Yesterday we met with Andy Deutsch, who started his own airline and now is a rancher. He flew us in one of his airplanes – a King Air that seats 10 (Don tells us the operating costs are about $250/hour, and worth about $1.6 million). We traveled about 300 km west of BA to a private ranch near the Pampas region, although it was still in Buenas Aires province. The best part of the flight was seeing how large the city is from the air. We realized why they tell us we won´t have time to see all of BA in only a month.
Hasta Luego!
Jen y Beth
Andy has about 4,000 head of cattle on about 15,000 acres. They don´t need to irrigate because they get about 1,000 mm of rain per year. They also grow soy beans, wheat, corn and hay. We had a barbeque. In the US you might hear the term carne asada in a Mexican restaurant. Here it is a style of preparing meat over an open flame. We could choose from pork or beef, and Jen was brave enough to try the black pudding again, but the rest of us passed. We had chorizos, ribs, flank steak and a kind of salsa that is on every table called Chimichurri. It is a mix of diced peppers and garlic that some of us are planning to bring home by the case. Also, we´ll need to ship some of this wine home.
Afterward, we took a tour of the ranch. We saw a spectacular array of bird life including egrets, peregrines, storks and something they call a water crow, which looks like a black sea gull with stork-like legs. The national bird is the hornaro, a little swallow that builds nests out of mud and twigs. The national flower grows on trees, the ceibo.
Today we have a little time before a city tour this afternoon, and a reception with the district governor of Rotary.
The words for the day are maestro! (dude!) and que barbarro! (cool!). Vacas are cows, with the bull called the macho (hmm), and the female is hembra, which is also a slang term for a well-endowed woman.
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