new gloves

turns out el grupo are fine. and we don´t have to spend every minute with them. relief.

we´re now in salta, in northern argentina. it´s a town of about 500,000 people, near the andes. there´s 3 mummies that were found in the mountains nearby that were some early incan people, they are in a museum here but we were busy eating pizza so haven´t seen them. it´s quite similar to peruvian towns, so is reminding me lots of my trip there 2 years ago which is nice. definitely feels very south american, the people look different, more like peruvians, i guess because it´s higher up, that makes them smaller and darker doesn´t it. altitude and gravity do strange things to people.

we flew here this morning from buenos aires, which was all fine (i haven´t had to take any valiums or put my jumper on my head on any of my flights yet, definite improvement, but i did say to abi it was like that film alive when we were going over the andes today and it was a bit turbulent- she said if that happened, she would definitely eat me to stay alive. i said i would eat my own arm if it came to it).

last night we went to our tango night. the lesson was fun. i was the man and my roommate kate was the girl, which she is anyway. so if i ever actually have to do a tango dance with a real man i´ll have to explain that i also only know the man´s part and they´ll have to be the woman. we got a certificate. then watched some real tango dancers, they were good, but the whole thing was a bit too touristy for me, so i only gave it 5/10. we then went to a bar and drank some argentinian drink called fernet - a shot of something herby and bitter and a bit medicinal mixed with coke. we played pool with some local people, they were impressed with english people´s pool playing ability. i didn´t know the word for fluke in spanish, so i let them believe it was actual skill and not just luck that the balls were going in... this got 10/10 as it was not touristy at all, and was an interaction with real argentinians and it gave them a good impression of english people. though it loses one mark for the fact that they spoke really good english so we didn´t have to use our broken spanish.

also spoke to some cute argentinian children today, they were trying to speak english and us spanish. then i remembered reading somewhere that you shouldn´t look at or speak to children over here in case their family think you are going to kidnap them. you shouldn´t give them sweets either as they can´t afford dentists. i suppose if a dentist kidnaps them then that´s ok.

thanks for the comments on yesterday´s questions. we don´t have any today.