chicoana y atardecer y gnocchi

santa vaca, mi vida está llena. after finishing up my first couple of days at la casa del niño, we´ve had a three day weekend here in salta, full of mostly sleeping for me. (which i love) but we´ve also been doing some fun things as well, getting to know the area and spending time together as a group.

on saturday, we traveled to chicoana, a little pueblo about a 45 minute drive from our new place in san lorenzo. maria del carmen, the director of our program here in salta brought us to visit her family´s house there, which is right on the main square of town. her father came to argentina during the spanish civil war and his uncles gave him the house that they had built right around the time that chicoana was founded, before even salta was here. her father was a farmer in the north of spain and he came here to be a farmer too. now maria del carmen´s brother is carrying on the work of the family farms since their father is 86 years old (!)

maria del carmen´s brother showed us alllllllll around his two farms and brought us to see how the water channeling system works here as well. we saw all of the machinery, the fields of tobacco, wheat, corn, and beans, as well as the different methods used to dry and sort tobacco here in Argentina. they had both the new and old systems of drying tobacco going. in the old days, they would string packs of leaves across beams 50 feet high in an adobe house that they would pump heat into gradually for two days. that took a LOT of manual labor and now the process is much more automized. but still it´s not as advanced as in the u.s. they had visited a farm in virginia and ranted and raved about the systems that we have there. we lunched and explored the itty-bitty-city before heading back to salta.


mountain view from the farm.


old adobe secadores de tobacco


liberty that way.


iglesia de chicoana.


todos juntos!

then i slept twelve hours. i woke up at the same time as everyone who went out dancing, except that i hadn´t gone out so i was a little bit more chipper. sunday was a real relaxed day and we visited some of the mercados artesanales in salta where i fell in love with the following: llamas, everything you can imagine made of llama wool, little mini armadillos, mate by the ton, and everything you can imagine made of leather. here´s a shot of the sunset that night with the main cathedral in salta.


then i slept 11 hours. and i was happy. today was a very relaxed day, a national feriado, or holiday. we hung out at the house most of the day enjoying the bright salta sun and trying to figure out how to dry laundry. the highlight of the day was rolling gnocchis! gnocchi is kind of like a pasta made of potatoes, which are cooked, combined with some magic sauce. (read: i don´t cook them myself, we used store bought paste.) it´s kind of like a throw back to kindergarten playdough, you roll a snake and then cut squares off and roll them off a fork. gnocchi is a staple here in argentina, usually eaten on the official gnocchi day, or the 29th of every month. here´s some shots of us, future gnocchi models!