December 3, 2010

After yesterday´s fatiguing travelling it was great to get a good night´s sleep without using an alarm.

Alas, I was woken up at 9am by the hotel telephone which was just next to my ear. I had forgotten which country I was in and to a large extent who I was and what mattered in my life. I instinctively picked up the phone and grumbled “hello?” At the other end was Mirta, our friend here in Salta.

She does not speak English, so I had to get by on my weak Spanish, which incidently is at its weakest just after I wake up in the morning. After a very confusing conversation I had Mirta´s phone numbers and an agreement to meet at her workplace.

When Hélène and I were in South America almost 15 years ago one of our stops was Salta. Through a friend of a friend we had been given the contact information of Mirta and her husband, Jose. They opened their house to us and treated us like old friends. We became a part of their daily life for 3 days and got to know them and their two daughters, then 1 1/2 and 7 years old, as well as it is possible to get to know someone in 3 days.

Our stay in Salta back then was part of our 8 week trip to South America. To prepare we had both done a 3 month intense self-study Linguaphone course to learn Spanish and also had an hour with a private teacher once a week. Salta was one of our last stops in Argentina after more than 3 weeks of total immersion in Spanish.

Jose and Mirta organized a family dinner while we were there. The atmosphere was fantastic. They had cooked a large fresh water dorado. It was oven baked and stuffed with roquefort cheese. We sat around the table and discussed late into the night. Small children took part until they fell asleep in their parents arms. That dinner was the height of my Spanish. It has deteriorated ever since.

When they followed us to the airport we were all sad to have to part ways. Mirta asked us when we would come back to see them. Next year, maybe? I answered that we didn´t have the money for that.

On our trip back then we had  brought two one liter sturdy metallic Sigg drinking bottles. Half an hour before boarding we realized that we had forgotten one of them at their home. They offered to drive back and get it, but there was not enough time. We told them that they could look after the bottle for us until we could come back and get it.

This was before the time of the cell phone and the general availability of the internet. We continued our travel in South America and eventually got back to Norway. For Christmas that year we sent a package with Christmas gifts to Jose, Mirta and their girls. It came back with the message “unknown at this address”. Knowing that the postal system in Argentina can be irrational we tried again, but with the same result. We were still in touch with Jorge, the friend of a friend who put us in touch with them. Several times we asked in our letters to him if he knew what had happened to Jose and MIrta. He never responded to the question, it probably just got lost in everything else.

During the last fifteen years, every time we have used the other Sigg bottle, while hiking in the woods, we have thought about our Argentinian friends and have wondered how they were doing.

When planning this trip we wanted to see Jorge again and got in touch with him. We will be spending Christmas with him and his family down further south in Argentina.

While responding to an email from Jorge just two months before leaving Norway, I asked him if he had Mirta or Jose´s email address. I don´t know why, but we had been so focused on getting their home address, we hadn´t thought about asking for an email address. A couple of days later I had Mirta´s email address in my inbox. It was a strange feeling. After almost 15 years of wondering I could get in touch with her just like that.

I sent her a careful email asking if she remembered the couple who had stayed in their house for 3 days so long ago. Back came the most wonderful emotional response. Of course she remembered us, how could she ever forget us? They too had been using their Sigg bottle over the years, and every time they had wondered what had happened to us in life.

I immediately started changing our travel plans so we could have a few days in Salta.

We took a taxi over to Mirta´s work place. At the gate we were told where she was and entered a small building, worked our way up a staircase and into an office. No one at the desk. We said hello and a sound came from the back room. It was great seeing her again and we were all quite emotional.

We agreed to meet at their place in the evening. Unfortunately Jose was extremely busy and had to work all weekend. It was unclear to us if it would be possible to meet him at all. The language barrier made communicating a bit difficult. Mirta tried to call a taxi for us, and we thought she was following us out to a taxi. Instead she led us out to her car and drove us back to the center. We walked  a bit in the streets of Salta, The city has roughly half a million inhabitants, like Oslo, but is by Argentinean standards a small provincial city. Compared to Peru it is obvious that Argentina is a rich country.

This is the San Francisco cathedral:

We did some home schooling at the hotel before Adrian and I ventured out again with a mission.

