Imagining Argentina*

As those of you that usually follow my blog probably already know, I am currently spending my holidays in my country, in Argentina.

It is my intention to show you the places I visit during my stay and also other places that I have been to in previous years. But before I start doing that, I thought it might be a good idea to run a sort of survey to see how much you already know about Argentina. I am sure you have at least once in your life before heard about my country? You don't need to start googling now or looking desperately for your World Atlas - we are not going back to school, people!

Let us see how much you've heard or know about my part of the world, shall we?

• First of all - have you ever been there? I know that some of you have! You are disqualified!! (just joking)

• Do you know where it is located? If I were to show you a map of the world, would you know where to point?

• Do you know what is the official language spoken there?

• Have you heard the names of any cities in Argentina? Do you, by any chance, know the name of the capital city?

• Do you know any particular food or dish that is typically Argentinean? (you can cheat by scrolling down my older posts....)

• Have you heard of any geographic landmarks or any popular tourist region in the country, like mountains, lakes, forests, waterfalls, etc.?

• Have you heard of any typical Argentinean music or Argentinean musician, band, composer?

• Have you heard of any political or historical figure,writer, scientist, footballer(!) or celebrity that you know was born in Argentina? (that excluding myself, of course! hehe)

• Do you remember hearing about Argentina on the news in your country? And do you remember what it was you heard?

And finally,

• Is there anything in particular you would like to know about the country or the place where I come from?

Remember, this is not school so you don't need to answer all the questions! And now a little help from your friend Aledys:

Do you know any of these Argentinean figures?

This is a famous "house" in Buenos Aires, does it look familiar at all to you?
Don't Cry, for me, if it doesn't!

These are photos of the province/city where I come from.
Do you the name of that province/city?



Have you ever seen photos or heard about any of these places?

Buenos Aires, Puerto Madero ©Maximiliano Buono


Iguazú National Park, Misiones


El Calafate National Park, Santa Cruz ©Ramón Tello



Have you ever heard of or experienced any of these things?

My father is drinking the national drink: mate

home-made dulce de leche


Tango, Buenos Aires ©Ramón Tello

Improvised asado (barbecue), Argentinean style.

empanadas, a typical filled pastry dish.

I hope you enjoyed this thread about Argentina. In future posts I will be showing you more places and things about the country, its people and its habits.


Ackowledgments:

I would like to thank Maximiliano Buono (from Buenos Aires, Argentina) and Ramón Tello (from Cariñena, Spain) for allowing me to show their pictures in this blog. Thanks guys, for your generosity.

*Imagining Argentina is the name of a film featuring Antonio Banderas and Emma Thompson and it deals with the desaparitions of people during the military government in Argentina during the ditatorship between 1976 and 1983.

North & South - Autumn & Spring

In a couple of days I will be heading south to visit my family and my friends in my country - Argentina. I will be going towards the spring then, because as you probably know, Argentina lies in South America, in the southern hemisphere.
I am quite anxious about my trip - how will I find everybody? Will I find things much changed? Of course, I am also very excited about going back home and I am looking foward to spending time with my people, visiting the places where I used to live, the place where I was born and lived most of my life and also new places where I have never been before.

Calamuchita Valley in the hills of Córdoba, Argentina; a place where I used to spend all my summer holidays.

I will stay in touch as much as I can and I will keep posting whenever I can; but, as you can imagine, I will be quite busy catching up with family and friends most of the time and my husband and I will also be making a roadtrip that will probably take about a week.

What will I miss from my second home, here in Holland? Definitely not the weather as you may well guess! But I will be missing the beautiful colours of the autumn in the Netherlands. Last year I took my holiday a bit earlier in the year and I got back just in time to capture the last of the autumnal splendor in the parks and forests near Zwolle.

Park "Het Engelse Werk", in Zwolle:











The "Zwolse Bos":











It is goodbye for now from the Netherlands and I will be writing back again from Argentina! Thank you all for your visits and your comments!

Interviewed for "Greetings from Holland"

Blogger Anita, author of "Greetings from Holland" interviewed me a couple of weeks ago for her blog. Click here to read the mini-interview!

Thanks a lot Anita, it was fun doing it!

Also, if you haven't yet visited Anita's blog, I suggest you do: in it you will find articles about interesting aspects of life in the Netherlands, all spiced up with the typical "carioca" flair of this Brazilian-born expat.

Click this link to go to "Greetings from Holland" and enjoy!

