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took it out of its cage, tossed it in the air, put it in his pocket, even let Frances and me hold it.  It has not been "fixed", but has been a pet since babyhood.  A tame jabiru wandered about the grounds.  A monkey island is under construction, a huge one.  The island is now a big plateau of earth in the center, and is to be reinforced with concrete.  A large moat surrounds the island, and in this will be fish, even our favorite pejerrey.  There is an attractive elephant house [[strikethrough]] with an Indian [[/strikethrough]] whose architecture suggests the Orient, and the bars are heavy cement, reinforced with iron, and shaped to suggest bamboo poles.

     There are 200,000 visitors a year to the Park.  The employes are paid 100 pesos a month, and are given two uniforms a year.

     About noon we left the Zoo, and were taken to a new park nearby, where one gets a superb panoramic view of the city.  Cordoba has 300,000 inhabitants, and 144 churches, and the view from the top of the hill where we stood is largely of spires and bell towers.

     Mr. Martinez, representative of the government bureau of tourismo, drove us out into the country, through the flat, dusty grazing land that so far has seemed to us to represent Argentina.  We had not gone far, however, when we began to approach the Cordoba hills, and we took a winding mountain road that led us around Lake San Roque, which, with the rather barren hills rising steeply from the blue water, reminded Bill and me at once of the approach to Prapat on Lake Toba.  We went as far as the Eden Hotel at La Falda, where, somewhat to our consternation, we found we were to lunch with the 350 Postal Inspectors who are convening in Argentina this month.  The lunch was good, and typical.  First came slices of ham stuffed with vegetable salad.  Then tomato soup, filet of beef with vegetables, roast kid and salad, canned peaches, coffee, and champagne.

     We took a different route home, a real mountain road, crossing the Sierras at a height of 4,000 feet with breath-taking views of the valley that stretched limitlessly off to the horizon.

     Martinez took us to the Oriental for tea, a typically Spanish restaurant with marble-topped tables, where the elite of town gather from five to seven to drink tea or coffee.  Our crowd heartlessly went for whisky and gin, of course, and speaking of gin, the story of Bill Shippen's attempt to buy a bottle of it by the dictionary came out.  He had asked Frances the Spanish word for gin.  She looked it up and found "trampa".  Bill went into a shop and ordered trampa, but got nowhere, the man flatly denying that he had ever heard of such a thing.  Bill could see bottles of gin on the shelf and finally got one by pointing.  My Bill was asking him that afternoon where he ever got that word for gin, a[[strikethrough]] nd [[/strikethrough]]^[[s]] all he had heard was "ginevra", and Frances showed it to him in the dictionary.  Martinez was puzzled, also, and we finally looked up trampa in the Spanish-English section.  It meant "trap" - which is gin in an entirely different sense!

Transcription Notes:
In the first paragraph, there are letters marked out with Xs, I just skipped that and continued on. Is that correct? The transcription instructions call for indicating a crossed out phrase with [[strikethrough]] phrase (if legible) and then a closing [[/strikethrough]]. the rest of your transcription was very good. Welcome aboard.--Tom C. There is also a correction in the last paragraph. 'and' was originally typed and then corrected to 'as'. I used 'as'.