Remembrance of Things Unblogged (Part 2)

“Never sure how to begin these things. It's always so awkward.”

“You could start by telling everyone that you've shamelessly abandoned your blog. Again.”

“I guess there's no way to be clever about it. I'm lazy.”

“Don't worry. Everybody knows.”

“But it's not like Buenos Aires anymore. I'm in Peru. I wake up around 9 am now.”

“Well, well. No longer outsourcing your mornings to mid-western time-zones? I think you actually flirted with the idea a couple of unwritten posts ago. Something about your 'living ambiguously' in Argentina, waking up around lunch time (Breakfast in Texas) after a night of reading and beef-eating, but the parameters of that lifestyle turned out to be a bit too ambiguous.”

“I need structure.”

“You need to write more.”

“I admire industrious people. Like the lovely couple we rented from in Buenos Aires. They were film-makers. Julia, a Porteña, wrote and directed a bunch of movies. Even co-directed a movie called the “The Motorcycle Diaries.”

“Impressive.”

“Yeah. And her partner, John, a native New Yorker, was an equally prolific photographer. Super cool. They had a great library in their Palermo apartment.”

“How'd you come across it?”

“We lucked out. Answered an ad on Craig's list. Such an amazing space. Right next to the botanical garden. Two bedrooms, balcony, great living room, lots of light. They were leaving for six weeks to shoot a film in a town called Urdinarrain.”

“Your spell-checker didn't like that name.”

“Yeah, it's Guaraní for something, I forget though. Urdi, as locals mercifully call it, is a four hour bus ride north of Buenos Aires. One of those old German settlements. Beautiful countryside town full of blond haired, blue eyed Argentines.”

“Hmm. I heard of those.”

“As far as we could tell, they weren't Nazis. Dacia actually has a sub-cutaneous Nazi-detector embedded in her left arm, so I was relieved when it failed to go off.”

“So you guys went up there?”

“Yeah, for a weekend. We wanted to check out 'the shoot' and see how the whole process went down. We also had vague hopes of being extras, but the weather wasn't all that cooperative and they ended up only shooting one scene the entire weekend. That is, one scene without us. I'm not sure if the film's going to make it.”

On Set

“Right. You forgot to write that post on vanity by the way. We're all curious if you have a mullet.”

“I don't. Sorry. But I grew a beard.”

“A beard, wow, how unattractive, and yet so...so South-American-Traveler.”

“Well, I have a theory about travel beards..."

Bearded I travel

“...It's never really a conscious decision or anything, the travel beard. It just happens. A kind of masculine sloppiness that gathers legitimacy after a while and begins to resemble a concerted effort. And that effort, facilitated by the passage of time and puberty, is rather common down here: Why are so many of these 20-something gringos bearded? Are beard-curious backpackers these days just razor shy or is there a more deeply-rooted tradition of travel behind the bristle?”

“You know I can't handle such suspense without feeling too mouthpiece-ish.”

“So I did my research. It turns out that Moses and Odysseus, some of antiquity's greatest travelers, both had serious, food-filtering beards. (Come to think of it, after revisiting Tierra Santa on Good Friday, that religious theme park, it seems that God has one too.) And the Age of Exploration, which entrusted this continent with centuries of identity-issues, was quite a whiskered lot as well. As most pogonologists (those who study beards) would likely venture: there is something definitively itinerant about facial hair.”

“I think you lost a couple of readers there.”

“Not the bearded ones.”

“But they're probably all out hunting or fixing their cars or something.”

“Now you're mixing your mullets with beards.”

“And you're mixing your blog-writing with cheeky, contrived dialogue.”

“But didn't Plato, who I believe was very bearded, do it all the time?”

“Now you're even losing the bearded ones.”

“...And speaking of Plato, whose method was marinated with such interrogative irony: after our six weeks in that wonderful apartment we sallied forth and visited the Jesuit missions in Northeastern Argentina.”

“Might I ask the relevance, dear Grad student?”

“It all begins, just as it does in the bible, with God (bearded).”

“Go on.”

“In the seventeenth century, Jesuit priests from Spain and Italy set up close to forty missions in what is now known as Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil. Tolerated for a while by the Spanish crown, who wasn't all that impressed by the Jesuit's willingness to integrate with the indigenous tribes, learn their language and provide a certain amount of protection from the culture-swallowing of the Old World, the Jesuits envisioned a social project that fashioned their missions on Plato's city in The Republic. Since adopting the political theory of an ancient Hellenic heretic wasn't going to win points with the church, the influence was unofficial, but for those in-the-know, it was undeniable.

Church facade at the Jesuit mission in San Ignacio

“Everyone in the mission had a craft. Be it medicine or pottery, citizens of the mission all had a trade and its practice was a life-long endeavor. You could say that mission life revolved around the need for self-expression. Mastering one's craft, one's 'techne,' was not only self-fulfilling for the natives, but also it became the way the Jesuits evangelized. I was surprised to learn they did this not in Latin, but in Guaraní. Not only were the Jesuits a tad more culturally sensitive than their colleagues, adapting as best as they could to their cultural mores and traditions while inserting their own, but their missions were more or less successful, lasting for three hundred years, and only after the Spanish crown deemed them no longer useful in holding their parking spot in the north. They were expelled from their missions and replaced by the Franciscans.”

“Aren't we snoringly historical?”

“I thought it was interesting. At least it comes with a picture.”

“Speaking of pictures, share with us what the hell these things are:”

Mysterious Herbivores!

“Well, I guess I kind of rushed into the whole Jesuit-Plato thing. Before we visited San Ignacio, we took a bus to a village called Mercedes, which was dusty, quiet, and didn't have any of the afore-pictured animals. We went there because it was the only way to get to the Argentinian wetlands, Esteros de Iberá, which we had read about in a local paper in Buenos Aires. The Esteros are accessed from a small town called Carlos Pelligrini, which is about three hours of bumpy dirt road from Mercedes. The Esteros are special because they have a bunch amazing animals in residence: Cayman, Piraná, and yes, the biggest rodent in the world, the Capybara (above). After arranging an excursion from our ranch, which was already teeming with tarantulas and bats (fortunately not in our room, but also unfortunately for the late-night pee-er, not not in the men's bathroom), we took a boat through this pristine reserve.

Smiling cayman

“After that, and after the missions, we went to Iguazú Falls, which felt like a Gringo convention. But I guess for good reason: they (the falls, that is) are absolutely beautiful. We stayed in your average hostel, which down here meant it's 80% full with post-military service Israelis, and bummed around, marveling at the tropical scenery. The falls form the tri-border zone of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. Since I didn't have a Brazilian visa, we stayed on the Argentinian side and were quite content.

Gravity at work. Iguazú Falls

“After that, being the international jet-setters we are, we took a bus to Buenos Aires, a plane to Miami, met up with my family in the Florida Keys for 5 days, then took a plane to Lima, then another to Cusco, where I'm currently typing and Dacia is sleeping, both of us plump with several layers. It's cold and I'm tired being gimmicky. I will return later with news of our Peruvian adventures, which will most likely concern volunteering in the outlying area of Cusco. It will also be much shorter than this post. Till then."