April 12-14, 2019
Happy Birthday to Nanny! Today we got up early to drive back to El Calfate, return the rental car and make it to the bus station for a 10:30am bus. We stopped at the store and picked up some food and snacks for our very long bus ride to Buenos Aires (it takes 2 days total to get there). Fortunately, the bus was pretty nice with seats that recline, and I was hoping to sleep as much as possible and work on this blog.
Our first bus ride was 6 hours before we stopped and changed to another overnight bus. I thought it was funny reading back through some of my early blog posts when I thought 9 hours was a really LONG shuttle ride. Now a 50- hour bus ride really takes the cake. There’s not much to say about what happened over the next days until we arrived Sunday morning in Buenos Aires (BA).
Once we left Patagonia, the scenery was exactly the same until we got to Buenos Aires. It was totally flat and desolate. We came into the city early Sunday morning (4/14) and booked a hostel downtown. We were able to take an Uber from the bus station to the hostel. It was so early we were not able to check into the room at that time, but they were nice enough to let us use the showers and store all of our bags until it was time to check in.
We showered and then hit the streets to explore Buenos Aires. We walked to the San Telmo Sunday market which was full of people and local vendors selling arts, crafts, jewelry and other various items. On the way there we passed an Italian street fair which we later learned was a huge part of the culture in Buenos Aires. Every weekend they have a fair that celebrates a different culture that is present in the city. We just happened to be there for the Italian one. Buenos Aires is most heavily influenced by Italy as they had over 2 million Italian immigrants come in the early 1900’s. They take great pride in having very good gelato and pizza in the city.
After the Sunday market, we grabbed a salad bar lunch before checking into the hostel. Once we got to our room Brendan began working on school and Taylor had some of her own things to do. I decided to do a free city walking tour. It was really great, and I learned a lot about the city and its history. I found it very interesting how eclectic BA is with all of their buildings designed with a diversified influence. When walking down the streets, you can see architecture that resembles buildings from France, Italy, England, Cambodia etc. It is a blended city of all different cultures and they value their diversity. I also found it interesting that Argentina has an open border policy. They believe that education and healthcare are a human right. Also 80% of people in the city own dogs. It is part of their healthcare system as they deem dogs as being therapeutic (I’m not exactly sure to what extent dogs are covered under healthcare services but it was pointed out on my tour that is the reason dogs are such a big part of the city culture).
The current downside for the Argentinian people is their peso is very weak to our US dollar about (45:1). This made things very inexpensive for us. You can take a taxi most anywhere in the city for around $2-4 USD. A huge slice of really good pizza is $1.50. I had my first Starbucks of the trip because a drink that would be over $5 at home was only $2.90 in Buenos Aires. We stayed at good hostels that were downtown and central to everything for $10 a night per person. It was nice being in a big city with all the amenities without having to pay big city prices. After my walking tour, I returned to the hostel and got Taylor and Brendan to go out and find some dinner. We explored a little bit that night and found the BA version of Times Square. They had many theaters all around and a lot of big flashing lights. We found some killer pizza before we headed back to the hostel for the night.
