Photos
All flights were on time, and turbulence was a minimum. The long overnight flight in small seats yielded little good sleep though. They showed at least 3 movies after dinner. We watched The Ides of March. Then we tried to sleep. I woke up to see part of Moneyball. And I then watched most of Water for Elephants. I broke my headset plug getting out of my seat after the first movie! Clay gave me his because he was watching the BBC's Pride & Prejudice on the tablet! We had already seen all 3 movies anyway. It is almost impossible to type on this tablet, or with the rollup keyboard AND the MS WORD app does not have a spellchecker!!! This really will be a lot of work now and later.
All flights were on time, and turbulence was a minimum. The long overnight flight in small seats yielded little good sleep though. They showed at least 3 movies after dinner. We watched The Ides of March. Then we tried to sleep. I woke up to see part of Moneyball. And I then watched most of Water for Elephants. I broke my headset plug getting out of my seat after the first movie! Clay gave me his because he was watching the BBC's Pride & Prejudice on the tablet! We had already seen all 3 movies anyway. It is almost impossible to type on this tablet, or with the rollup keyboard AND the MS WORD app does not have a spellchecker!!! This really will be a lot of work now and later.
There were 30 or so people with our Gohagan group on our flight. We got gathered up with our luggage right after we paid our $140 USD reciprocity fee and cleared customs/immigration. Our Argentine visas expire in 2022 and she told us that since our passports expire in 2018 that we can bring the expired one with the sticker and new passport to return later. That seems more than fair. We brought US cash for this but we could easily have used a credit card for this. With benefit of hindsight, we should have, but I had read too many horror stories of people arriving and the phone lines to process CC transactions were down. Gohagan gave us a letter on arrival at the hotel that states Le Boreal will take shipboard tips of $108-135 per person at the end of the cruise by either USD or Euros OR will charge a 5% service charge for using a credit card. We specifically brought along a Capital One credit card to pay those shipboard tips and would have paid the reciprocity fee with it, if Gohagan had shared that information earlier. Anyway, we went back to the same bank we stood in to get coins in 2008 across from H. Stern! We got local cash from the ATM there and will try to conserve our US cash for those tips. Just sayin'! It’s annoying, if they knew they should have said before we got to the hotel in BA.
We are staying at the Marriott Plaza hotel. It is directly at one corner of Plaza San Martin. It is in an impressive old building. We have an OK room, 517, with a view of an air shaft on the fifth floor! There is a reason that Trip Advisor reports either love or hate this place! It is really hot here in BA! We were exhausted and ready to take a nap but we forced ourselves to stay up and go out first to honor the local afternoon siesta tradition. We went to the hospitality desk and got directions and suggestions first. Clay wanted to replace the capybara leather wallet he bought here in 2008. We bought one at the second store we checked on the hostess' recommendation. He also got a new t-shirt. We found a supermercado and bought a big bottle of water. We found the big Quilmes beer there too! Ha!
Then we went to his lunch pick place El Federal but the locals didn't like it when we asked so we walked on around to their recommendation of Las Nazarenas. It was a great choice. We really liked it. We ate the fixed price 5 part lunch menu at 80A$ which is about $20US. It was good and a good price for more than enough food for us. Argentine beef is really different. I think it is fresh and feeds by grazing only.
Brace yourselves for a load of photos now. Clay went nuts and got himself invited into the kitchen again! It really was a great lunch. The waiter even snatched Bob up off the table before we left and posed with him over my shoulder for Clay to take a photo! We highly recommend Las Nazarenas and the fixed price lunch was a great deal. Oh, and our meal was delivered to the table on a small portable charcoal brazier, where it was plated and served. Somehow, Clay managed to be either so agog or jetlagged that he failed to get a photo of the thing!
Earlier we drove by the opera house, Teatro Colon and it was not covered by scaffolding this time! Beautiful. We are really glad we had already seen everything else we wanted to see here before. We were too tired and miserable to enjoy today. We napped through the afternoon. The bed here is incredible! It is like a giant marshmallow covered in down comforter and pillows. Best nap since Istanbul, which coincidently was in 1999 after my last similar overseas coach flight! (The one in 2000 was the bulkhead aisle and was much more tolerable.) Hmmm...
Buenos Aires means fair wind as a port... Also did not realize before that BA is 2 hours ahead of East Coast USA time.
At 6-7pm Gohagan had a Cocktail reception introduction at the hotel meeting room. The first person we met there was Barbara Crews! She came over because she thought she recognized our faces. She shook my hand and I asked her if she knew who we were. She confessed she didn't and then I said Grin, an Airedale Terrier, and told her she used to be our vet in El Paso. She remembered then. Her husband Billy couldn't believe it. After meat and cheese canapés and beer, wine and juice, we decided to skip dinner and Clay would go use the hotel treadmill while I did chores.
Good choice since a massive thunderstorm is raging this evening. But, Gohagan's local hosts did arrange an evening out at a Tango show this evening. They must have gotten a lot of people to go because they said the bus would leave at 8pm. Hopefully they didn’t get too wet. I think we heard it was $180pp this morning at the hospitality desk. That is about $40-50 more than we paid in '08 as I recall. But they had dinner with their show tonight so that seems reasonable. We heard that the food was fine and the show was very good. Clay's wallet price doubled since ‘08! Anyway we'll be early to bed tonight.
Tomorrow Gohagan provides a breakfast buffet in the meeting room at 7am, a very important briefing at 8am (mandatory) and then there is a city tour at 9am. It will visit the highlights and we will see them again. I'm sure it will all be new to Clay. Typing is such a nightmare right now that I will leave the tour description for captioning of Clay’s photos after we get home!!! The tour ends at 1pm. Then we are on our own until the flight to Ushuaia. Our airport greeter shared that as we are over 200 people that we are on 3 different flights on Saturday. Our hotel welcome letter NOTES that at least one group will have to depart for the airport by 4am on Saturday. Presumably the mandatory breakfast tomorrow is where we learn our flight assignments, since the letter also states we have to provide baggage plans from 1-5pm tomorrow and pickup our color-coded luggage tags. Well, that is it from day one in BA. Goodnight from BA.
Photos
Photos
