Yesterday I acompanied my cousin Simon ona buissness trip he had to make to a town near the Sierras called Jesus Maria. He just had to go drop some papers off, but I wanted to come along for the ride into the country, and im glad I did! I got to see a little more of rural Argentina. We took a back road that went through two little towns, and by a whole bunch or huge feilds and open space. It was another one of those gray sky mornings, a little fresh, perfect for traveling. The feilds all looked a little bit different though, they all had patches of wild growth in them, and it made for a lot more interesting landscape, as if the earth had missed a few spots when she had to surrender her long green hair. At one point, I saw a little colum of smoke billowing out of the ditch next to the road. I commented to Simon that this reminded me a lot of Honduras, when people would just bunch up their trash by the side of the road adn then burn it. He told me there used to be a lot more of that, but then the province came under a heavy drought, and many large, large fires were started. He also explained that burning like that then had become illegal in the province of Cordoba, but said that people still did it to be able to develope land. He went on to explain the Earth's weird hair cut: people who buy land out in the country, in a place that is not meant for developement and want to develope it, often burn the land "accidentaly" and only then are they able to turn it into feilds and such. You see, there are laws against cutting down all the veggitation on your property, but there are no laws about recultivating the land after there has been a fire. The little patches of wild growth in the feilds are the peices of what it originaly looked like in order to say that they didnt cut down the veggitation. Those are the places the fire had "missed." Thought that was kind of interesting!
When we almost got into Jesus Maria we drove the a little town that had the anual salame festival. Its proabably the most beautiful town I have seen since I got here. The "main street" of the town was the road we came in on, adn for about two miles it was lined with trees. Oh but these werent just any trees, these were huge trees, all of their trunks too big for me to wrap my arms around and touch my hands together! Their branches streched high above the the road, and fromed a green tunnel, the branches of the trees from opposite sides of the street forming one huge upsidedown V. It was sooper cool! I could only imagine what that spectacle looked like in fall! I had to get up early to go on this ride, but it was deffinatrly worth it! :)