I haven’t done a morning post in a really long time, but I wanted to make sure to throw this into the journal because I want to remember. I had a really nice talk with the guys this morning. We had a hilarious conversation on Facebook. I couldn’t turn off the filters, but that’s another story. I wanted to really capture some of the moments that’s happening now. Later on today, I’m going to take a bus to another part of Argentina, but I wanted to do this morning post because so much had happened yesterday.
I had gone up to the peak and had seen everything. It was a beautiful little cable car ride up there. It was a little bit brisk.
There weren’t a lot of people up there, I got to walk around freely. I saw two of the things that what’s-his-name had told me to see in Jujuy. I went to a little art museum in the morning, saw a little art from Jujuy, San Salvador de Jujuy artists. The day was spent exploring and being there—present in the neighborhood yesterday. It was a lot of great, cool little things to really observe in the neighborhood. Seeing the little toys the kids were playing with. Yes, they still play with wooden toys, like I did when I was a kid. As I walked around I thought one thing, the neighborhood was very deliberately designed.
One of the things about Argentina is that all the different places that I’ve gone, you’ll see that all the neighborhoods—all the cities—are designed in cuadras or squares or that kind of geometric pattern where you have smaller squares, larger squares, to even larger squares in the same repeating geometric pattern. Even the names of streets repeat. When I was walking around, the names of the streets are exactly the same. Nuevo de Julio, San Cristóbal; all of them—all the streets are the same.
They’re organized in the patterns where you have a square and from the square, that’s where the main shops and the main things are. And then if you walk on one side of the square to another, you’ll find another square. So it’s really cool seeing the architecture and design of these cities and being able to reflect on it and look back on it.
If you are on top of the mountain, and you look down, you see the same geometric pattern from above the hill. And it’s just cool to see that this was civil engineering, somebody did put thought into this. It wasn’t just, hey, I’m going to build a city. It’s, hey, this is what a city is supposed to be like. Obviously, it’s taking notes from European cities because you have the supposedly European architects coming over and this is fertile fresh ground. So they have the ability to build things up from scratch with the things that they’ve learned from over there in Europe and the things that they, I guess, seemed as the most useful organization of people.
And from the Spanish who conquered Argentina or who occupied Argentina, it was the cuadras, the squares. That’s their methodology of civil planning. So it was a good day and I went to a lovely dinner that was close, a restaurant that was close by last night.
And it was very relaxing, calm. I had a wonderful day yesterday, but today is going to be another day. I’m excited.
I’m up. My energy level is here. I have to take a bus though.
I think the bus is supposed to be like two hours or something like that. I can’t remember, but it’s from San Salvador, Jujuy to Salta. And Salta is supposed to be a place where you have, I think, mountains I was seeing from the plane.
There’s supposed to be mountains in Salta, where it’s the indigenous people territory, I was told. It’s called, I think they’re called the pueblos, what are they? I don’t remember the exact name, but they are indigenous people to the place in Argentina or the Andes mountains or the mountains that line up Chile and Peru and all of those places. So I’m excited for it today and can’t wait until next time.
-Tall Black Nomad