Meeting the Masses
We stumbled off the bus that first day in Gallegos and pretty much fell into D and C's car. I had the impression of wide square streets, mud and construction, a town smacking of youth and growth - reminiscent of what Scarlett saw in Atlanta. Negra hadn't been home in a year and spent most of the ride to her parents' new house pointing out things that hadn't been there the last time she'd been home, while D and C explained how the town had roughly tripled in size since they'd moved there twenty years ago. The wind was roaring. I thought of all the places in the world, and all the stories of the Old West in Patagonia, and realised this was as close as I would ever get to the frontier.
We went home, met the bro and sis, showered gratefully and ate home-made lasagna even more gratefully.
Then the people started coming over.
They came over in hordes. The entire town appeared to have turned out to greet Negra home. Like our family, their family has family friends - it was as though all the uncles, aunts, grandparents and cousins on both sides of my family were there, along with the entire L family, the Fs, and all the other assorted people usually found around my house. It seems now like hundreds came, though logically it can't have been more than 30. I was introduced to person after person, promptly forgetting their names each time. All the intricacies of how they knew each other and who belonged where and how long they'd known each other were explained in rapid Spanish, while around me everyone else was talking at the same time, very loudly and at great length. Children were running around, the kitchen was a flurry of activity as pizzas were prepared.
I was terrified.
My family suffers from a rather strong fear of strangers. They will understand. And it wasn't even like everyone was talking in English. In English I could at least have made an effort. Any scant knowledge of castellano I'd previously possessed fled as my tired brain tried to process what was going on. I was rendered the tall dumb one.
Ok, not really. I was, however, completely overwhelmed. I could see what a wonderful scene it was - I just wasn't up to par at that moment. At one point the living room emptied for a second as the tide rushed into the kitchen for some reason, and I sank gratefully into an armchair. Negra's father grinned at me.
"Lot of people, huh?" he said. "It's ok if you go upstairs and take a nap, you know, you must be exhausted."
I'd never been so grateful to anyone in my entire life.
I don't know how Negra was still on her feet when I woke up again an hour or so later. The masses were still amassed - and, to my distress, the older ones announced they were going out, and that I was going with them.
You're tough, Sarah, I scolded myself. You're so in the mood to party right now.
Fortunately for me, around 2am Negra decided it was time to call it a night. "We're such losers, I can't believe how early it is," she kept saying. As 2am is a perfectly acceptable time to skip Hamilton, and even in Buenos Aires was early but not disastrous, I asked what time people usually went home in Rio Gallegos. "Oh, we usually don't even go out until around 4," she replied, laughing at the look of horror on my face. "You're not old, Sarah!" she cried.
We slept nearly 14 hours that night and woke up the next day to blazing Patagonia sun - in the words of Frank, refreshed and replenished and ra-a-aring to go.
We went home, met the bro and sis, showered gratefully and ate home-made lasagna even more gratefully.
Then the people started coming over.
They came over in hordes. The entire town appeared to have turned out to greet Negra home. Like our family, their family has family friends - it was as though all the uncles, aunts, grandparents and cousins on both sides of my family were there, along with the entire L family, the Fs, and all the other assorted people usually found around my house. It seems now like hundreds came, though logically it can't have been more than 30. I was introduced to person after person, promptly forgetting their names each time. All the intricacies of how they knew each other and who belonged where and how long they'd known each other were explained in rapid Spanish, while around me everyone else was talking at the same time, very loudly and at great length. Children were running around, the kitchen was a flurry of activity as pizzas were prepared.
I was terrified.
My family suffers from a rather strong fear of strangers. They will understand. And it wasn't even like everyone was talking in English. In English I could at least have made an effort. Any scant knowledge of castellano I'd previously possessed fled as my tired brain tried to process what was going on. I was rendered the tall dumb one.
Ok, not really. I was, however, completely overwhelmed. I could see what a wonderful scene it was - I just wasn't up to par at that moment. At one point the living room emptied for a second as the tide rushed into the kitchen for some reason, and I sank gratefully into an armchair. Negra's father grinned at me.
"Lot of people, huh?" he said. "It's ok if you go upstairs and take a nap, you know, you must be exhausted."
I'd never been so grateful to anyone in my entire life.
I don't know how Negra was still on her feet when I woke up again an hour or so later. The masses were still amassed - and, to my distress, the older ones announced they were going out, and that I was going with them.
You're tough, Sarah, I scolded myself. You're so in the mood to party right now.
Fortunately for me, around 2am Negra decided it was time to call it a night. "We're such losers, I can't believe how early it is," she kept saying. As 2am is a perfectly acceptable time to skip Hamilton, and even in Buenos Aires was early but not disastrous, I asked what time people usually went home in Rio Gallegos. "Oh, we usually don't even go out until around 4," she replied, laughing at the look of horror on my face. "You're not old, Sarah!" she cried.
We slept nearly 14 hours that night and woke up the next day to blazing Patagonia sun - in the words of Frank, refreshed and replenished and ra-a-aring to go.
posted by SarahT at 12:10 pm
3 Comments:
Sounds like fun, and I think I would last approximately one day in that part of the world - "We don't even go out until 4 a.m.", I consider myself in good form if I make it past midnight these days!
Hope all is going well. Talk to you soon, Em.
Sounds great honey!!! Though I can appreciate how overwhelmed you were - we all seem to suffer with that! Lova ya kiddo! mom xxxx
I was wondering where you'd got lost too? I was hoping you and Belen weren't on some mountain top cooking up your fellow plane passengers!
Even I would have sunk into a deep dark hole in that situation, Sarah! Gosh, look how much you're learning!!! I'm gonna e-mail you, gots lots to tell :-)
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