Welcome to Buenos Aires

I guess it's day three of our trip, though I started out the trip a little mixed up. As a testament to how busy our lives had been and how little homework I'd done, I had thought that Buenos Aires was two hours behind. When we got on the plane and I looked in the magazine, I learned it was, in fact, two hours ahead. And just to throw a little spice into the mix, I don't think they're on the same daylight savings schedule we are, so it's three hours ahead. Needless to say, we've been blissfully sleeping in til noon for the past two days.

Our usual travel pattern includes a stay at either a hip boutique hotel or a national chain with a government discount, depending on our budgetary situation. This time we are trying something completely new, and renting a one-bedroom apartment in Palermo for the week. It is surprisingly cheap (less than US$60 per night) and very comfortable. There's even a pool on the roof we haven't gotten to enjoy yet. Aside from the initial trepidation felt as we hopped in a cab having no clue where we were headed, we quickly made ourselves at home without the help of any front desk and soon headed out on foot to check out our new neighborhood. First stop: ATM. Buenos Aires is pretty short on these handy machines. We walked for probably a half-hour before we found our first one, which was not surprisingly out of order. We finally stumbled upon a mall with one and found out the limit is about $US100/day. We found ourselves a nice little steakhouse in Las Canitas for dinner and were pleasantly surprised that you can get a steak here for between $10 and $12, depending on the cut. So dining here has thus far been a pleasure.

Yesterday we woke up late and went exploring the San Telmo Sunday market. As we're in the Southern Hemisphere, we're just about starting summer, so it was about 87 degrees out yesterday. Many shops about town were closed but the side streets and antique shops were bustling. I picked up a ton of great CDs mixing bossa nova and tango styles with popular bands like the Beatles and Guns'n'Roses; always one of my favorite souvenirs. There were some tango demonstrations closer to the square, some with professional performers and some that appeared to be tourists trying out their new dance moves. We could have spent hours there but we had a rock show to go to.

This past summer a girl in a band from here came to one of our shows. We stayed in touch, and last night her band, Nobarbies, was opening for the Donnas. The Nobarbies are an awesome all-female metal band and our friend Steffi on guitar looked like a punk-rock female version of Slash. After the show, she complained in broken English about not getting the right sound on her guitar, which is kind of cool to see that we're all the same as musicians. This was our first foreign concert since the Huey Lewis incident of 2000 in Copenhagen, and I really enjoyed it. I was also reminded of the fact that the actual concert tickets outside of the US still are real keepsakes with pictures on them, vs. the green and white Ticketmaster ones that we now get at every concert. We'll get more savvy with posting pictures a little later. The sad part was leaving the show, only a few steps from the venue, I saw the first homeless family I've ever seen - meaning three beautiful children with dirty faces sleeping on a mattress with their mother. We ate at a pizza place then got taken for a ride by a cab driver.

Today we explored Palermo's shopping district on foot. Much to my dismay I didn't find anything that suits my style at all. I'm just up from a nap, and Bry is still napping. We haven't figured out what we're doing tonight yet. Navigating menus with our un poco Spanish skills has been a little challenging. Neither of our dictionaries has been very helpful, so we try to put our combined knowledge together and guess at things. We unforutnately tried a tart today that was a quiche. Empanadas are cheap and awesome and pretty easy to figure out, so we'll probably eat a lot more of them before the trip is over.

As a side note, I discovered a great snack, chocolate and peanut butter chex mix. Lucky for you, this snack is not of Argentinian origin; rather, I picked it up at JFK. Go find some pronto (is pronto Spanish or Italian?) Adios for now.