Buenos Aires

Hey all,

Well things have certainly been going poorly the first few days of the trip. First off I went to the Chilean border and was stopped for having the wrong passport. I brought my original American one, not thinking that it would make me an illegal immigrant as it doesn´t have any record of me entering Peru- the Peace Corps one does. I´m lucky they let me go back for it, but I still lost a day of the trip. I then decided to buy a flight to Buenos Aires and try the trip from the opposite angle, but Peru apparently doesn´t have automatic debit so I was running until the last minute to get the ticket paid and ended up having to deposit the cash into the company´s bank account at the last minute before I would have lost the ticket.
Even then I wasn´t sure I had it until I got to Lima the next morning to fly out of there and checked my email for the confirmation. A lone speck of good luck so far was getting to spend a few hours with my host family in Lima, share a good meal and get caught up before heading off to the airport. My flight was on time and everything, but, of course, they lost my luggage. I´m beating myself up over this because I may have been able to carry it on, being a backpack and all, albeit a large one. Still don´t know how that one will turn out, but as it stands I only lost clothes, that stupid original passport, and my keys. If I don´t get the pack back I´ll need to reapply for that passport again and it´ll cost me more money I don´t have, and because of the keys I´ll have to find somebody with boltcutters in the valley to get me into my room and who knows how long that´ll take. Those are the prinipal headaches, and the need to buy a more shirts and socks for the trip and carry them in the small carry-on bag I had as well as the toiletries...
To top it all off I´m doing some final trip-planning and finding out that all those blogs are liars or idiots. Timetables they describe don´t appear to be possible and I¨ll need to cut out some stuff in Patagonia if not nearly the whole bit. I don´t even care anymore. All of this has sucked the joy right out of traveling, and this is on top of some drama before I left that I don´t even feel like remembering. I´m not all that happy with just the whole concept of life right now, and even though the one thing I´ve learned about myself by now is that I can take punches like a champ, I´ll be hard-pressed not to put a pen in the eye of the next bearer of bad news.
So, as for Buenos Aires. It does have a European flair to it with its avenues reminding me a lot of Paris. It still has its South American style, though, which doesn´t translate well really. There is inelegant, but efficient use of space everywhere, making the avenues uglier than they should be. It also is pretty dirty and traffic is a killer, giving the impression of a much more cramped city than it actually is. It has a lot of cultural opportunities from all over the world- a real melting pot- but not a whole lot of history to boast of in the form of places to see. Churches are churches after awhile, and there aren´t many buildings or sites with specific character here. One that was pretty cool was its cemetary of El Recolete. This is where the rich and famous have been buried for thousands of years and all of the mausoleums and monuments give a New Orleans vibe.
I haven´t tried the food yet, and may wait til later in the trip for the famous parillada, or smorgasbord of grilled meats. The people in general are more European-featured than in Peru, with some pretty American looking girls surprising with the Argentine-accented Spanish, which is very different from pretty much everywhere else and hard to understand at first. Well, I´ll throw down other stuff as it occurs to me. I´m off to Uruguay for a brief trip tomorrow and after that Iguazu Falls. After that, unfortunately, is the Heart of Darkness. Hopefully I won´t get stuck down there because I have few vacation days to spare as is...