I´m sorry. I´m really sorry about the title of this post. I wrote it. Then I was like “Good God, don´t do that.” Then I was like, “No, keep it. Someone somewhere will like it.” Then I was like, “Yeah, you´ll like it.” Then I was like, “Exactly.” Then I realized I was saying all this out loud and that the Argentinians around me were whispering to each other, so I decided to just leave it and move on.

 I´ve been working — volunteering actually — at an organic farm called Chacra El Cielo for a little over a week. The farm´s up in the hills above this fast-growing tourist town called El Bolson, which has somehow become the hippie epicenter of Southern Argentina. The first time I walked through the main plaza/park it seemed like a Phish concert had just let out — lots of 18 and 19-year-olds wearing clothes made out of curtains and selling things they had made and poorly playing the guitar. But while I scoff at these kids` “artesanal crafts” I like their general sentiment toward life. A few times a week the town blocks off one of the roads around the plaza and have a kind of giant craft fair where people sell their stuff (if you´re into moon-shaped jewlry it´s your personal heaven) and they usually have some bands playing. The musicians aren´t famous or really even known by too many people in the crowd, but everyone crowds around the little makeshift stage and claps with the beat. After a song or two, the hippiest of the hippies (that is, those that clearly don´t have homes) will start dancing in that formless, I-don´t-care-if-I-look-like-a-fool hippie style. Then more of the crowd will join in. Then more. And by the sixth or seventh song, even the dogs are up on two legs and passing hash pipes to one another. Well, that´s a lie. The dogs here go straight to the heavy drugs. But the point is that people will just dance here. In New York, even at shows that were really tough to get tickets for and that featured some of the greatest musicians in the world, everyone would just stand around and text message their friends. Bam, New York music scene! You just got hated on. Anyway, it´s refreshing to see people let themselves have fun and get their gravel on…

But anyway, the farm. I like it a lot. It´s a bit smaller than I expected. Only a couple of acres or so and the only people who work on it are the two owners — a woman named Rosa and a dude named Nano who are married and real nice — along with whatever volunteers happen to be there at the time. Last week, that was me and two other American kids, one from Oregon and the other from California. The main house doubles as a hostel and most of what is grown is sold to people staying at the hostel or used by Rosa when she cooks for her family and volunteers. There are a bunch of organic farms around El Bolson and I figured there´d be a big farmer´s market where everyone would sell their stuffs, but there doesn´t seem to be one, which is kind of a shame. I´d rather go around and sample people´s raspberries than walk around and look at all the mutlicolored scarves the hippies are hawking. Oh my God, I just wrote a paragraph and didn´t use a single parenthetical. This is good, I think.

 Charca El Cielo has a lot of stuff packed into its little patch of land on the hill. They grow peas, cabbage, basil, raspberries, boysenberries, green beans, corn, tomatoes, garlic, sunflowers, squash and probably a whole bunch of other things I haven´t seen yet or am forgetting. There´s also chickens, ducks, rabbits and a bunch of cats and dogs (that don´t get eaten, I´m pretty sure). So far, I´ve spent a lot of time pulling garlic out of the ground cleaning them suckers. I´ve also harvested (I love using harvest as a verb) peas and beans and squash, I´ve helped cut down some dead trees, I´ve cleaned a kiddie swimming pool, I´ve carried around bags of animal feed, I´ve run after chickens that got out of their pen, I´ve eaten rabbit and I´ve developed a pretty horrid case of the diarrhea (from the water, not the rabbits I think; my stomach´s getting better now, though). Damn, parentheses are where it´s at.

Also, I´ve been surrounded by adorableness (can´t believe I used that word). There are three kittens at the farm that will jump into your arms and then fall asleep almost immediately. And the owners of the farm have two kids, Salomé (age 1) and Danté (age 4) who are both cool as hell and look like little kids — that is, they´re rel cute. My job for an hour one afternoon was to take them for a walk in the woods so Rosa could clean without worrying about what they were getting into. We walked only about a quarter of a mile and the scenery was pretty bland, but it was one of the best hikes I´ve done in Argentina. You know, cause I had these two little kids with me that looked at every bush like it was the most amazing thing anyone had ever put anywhere. Photographs:

Cielo means “sky.” El means “the.”

View from the farm down toward El Bolson.

The other volunteers: Robert and Katie. It was nice being around native English speakers because I could make puns. Robert and Katie never, like, laughed at any of them, but it was satisfying to know my stupid word plays were at least understood.

Salomé and Danté. They´re not full-grown people.

A beast.

And, finally, I went with the other volunteer Katie on a good backpacking trip this past weekend (we don´t work Saturdays or Sundays) up into the mountains on the other side of El Bolson. As is becoming gloriously usual, there were pristine lakes, expanive views and lots of colors when the sun went down…