Zwolle Culinair: the Superstreekmarkt (super regional market)

De Week van de Smaak (in English, "National Tasting Week") is a gastronomic event in the Netherlands held every year to celebrate traditional, sustainable international and local food. National Tasting Week is celebrated with hundreds of different activities in which food and local produce takes central stage. Restaurants, local producers, farmers, food shops, cookery schools - they all organise their own activities in big and small cities across the country.

This event actually started back in 1992 in France, where it is known as Le Semaine du Goût and it soon extended into other European countries. Today, the event is celebrated in Switzerland (since 2001), Belgium (since 2006) and the Netherlands (since 2007).


In Zwolle, the city where I live, National Tasting Week was celebrated with many special activities. The Dutch Tourist Office (the VVV or Vereiniging van Vreemdelingenverkeer), for example, offered during the week of 21-27 September, a gastronomic walking tour through the historic city centre, visiting some of the best restaurants and shops which held tasting sessions or had special menus especially elaborated for the occasion.

"Sunday 27 September, Welcome to the Super Regional Market"

Another big event which took place to celebrate National Tasting Day was the Superstreekmarkt (in English, the "super regional market") in which traditional local produce was displayed on the approximately 50 stalls arranged around the restaurant of the Agnietenberg camping site in Zwolle.
There, visitors could taste and buy different regional products and delicacies that are not normally found in supermarkets but in traditional winkeltjes (in English, "little shops") in the city or in farms from the region. Also, there were open cooking demonstrations, talks, poetry reading, wine tasting, etc.

The market could be easily reached by car but there were other "fun" options, like sailing from the city centre of Zwolle to the Agnietenberg by boat on board "De Gebeurtenis"; or riding in one of the fietstaxis (taxi bikes) Fiestjoe.

The taxi-bike, an environmentlly friendly means of transport in Zwolle.

Some more photos of the Superstreekmarkt in the Agnietenberg, Zwolle:

Busy day at the Super Regional Market

A tasting of cheeses, patés and jams in one of the stalls in the market.

Did you know that there are more than 180 vineyards in the Netherlands? Winegrowing is a thriving industry that contributes about 1 million of bottle per year! There is even a vineyard in my own city, in Zwolle - check their website for more information about the wines and visiting or volunteering to work during the high season: Wijngaard De Swolse Marken.

Dutch wines at the market during the National Tasting Week in Zwolle.

The wine shop Henri Bloem had an international selection of wines for the public to taste. I was pleased to discover that one of their star wines (Felino, Viña Cobos, Malbec 2008) actually came from Mendoza, the wine producing region in my country, Argentina.

The wine tasting selection at the Henri Bloem stall in the market.

Visitors could also see, taste and buy another typical delicacy from the region: smoked eel.

The mobile smokehouse of Profarm Paling, a local producer.

Smoked eel or "gerookte paling", a local delicacy.

A stall displaying typical dry sausages.

The typical sausages of a local producer.

More "lekker" (in English, "tasty") sausages.

A view of the turnout for the Super Regional Market in Zwolle.

Of course there were a couple of stalls offering a tasting of locally made cheeses:

The stall of Isseldelta Bier.

Vinaigrettes ready to go!

Cook books for those looking for inspiration.

The winter garden at the Agnietenberg, Zwolle.

There is more to come yet, in this month of October: Zwolle Culinair, an event which will take place from 23 to 25 October in Deltion College, Zwolle.

If you are curious about other gastronomic events taking place in Zwolle, visit the Zwolle, Week van de Smaak website, or the VVVZwolle (Dutch Tourist Board, Zwolle).

Our own Elfstedentocht: Stop #1 - Leeuwarden

Have you ever heard of the Elfstedentocht?

The Elfstedentocht (in English, "eleven cities tour") is a speed ice-skating race which is held in the Dutch province of Friesland during the winter. It is a major sports event in the Netherlands, but it is only held on those years when the weather conditions allow canals and lakes to freeze, forming a natural ice track of approximately 200 kilometres joining eleven cities in this province: Leeuwarden, Sneek, IJlst, Sloten, Stavoren, Hindelopen, Workum, Bolsward, Harlingen, Franeker and Dokkum.

The route of the Marathon of the Eleven Cities in the province of Friesland.

