Hola everyone! Salutations for Bariloche, Argentina! After three weeks of Chile, I was excited to check out Argentina. Everyone there told me that Bariloche was a gorgious city, and they were right. The city is located between a huge lake and a bunch of mountains, its pretty rough. To be honest though, the bus ride here was more impressive to me. When you look at the pics, you can see the country side, it reminded me of Wyoming or Montana with its lack of vegitation while having large rock formations and mountains in the background. Definitely dug it.

So while I have been here I have been taking private spanish classes again. They have been giong well while I have been working more on grammar and using past tenses and conditional tenses correctly. Then my teacher told me that I would start working on the subjunctive tenses, telling me that it constitutes about half of the spoken spanish. Let me tell you, after all the work I had been doing on my spanish and then finding out that it was only about half of it, I was really happy to hear that. But now I just started working on it and I am finding it similar to all the other spanish I have been learning in that it is just another thing for me to remember and try to use correctly. I talked to Meg, my sis, and asked her how long it took her to get the subjunctive tense down. She told me 6 months. I´ll do it in half that.

Spanish isn´t the only thing I am learning here. There is a complementary tango lesson given with each week of class, so I have been going about 2 or 3 nights a week to learn how to tango. The sessions are taught with about 20 people dancing, with 2 instructors and other locals that dance with myself and others. So I have been learning how to tango with the help of a couple girls in the class, and while I thought they looked a little young, I didn´t think much of it. Later, I asked one of the girls how old she was out of curiosity and found out that she was THIRTEEN YEARS OLD! I just have to memorize this phrase: "Officer, all I did was dance and nothing else".

Last weekend I went on a little 500 km excursion to do a well known drive around the area to take in the scenery. Myself, a french guy, an english guy and gal, and another american rented a car and did the loop. It was a great time, though my bum was a little sore from sitting for most of the day in the crappy car we rented. However, I was very suprised by one of the things we saw on our drive, flamingos! Okay, I knew there were flamingos in South America, but I had no idea I´d be seeing them in this temperate zone. They weren´t very pink, but it was still pretty neat.

The next day, the british girl, the french guy, and myself went on a horse trek through some of the national park that is near Bariloche. I was stunned by how beautiful it was. Even though I posted pictures of this trek, the pictures in no way do the scenery justice. We could see the lake in the distance between some mountains, below us we could see the valley with the crystal clear water of the river coming down from the mountains. I didn´t take any pictures of them, but we saw four condors flying of to grab some grub at the beginning of our trip, all of them flying off to the same point. After a day long ride, I am excited to do a longer one for a couple days when I go farther south.

So anyways, things are going great here and even though I will be missing out on an awesome meal tomorrow for Thanksgiving, I just look around and realize I´m in ARGENTINA.  We´ll see what I say when Christmas rolls around.

Take care and Chao!

Goody