Buenos Aires (12/7-12/20)

Scott carrying Peter's bag

Peter, Scott and I arrived in Buenos Aires late in the evening, rum in hand. We looked up a few hostels in the San Telmo area (where we were hoping to get an apartment once everyone arrived), decided against a taxi, and walked the 20 or so blocks, taking frequent breaks for rum and backpack-switching. Peter had brought all his luggage (an absurd amount for the two or three weeks he was there) in a large, heavy purple duffel bag. Throughout our time in BA, Peter would use Scott's cheapness to his advantage by offering him small sums of pesos in exchange for physical labor. In this case, Peter paid Scott something like $2 to switch off carrying this impossibly heavy bag on his shoulders. Since Scott had lost a bet earlier, the stakes of which dictated he take several swigs of rum, he was just tipsy enough to be amenable to such blatant manipulation.
When we got to the hostel, I slept, but Scott and Peter went on some adventure until 5am with two Swedish girls (ask them about it if you're interested). The next morning, Ben, Daniel and I had set up a rendezvous at the bar of the Sheraton. Go figure. I walked there via the bustling pedestrian walkway on Calle Florida, stopping often to consult my map. On one such pause, I was standing at the corner of a small kiosk, back to it, when someone slashed the strap of my purse! I'd heard about this move as a popular thieving tactic for crowded areas, and as soon as I felt slack in the strap, I did a wildly overexaggerated acrobatic move to clutch my bag. Somehow, a moment later, I was holding my bag - the thief was foiled! I waited until my heart was beating at a regular pace, then inspected the damage - only to find that what I thought had been a malicious purse-snatching attempt was actually just a worn seam on the strap failing. The seam had simply come undone. I have to hope it was amusing for any onlookers to see a gringa calmly reading a map one moment, and comically wheeling her arms to grab her own purse the next. Ha, ha.

Elated reunion/searching for apartments

Walking into the Sheraton was like coming home to my dog after being gone for any amount of time greater than 10 minutes - I was immediately mobbed by a squealing, squirming, elated ...thing. This time, it was Ben and Daniel, and we were glad* to see each other (*understatement).
The thing to do, of course, was to go and buy some choripan - grilled chorizo sausage stuffed into a French roll, with your choice of toppings - and some beer, and go sit in a park to wait for the apartment rentals we'd contacted from Craigslist to call us back. This happened a few hours later, and Ben, Daniel and I went to check out the place. It was a one-bedroom apartment with one queen and one single bed, a kitchen, a living room replete with a computer and TV, a bathroom, and a large patio with high walls (good for keeping beer pong balls from getting lost). We decided to think it over that night, and stay at the hostel while we considered.
Of course, being who we are, we immediately made friends at the hostel, and were having so much fun with said friends that we were politely asked to leave at around midnight, so the rest of the hostel could sleep. We went to the club conveniently located next door, where we noticed the people in line looked rather young. Plus, several of them were inexplicably wearing sailor costumes. Did we miss something?

In da club

As it turns out, 15 is the minimum age for entering some clubs in BA, and December 8th is right around when high schoolers get let out on their summer break. Aside from the 10 or so of us from the hostel, no one in the club was over 18. I felt creepy just dancing; I can't imagine how the boys felt.
That being said, we had a great night dancing amongst the self-conscious teenagers, and I went home at 3am quite satisfied with the evening. I showered, got into bed, and went to set an alarm on my cell phone - only to see I had several text messages from a Spanish friend I'd met on the trail in Patagonia, and who had been trying to meet up with me in BA. So I got dressed, grabbed Ben, and we went and danced with my friend and his Argentinian friend at the same club until the sun came up. I taught them some Bay Area dance moves, which they discounted as something I'd made up...

Dealing with accounting/USD headache

Since we hadn't heard back from any of our other Craigslist prospects, we decided to move into the apartment we'd toured the day before. It was located in the San Telmo district, at Mexico 613, and we made a quick visit to the ATM to get money for the owner, who insisted on being paid in US dollars, since it's a more stable currency than Argentinian pesos. We immediately ran into trouble. No ATMs would dispense US dollars to us, and gave us an error message that led us to believe ATMs weren't friendly towards foreign bank cards. It was a holiday (the president's inauguration) all weekend, which meant the casas de cambio (change houses) were closed. We apologized profusely when we showed up with less than the monthly amount - we were able to scrounge a few hundred USD amongst us - and promised we'd get the rest when everything opened on Monday. Unfortunately, come Monday we found out that there are specific restrictions against foreigners being able to withdraw USD, specifically, since the government wants to keep the money in country. There were only two change houses in the entire city that would give foreigners dollars, and to receive them one must provide a passport and an ATM receipt for the amount of Argentinian pesos to be exchanged. Lots of sprinting through the rain, some fairly complicated accounting, and several interminable waits in line later, we'd obtained both the money for the apartment and for the security deposit in USD. Then, we were unable to contact the owner, who lived outside the city, and would only ever receive occasional cryptic emails from him that lacked enough information for us to act. We never ended up paying him the last $400 of the security deposit...
The first night in the apartment, we (naturally) decided to have a housewarming party. We invited our friends from the hostel, my Spanish friend, and a Dutch girl Scott and I had met in the mines of Potosi. Pretty soon, we had a decently-sized, roughly gender-matched group playing beer pong on our back patio. None of our guests had ever played the game before, and were thrilled to learn. We ended up teaching them several variations on the game, until an upstairs neighbor poked his head out and entreated us to move our party inside.

