The gaucho is the Argentinean -- and Uruguayan -- cowboy. (For that matter, his counterpart is found in Chile and Brazil as well.) Today, he's a ranch manager or ranch hand, but in the early 19th century he was a guy imported from Spain's underclass to keep unfenced herds of cattle together. He was colorful, lived by his own code of honor, and often kept company with the country's indigenous Guarani, before the Guarani were wiped out in the 1870's. Here's a link with a brief overview: http://iq.lycos.co.uk/qa/show/118/Who+were+the+gauchos%3F/

San Antonio de Areco's gaucho flavor includes a gaucho museum, chiefly filled with artifacts derived from and about Ricardo Guiraldes (1886-1927), who wrote the definitive gaucho novel, Don Segundo Sombra. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Güiraldes) The museum recalls an old estancia, with the main house fortified with a moat, though not a particularly deep one. Still, I suppose it afforded one the chance to lock and load. The veranda is pictured above. There are estancias all over the region, many of them catering to guests. They are Argentina's dude ranches.

Besides the museum, and gorgeously tooled spurs and whips and stirrups for sale everywhere, San Antonio has several old-time "pulperias," which were combination bar/general stores. The one in the photo, on the town square and named Esquina de Merti, or "Merti's Corner," has decor which any restauranteur would kill for: high beamed ceilings, exposed brick, floor to ceiling shelves with dusty staples. And. when I walked in, sitting in the corner were a quartet of leathery gents in riding boots and berets sharing a beer. Some Mozart suddenly ruffled the silence, and one of them answered his cellphone. The modern gaucho.

Descanso en San Antonio de Areco

Fatigue from 2 weeks of dancing has set in. It is time to get out of Dodge. And all the savvy guidebooks imply that you really haven't seen Argentina until you've travelled as the Argentinians do -- on a double-decked, TV-outfitted, drinks-serving coche, complete with leather seats that recline fully, for those 36-hour jaunts to Mendoza.

I was going only to San Antonio de Areco, a bare 2 hours out of town, $15 round-trip, so we dispensed with the TV and the drinks. But the seats were sumptuous, and I felt, riding in the second story of this amazing conveyance, like a Maharani on her elephant. Drape me in silk and bejewel me. (Please.)

It took quite a while to get out of Buenos Aires. But at last we hit open road -- the fabled pampa. To my surprise, it looked a lot like Illinois -- verdant agricultural flatland punctuated by great stands of trees. Scratch one more exotic fantasy.

San Antonio de Areco, population 20,000, is the center of gaucho culture in Argentina. Its festival celebrating same happens next week and the town will be thronged by those wanting to see gaucho sports, dancing and parades. (Two of these involve horses.) But, for now, it is a tranquil place, filled with artisanal workshops making gaucho-related crafts -- silver, leather and weaving. And, for some reason, chocolate.

By American standards, this is a very low-key tourist attraction. It is quite in contrast to El Tigre. Signage is discreet and tasteful, Children go to school, sports are played, lives are led. It's the sort of place where dogs run free, and thus don't despoil the sidewalks, although any patch of grass is fair game. The odd sheep is let out to graze on the parkways. Tourism seems almost incidental. Yet there are more, and better, restaurants and shops than another town its size might boast.

My hotel, Paradores Draghi, is wonderful, a tiny inn attached to a silver workshop. Overnight is $43. (This is one reason tourists are flocking to Argentina.) I'm luxuriating in silky sheets and adequate toweling, the latter not a feature of my apartment. There is a small pool and fountain in the courtyard. Breakfast of croissants and jam is delivered to my door in the morning at 8:30. Sigh.

San Antonians ride bikes everywhere, and the hotel makes them available. So this morning I decided to take a spin myself. Many of you know that my relationship with bikes is tentative at best, since I didn't learn to ride as a child. Gary bought me my first bike shortly before I became pregnant with Pearson. But after hotel personnel reset the seat to a low and ridiculously inefficient height, I set out. The bikes are sturdy single-speeds with hand-brakes. Some of the roads are paved, some not, and there are no hills. I didn't really see anything I hadn't seen on foot. But somehow the interaction with the community felt different this way.

I've decided to stay a second night.

Eating in Baires

Eating in another country is, in some ways, about finding new comfort food. What can you ingest day after day that leaves you feeling sated and happy?