Before the trip I was in a hurry to scan the last school books and had brought the last batch of books only on one of the external hard disks. It was a special disk I had bought after much research. The Nexto-eXtreme 640GB seemed to be the Sherman Tank of external hard disks. It could withstand rough treatment, had its own battery, for operation without a computer, and a built in memory card reader  and one-click copying from card to disk. Still, I had planned to copy over the data to one of the two 1TB external disks I had brought in addition. I never got around to it and Murphy seemed to strike again. I´m normally very good with backups and haven´t lost significant data since an incident in 1995, and that was because of a failure with both the main and the backup disk.

Imagine my horror then when I wanted to copy one of Iseline´s reading books over to an iPad in the Amazon. The disk never mounted and only came up in Disk Utility as unmountable. Ouch! In addition to the books I had a complete copy of our home data on that disk, data I really wanted to have available during the voyage.

Back in civilization with a bit of time on my hand I now started to investigate. The disk was reporting that it only had 1 read/write head, whereas it should have 256. I could hear the disk spinning. This lead me to believe that it was the electronics that was malfunctioning and not the disk itself. With some luck only the casing part was malfunctioning and the onboard disk electronics might be OK. If the disk was detachable I might be in business. I unscrewed the casing and found a 2.5 inch Samsung SATA disk in there. Hope was increasing.

Now, who would have a 2.5 inch external SATA casing with a USB interface in Salta, and would I be able to find them?

With the disk in my pocket Adrian and I went downtown in search of a computer store I had seen on our previous walk. We found another one instead.

I had my doubts as we entered what seemed to be an internet café with a computer store add on. The “reception” was some worn tables with flat screens on them connected to old oversized desktop computers. You can see them behind Adrian:

The woman serving us seemed to understand nothing about what I was talking about, but took my disk and disappeared up a staircase. After a while she came back down with the disk and asked us to follow her. We were brought up to the geek department. Here were the knowledgable engineers who loved to tinker and find solutions. A very clever guy spoke my language immediately. Computer lingo is pretty international, When I asked for “una caja externa por un disco duro SATA 640GB con connection USB” and showed him the 2.5 inch disk his eyes lit up. He didn´t have casings, but he had an emergency cable adapter with a USB interface. Exactly what I needed. When I asked him how much it cost he smiled and said he had no idea. That is her job (looking at the sales woman).

They tried it out in their lab

and to my utter satisfaction I could see that the disk operated as it should. Here is my geek friend after the testing:

After getting a hand-written receipt

we hurried back to the hotel to start the backup and all the data are now safely backed up. Whew!

We took a taxi out to the home of Mirta and Jose, The taxi driver was playing very loud synth music from the 80s and “Easy Lady” by Spagna was on when we entered the car. I was right back there partying when I was a student. My warm up routine used to be to move one of the loudspeakers of my stereo into the bathroom, put on “I wanna dance with somebody” with Whitney Houston on really loud and then dance, drink a bottle of beer and shower at the same time. Dead certain to bring on the party mood!

We stopped on the way to get a bottle of wine for our hosts. The driver knew about a place and when we arrived I could see bottles of wine in the side window. Once on the inside there were no bottles in sight, instead the place looked like a small shop for snacks and soda and I thought I was in the wrong place. It had to be next door. I went out, saw all the bottles on display in what seemed to be the store next door, except there was no door to that store. Woot? The driver made signs telling me to go back into the first store.

When I asked for a bottle of wine a woman asked me to follow her. She went over to the back corner of the store and I was brought through an extremely narrow and dirty passage (I had to pull in my stomach not to touch the walls) and entered a separate room where all the wine bottles were on display.

We spent the evening with Mirta,

her 3 daughters, her mother and Vero´s boyfriend, Mario. My image of Carla needed a major upgrade. The 1 1/2 year old girl I played peek-a-boo with last time was now a 16 year old teenager. The shy Vero was now a woman studying at university. Mirta´s mother hadn´t changed much at all. She was still the same very kind, gentle and always smiling woman radiating positive grandmother energy.

We showed them our blog and travel route and discussed the differences between the economies in Argentina and Norway. They said that they would have to set aside savings for about 100 years to make such a voyage.

Here it is, the famous Sigg bottle. When Mirta wanted to give it back to us we told her that this was its home now:

The kids got some paper and some crayons and went to work. Iseline made a drawing for Mirta:

Viktor created a monster making game. He made us take turns choosing different elements for the diffreent parts of the monster, eg. body shape, number of eyes etc. That way we all had our own unique monsters drawn. Here are the choices.

Her is Mario with his monster:

Adrian showing his drawing to “Abuela”

It was a great evening.

We agreed to meet the next day at 4pm by the cathedral in the center and do a hike to a hill looking over the city.

Eirik

—–