Oktoberfest - It's not just for Germans and Canadians anymore

Ahh.. Oktoberfest. The festival of beer. The celebration of the harvest (or something like that). This past weekend we continued our exploration of the Argentine countryside by taking a trip to the village of Belgrano in the region of Cordoba to take part in the Fiesta Nacional de Cerveza.

We traveled about 15 hours by bus to get there. Luckily the first 10 hours were in super-first class 'cama' service. Which essentially means a double decker bus with seats that turn into beds. Oh, and they serve you a nice glass of whisky before you go to bed! Sadly, the other 5 hours of travel were decidedly less luxurious.

Anyway, the festival was completely incredible. It was in a huge park, with a large stage of german entertainment and brewery and food stations set up around the outside. As you'll see from one of the pictures above, we all bought steins complete with neck lanyards, which was quite convenient. Also quite convenient was the price - approximately $1.75 to refill the stein. Ahh.. good times.

We stayed at the festival until about midnight (from 5pm) and ended up meeting lots of cool people. I got to practice my spanish lots and was quite happy to get a few compliments on my ability to understand and speak the language. I still feel like I'm progressing a little bit each day, but even everyday tasks remain challenging.

After the festival, a few of us ended up having quite an unpleasant experience. We had heard that it would be difficult to get taxis back to our hotel, but we had no idea what we were in for. Essentially between the hours of midnight and 4am, we were abandoned by our group leader (that's another story altogether!), and three of us had to beg, cajole, and shiver our way home. We luckily were able to bribe an out-of-province cab driver into taking us to our hotel (10 miles away) at 4am. I think he took pity on my broken spanish telling him "tengo frio, tengo mucho dollares" - "I'm cold, I have lots of money". Anyway, all's well that end's well, I suppose.

We returned to Buenos Aires yesterday morning and I caught up on my sleep and homework. Things continue to be great here. It's hard to believe that I've been gone 5 weeks already. This trip has been amazing and, as tough as learning spanish is, I'm motivated by my end goal of one day being fluent in this language.

On to the pictures:
The first row are some shots of the stage and the festival crowd. Typically, Argentines don't drink to get drunk - public drunkenness is pretty rare. All bets were off at this festival.

The second row is a shot of my favourite beer stand there (I bought a t-shirt!) and a shot of me at the gateway to the festival.

The third row is a shot of a few of my friends from the trip. From left: Alejandro (from Argentina - tour guide who didn't know anything); me, Gideon (from Colorado - we're getting an apartment together, cool guy); Christian (from Argentina - very cool guy; speaks perfect english); Wes (from California, studies sculpture); Matt (from Arkansas - wears the Toronto Maple Leafs shirt so people won't ask him about George Bush); and Gene (from Arizona - we've been in the same spanish class for two months now).

Chau!