An international exchange

It happened one evening in Tigre (photo) and again on a Saturday afternoon in Salta. I happened across a pair of guys juggling in a park. They weren't passing the hat, just passing equipment, practicing their juggling.

I watched them for awhile, and tried to wait until they were between patterns. Then I did something that women tourists probably don't do too often. I asked if I could juggle, too. They were a little surprised, I suppose, but they gladly offered me the use of their equipment to see what I could do.

I'm not the greatest juggler in the world, and I was pretty out of practice, but I can keep three balls and (usually) three clubs in the air, and do a couple of extra things with them, and in both places, I ended up teaching a couple of tricks. My Spanish isn't really equipped to teach juggling, so we all fumbled along in some mixture of Spanish and English and gesture. Words like "inside" and "outside" and "here" and "sooner" all served well. However we managed it, I'm glad we did. It was an opportunity

They all had clubs. One had very dirty professionally-made balls; the other three had tired tennis balls filled with rice or sand and taped over. (Tennis balls alone are too light and bouncy to juggle comfortably.) The fellow in the photo above had torches, of course, and he let me try them, too. It had been a very long time since I had last juggled torches, but I managed it a little bit.