January 10, 2008 | Filed Under Blog | 1 Comment
I met a glacier today.
It was immense, and gorgeous, and silent, except when it made large, thundering noises as pieces of it collapsed into the sea, overwhelmed by its own weight as the glacier advanced.
The ice was actually quite blue.
It is about four million years old.
It was staggering.
The glacier´s full name is Perito Moreno, but we decided to call him Morrie.
(We also saw condors, hawks, eagles, rheas, and lots of wild hares. Patagonia is beyond beautiful. I thought just being here was going to be the highlight, but Morrie has given everything else a good run for its money.)
January 7, 2008 | Filed Under Blog | No Comments
The last handful of days have been loveliness, featuring the extraordinary trees of Buenos Aires (perfect for climbing in, among other things), a ride in a boat in the iron-rich waters of a delta where five rivers meet, a cookie that is, in effect, a sandwich of two sugar cookies with dulche de leche in the middle, getting to watch my sweetie enjoy one of those famous Argentinian steaks (no thanks for me), and a lot of just walking around, being outside regular routines.
Restaurant eating has been just fine (they keep the kosher in Buenos Aires) but my goodness, these Argentinians put beef fat in cookies and crackers, and gelatin in just about everything else. My Spanish label-reading has gotten quite good, as it will need to be, given that we´re heading south, away from all the Yidden, this afternoon.
I would like to announce that I have a new project: I´m now going to try to play Ms. Pac Man in as many different countries as I can. As of last night, I´m up to four, and that might have to be it for a while (unless I sneak over the border to Mexico when I get back to find a video arcade, just on principle). But I have time; this is a long term project that will last until the game is completely obsolete everywhere.
January 2, 2008 | Filed Under Blog | No Comments
As time and cheap Internet allows, I’m going to try to post from the road. I hope you will forgive whatever typos sneak in from the Spanish keyboard.
So greetings from NE Argentina, near the border of Brazil. The last day and a half have been spent at Iguazu Falls, which is primarily known for its extraordinary waterfalls, but it’s also an extremely well-kept nature preserve. The falls were, well, breathtaking. There’s not a lot to say; they are truly one of the wonders of this earth. I said a lot of spontaneous brachot (I think I invented a couple) as we bumped into new and increasingly glorious sights. There were great arching rainbows all over the place, where the falls met the bright sun. I thought a lot about shefa (abundance, overflow) and wondered if maybe the Kabbalists were right after all. We took a boat ride that drove us smack into a couple of the falls. Some of them were terrifying and mighty, awesome in the original sense of the word. We got to hike around the falls themselves, and wander around in the jungley/rainforestish climate, where we saw lots of critters of various sorts–there are more wild coati here than there are cats in Jerusalem, plus iguanas, parrots, and all sorts of stuff in between. Between the waterfalls, the fact that there were great swarms of butterflies everywhere (and they came to sit on our shoulders and hats) and the rainbows, I became pretty convinced that there were unicorns hiding in the guapoy trees. I didn’t get a picture of any, but believe me, they’re there.