OUR TRIP TO PATAGONIA will be exceptional if all Argentineans are as welcoming as Kary and her family. I had met her last year through Rosetta Stone’s online language learning site Shared Talk; me to practice Spanish and her English, and over the months we developed a friendship. On behalf of her husband Fabian and teen-age daughter Julietta, she offered to meet us at the Buenos Aires Airport, get us to the Ruta Sur Depot to pick up the camper, help us go shopping for supplies; and, best of all, invited us back to her house for an Asado … the traditional Argentine cook out.
It was a national holiday and raining when we arrived, but everything went fine. OK, everything was actually a madhouse of people and traffic, but … no hay problema. Kary and Fabian and Julietta greeted us as we walked out of Customs, picking up the camper had the usual paper work hassles that seemed to work out in the end, and the superstore where we shopped for supplies was overrun with holiday shoppers. And then the cookout…
The fire had been started in Fabian’s grill two hours before we got to Kary’s house by her brother, using a local fire wood whose name I really should have written down. Fabian explained that the key ingredient to the Asado – beside the meat itself –was the heat and smoke from the special wood. While he was cooking, he would occasionally cut off a piece, place it between two slices of bread, and hand it out as appetizers while Kary gave us a tour of her fascinating remodeled home – centered around an interior courtyard where the cookout was underway.
The dinner was a riot of Spanish and English and food and wine. I’m pretty sure everyone understood what was being said, mostly. At the end, Fabian apparently gave away his cooking secrets to me, although he was fairly safe doing so in Spanish; as all I caught was something about using salt as the seasoning, wood (not charcoal) for the fire, and to cook the meat starting with the bone side down.
After the dinner we poured over maps of Argentina, and then Kary and Fabian and Julietta jumped in their car and escorted us out of town through a maze of streets I could never backtrack, waving us goodbye at the entrance to the highway heading south, towards Patogonia ...
Writing this from the Laguna Lobo camping grounds, about 60 miles from Buenos Aires.
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