This past weekend I had another vacation within my year long vacation and let me tell you, it was GREAT. On Thursday night Julie and I hopped on a bus to Villa General Belgrano, a city in the province of Córdoba. The main attraction of the weekend was the conclusion of Oktoberfest 2010. The one in Argentina claims to be the second largest in the world, and there were definitely a lot of people there, but not an insanely large amount of people like I had expected. The bus ride was about 10 hours so we got in around 9AM on Friday morning and headed over to the campsite to meet up with Marcos, an Argentine friend. Marcos and Rachael, another girl from Madison, did a study abroad together in Germany during high school and he was the one who organized our whole trip and had the tent all set up for us when we arrived.
We spent Friday just hanging out on the beach, getting to know Marcos a little and meeting some of the really drunk guys who had been pregmaing for Oktoberfest all morning. It was a fun day and we ended up just hanging out with some new friends we made (a group of about 10 people from the province of Buenos Aires and California) rather than heading into town with a $12.50 (US dollars) taxi ride and attending the beer festival. They were all really cool and we all have plans to get together on Saturday night for an asado (basically a BBQ with freshly butchered meats) at Marcos's house in La Plata. It's exciting to have ARgentine friends!!! The only bad thing about Friday night was that it was REALLY QUITE COLD in the tent and Julie Marcos and I all didn't really sleep too much. I woke up every hour or two and all I could think of was how nice it was going to be once the sun came out during the day and I could lay out on the beach again and take a nap, but I survived, so no harm done.
Saturday morning we did some more exploring of the river, which was gorgeous. It looked like something out of a national park and it was littered with boulders and great for clambering around. We hung out with our friends again, had an asado that one of the boys prepared for lunch and then cleaned up and headed to the beer park. It was quite an experience and I will just say that I was really glad to have an Argentine man with me when the guys got a little aggressive. Everyone had to buy their own bier steins, which are just gigantic mugs for drinking beer and then go to a stand to buy tickets to fill up your mug with fancy beer. We got back to our campsite around 4:45AM so we missed the coldest hours of the night and we spent a few good hours before we went home hanging out with a random friend we met at Oktoberfest who had graduated from MADISON!!!!
Sunday was more of the same, hanging out at the river and then having a little campground fiesta with our new friends. They all grilled up hamburgers but Rachael, Julie and I went into town to explore and to go to a German restauraunt, THe city of Villa General Belgrano is known for being like a small German city so we thought we should give the cuisine a try. It was delicious and although the Argentines and Marcos went out dancing until 6:30AM we headed back to get a few hours of sleep in before we got up to take our bus back to the city. We had a ~12 hour bus ride back into the city because of the traffic of everyone getting back from the long weekend and last night I wrote a 5 page final paper for one of my literature classes so I only got 4 hours of sleep and am currently watching a movie for my afternoon class.
Two of my classes will be over with by next Thursday so I'm pretty excited about that, even if it means more work right meow. I need to make it through next THursday and it will be smooth sailing as my 3 remaining classes trail off. Two will end in the third week of November and the final class will end on December 1st. I am back in Buenos Aires for the week but a little busy, so I hope you enjoy my photos, which I put up on Facebook and are quite silly, and are all having a great time wherever you are in the world!
(http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2063746&id=1280460131) the link to my photos.
No comments:
Post a Comment