Today I took the bus with Angelina to Oncativo where her mother lives. The rural areas between Cordoba and Oncativo were very flat and there was lots of soy and other crops growing. Maria Jose picked us up and we went to her house which is incredible, something out of a fairy tale. Everything is tile or hardwood or exposed brick in dark rich colors on the inside and the outside is brick with a little gate and a pretty tiled roof. The style of architecture here is very unique, I need to get some good pictures.
Maria Jose works for INTA which is a governmental organization that does agriculture research and also agriculture-related public outreach so it is right up my alley. We met her friend and coworker Jose at the office and talked for a long time about farming and the area (Villa General Belgrano) where I will be working later on. Sometimes Maria Jose translated, sometimes I just listened to the Spanish and caught the gist of what they were saying-it was very good practice. It turns out there is an INTA office near to Villa General and I might be able to visit their friend there on his house/farm with Maria Jose.
Jose works in public outreach and he supervises a bunch of home gardens, community gardens, school gardens, and hospital gardens in the area so after talking he took us on this wild tour of all his gardens in the area. They were all beautiful but in different states of progress. I recognized most of the vegetables--lots of chard, onions, lettuce. Winter is just ending so a lot of things are starting up. A couple of the gardens were in empty lots but one was in this huge hospice-facility where we drove down a road lined with trees into what seemed like its own miniature city with old beautiful buildings and murals everywhere. The patients are free to just walk around and there are dogs everywhere--I couldn´t imagine a more healthy and therapeutic place to be. And it is public! Free! Ten times better than the expensive private mental illness and hospice facilities we have in the US.
After the hospice we went to a backyard garden of a couple that was home. They were reeeeeeaaaallly nice people and let me try an orange from their tree (AMAZING) and called me "chica bonita." I have to say I am really starting to love the kissing-greeting, it is like an instant shyness-dissolver, although I am still finding it hard to practice my Spanish speaking. On the way home I learned that horse-drawn carts are a legitimate form of transportation in Oncativo (I saw three). Now I feel like I have had a proper initiation to Argentine urban gardening and I look forward to visiting some gardens in Cordoba at a later date.
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