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Whale Watching
By great good fortune (and a little planning) we visited Puerto Madryn and Península Valdés for a second time in August; this latest trip happened near the beginning of the Southern Right Whales’ season there, rather than the end. And it was spectacular. We walked out on the long pier in Puerto Madryn, and the…
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Sounds of Water
When it rains here in our favorite deluge style, the gutters on the front of my house sound as if they might soon tear away from the roof, though I choose to believe that’s just the sound of water cascading over the edge. My own little waterfall–no need to leave home. The back gutters are…
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More remote, named places
Punta Delgada, Península Valdés I’ve been back in Oregon for a month and a half now, more or less (the precise day count seems unimportant) and, as usually happens with completed travel, the time away and the places visited–and, sadly, the people–seem increasingly remote, a little unreal, my own personal fairytale, once upon a time…
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Bridges real, imagined, or ruined.
Parque Provincial Aconcagua Plaza España, Mendoza We rode the overnight bus back to Rosario from Mendoza last night, luxuriating in coche came comfort–except that my legs are a little short to take full advantage of the footrest. Dozing off, I composed a brilliant blog post in my head. What follows may or may not resemble…
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Today’s word harvest: three new trees
Ceibo Sapo game Today we crossed the Rosario-Victoria bridge (long bridge over the Paraná river, longer causeway across the wetlands) to Estancia “El Cerrito” for asado (barbeque), a folklore show (with audience participation dancing at the end), some fierce games of sapo (coin toss with a bronze toad’s gaping maw as target) and lots of…
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Running on Sunday
I set out to run on Sunday, either over toward the Paraná River and along the bluffs on the shore for a bit, as I’ve done before, or maybe taking Blvd. Oroño in the other direction, toward Parque de la Independencia [map]. But I found that the boulevard is closed to vehicle traffic on Sundays…
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Signs (taken for wonders?)
The exotic is always alluring; borrow a few words from another language, or a cinema icon from another era, and the possibilities blossom. Or wilt. I always enjoy reading signs (we recently turned the car around to photograph a sign for “Salad Shrimp” offered right next to night crawlers; imagine our disappointment when it was…
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Orientation: Stone Windows
alabaster window It’s orientation week, for students and visiting faculty alike. I want to say disorientation as well (notice my self-restraint–no parenthesis around the prefix, though both training and inclination leave me tempted to ask a word to be its opposite even as it is defined, greedily hoping to hold ambivalence and precision in the…
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Travel guides new and old
I love reading travel guides. I’ve bought several in preparation for my upcoming trip to Argentina, and I’ve pretty well cleaned out the public library’s shelf. (Good news for those planning their own trips: I leave at the end of the month, and all books will be returned.) The university library has just one book…