By Karla Bruning for WashingtonTimes.comMENDOZA, Argentina, March 15, 2011—Spring may be about to, well, spring, but I spent the last two weeks down south in Argentina hiding out the last dregs of New York City's winter.
One night, I stumbled upon a local road race in Mendoza. Maybe 100 runners, largely clad in orange shirts, raced by me along a beautiful street shaded by stately poplar trees. Men outnumbered women four or five to one, and onlookers clapped for the leaders but no one else. Suddenly, I wished so badly that I was running with them.
Before I left for the trip, I’d looked for races in Buenos Aires and Mendoza that I could possibly run. But my limited Spanish only turned up races that were happening before I arrived or after I was already gone.
Yet, there they were: my Argentinian compadres running down the street to confused onlookers. I asked a local man what race it was and he answered that he had no idea. He didn’t know a race took place during Fiesta Nacional de la Vendimia, the annual wine harvest festival that brought me to Mendoza in the first place.
Indeed, the Carousel of Queens would take over the streets shortly. Each district of the Province of Mendoza chooses a queen for the festival—a young woman aged 18 to 22—and as many as 100,000 people line the streets to watch the queens parade on their elaborate floats. The following evening, one lucky lady among them would be chosen queen for the entire festival.
But before the queens, before the celebrations, before the crowds, there were the runners. I later found out it was the..Read full article
