For two months I'd been begging Isabel for her empanada recipe. Si, I will do it, she told me. But translating a family recipe from spanish to english, from metric to our silly cups and teaspoons, from large family gathering to empanadas for two...it was all just too much.So while stopping for a couple of days on our trip from Salta to Buenos Aires, Osvaldo and Isabel had us over for a day in the kitchen.She cooked. I wrote. And while I'm pretty certain I...

Once a trip, maybe once a lifetime, you get an Osvaldo in your life.Osvaldo's job was to teach us Spanish here in Cordoba and in doing that he became the kind of friend you might spend years developing. He found us very reasonable lodgings and the first day of class even met us at our apt and rode the bus to his house with us so we'd know how to do it.When Bob broke a tooth Osvaldo called his own dentist and begged an apt for him and then took him there a...

Cordoba is a young person's city, a university town with a high rate of graduates and a low median age of citizens. Cordoba, established in 1500-something had a university and a municipal swimming pool 200 years before Lewis & Clark were loading the canoe. And in the beginning it was part of Peru, but then that's another chapter entirely.Anyway, it's young and fun, but still has lots to offer us older folks. We loved the pedestrian areas and walked t...

The first trajedy of our trip struck the day before we left Buenos Aires for Cordoba. A filling popped out of my front tooth and left a big gaping hole.Karen said, I guess we'll have to go to a dentist. When we got to Cordoba we met our spanish teacher, Osvaldo Carnero and along with many other helpful things he did for us, he said he would ocntact his dentist and arrange for me to get my tooth fixed.He emailed us later that day and said he had made me an apt...

It's so totally Argentinean. Immense--gigantic even, with 150 different bus companies. Can you see that? There is nothing in the US that compares to this--it blows your mind.This is a bus station. And it's all in Spanish--every millimeter of it. In a country where petrol is more expensive than fine wine, taxis convert to natural gas. So even if you own a car, it's just out of sight to drive it far.When you're traveling cross country you grab a bu...