Camping trip in Entre Rios

I am very behind with my updates of what I am getting up to, so I'll just very quickly go to back to October 8th, Francis' birthday. We had just moved into our new flat and we decided to invite some friends over for a traditional Sunday roast to warm up the new house. Luckily we decided to have roast beef and teach the Argentineans?! a thing or two about how the Brits do it. They were all very dubious about the gravy ... but the roast potatoes went down a treat! My three friends from work and their other halves after a few bottles of wine and champagne. No birthday would be complete without fireworks ... Flor made Francis a cake and put a real firework on top! It's now the end of October, and there's another long weekend in honour of El día de la raza. I manage to get a few extra days off work, we hire a car and drive north past the delta swamps, along the Rio Uruguay and border with Uruguay, to go camping by the river with the mosquitoes in the north of Entre Rios.

We were camping near the national park, El Palmar. We went for long walks, admiring the amazing wildlife and seeing an incredible amount of palm trees. Below are some photos from the trip:

We decided to steal a Lassy for the holiday to accompany us on our walks and sleep outside our tent guarding it.

Cows

After walking along for HOURS not seeing a single soul, we very oddly come across a Jewish graveyard. Very surreal, as it really was in the middle of nowhere, we had been walking for about 4 hours and were still 50kms from the nearest town which we were told was a 'short walk' away when Francis asked where he could watch the rugby. (we didnt walk the 50kms obviously, we hitch-hiked at the first sign of a car along the mud track with some very friendly Bolivian men who were here working putting up electricity cables from town to town)

Then after finally making it to the town, just before it got dark, we found another very nice man to drive us back nearer to where we were camping.

Back to base camp for delicious, candle lit bbq's outside the tent. (ps-people from Macmillan, the wind-up tourch really came in handy)

When driving back to the city, we managed to stumble across an amazing ranch, where we had more bbq and a spot of wonderful music and charismatic joke telling by the man with the hat!

A visitor comes to stay ....

Sorry for the lack of blog entries .... I'm finally beginning to settle into Buenos Aires and very much enjoying the long awaited, true arrival of springtime which is very rapidly turning into a boiling hot summer ... I have lots of photos to update with, but will start back in early Sept.... Francis arrives after a long voyage on foot and by sea which you can read all about on http://www.positiveworks.blogspot.com/ he has timed it perfectly and seems to skip very nicely from a northern hemisphere summer into the last days of a southern winter. (ps-I think you can click on any photo if you want to see it bigger) ...and that's it... hoorray spring is here and I can put my coat away and begin to flock to the parks and markets to enjoy the beautiful, mild weather and everything that a Buenos Aires spring has to offer. Below are pictures from the arts and crafts market in the famous Recoleta part of town: Maté cups

Live music in the parks for all the city folk to enjoy on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Steak time again, and they keep getting bigger ...

Watching a bit of folk music in a down town buenos aires joint .....

Another walk in the botanic gardens, aka the cat refuge. Although the place is absolutely full of cats, they dont seem to socialise very much!

Francis making friends with the locals.

We walk into the butchers to buy a small piece of meat ... and the extremely friendly butcher ends up emptying out his whole fridge to set the scene for the classic Argentine shot.

Watching the rugby world cup, Argentina vs Ireland, and these boys just dont seem to do it in quite the same manner as the Brits do .... milkshakes all round lads!

Living the real Argentine way!

Ana, in red, is the lady Ilive with. Her parents were Italian and this here is a traditional Italian/ Argentinian meal called Baña Cauda. It is a similar ritual to fondue, but it is made of Anchovies, lots of garlic and cream. The table is filled with all sorts of vegetables to dip into this delicious anchovy sauce. Very healthy if you ignore the cream bit. So she invited me to try this 'once in a while' winter ritual she has with alll her interesting actor, playwrites, architects, musician and tango teacher friends! (I managed to have my first tango lesson from Ana's tango teacher friend who actually did a degree in Tango studies at the university...)

Batu wants some too but cant reach.

And then Alejandro starts playing some lovely Argentinian folk music.

The sisters dance!

And then all the ladies get up for a dance. Afetr a few more classesof wine the men do too and they dance and sing and drink until 5am!

Another day I come downstairs and Batu is having a hair cut.

'How do I look?'