¿'Murica?

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As we all know, Independence Day in the USA is a pretty big deal. Days off, hamburgers, beer, fireworks, and of course always the couple idiots that do something stupid and make the news. In Argentina, it's not quite as big a deal, so they make up for it by essentially having two: May 25 and July 9.

May 25th corresponds to the May Revolution, when the people revolted against the Viceroy and instituted their own local government. This day is huge in the Buenos Aires Province, since the revolutions were in BA. July 9th is the day of the independence declaration, which took place in Tucumán, in west Argentina. It's less important in BA but huge over there.

As we went out last night (and some of us may have possibly gotten home around 6:15), much of the day was spent sleeping. I started moving around noon, but apparently several people were out until 4:00 or 5:00. I pretty much took the day to plan some of our post-dialogue travels. The verdict is in and the tickets are bought: we will be spending 4 days in Santiago de Chile, and 3 visiting the Iguazú Falls, near the corner of Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina.

The Iguazú Falls are the widest in the world, coming in at 2.7 kilometers, and they provide the 6th-largest waterflow, and the second-largest curtain of water (after Victoria Falls). We can swim there, of course, and there's an impressive natural park nearby. This was very much a split-second decision; as most of you know, the plan had been to do Brazil, but it turns out that like Argentina, they charge a $160 fee to enter the country, which made it not worth it. So we were looking at what else to do, and the other options I'd mentioned had issues: La Serena is actually pretty cold that time of year, so we wouldn't be swimming, and we're already doing a ton of cities so we didn't want to do Montevideo too.

Back to the day: after planning all that, we went to the Avenida de Mayo, which leads across Avenida 9 de Julio (the widest in the world), and to la Casa Rosada. There was a bit of a street party going on here, with lots of venders selling cool trinkets, everything from all-natural, organic tea to handmade knives to children's toys. There were also stalls for other Latin American countries to sell food, which I thought was really cool, especially on Independence Day. Could you see America letting Canada have a stall at our street festival?

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