soon became clear that we running optimisitcally and blindly to an unknown province. We did not know what sort of work we would be doing, what sort of farm it would be on (“there’s a lot to do” was the only description I knew), what the town was like or who the owners of the farm were.

            “The person I e-mailed with is a woman,” I offered.

            “At least that’s what she says.”

At this point the friend offered to loan us her knife. (We turned it down).

A bit of background:

WWOOFing is a program where anyone can volunteer to go work on an organic farm, for any amount of time from weeks to months. It cost $40 to join the WWOOF website, which then provided me with a collection of e-mails of farms who I could ask to let me work for them. This program runs throughout the world (a friend WWOOF-ed in Hawaii for a summer) and differs by farm. 

Sheep are Odd

When we arrived on the farm (after our taxi first accidentally brought us to another small organic farm), the first animal I saw was a sheep, leashed to a pole.

            “Is it female?” I asked, and they laughed at me.

Between it’s legs hung something pink and huge. I thought it was an udder, turns out it was balls. (In my defense, the balls are the size of two bannas hung together, curves pointing out, not very different in size from actual sheep udders). The male sheep, one owner of the farm told us, was kept separate from the females, and only allowed to have sex with them once a year.

Part of why I’d gone to a farm was because I wanted to fill in the gap between the packaged meat and the living animal it came from, and then decide how I felt about it morally. Trying to find some framework for judging how farm animals were treated, I kept asking about how sheep lived in the wild. There are no wild sheep, Luis, the other farm owner, insisted, they were a completely domesticated species, and had adapted to be so. For instance, sheep grow coats so thick they suffer from heat if no one shears them each summer.

            Still, something can be inferred about the animals that evolved into modern day sheep. For instance, according to the evolutionary psych books I was reading at the time (“The Moral Animal”), large balls imply a species in which femalse have sex with many males. Because they don’t monopolize any notable section of a female’s fertility time, the males instead try to overload her with semen, hoping theirs will beat out the sperm of the other males.

            A side note for those of you who think sheep make cute little “baa-ing” sounds. Most adult sheep sound as if they’re about to throw up. We had one cantakerous sheep who would stick out her tounge and bellow blehhhhh. (I would imitate the sheep all the time. This one and I got into shouting matches). Lambs, admittedly, are cute, if very very sad to watch. Every day two or three lambs would escape the sheep pen through gaps in the walls, and go frolic in the greater farm land. Then they would realize that they forgot how to get back in, and would cry. (Baby sheep make a high, mewling “mehhh”). Even when one lamb would find a way in (and there were many), his/her friends wouldn’t follow but instead would stand on the other side, bewildered. It is as if there is something fundamentally wrong with sheep language.  

Routine

The farm was owned by a husband and wife couple, Luis and Laura, who had previously worked as a kindergarten teacher, and I think, an electrician, before deciding they preferred farming. They had four children, ages 16-22, the eldest of which lived in the city while going to university. Our farm was a 40 minute walk from the town of Tunuyán, and bordered by other family farms (hence our taxi getting lost).

Stephanie and I slept in a tent we’d borrowed from her cousin (most of her family lives in Argentina) with a mat and blankets the family lent us. We soon settled into a comfortable, if not exactly thrilling, routine. Luis and Laura would wake us at 8am, and give us a breakfast of tea with bread and jam. We spent the mornings weeding, and feeding animals until 1pm or 1:30pm. Lunch was with the parents and their kids, then we’d take a siesta, because Mendoza province gets hot enough that you need to. Usually I’d read or nap until we returned to work at 5pm, and we’d keep working until it got dark, usually around 8:40pm.

A nice part was I really did feel accepted by the family. They’d joke and tease us constantly (me for my American-accented Spanish, and for getting smudged with dirt while working in the dirt) and on Thursdays after dinner we’d watch movie on TV with the family.

                                           Our part of the farm