desde el Bolson!!!!!

Hello loved-ones!!!
Ahh, finally a little time aside to write and update everyone on how things are in paradise. I´m about to enter week 3 on Granja Valle Pintado and what an intense experience it has been. The valley is incredibly beautiful. Photos don´t do it justice, but I´ll try to have some for the next entry. Huge hills covered with pine and decidious forest, and the brilliant Rio Azul running through it with water so clear and cold that a 10 second dip turns you into a new person, hehe. The farm has a beautiful garden, which Caro and I are assigned to attend along with a wonderful older couple, Lila and Jorge, from Israel and Buenos Aires, respectively. But aside from the garden, there are many other volunteers, mostly from the US and Canada, who are working on gearing up to host a huge natural building conference, Bioconstruyendo, next month. With tons of people are coming and going it´s a bit hard to find peace of mind, especially since Caro and I have been sleeping in a loft above the communal kitchen, but there are a lot of fun characters that we´ve been getting to know. Besides the humans, there´s beautiful old horse, Petizo, that I´m in charge of caring for, taking him back and forth from pasture, as well as feeding the dogs and cats. The chickens and geese are another volunteer´s responsability, but they graze here and there all over the place anyway and leave little poops that are impossible to avoid.
After 3 weeks Caro and I are hitting a rocky spot where we´re realizing that we probably aren´t compatible long term as a couple because the magic that we expected just isn´t there. So we´ve taken a couple of days off separately to reflect and readjust to that reality. We care about each other a lot and want to continue to spend time together, so it´s just a matter of reinventing our relationship and deciding who we are and what each of us wants. Both of us know we´re here together for a reason and little by little we´re discovering that.
Oh, and I just found out that I made the intial selection for Fulbright, which means I have a very good chance of being in Colombia for a year starting in August. We´ll see.
Love to everyone!!! I´ll write more soon!!!

time to return!!!!

Wow! A year has passed since the last entry in this blog, since I left Argentina and returned to Columbia. What a year it has been! Lots of working, finishing school, growing gardens, starting friendships, and now enjoying the harvest and saying goodbye. Tommorrow afternoon I climb aboard a flight and wake up in Santiago, Chile where I will have lots of fun carrying my stuff from the airport to a shuttle to the bus terminal on the other side of the enormous city. Then it's time to cross the Andes and return to Mendoza, to my beloved Carito and 100 degree desert heat. Today I said goodbyes and walked the streets of Columbia in the freezing cold already feeling like I was an outsider visiting old haunts, a feeling I'll have to get used to.

Anyway, I will be updating soon when the action begins again- stay tuned lovelies!!!