Mal de ojo, dulce de pata de vaca and a sugarcane theives

A cool tree and roof in San Agustin: Jam session in the Hare Krishna temple in Neiva:

Lourdes, Alma del Viento, Maxi and I heading to town for our big concert in Macizo Cafe and the Plaza... everybody with their hair-do´s:

Well, the news of the day is that someone has given me a ´´mal de ojo,´´ or cast a spell on me. That means that I have a really bad headache in just one little spot above my ear. How do you know when you have mal de ojo? You put some oil on a plate and crack three eggs onto the plate. If all of the yolks come together in the middle, you have mal de ojo. Soon I will find out what the cure entails.

I also came to discover that the people here, other than inventing the best peanut candies in the world, have come to develop the most disgusting kind of candy in the world... dulce de pata de vaca. Yep, candy made out of sugar and... cow´s feet, not just the hooves, but the whole bottom part of the leg. The result is a gelatinous flabby thing, it doesn´t even smell good. The people at the store tried to convince me that it was vegetarian AND that it is very good for you. Needless to say, I didn´t bother trying it.

Our concert last night went very well. There was a great turn-out, everyone stayed until the very end, including the mayor and governor. Quite the event, I might add. We had a great time and after we headed to the lookout over the town to share a little bottle of rum amongst friends.

The highlight of the past few days was two nights ago. We arrived to the house pretty late, Lourdes, Alma del Viento, Maxi and myself. Around 9pm we started to make dinner in the kitchen which is in the back of the house. Maxi and I were preparing polenta, a typical Argentinian dish. Lourdes decided that it was a good night for a bonfire so she was making a couple of trips around the perimeter of the house looking for kindling and just checking things out. The house is on a farm which consists of 11 square kilometers (aka, a TON of land) and there are also a few cows, chickens, etc. All of the sudden I heard Lourdes yelling the names of the neighbors saying, ``there are two guys here, Miriam, Maria, there are two guys here.´´ It seemed to be a pretty weird form of telling the neighbors that they had a visitor. We walked outside of the kitchen and Lourdes was in the middle of the back yard, yelling, ´´theives, theives, I`m going to get you, bring the machete.´´ She was jumping up and down like a wild woman.

In her walk around the yard, she noticed two guys laying in the grass and made a scene. She scared the living daylights out of them by screaming until they ran towards the back of the property until they realized that leads to nowhere, then one turned around, they ran into eachother, almost fell, jumped the fence and took off. The police came, checked out the house for us, fired a couple of shots into the air, and we locked ourselves in the house for the night. The next day we discovered that they had been there for hours eating a mountain of sugarcane. The good news, is that with the scene that Lourdes made, its pretty unlikely that they will ever return.