Anticipation is overrated

Jujuy-


I don’t know how to do justice to this experience. Before, I didn’t really have expectations- I mean obviously I knew certain things about the place that people had told me: that it was beautiful, remote, very indigenous, very different from Buenos Aires. But I didn’t have expectations in the sense of images, experiences I was anticipating. I knew the trip was comiong, but I saw it as like a blank, empty stretch of time- I didn’t imagine it in any particular way. In a sense I suppose that was bad, as I missed out on the pleasure of looking forward to it, but all things considered I’m happy about it. Not having this trip as sort of a constant occupation for my mind I think made it easier for me to take advantage of the days, perfectly interesting and exciting in themselves, leading up to it. That is to say, I didn’t miss out on the present by dwelling on the future. More than that though, I think my lack of expectations enhanced my enjoyment of the trip itself. Without any expectations with which to compare what I was experiencing, I could take every experience as it came, enjoying it for it’s own intrinsic value, without any ridiculous imagined fantasy experience against which to weigh it. As a result I was in pretty much a constant state of pleasant surprise and complete breathless incredulity. Hence the title.

But you people are probably interested in specific details of the trip, aren’t you?

So on Thursday after a couple failed attempts to call a cab (first because I didn’t have my cell phone number conveniently at hand, second because I hung up before realizing that I hadn’t fully understood what the woman had said to me) I finally just went out and hailed one, after which I spent the entire ride to the airpark feeling anxious that the cab driver was going to rob me (a result of having seen Pizza, Birra, Faso). The flight passed pretty amiably and uneventfully and included an absurdly short 20 minute hop from Salta to Jujuy. We landed in the Jujuy international airport, an adorable retro-style place with only 2 gates and about as many flights per day, and that is only international because of it’s location in the corner of the country. During the approximately 2 hour bus ride there my eyes were absolutely glued to the utterly impresionante landscape, which at first glance reminded me of what I’ve seen of Arizona but with the accumulation of varyingly colored mountains (green, red, all possible shades of pink, gray) and remote towns which despite my best judgment I couldn’t help but see as romantically poverty-stricken, it began to appear to me as more and more unmistakably Jujuy.

I’ll sum up the hotel as consisting of the following: a central building whose principle function as far as I could tell was to dispense wonderfully doughy medialunes, and an array of cabañas set against an incredible mountain backdrop that during the whole weekend I did not cease to find unbelievable. When I stepped out from the central building and first saw this, my immediate thought was: “what did I ever do to deserve an experience like this?”.
To avoid an exhaustive account of the entire weekend in all it’s minute detail I’ll describe the most important elements of it in list form:

-Muchissimas compras of absurdly cheap and quite high quality indigneous artesan products.
-Cacti
-Montones de delicious food, including principally asada and an empanada de llama.
-Lots of spectacular folkloric music.
-Cool flacsitos
-A tour of a prehistoric archaeological site, complete with hilarious reenacted dialogues representing historical events.
-Lots of utterly hermoso “trekking” (as it seems to be called in castellano).
-Spectacular and fascinating explorations of some of the region’s principal (yet still miniscule) towns.
-Salt flats

Okat I’ve got to stop here because I think I’ve exhausted the supply of synonyms for “good” offered by both the english and spanish languages.

P.S. ¡COMMENTARIOS!

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