It's a long flight to Buenos Aires. Ten hours. But flying over the Isthmus of Panama, seeing tropical lightning storms from above the clouds, and waking up to a glorious sunrise over the Andes Mountains make it all worth while. Kinda makes me wanna have a chocolate mint. Argentina from above looks very green... I guess there's nothing but farmland out here. Maybe that's why Buenos Aires literally translates to mean "good air." The city is also known as the "New York of the South"... and if there's any truth to that, then I'm not sure how "good" the air is gonna be. Actually, I'm not really sure what to expect here. We didn't really do much research. And other than one semester of high school Spanish and asking our Mexican friend to teach us some Spanish cuss words, we definitely don't speak the language. All I know is we rented a fabulous apartment and a driver to get us there. Ehh, I guess we'll just wing it. [shrug]
Coming out of customs, we see a guy holding a sign with the wifey's name on it: Wifey of Leisure. JK. Yeah baby, there's our ride! So the guy leads us to the pick up area and makes a call on his walkie talkie. I'm expecting a posh limo to pull up and take us to our luxurious apartment. So we're waiting for like 10 minutes and out comes NOT a stretch limo and a chauffer, but some random looking kid in an unmarked, compact VW. Oookay... I guess this is our ride. We take a leap of faith and trust that he's not gonna kill us. The whole ride, the wifey and I whisper under our breaths about when he's gonna pull a knife on us in Chinese (which is kinda ridiculous now that I think about it since dude doesn't even understand English, much less Chinese). Anyway, how bad can he be? He's playing Culture Club on the radio. Maybe I should be scared. 
An hour later, we arrive at our apartment alive and well. The landlord is there to greet us, but the place is kinda old and dumpy -- not at all like the pictures on the website. The paint is chipping, the furniture looks worn, and the bathroom is tiny. WTF? Where's my fab place?? I dunno if I can deal with this for a month. And just as we're starting to doubt whether or not this trip was such a good idea, it dawns on us that perhaps we're just spoiled by our unrealistic, uppity American standards. Could that possibly be it? That our driver had absolutely no intentions of stabbing us to death... or that our apartment would make any average Argentine drool? Spoiled are we? Probably.
So having changed our mindset, we're gonna give this place a chance... though some electricity, internet, or phone service would be nice. To make a longer story less long, 8 hours into our stay, nothing was turned on yet, the owner dude wasn't around, and I had to deal directly with an Argentine version of a PG&E guy who spoke only Spanish... at least his butt crack wasn't showing. Anyhoo, through the extreme kindness of a random neighbor, we get our power on because he totally goes out of his way to translate and help me out of my dilemma. Helping a random stranger. You don't get much of that in the states... nor do we expect it. Another trait of a spoiled American? Unfortunate, but probably. I think I just might like it here. Click here to see our Flickr pics!
Dulce de Leche Pancakes
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