So I had my birthday dinner last Friday, and the weather decided to be on its best behavior yet. It was going to be just an intimate little gathering on my terrace, but more folks showed up than I expected, and it was fun! It's always wild when you finally have a chance to introduce people from different parts of your life to each other...and then watch them get along really well and have a good time. I got a lot of compliments on my cooking, which I had fun with, especially the spicy Thai peanut pizza with tofu, carrots, spring onions, sweet onions, and sesame and celery seeds. It's a very non-Argentine concoction, and it disappeared quickly. Then, of course, I had chocolate cake and got sung "Happy Birthday" to in three languages: English, Spanish, and, well, Argentinian. All-in-all it was a lovely evening that made me feel very good about being here, being thirty, having found some good friends, and having my birthday in the spring for a change.

This past week I've been plugging away on writing projects and enjoying a mixture of sun and thunderstorms (today was rainy and stormy...with hail!) I like the energy of the storms, and being up on the terrace. It's like camping out in the city.

Turning 30

So my thirtieth birthday was yesterday, and I'm pretty happy about it. I think my thirties are going to be my best decade yet. As a friend put it, in your twenties, one tends to ramble on without knowing what the hell they're talking about, and in your thirties, you still ramble on without knowing what you're talking about but it doesn't matter because you don't care what anybody thinks anymore.

It's true, I'm feeling more at peace with life and myself than I have in a while. Finally learning what it means to live in the moment and work on building a creative and happy life. The sun came out for my birthday and I spent the morning basking in it on the terrace with my coffee and journal. Then I went to the botanical garden and basked some more, this time in the company of many friendly feral cats, and ran into a couple people I knew (Buenos Aires is starting to feel small!). Then I went for an hour massage, followed by a dinner out with Pablo at a vegetarian restaurant we'd been meaning to try, which turned out to be the best vegetarian food I've had in Argentina yet. Friday, I'm having a birthday dinner with friends--grilled pizzas on the terrace and an excruciatingly divine chocolate cake. More details on that later.

So I'm now right smack in the middle of Saturn Return--an astrological phenomenon that happens every 28 years or so when Saturn returns to the position it was it when you were born. It lasts about four years--28 to 32--and it can be a time of solidifying life decisions (like marriage or professional milestones), or it can really shake things up and force you to look at ways you need to change your life and let go of unnecessary baggage in order to find your true path. The latter is definitely what Saturn Return has been for me, and these past couple years have included a lot of pain and some rough lessons, but halfway through Saturn Return, I think I can say I've done a lot of internal work and made a lot of good, courageous decisions, and if I continue to apply myself and work hard these next couple years, things are looking up. Yeah, thirties are going to kick ass.

Long Time, No Blog

O.K., so I've been ridiculously horrible about not keeping up my blog! It becomes a vicious cycle: I get lazy and don't blog and then people lose interest and don't check my blog and then I don't blog again because I figure nobody's reading it and I'm just writing out into lonely cyberspace and I don't want to harass all my friends with e-mails saying, "read my blog again!" because then they'll read it and I'll get lazy again and not post and everybody will get mad at me.

But I digress. I think it's time I started blogging again, as I've got a new computer with pretty blue lights and a "borrowed" wireless connection in my apartment, so I figure those are as good reasons as any. If anybody's out there, by all means leave a comment, even if you're an extraterrestrial and I don't understand what you're saying, at least I will know there is a soul out there who has attempted contact in this never-ending, expanding blogosphere.

So I'm back in Buenos Aires for the last couple gloomy chilly rainy weeks of winter which I figure will help me to appreciate the spring more. I went back to the states for a much-reveled in month and a half of summer, zoomed around visiting family and friends, continued playing vendor in the Cultural Survival Bazaars, went whitewater rafting, hung out by the ocean, celebrated my thirtieth birthday early a couple times (eek, the real thing is soon! eh, whatever. I'm realizing thirty doesn't mean anything anymore, used to be people's whole life spans, but hey....)

Before my trip to the states I had a bit of a challenging run of things, got my bag stolen, broke my foot (during which my most loyal companion was a black cat missing one of her paws who took to me quite possessively), got my apartment broken into and camera and computer stolen--along with years of writing, bounced around without any form of stable, affordable housing for a while, and have learned much about the chaos and instability of Argentine life.

On the upside, I found a great writers' group, have been bravely carving away at my writers' block, loving the fair trade thing, teaching freelance English, being in love, speaking Spanish like a porteno, making friends, learning the art of patience, and being grateful that I can walk again.

I now have a cute tiny studio apartment off a shared rooftop terrace, and I feel like a parrot in a little concrete nest, looking out at the other nests with their tufts of plants on their balconies, and listening to thundertsorms pounding hard on my roof.

Will write more, I promise.

Coming Home

I can't believe how fast time flies. I'm coming home next week! Thursday morning, Nov. 30th to be exact. I'll be home for about 3 weeks, then going to see my sister in Utah for Christmas, then visiting a friend in Texas and coming back down here to Buenos Aires in January.

Anybody who's around the Boston area should come out for the Cultural Survival Crafts Bazaar, Sat & Sun December 9-10, where I will be a vendor and officially kicking off my fair trade business! I'll be selling black ceramics, llama wool shawls, and silver and sterling silver jewelry all with designs distinct to indigenous communities in the northwest of Argentina.