This Marathon of the Eleven Cities has only taken place 15 times since it was officially started in 1909 and the last one took place in 1997. When it will next take place, is anybody's guess, since there are a number of factors that need to combine in order to create the right conditions for the race to be held safely. Ideally, the ice layer needs to have a thickness of 15 cm along the entire 200 km track. During the last decades and as a consequence of global warming, the space of time between races has become longer and longer.

Here, in the archives of Geschiedenis (in English, "history") a channel of the broadcasting network Omroep, you can find videos of the Elfstedentocht so that you can get an idea of what it is all about.

Since living here in the Netherlands, I have never been able to see one of these marathons which has been quite disappointing. That is why last year in the summer, we decided to do our own Elfstedentocht - by car.

The marathon begins and finishes in the capital city of Friesland: Leeuwarden, and that is where we will start this new series in the blog.

Leeuwarden (in Dutch, click to hear pronunciation) or Ljowert (in Fries, the language spoken in this province - click to hear pronunciation) lies about 140 km from Amsterdam. It is the city where the Nassaus (ancestors of the present royal family) resided back in the 16th and 17th century; and it is also the city where Mata Hari, the famous exotic dancer and spy, was born.

A swan, symbol of the province of Friesland, engraved on the façade of the Frisian Academy in Leeuwarden.

Let's take a tour of the city, starting at the Frisian version of the leaning tower of Pisa: the Oldehove.

The Oldehove, the leaning tower of Leeuwarden.

The story goes that in the 16th century, the people of Leeuwarden wanted to have a church tower. This could not be just any church tower: it had to be higher than the Martini tower in the neighbour city of Groningen.
They started building the Oldehove tower in 1529; but once the builders had reached a height of 10 meters, the tower began ostensibly to lean to one side. After several unsuccessful attempts to correct the problem -for the city had to have a tower at all costs- they realised that there was no point carrying on and the construction was halted when the tower had reached a height of 40 m. It is said that the master builder Jacob van Aacken died of sorrow after failing to provide his city with a tower that would rival that of the neighbour town of Groningen.

The beautiful park of Prinsentuin (in English, "princes' garden") was part of a palace garden created in the 17th century for the family of the Nassaus.

Prinsentuin in Leeuwarden.

The Prinsentuin was donated by the stadhouder family (Nassaus) in the early 19th century to the city of Leeuwarden.

Prinsentuin in Leeuwarden.

This park has been open to the public since the end of the 18th century, which makes it the oldest park of this kind in the Netherlands.

Prinsentuin in Leeuwarden.

The Waag ("weighhouse") was the trading centre of the city of Leeuwarden, where cheese and butter were weighed officially and where transactions took place.

De Waag, built around 1590.

The Fries Museum in Leeuwarden is a "must-see" if you are interested in getting to know the best things that the Frisian people have ever created.

The Fries Museum in Leeuwarden.

There you will find permanent art expositions, exhibitions of contemporary art, and style rooms. Within the complex, the Mata Hari museum and the Verzetsmuseum (in English, "museum of the Resistance") are really worth a visit if you want to know more about the famous spy or what life was like during the WWII in Friesland. I will come back to the Fries Museum later, dedicating a full blog entry to it in the future.

Façade of the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden.

If you take a walk around the city centre in Leeuwarden, you are bound to find very interesting architecture and old historic monuments. Let's take a look:

A street in the city centre, the Achmea Tower seen in the background.

The Princessehof, houses the Ceramics Museum in Leeuwarden.

Me posing by a water pump, close to the Grotekerk (in English, "big church")in Leeuwarden.

The "Oranjepoortje", the entrance for the royal family at the Grotekerk.

A quite elegant street in the city centre of Leeuwarden.

Stadhouderlijk Hof Palace (1564), former royal palace now houses a 4-star hotel.

Another street of Leeuwarden.

The shopping centre Zaailand in Leeuwarden.

Leeuwarden is definitely an attractive city from every point of view. It has a lot to offer, with its historic city centre and interesting museums, its many art galleries and antique shops and of course, the active waterways where you can take boat trips and admire the city from a different perspective.

Our Elfestedentocht will continue in a few weeks, this time visiting the city of Sneek.


Some useful links:

* Official site of the association of the Elfstedentocht or "Vereniging De Friesche Elf Steden" where you can find information about the marathon.

* Visit Frysland, tourist information about the province of Friesland, including the eleven cities of the Elfstedentocht.

* More tourist information of the Eleven Cities.

* Official website of the Fries Museum Leeuwarden.