We recently returned from a trip to the other Santa Fe - Santa Fe, Argentina in the province of the same name, roughly 300 miles north of Buenos Aires. Jen was scheduled to present a couple of workshops at the teacher training college on Wednesday and Thursday nights, so we took the early bus on Wednesday morning. It wasn't bad - 6 1/2 hours across the pampas in a comfortable seat, some snacks, a John D. MacDonald Travis McGee novel...before we knew it, we were there to be picked up at the station by Claudio and Julieta.
Our new friends had arranged a tour for us of Santa Fe, a city of 450,000, and after a quick lunch, we met up with the Spanish-speaking tour guide from the city, with whom we toured various plazas, churches, and museums. It was pretty interesting (especially the church where a priest had been killed by a jaguar driven inside by flood), but we were tired and Jen had to give a performance at 8:00. We eventually made it back to the Holiday Inn for a rest.
Jen's presentation on "Multiple Intelligences in the Classroom" went well despite the power outage halfway through that plunged the room into darkness. Jen, sans Powerpoint, just kept talking as if nothing had happened. She's a trooper, that girl. Eventually the lights came back on, and afterward several of us headed down to a local restaurant for dinner. Seeing Jen work a crowd for ninety minutes had made me thirsty, and I spotted something on the beer menu called a satelite. Turned out to be a very tall glass of ice cold Santa Fe beer, the pride and joy of the city. I gladly had a couple.
Which brings us to the following day, where we had scheduled a tour of the cerveceria, or brewery, which is more or less Santa Fe's claim to fame. I vaguely remember going on the Coors Brewery tour many years ago in Colorado, but this personalized tour for just the four of us (me, Jen, Julieta, and Boris, an American kid Jen knew) was great. It was all in Spanish, and took us through the whole brewing process. The brewery is massive, the biggest in Argentina, and they brew several different varieties there, including Budweiser and Heineken (yeah, I know). At the end, we bought some cute beer glasses and got some free tickets for beers across the street at the company restaurant.
That night, Jen did another presentation (on "Writing a Statement of Purpose"), this time for a crowd of 170 teachers, students and translators. This workshop involved passing out smooth rocks to each participant and having them find ways to describe their individual rock. Their rocks were then confiscated, only to be re-united with their owners at the end of the presentation. I guess you had to have been there, but it was fun and some of those kids will probably keep "their rock" forever!
We were up and gone the next morning, back on the bus for six hours and back to the bosom of Buenos Aires. Santa Fe is a nice, quiet little city on the Parana River - a lot quieter than BA, and a lot cheaper, too. We met some nice folks there, and I wouldn't mind going back sometime -maybe in the summer when a few satelites of icy Santa Fe beer would taste oh -so- good!
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