hola a todos

¡Buenos dias a todos! All is well here in San Juan, Argentina. I have survived a soccer match celebration in the central plaza of the city, and I survived an all-day family lunch. So far so good!

Here is a quote from an email I sent to my family yesterday:

it´s beautiful here - durig our whole ride up here i thought i was looking at the andes but ximena told me they were just the pre-andes. all i know is that they were big-ass mountains with big-ass snow. unlike anything i had ever seen before. it is very arid - kind of like a wider sonoma valley. very beautiful - but very cold. colder than usual for this time of year.

And from today:

my brain officially hurts. but i survived the most amazing family lunch yesterday. you all should be very,very proud. i am not kidding when i say that 30 people showed up for almuerzo yesterday. and mom - the best dining toom table to fit 16 - 18 people around is a ping-pong table. i´m not sure where mabel found the tablecloth to fit on it, but it´s worth rememebering. we had the most amazing paella ever. and the paella pan was to die for. i´ve never seen anything so huge. we all ate two and three servings. and yes, i took pictures. i met every family member that exists in his hemisphere. i have no idea who they are. everybody was worried about me at the dinner table b-c i didn´t say a word. first of all, i couldn´t get word in edgewise even if i knew how. and secondly, anytime someone said anything, 3 people would immediately start yelling. oh - and this lunch lasted about 6 hours. we sat down to eat at about 2pm, then desserts came out at about 4pm. i´ve never seen so many desserts. the argentinians, or at least this famiy, seems to like sloppy, sweet things. there was this flat brownie thing with caramel and some other creamy thing on top, flan, some fruit in syrup, a flat lemon pie, another apple pie-crisp and i´m sure i´m forgetting something. and then more people came over. .... finally at about 6pm i decided that i had to start diving in on conversations. so i started asking about specific words that i heard in senences that i didn´t know. i was doing pretty well until i ran into a woman with the dreaded argentine accent i had always heard about. too much shhooshing, and shs added to every single word. and vos was used too. nightmere. but i lived to tell the tale. and one of mabel´s nephews was bragging about me, so that´s a plus. i overheard him and this other relative talking about me. the one person was worried that i didn´t understand anything and he said, no - there were just too many people and that one-on-one i could hold my own. besos a mi primo nuevo.

Besos a todos. I will try to see if i can hook the camera up to the computer and upload some pictures. No promises.