Generic food in Buenos Aires is bland, much to my surprise. The ingredients are wonderfully fresh, but salt is an option and pepper rarely supplied. Garlic is a mystery. Did all the Italian and Spanish immigrants drop it overboard crossing the Atlantic? If there is something on the menu labeled "piquante," I always order it, knowing that their "spicy" will be my "flavorful." Argentina must have the lowest rate of heartburn in the world.

The national dish is "parrilla," translated loosely as barbecue. The country is known for its livestock and, though it has over 3000 miles of coastline, seafood takes second billing. Great slabs of grilled meat are consumed ritualistically in every neighborhood. The other night, I got to go to an upscale parilla in the Palermo neighborhood, which had been mentioned that very week in the New York Times travel mag. Foodies were descending from everywhere, but, thanks to Karen and Mike, enterprising fellow tango students, we got there first. The good news is that the sauces served with these morsels of seared flesh were memorable.

There are lots of pizzerias, serving up a variety of styles, from flat to doughy. A spinach tortilla is very filling. "Tortillas" are grilled rounds of vegetables and cheese, like a quiche filling without a crust. And I can always find good, plainly dressed, salads.

Argentinians seem to make up for the lack of savory with an abundance of sweet. It is impossible to buy unsweetened yogurt or soy milk, for example. Confiterias are everywhere. But the best of Baires' Italian gastronomic heritage, I think, is in its abundance of heladerias, or gelatorias. The one around the corner from me serves up a divine concoction of figs and nuts.

Although mate drinking is an Argentine habit, the coffee is excellent. Perhaps that is my comfort food.

El Tango, or Why on earth am I doing this?

Tango seems to provoke many reactions.

People who watch it see it as erotic or hokey or scandalous or angst-filled.

Those of us who dance it, however, have a whole thesaurus of adjectives for tango, depending on where we are with our dancing, with our lives, with our bodies, with our spirits. A good dance can leave us elated for hours; poor ones can equally depress us. The elation -- the "tango high" -- drives us to improve, on the theory that becoming better at it will result in more good dances, and more tango highs. The vocabulary of addiction is appropriate here. But as addictions go, tango is healthy.

Argentine tango, (as opposed to ballroom tango, such as that seen on "Dancing With The Stars"), is a lead-follow dance that, in its social form, is completely improvised. There are infinite combinations of patterns from which a leader may choose to express his sense of the music being played, the partner being danced with, his particular attitude of the moment. (Women can lead, but usually men do.) In a simple analogy, the leader speaks the tango "language;" the follower hears and interprets it. A good dance is an intimate dialogue.

My initiation to Argentine tango is fairly classic. I had always been intrigued by the dance. I was newly divorced and needed to do something outrageous to prove to myself, I guess, that I existed. By chance I learned that Portland had one of the strongest tango communities in the country. On a whim, I signed up for beginner classes where I was embraced by a series of males, with none of whom I had to have more than passing conversation. It suited my mindset to a tee. I found that I felt rather giddy after these classes. I chalked it up to a pheromonal rush. Little did I know that I'd met the candy man.

Naturally, I wanted to learn more, so I took classes and workshops and tried mightily to figure out how I might convert my swimmer's body, which had no relationship with gravity and had strength in most of the wrong places, into a dancer's body.

And I began to really pay attention to tango music. That was like progressing from hash to heroin. Tango music is different from most other social dance music because it's not driven by percussion and it has the elastic dynamics typical of classical music. As a wee (and only) child, I used to amuse myself for hours dancing to my mother's light classical records -- things as varied as Saint-Saens "Dance Macabre" and Morton Gould's "Rumba Fantasy". So, while the technical aspects of tango continue to bedevil me, dancing to tango music feels very natural, and as exhilarating as being seven again. Hard to beat that.

And I'll bet you thought it was all about shoes...

Colgada Day

Colgadas are off-axis moves, in which the leader hangs the follower out to swing off his axis. They are quite counter-intuitive for a tango follower. Working 5 hours on them was exhausting, and I've hunkered down tonight at the apartment a little wine with leftover chicken salad from lunch amplified by bagged salad from the local market. (It isn't exactly bagged -- it's a variety of shredded, shrink-wrapped veggies on small paper plates. But it doesn't require a lot of gussying up and it's filling. And, hey, it's salad.) [Family joke.]

