We’re out of here!
Friday, February 29th, 2008Okay, not really out, out…but we’re finally leaving Buenos Aires after staying here over a month. It’s been good but difficult at times.
Spanish classes have been really interesting. We feel more comfortable with the language but it’s still really hard. We’re thinking about taking more Spanish in Mendoza (about a month away), but it will definitely need to be taught differently. Like maybe one-on-one. I had to go to class alone one day when John was on the phone with one of our lovely financial institutions (and no, it hasn’t been resolved in around 2 weeks which is really convenient since we’ll have limited internet access until we get to the end of the world) and it was like night and day. Like I had to actually pay attention to everything for 2 hours. Because the teacher actually expected me to respond to everything. I can see why people do one-on-one…I felt so tired but it was kind of an amazing feeling…
Next, we head down the coast. Our plan is to start in Mar del Plata — which is supposed to be really crowded right now until Easter (they celebrate Easter here for a week — it’s called something that has totally escaped me)–oh and we had totally seen a dumbed down version of Carnival here. I mean dumbed down in terms of not like in Brazil. For a few weeks they’ve had closed down some of the streets on weekend nights and they’ve had little fiestas. And the foam soap comes out which is kind of cool–anyway, then we just keep heading down the coast until we get to a place called Rio Gallegos which is kind of the last point until you get into all those problems with water. Meaning you either have to jump in a plane or cross into Chile and transport across the Magellanic Strait. Not sure how that’s going to work out but eventually we plan to get to Ushuaia (end-of-the-world), loop over to Chile and see those cool spires in the park there (you know, those ones from the advertisements for Patagonia?) and then head north again and back into Argentina until we eventually get to Mendoza where we’ll drink wine.
Did I mention they have really good and cheap wine here! The most we’ve spent it probably 7 USD (most of the time quite a bit less than that) where we’d probably be spending at least twice that for an equivalent in the US…
Anyway, we’re outta here!