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Published: February 2nd 2007
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Sunset
The view outside where I was staying Hi everyone from Bariloche! This place is AMAZING!! I am in heavenly love! Its a small town built along a lake, with a line of snow-capped mountains in the background. There are roses of every colour everywhere, tons of St. Bernard dogs on the street (something to do with Bariloche being a former Swiss colony), street performers everywhere, and masses of lakes in the surrounding areas with water like I have never seen before, bright green and blue and so clear it looks like glass. In winter Bariloche is a ski resort but now in the summer its great for hikes. It´s also famous for....
Its sweets. Oh. My. Good. Lord. I have never been much of a chocolate person. But my God. The sweets here are HEAVENLY. You could not take the giddy smile off my face when I first tried them. There are entire department store sized shops full of every chocolate and sweet thing you can think of. Chocolates, pastries, cakes, pavlovas, ice creams, hence developing a Bariloche belly. How the local people aren´t all fat hippos is beyond me! I actually ate so much icecream (peer pressure) that I felt sick for a few days hahaha.
Chocolate store
One of the department store-sized sweet shops in Bariloche! The Spanish school was great and I can actually feel myself getting much better with the language (though by no means good!), in my class was another Australian Irene and an American Janelle, so we ran a bit of amock together in class with our dodgy español! In the afternoons we could do activities with other people in our class, on afternoon a few of us played soccor with some kids from a poorer community (they were like 10 years old and beat us 4-2 haha). Another afternoon we went for a hike up to the top of Cerro Otto, and me being Australian was too slack to take my hiking boots to just wore my thongs... so the walk turned out to be reeeaaally steep and dusty, so with no grip on my shoes I ended up slipping over tons of times on the way up, then practically sliding down on my butt on the way down. Not only did I get lots of crap from everyone, but I also got coated in dirt which didn´t make me very popular on the packed public transport to get home!
The Spanish school I´m with here organised a homestay
Chocolate store!
How could you choose?! accomodation so that I could practise my spanish, ao when I arrived I was expecting a family but instead am staying in the BEAUTIFUL house on the lake with a beautiful room, with two Argentinian guys in their 20´s plus two of their friends who are visiting from New York. They became my temporary big brothers so it turned out to be a little family after all! Every night we sit around until late chatting, making dinner together and drinking beer, one of the boys from NY was a chef, so he cooked up lots of yummy food and I even ate some stomach lining of a cow, which was really really tasty I kid you not!
The best thing about staying with the local boys was that as well as showing me all the famous views, they also took me to some places that only the locals would know about. One afternoon we went in search of this ´secret beach´with this bloke named Nacho (nickname but I have no idea why haha), so we were scaling this rockfaces and treking through the lake, cut my legs and hands up and eventually came to this pebble beach that had
Cerro Otto
The view from the top of Cerro Otto to be like 3m long, y hell! I was like "um guys.. this isn´t beach". But we all jumped in to the freezing lake and sunbaked for a while.
Then on my very last day in Bariloche before I embarked on a 30 + hour bus ride south, we went for a drive and checked out some beautiful views, and stopped at a cervezaria to taste some local beer. The whole day I was reminding them "oi remember my bus is at 3.30pm" and they were like "yeah yeah, it only takes 20 minutes from here....." Ok NEVER believe an Argentinian when they say ´20 minutes´ because when we got to the bus station, the bus had already left and we had to race along the highway chasing it until we saw it, then flag it over so I could get on. I nearly had a stressed-induced heart attack and man was I embarrassed getting onto that bus!!! Do not wish to repeat that experience!!
Overall I looooved Bariloche and was a little sad to leave, and am heading even further south now to Patagonia! Love you all! xoxoxo
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