last weekend i pretty much forgot that i was still in argentina....along with another whopping 60 foreign exchange students, i spent the weekend in the argentina's northernmost province of jujuy, where probably the last thing one will find is dulce de leche churros or fashionable women in fur coats. nope, the andean region of jujuy was far from the buenos aires snippet of argentina that i've become used to. the break from bustling urban life was sure welcome though!!

whereas here in buenos aires my favorite views include charming balconies, cobblestone streets in san telmo, and the stubble-faced argentine men, the main attraction in tilcara blew all of them away: mountains. mountains everywhere for miles and miles like nothing i've ever seen....stark and barren, yet colorful and majestic. probably about half of my pictures from the weekend were just of the mountains, i never got bored of them!!

on friday morning, after having settled into the hotel and exploring the charming town center the night before, we bussed over to an awesome pre-incan archaeological site up in the hills. the burial sites were really cool, even though it was slightly creepy to learn that they often buried up to twenty people side by side in the same pit. ick. and that families often kept the skeletons of their deceased family members in their homes for years and years. very creepy, and totally fascinating.

after our tour of the ruins, we headed to a small town nearby called humahuaca, where i tried coca leaves for the first time!! the coca plant is native to northern south america and plays an important role in many andean cultures and religious practices, as well as being the best medicine around for altitude sickness and nausea. my friends and i bought a bag for several pesos and then got to work chewing the bitter little leaves. you basically just take a handful  and chew them on one side of your mouth, kind of like tobacco. when i first walked through the town center, i noticed many men with huge bulges in their cheeks and i thought it was some common deformity that everyone just happened to have. my badddd.....not a weird deformity, people just like chewing, and chewing a lot of these bitter little leaves!! the leaves are totally legal and normal, but i did feel slightly sketchy to a certain extent: coca leaves are refined and purified to make cocaine.....eeeesh. and the leaves themselves do drug you up a little bit, i felt completely woozy and numb all over after chewing a few. whoops!! the social, political, and economic issues surrounding this leaf are  extremely complicated and, in my nerdy anthropology spirit, i find the intersections really fascinating. like i said, the leaf plays a central role in the day-to-day lives of millions of indigenous people as well as providing an important stronghold for their economic stability. and then on the other hand, like i said, the coca leaf serves as the raw material used to manufacture cocaine and excessive production is the seed for huge ramifications across the world. what interests me is how the different governments approach the situation. you restrict the cultivation of the crop, you restrict the proliferation of the cocaine industry, but potentially at the social, cultural, and economic expense of the communities that have been producing and consuming it for centuries, even millennia in some cases. you can see some big tensions between the historical and the modern, all through the microcosm of one seemingly harmless leaf. who knew such a tiny little leaf could cause so much freaking drama!!  another fascinating thing i somehow never knew: extractions from the coca leaf are an ingredient in coca cola, my favorite drink of all time. should be a no-brainer, and yet somehow i never knew!!

i kinda look like i'm on drugs in this picture, and in a way i guess i sort of was. oh well, the leaves helped a ton with the chest pains i was feeling from being so high up in the mountains!! i'll be bringing bags and bags with me when i hike the inca trail to macchu piccu!! i swear they cure everything. we strolled through the town market and the various other shops (where i purchased an oh-so-cozzzyy traditional wool sweater like you can't even imagine) before heading back to the hotel. that evening, i went out for dinner with a group of friends to a traditional peña restaurant, where we enjoyed live folkloric music and also dug into some llama meat!! my friend hannah offered me a few bites of her milanesa de llama, basically a thinly breaded and fried cutlet of llama meat, tasted pretty good to my pleasant surprise!! sort of a cross between chicken and beef, but way tougher to chew through. mmmmmm.

will and nina and wine!! some of my favorites!! 

live music duo, great guitar and other cool instruments!! 

 we left the restaurant around midnight and briefly wandered around the town center looking for other things to do, but tilcara definitely ain't a hopping nightlife city like buenos aires!! so instead, we befriended (well okay fine, iiiii befriended) the cutest stray dog ever, whom we named betty. she was super spunky and had an excess of personality, soooo pressshhh as my family would say!! after playing in the street together with our new canine friend, a couple friends and i went and sat by the river to enjoy the full moon and the clear night sky, great to breathe in some fresh air for once. on the walk back, hannah and i stopped into a grocery store to buy some snacks, where we encountered none other than BETTY!!! just chilling on the floor with some hombres and taking in the scene calmly, and no one was freaking out that there was some mangy and probably flea-infested dog (but reallllly cute) inside the store. that DEFINITELY would not be the case in america. i love this dog-friendly country!! dogs should always be welcome everywhere!! betty then followed us all the way back to the hotel and pretty much refused to leave. what a sweetie.

day two in tilcara. after our typical argentine breakfast of coffee and medialunas (mini croissants), we set off for a long and beautiful bus ride through the mountains, passing several tiny communities along the way and getting higher and higher up with each bend. small clay brick homes were nestled into the steep mountainside, some almost completely isolated and alone and barely hanging onto the landscape, or so it appeared. i was dying to get off the bus and meet the people who lived there, miles and miles removed from other people and communities, and not necessarily in a crop-friendly or tourist-heavy environment to boot. i have no idea how they manage to make their livelihoods, but somehow they keep on getting by despite the struggles and the isolation. major props. we drove for about two hours through the andean peaks, then stopped at the highest point of them all, almost 14,000 feet above sea level and higher than the city of la paz in bolivia!! once again, the change in altitude was affecting me but those coca leaves worked their magic immediately. the program coordinators had also brought along thermoses of coca leaf tea to help us with the altitude sickness and shortness of breath, which was equally helpful and quite tasty!! the wind up there was insane, as you can see from one of my photos below!! 

after enjoying the views and freezing our butts off, we hopped back onto the bus for a short ride to las salinas, a freaking HUGEEEEE desert composed entirely of salt, basically. the whole salt deposit formation thing stretched on for miles and miles and was pretty cool overall. many of the people who live in the mountains nearby rely on salt extractions to be able to feed their goats, and thus be able to make a solid living. others carve little trinkets out of salt (my friend bought a pure-salt llama!!) and sell them to the tourists who come to take in the vastness of the area. after having spent almost three hours on the bus and drinking cup after cup of coca tea, i was just about dying for a bathroom.....and naturally there was only one toilet for a line of about forty people. sooo instead, some friends and i walked far out into the salt nothingness and took care of things there!! a little TMI i know, but who else can honestly say they've done that?? peeing in a giant salt flat wasn't necessarily on my argentina to-do list but, hey, turned out to be a pretty memorable experience. overall, a really great weekend!! enough writing for now!!

the scene of the crime