Cousin Toast: “Because Clearly…. (Clearly)…”

Erin and Joe seal the deal. from Andrew Stein on Vimeo.

Joe breaks the glass!

Congratulations to cousin Erin and Joe!!

No complaints this labor day weekend as I continue this day of wine tasting, eating, and napping while reading Harry Potter and watching the sun go down. And I almost forgot to mention the delicious cheese that we have too.

Happy Lab Day Weekend everyone!

Although I’m stationed in the Bay Area these days, I woke up this morning and soon learned that my hometown of La Canada Flintridge, a small city northeast of Downtown LA was on fire.  Conveniently, with my parents out of town, I needed to learn what was going on and needed to spread the word to concerned friends and family (and my parents).

A great source for reading about updates on the fire is this website produced by the city: http://www.lacanadaflintridge.com/news/welcome.cfm?action=details&ID=323

Who knew that Stanford Stadium would be a perfect location for a futbol game?  I guess we all learned that last weekend.  Click on the photo below to see some photos I took of the game between Club America and Intermilan.  Enjoy!

I haven´t posted in a while I realize, but I can´t say that I haven´t tried.  The internet in Patagonia is not exactly fast.  In fact, in the last place we visited, El Chalten, the connection would time-out every time I tried to do anything on wordpress.

That said, I will date the next couple posts as if I was writing them on that day so that it will hopefully be easier to follow.  For the big picture, we traveled to El Chalten in Patagonia on Christmas day, and then continued on to Calafate on Dec 29th.  Both regions have some awesome glaciers to view and are located on the western side of Argentine Patagonia.

I will also try to put some photos up… because describing some of the things that I´m seeing would almost be impossible.

Where better a place for a Jewish family to celebrate Christmas Eve than Buenos Aires, Argentina.  Most things were closed, but my parents and I did get a great suggestion for this place very close to our hotel.  Lola restuarant was a lot of fun, the food was great, and it welcomed the birth of Christ in a great way.

Walking home afterwards, although only 2 short blocks, was filled with so many fireworks coming off of every building and every street, that if we were more paranoid, it would have been easy to think that we were under attack.  It was also much easier to hear the fireworks than see them, which added an interesting element to the journey to the hotel.

We left Los Suites in the Recoleta region of Buenos Aires this morning and made our way to Patagonia!

I got a couple pictures up and I reduced the size so they should be able to load much quicker.  These are from a region of Buenos Aires known as Boca (¨the mouth¨). Enjoy!

The area was extremely colorful, and the streets were ridiculously photogenic.

Tango dancers:

We´re half way through day 2 in Buenos Aires, and we returned to the hotel to freshen up and drop a couple things off before walking around the city some more.  Today we visited the Jewish section of the city, and the equivalent to the Jewish Community Center.  We then walked around the area and visited a local synagogue.

Afterwards, we grabbed a bite to eat at an Italian place.  The Italian influence here is very big and therefore there are many Italian restaurants to choose from.  After lunch we took a larger scale tour of Buenos Aires to get the bigger picture.  This is something that a lot of people would usually do first; however, we realized that it being Christmas eve tonight, there was going to be little open starting in the early afternoon, and so we wanted to make the most of what required things being open on our first day and a half here.

At the moment, I´m experiencing a couple technical difficulties uploading more pictures.  Also, I apologize that this pictures I put on the site yesterday were gynormous, and will try to figure out a way to reduce the size in the future.  I barely had the patience to wait for them to load, and they´re my pictures after all.