December 9-1011am-7pm
Hynes Convention Center 900 Boylston St, Boston, MA

More details at:
http://www.cs.org/events/bazaar/index.cfm

Please come out, I'd love to see you there!

Las Montañas

So I recently got back from a wonderfully successful ten-day trip to the mountains in northwest Argentina, both for some much needed out-of-city time, and also to make contacts and buy artisanry for my budding fair trade business. I went with Juan Pablo to the province of Tucumán, where he is from, in the central northwest region. We visited a couple of his cousins in the city for an asado, an Argentinian barbecue where they grill just about every part of the animal (we vegetarians ate salad), and then headed of to Tafi del Valle, a tranquil, though touristy, mountain town. Fortunately it wasn´t tourist season yet, so all was pretty laid back and it was so refreshing to get out of the city!

So we stayed there for a night snacking on regional cheeses and artisanal chocolates, and then continued on to Amaicha del Valle, over the other side of the mountains where it hasn´t rained since March. It´s a very dry desert, but along the valley floor there are plenty of trees for shade, agorrobos and alamos, with a distinct bright eternal spring green. Juan Pablo used to live there and had many friends and contacts for buying artisanry. . . turns out he´s a great business partner! He knows a lot about setting up workers´cooperatives and Argentinian laws and subsidies and whatnot, and we chatted with people about the possibilities for starting artisans´cooperatives. Some already exist, and some are pretty excited about the idea, and about the idea of fair trade in general, which is not something they´ve had regular access to. A lot of artisans have felt very exploited and are quite interested in alternatives, though also understandably very mistrustful of outsiders. But Pablo is good with talking with people about possibilities, and we left with our heads full of ideas and potential, as well as plenty of contacts and artisanry: beautiful sterling silver and silver jewelry, llama wool shawls, and black ceramics, all with designs distinct to the region. We are also exploring possibilities for documentary film-making.

Amaicha del Valle is an indigenous commune of the Daguita people, and are in a stage of trying to regroup and reorganize and empower their community after having been severely exploited. When we were there, they happened to be holding the first among hopefully a series of democratic assemblies to discuss and deal with issues in their community: exploitation of artisans, lack of water, education, the need to protect the environment, etc. It´s a fairly closed community, but Pablo and I were able to attend the assembly because he had a chat with the cacique (leader). It was a great opportunity. . . unfortunately my Spanish comprehension is still quite limited, but I did get a copy of their constitution which I am beginning to translate and it is quite fascinating and inspiring.

We had planned to travel furher up into the mountains, but I got sick with an upset stomache and couldn´t go anywhere--aparently it´s pretty common for people to get sick there when adapting to the strong desert climate. Anyway, I´m better now. And I did manage to feel good enough in time to go off on a jeeping expedition with this crazy Belgian (the husband of a friend of Pablo´s), off into the desert to shoot things, poke around looking for pottery shards and arrowheads, and meeting a couple of his friends . . . a precious elderly indigenous couple that lives in a house out in the middle of nowhere, way off the road in the desert, in a rough but simple life. I don´t know how to describe the energy of the place: so tranquil, so wild, so real. I didn´t want to leave.

Alas, now I am back in the city with the porteños (Buenos Aires city folk), and I´ve got my posh modern apartment filled high with rustic old pottery and llama wool, and Buenos Aires is in full bloom, with trees full of purple flowers.

Feria de San Telmo

Sundays here are full of artisans fairs, street performances, and hanging out and sharing yerba mate in the sun. There's the fair at Mataderos, on the fringe of the city, mostly attended by locals, where they have traditional music and dancing from the north of Argentina, and all sorts of specialty food products. A friend of mine sells cheese there from the province of Tucuman, in the mountains.

Another great fair is the antique fair in Plaza Dorrego in San Telmo, an old working class barrio just south of the center with cobblestone streets and a rough edge. It's where tango was born (although residents of the barrio further south, La Boca, would beg to differ), originally danced by men and prostitutes, and often just men while they were waiting turns for prostitutes. Tango shows are an integral part of the Sunday fair here, and the antique displays are impressive and rather photogenic. So here's a bit of a photo gallery:

Desaparecidos

Today marks one month since the disappearance of Jorge Julio Lopez, the main witness in a trial of a former military general from the dictatorship of the seventies who was recently convicted for crimes of genocide, including the kidnapping, torture, and murder of teenagers.

Disappearances aren't supposed to happen here these days. It's an age of democracy, and people are trying to move on from the days when 30,000 people were disappeared. But apparently there are still people who don't want certain secrets to get out, and are willing to continue such tactics. Julio Lopez is a 77-year-old carpenter and ex-desaparcido who had been held and tortured for 80 days...now he has either been killed for his willingness to speak up, or he is currently reliving his nightmare as we speak.

There have been marches on the plaza demanding the appearance with life of Lopez, and there will be another one today, with hundreds of thousands of people. I've received phone calls on my land-line and cell-phone from the government searching for any information on his whereabouts, as part of a program to keep up the image that anything and everything is being done to locate him. But there is corruption in the government, everybody knows it, and there's little surprise that information has not yet surfaced.