Housewarming party crew

We played more games throughout the night, solidified new friendships, and had a hilarious time trying to make small trips out of the apartment, which was made difficult since we only had one key. (Actually, the first person to show up at the party arrived when Scott, Ben and Daniel had left to get several dozen empanadas, and Peter and I helplessly chatted with her from our street-facing balcony - neither could we let her in nor could we leave the apartment at all, since the other boys had the key. In the end, we attempted to tie sheets together a la Home Alone, and did our best to hoist her up to the second floor. Didn't work. Shocking. Another time, I took a 4am nap in the doorway to our apartment when Scott and I accidentally made it home before the other boys; I wrapped myself in Peter's Boca flag in the freezing BA night.)
The following day, we decided to check out the inaugural festivities. This was not difficult to do, seeing as the major avenue bisecting our section of the city had been blocked for the day. This was so that president-elect Cristina Kirchner could travel in her personal cavalcade from the Casa Rosada ("Pink House," Argentina's version of the White House - it's actually pink). It was an exciting time to be in the city, not least of which because we'd noticed many pieces of graffiti art championing President Kirchner, or, as she is more often just called affectionately: Cristina. It seemed odd and wonderful that, although she'd been in office already for a year in the stead of her late husband, Nestor Kirchner, she was still so popular amongst the citizens. There were certainly parallels to Eva Peron, particularly because Cristina's primary qualification (and apparently the basis for her campaign) was that she'd been married to the late socialist president. Nestor is often depicted in graffiti, banners, and T-shirts in a scuba costume; he famously likened Argentina to a diver underwater, and called for the country to rise to the surface.

Beer pong, even with injuries

For the final few weeks of our trip, we settled into something of a routine. In BA, it is normal to go out to bars at around midnight or 1am, and the clubs only really get crowded around 4am. This lifestyle, of course, is not exactly conducive to waking up early to go sightseeing, although we did manage to visit a few of the enormous city's main draws, such as the Recoleta Cemetery, the Floralis sculpture, and the San Telmo antiques market. Normally, I'd wake up around 11am or noon, go buy groceries (read: bread and eggs) to make breakfast, and the boys would wake up around 1 or 2pm. Then, despite ambitious plans to explore or to visit an All-You-Can-Eat-Parrilla, we'd inevitably just buy some choripan, play beer pong, watch a movie, then either go out again in club-centric Palermo (on the other side of the city) or play pool at "our bar," Sera de Dios. (We'd decided we needed a bar in San Telmo where the bartender would know us and where we could pretend we were locals; I took one step inside Sera de Dios and knew it was the place.)
Our routine invariably also meant that each day a dish would get broken, someone would get stepped on while sleeping, and/or Ben would gash his elbow open on the broken ceramic soap holder in the shower (good thing we all had First Aid kits. Except Peter, of course).
Another interesting aspect of living with four boys was the fact that most of the women in BA are inordinately beautiful. I'm not sure why, but there seems to be an abnormal concentration of elegant and striking women in the city, and Peter decided there needed to be a code word for indicating that one of these women was near. He settled on the word "maté," which refers to the bitter Argentinian herbal tea drink popular throughout the country. Once this had been established, of course, Peter abused the term aggressively; any woman wearing a short skirt or sporting undone hair qualified as one of the most beautiful women in the world, and the incessant chant of "maté, maté, OH! ...look at that maté!" got more than a little bit annoying.

Hanging in the living room-cum-bedroom

Finally, it came time to leave this intoxicating, magical continent. Scott flew two days after I did, so I spent my 14-hour solo layover in Mexico City eating tacos and drinking spicy hot chocolate. I arrived in San Francisco after midnight, and stood around for an hour with 19 other disgruntled passengers whose bags had also not arrived with the rest. The airline attendants rushed around frantically, trying to pacify the stressed passengers, and I smiled in knowing that South America isn't the only place where things don't work the way they are expected to. It turned out that our bags had gotten stuck in the conveyor belt between the plane and baggage claim, but it took lots of frantic phone calls before the "lost" bags were located. I applied a skill I'd learned in the face of frustration on my travels, I sat back, took a deep breath, and laughed. I've learned that there's little else to do when confronted with the uncertainty and absurdity that is this life.


That's it! Thanks for reading, and thank you to all who made our journey what it was :)

Please check back in a few days for a final video account of our travels!