Last Week in Buenos Aires

Hello everyone,

I hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Years! Nikki and I had a very enjoyable Christmas and New Years.

Our last blog left off with us just making our bus ride back to Buenos Aires on Christmas morning. Just like on the bus ride to Pinamar, we both slept for a good 4 hours due to the seats being so comfortable! When we arrived back in Buenos Aires, we felt refreshed and ready to enjoy Christmas day! Our Christmas plans were to have a Christmas lunch with our friends Seb and Julie and a couple of their friends. Seb and Julie were extremely generous to include us in their holiday plans since we had only met them about a month earlier in our Spanish school. The lunch was in a suburb of Buenos Aires, but luckily, the bus terminal where we arrived is right next to the train station. With all our bags still in tow, we jumped on the first train and were on our way to the party. We had booked an Airbnb near the party for that night since we didn’t want to interrupt someone’s Christmas dinner by having to get the keys from them. Once in San Isidro, the suburb, we dropped our bags off at the Airbnb and made our way to the party.

We arrived at the party and could hear the clamor from outside and the one major thing we noticed was all the conversations were in Spanish! It also seemed like a lot more people were there than we anticipated. Sure enough, as we stepped inside, we were greeted by 14 of Julie’s friends and a huge table of food! Seb had been cooking all day for the lunch and the results were impressive. He had cooked everything from potatoes, to beef to a wide array of salads. Everyone had just started eating, so we took our seats and started to taste the amazing food! We also introduced ourselves to everyone and it was apparent that, other than Seb, we were the only native English speakers. I guessed that much of the lunch would be in Spanish and I was looking forward to having a full afternoon to practice. Nikki on the other hand, was much more nervous for the forced Spanish but it turned out almost everyone there spoke beautiful English. I still wanted to practice Spanish, so I tried to respond entirely in Spanish while Nikki could drift between English and Spanish. It turned out to be a great scenario because everyone could talk in whichever language they wanted to practice. Everyone we met at the party was so welcoming to us! They were interested why we were in Argentina and what our travel plans were. We talked about our lives back in the States and asked them a bunch of questions about how life is in Buenos Aires. We had a lovely afternoon with everyone.

The next day we took the train back to Buenos Aires where we had booked our last Airbnb while we waited for our truck to arrive. We decided to stay in our favorite neighborhood in Buenos Aires, San Telmo. San Telmo is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Buenos Aires and is full of cobbled streets, cafes, restaurants and ice cream shops. The ship carrying our truck arrived in the port on time on the 27^th of December, but we knew the unloading and processing of all the containers would take some time. After talking with our broker about the timeline of the unloading and processing, we booked our Airbnb through Friday January 3^rd thinking that the truck would be ready for pickup either on the 2^nd or 3^rd. Another reason the process would take so long was because of New Years. The port or customs office would not be open on the 31^st or the 1^st which were a Tuesday and a Wednesday. We understood this and instead used this time to finalize everything we needed to while we had consistent Wifi and to buy any last-minute items we needed.

When New Year’s Eve rolled around, we once again were invited to a party by Julie! She said one of her friends was having a party and it would be fun if we came along too. Being from the US, we assumed it would be a similar style party where you have a couple drinks with friends to bring in the new year. Because of this, we decided to bring two bottles of wine, a bottle of vodka and some lemonade for mixer. The party was once again in the suburbs so we took an hour bus ride there. We showed up to the house at the exact same time as Julie and Seb which was great since we didn’t know exactly which house it was. We realized that Julie’s whole family was there including her parents and both her brothers. This didn’t seem odd at first but once we were inside, we noticed the table was set for a very nice meal for 12. It was then that we realized this wasn’t like a normal US New Year’s party. Instead we were so generously invited to an asado, a traditional Argentinian BBQ, between Julie’s family and her friend’s family. Julie’s family had seemed to have adopted us for the short time we were there. It was so sweet and thoughtful of them! But with the new party circumstances, our drink choice of vodka lemonade was a little out of place.

We sat down to a wonderful dinner of steak, potatoes and biscuits surrounded once again by the nicest people. Nikki and I have decided that Argentinians are the nicest and most generous people we have met. Everyone is genuinely interested in other peoples’ lives. We talked throughout most of the night, in Spanish once again so we are getting some good conversational practice, about everyone’s lives and it made for a very pleasant evening. We finished dinner just in time to bring out the champagne and make a toast to bring in 2020!

On the days since New Year’s we have just been working diligently at our Airbnb trying to get everything sorted and planned for the next step of our trip. We have been working to plan the next month in our truck and to buy all the necessary equipment while we are still in a big city. We have also been enjoying the variety of restaurants, bars and ice cream shops around us! Every night we go to a new restaurant and we still have many more we would love to try. While we have been preparing ourselves for our next steps of the trip, our broker here in Argentina has been working to get our truck ready for pickup but it has not been going as smoothly as we would have hoped. The processes of temporary importation of a car in Argentina is a very complicated process; as we are learning. Even as we approached January 3^rd, we were still not very confident that our truck would be ready. We were all packed and ready to meet our broker at the port once he gave us the all clear but unfortunately something held up the inspection process and we were told we would have to wait until Monday to continue. We were so bummed because we were so excited to finally be living in our little home but there was nothing more we could do to help. Instead we had to extend our stay at the Airbnb until at least Monday, which thankfully we could do. So instead of going to get our car we went out for a nice lunch and do some more shopping. We had planned to do this shopping once we had the car, but now that we had the day free we walked about the city looking for a few last-minute things, gas for our camping stoves and, more excitingly, a guitar!

I have always wanted to learn to play guitar and when we were deciding what we could do on our trip, I thought about learning how to play. Nikki and I walked 2 miles to this street that only sold musical instruments. There were probably 20 different stores all in a line that had everything from guitars to percussion to trumpets. This was the musical heart of Buenos Aires. We went into about 5 different stores and asked about guitars until we found a tiny hole in the wall shop. Inside this shop was stacks and stacks of all kinds of musical products. There were enough products to fill a store twice its size. The only way to traverse the store was a very narrow winding path. We tiptoed along this path until we met the owner of the store. I told him my story, all in Spanish, that we were traveling for a year and I wanted to learn how to play guitar. He was very excited to hear our story and new exactly what type of guitar I needed. He returned with a beautiful but plain looking guitar and started talking about it with enthusiasm. I even surprised myself when I could understand almost everything he was saying about the guitar even though I know nothing about guitars. He then tuned the guitar and started to play it. The sound it made was absolutely beautiful and I knew then, this was the guitar for me. This was also our wedding present from Laini! So now I am starting to slowly learn how to play guitar. I am hoping to post some videos of my guitar progression if our internet allows it and Nikki and I would love to post some duets together once we get her ukulele out of the truck!

I am writing this blog on Sunday January 5 and I am hoping to high heaven that our truck is ready tomorrow. If it is, I will let you all know as soon as possible since I know many people are also holding their breath for that news. If we do get the truck tomorrow, we will probably be leaving Buenos Aires the same day and starting our journey south. We will probably drive about 2 hours outside of Buenos Aires for our first night in the truck and then continue south for the next 3-4 days. I don’t know exactly when we will have wifi again, but we will make an effort to find wifi as least once a week to keep the blog updated. From here on out, our satellite phone is the best way to reach us since we can receive and send texts from anywhere. We hope everyone’s 2020 is starting out well and we will keep everyone updated on the next steps of trip!