Argentina or on the way to Antartica
Sometimes the gods just smile on you. Argentina is one of those countries where we both do not speak the language and where we study menus and signs with an intense interest, as if we were visiting any of the museums at the national mall and all around us were objects worthy of collecting and thus we need to know everything we can about them.
We arrived yesterday early in the morning around 7:30 after a red eye flight from Atlanta to Buenos Aires, to discover how good US and/or European airports are in managing the herds of people through immigration and customs. Immigration was smooth, but then all hell broke loose: we were in the baggage area trying to wiggle ourselves through hordes of lucky luggage laden people, who tried to get through customs into the wonderful world out there called Argentina.
Lines of people with their luggage snaking themselves around the carousels and then people like us, cutting a path through the lines on the way to a carousel, where hopefully our bags would appear, so that we could start finding one of the ends of a snaking line and join the stalled mass of the "we have our bags - let us out people".
It took us 2 hours to reach the luggage X-ray machines, where you normally put your bags thru at the beginning of a trip. This was Argentinian customs, those machines, where you put your just recovered luggage thru and walk around them to the other end and retrieve them, after which you give a filled out form to a guy who's talking with his friends and march out into the world of Spanish speakers holding up signs with names of people they need to collect, one of them named Jesu Christa.
Then to the ATM battery of three of which one is working, so "another where is the end of this snaking line" moment.
Next stop a taxi desk to buy a ticket to a hotel 20 minutes away from the airport. Now here is when the gods are smiling at you: when the ordeal is over everything else goes very very well. The cab delivers you to a hotel, where you find yourself to be the only guests, so they have a room for you, a very nice room with balcony at 10:30 am so you can go to sleep till 2 pm.
Then you walk out into the mall of which the hotel is the anchor business to find 70% of the shops empty and for rent, a Burger King, a coffee shop, two other closed restaurants and one open for business restaurant with chairs and tables on the little plaza, where we study the menus and choose one meat empanada for 15 pesos, at the same time between us doing conversion games into dollars, and also order a salad with Parma ham and cheese, because we could interpret the words.
The waiter advises 2 empanadas "as they are very small", if we understood, that that is what he was saying, and then he proceeds to bring 3. The cerveza is local from the tap, after we have been doing pumping motions to him to make him understand that we do not want bottled beer.
The weather is a pleasant 70 plus and the sun is shining. The tables around us are all occupied by guys "talking business maybe". The bill is padded with bread at meat prices and the waiter points out where to put the tip on the credit card slip.
Outside the mall is a dusty highway and thus we return to our lovely room having the hotel to ourselves. The evening meal at same establishment is a shared 350 gram beef steak (however their grams must be having inflation problems) with papas (one potato) in cream sauce and a bottle of red wine. (we point to a table next to us and "ask" for same bottle.)
When the bill comes the wine converts to 12 dollars, so we "ask" for another one for our room and retire for the night, awaiting a 5:45 am wake-up call.
The hotel shuttle brought us back, the check-in goes flawlessly, the security line is a "show performance" procedure in which we did not take anything off our bodies or out of our pockets, thus triggering the alarm, along with every other passenger, followed by a lackluster pat down by a guy behind the machine.
We marched into the waiting area, found free wifi, were called to the gate on time, marched into a bus, that drove us 200 yards to a big plane, marched up the steps into a jetway, which by the way is connected to the building we were waiting in (sic), into the plane from where I am reporting to you.
So we are on our way to Ushuaia looking for a problem free arrival and transportation to our little family owned hotel. Pablo has emailed me that he organized a taxi to take us to his Hosteria.
So now I have time to learn a few Spanish words before I write to you again. Please forgive me if I start using them here.
We arrived yesterday early in the morning around 7:30 after a red eye flight from Atlanta to Buenos Aires, to discover how good US and/or European airports are in managing the herds of people through immigration and customs. Immigration was smooth, but then all hell broke loose: we were in the baggage area trying to wiggle ourselves through hordes of lucky luggage laden people, who tried to get through customs into the wonderful world out there called Argentina.
Lines of people with their luggage snaking themselves around the carousels and then people like us, cutting a path through the lines on the way to a carousel, where hopefully our bags would appear, so that we could start finding one of the ends of a snaking line and join the stalled mass of the "we have our bags - let us out people".
It took us 2 hours to reach the luggage X-ray machines, where you normally put your bags thru at the beginning of a trip. This was Argentinian customs, those machines, where you put your just recovered luggage thru and walk around them to the other end and retrieve them, after which you give a filled out form to a guy who's talking with his friends and march out into the world of Spanish speakers holding up signs with names of people they need to collect, one of them named Jesu Christa.
Then to the ATM battery of three of which one is working, so "another where is the end of this snaking line" moment.
Next stop a taxi desk to buy a ticket to a hotel 20 minutes away from the airport. Now here is when the gods are smiling at you: when the ordeal is over everything else goes very very well. The cab delivers you to a hotel, where you find yourself to be the only guests, so they have a room for you, a very nice room with balcony at 10:30 am so you can go to sleep till 2 pm.
Then you walk out into the mall of which the hotel is the anchor business to find 70% of the shops empty and for rent, a Burger King, a coffee shop, two other closed restaurants and one open for business restaurant with chairs and tables on the little plaza, where we study the menus and choose one meat empanada for 15 pesos, at the same time between us doing conversion games into dollars, and also order a salad with Parma ham and cheese, because we could interpret the words.
The waiter advises 2 empanadas "as they are very small", if we understood, that that is what he was saying, and then he proceeds to bring 3. The cerveza is local from the tap, after we have been doing pumping motions to him to make him understand that we do not want bottled beer.
The weather is a pleasant 70 plus and the sun is shining. The tables around us are all occupied by guys "talking business maybe". The bill is padded with bread at meat prices and the waiter points out where to put the tip on the credit card slip.
Outside the mall is a dusty highway and thus we return to our lovely room having the hotel to ourselves. The evening meal at same establishment is a shared 350 gram beef steak (however their grams must be having inflation problems) with papas (one potato) in cream sauce and a bottle of red wine. (we point to a table next to us and "ask" for same bottle.)
When the bill comes the wine converts to 12 dollars, so we "ask" for another one for our room and retire for the night, awaiting a 5:45 am wake-up call.
The hotel shuttle brought us back, the check-in goes flawlessly, the security line is a "show performance" procedure in which we did not take anything off our bodies or out of our pockets, thus triggering the alarm, along with every other passenger, followed by a lackluster pat down by a guy behind the machine.
We marched into the waiting area, found free wifi, were called to the gate on time, marched into a bus, that drove us 200 yards to a big plane, marched up the steps into a jetway, which by the way is connected to the building we were waiting in (sic), into the plane from where I am reporting to you.
So we are on our way to Ushuaia looking for a problem free arrival and transportation to our little family owned hotel. Pablo has emailed me that he organized a taxi to take us to his Hosteria.
So now I have time to learn a few Spanish words before I write to you again. Please forgive me if I start using them here.
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