Our teacher said it was the toughest day of the two weeks, which is reassuring, since I agreed. She is Luciana Valle, 30ish, with long curly black hair, amazing posture, and a quick wit. In the hyper-competitive world of Buenos Aires tango, she has quickly built a following for her exceptional ability to analyze movement and to structure teaching. Her English is fluent, her energy intense, her attention direct and encouraging. One craves her "Bien!" (good) and even her "Bastante bien!" (not bad).

The other wonderful thing about her program is being able to dance with the 9 leader assistants, as they are called. (Privately, I've dubbed them "hunkacitos," sweet young guys who are passionate about the dance). Some of them are teachers elsewhere. Each has a different style, strength, body type, embrace -- and adapting to these variances is itself part of the learning process. One of my fellow students, a willowy, sophisticated blonde from Minneapolis, says, with a dramatic snap of her fingers, that the class makes her feel like Cleopatra: "Next!"

On the right-hand side of this page are some You Tube videos of Luciana dancing with young Portland hotshot Alex Krebs in Washington, DC , in 2003-04. More recent ones, from her visit to Portland this year, were too dark to include. These are at least visible. They include dances to two of the rhythms of tango: a tango (slower) and a couple milongas (faster). The third rhythm, not represented, is tango waltz.

Tango Heaven, Week 2

I came here to go to tango heaven, which, very briefly described, is two weeks of classes with a superb teacher, each week comprising 25 hours of dancing with accomplished partners. Tough on the feet, tough on the bod, superb for the soul.

Today was the first day of Week Two. The schedule has us assemble at 11 AM, warm up (photo), and then address the material for the day until 1 PM, when we break an hour for lunch. Then another two hours dancing, followed by a half hour break, followed by an hour's review and practice. Note for the overly imaginative: we are not dressed in fishnet and stilettos. Most of us follow the example of the instructor and opt for dance sneakers. Crazy we are, perhaps, but masochists we're not.

Last night I was naughty and went to a milonga until past midnight. And tonight I went to the "practica" held by our teacher. It's 1 AM as I write this. But that's it for the week. I shall not sin again. At tonight's practica, I ran into a young Portland dancer who just arrived for a 2-month stay. He asked me if I'd sustained any mosquito bites yet. (Yes.) It was an odd question until I remembered that Portland has virtually no mosquitos. One person's ho-hum is another person's exotica.

Election Day escape

The returns are coming in, to the tune of "Stars and Stripes Forever." At least that was what was on the TV in the cafe where I had dinner. Argentina has no dearth of home-grown music. Were they trying to pin this election on America? I shall try not to read too much into it.

I headed out late in the morning and passed two polling places thronged with voters. I was going to El Tigre, which is described as a favorite weekend retreat for Portenos. (I don't know how to effect the tilde on my computer, but imagine it over the n, which would mean the word is pronounced "portenyo.") BA is on the river Plata and so the nickname derives from the city's function as a port. Further upriver, there is a huge delta where tributaries join the Plata. And it is on the islands of the delta where many have built vacation homes on stilts. It has always sounded intriguing. I love water, but prefer lakes and oceans to rivers generally.

It takes around an hour to get there, using two trains. The second train runs along the river past some rather tony suburbs. There is a bike and walking trail all along this leg, and, at one of the stations a sign pronounced, in elegant lettering: Bike & Coffee. Must have been a displaced Portlander.

The thing to do in El Tigre is to take a ride through the canals on a launch in order to get a feel for this watery community. The launch I took was named the "Realidad II." An odd name for a boat. It promised some sort of revelation it never quite delivered.

The houses, most of them on stilts, have electricity. But water comes from the river and thus must be filtered. They are reached only by boat, so there are gas stations/convenience stores you just float into.

There are several rowing clubs, with hapless rowers trying to outmaneuver the wakes generated by the many power boats on a thoroughfare narrower than the Williamette above the Sellwood Bridge. I felt for them. A high point of the tour was seeing a kayaker turn over and struggle to reboard his craft. I heard the Spanish-speaking guide say something about "man alone versus nature." Whatever. The river is quite brown. I felt for him.

The houses ranged from modest but tidy (most) to impressive (a very few) to markedly decaying (more than a few). Then an apparition appeared on the left bank: a magnificent stone edifice which would have been very at home in Vienna.

It was the Museo del Arte Tigre, a recently restored former casino. The incongruity of its site made me laugh, but I had to admire its grandeur, and and after the boat tour I walked to it, to be sure I had seen what I thought I had seen. It was there, and the grounds were charming.