Salta. Rosana and I came back to Buenos Aires yesterday after 3 weeks up in Salta over Xmas and New Years. We spent most of the time hanging out with her family, and her extended family and her extended extended family. There's a lot of family there, and they all live pretty close to one another. It has taken me two summers now to figure out who is who, and remember most everyones' names - of the people of met. The kids ... her cousins, nieces and nephews ... are the hardest because there are so many of them. Salta is a small city of several hundred thousand people in Northern Argentina. It sits in a large valley surrounded by mountains, which are bright green in summer during the rainy season. Despite the fact that it can rain for a couple hours or sometimes all day during the summer, Salta feels arid ... more like Arizona than California. In fact, if you took Santa Barbara and moved it to Arizona, it looks something like that. It's a old, spanish colonial city. It was where people brought horses, cattle and donkeys for sale in the old days, because it's situated on the old route during the 1600s and 1700s from Potosi, where silver was mined, to Buenos Aires, where the silver was shipped off to Spain. In fact, many of the cities in Northern Argentina that are tiny and you may not even have heard of are older than Buenos Aires and were larger, richer and more important back in the day. Now the industry up here is tourism, wine, tobacco, agriculture and petrol. People from Buenos Aires come here in droves during vacation because it is warm, cheap and looks and feels very different from Buenos Aires. Its slower, safer, people take ciesta and it has plazas, buildings, cathedrals, tamales, folkloric music, gauchos (Argentine cowboys) and colorful mountains and deserts. That's why people come. Many of the portenos who come are young and more or less back-pack and stay in hostels. Unfortunately many come across as somewhat obnoxious and disrespectful, and the locals tolerate them but don't really like them - not altogether that different than our perception of some New Yorkers. And, like New York and the rest of the United States, there is a similar tension here between Buenos Aires and the rest of the country. The center of town is relatively small, and I'd say most people live in the barrios and some small towns surrounding it, which range from very wealthy (people have second homes here ... Robert Duvall and Richard Gere among others) to middle class to working class to slums, depending. Our days went something like this: 10am - get out of bed and have a breakfast of tea, bread, cheese and yogurt and sit around talking; 11:30am - go visit her sister and brother in law who run a bakery from their house (I helped out baking or selling); 3pm - eat a big lunch and sit around and talk; 4pm - take a nap; 6pm - go into town or go visit family; 10pm - tea again, maybe with ham and cheese sandwiches, sit around and talk and go to sleep at 1am. We went south to Cafayate for a long weekend and north, with Rosana's family, up to the Quebrada de Humauaca for a couple days when we got back. This is a pic of a sculpture in the center of the main plaza in Salta, and if you look closely you can see that each of the women have something in common. The other pick is from Cafayate, or actually an hour south of Cafayate in Tucuman at the ruins of Quilmes, which was an Indian tribe with a well fortefied mountain village that held out for a long time against the Spanish until they were finally defeated and sent on a forced march south close to Buenos Aires, which is where Quilmes barrio is today and Quilmes beer is manufactured.