Jason Wells

Heather and Jason write:

From last Sunday. It’s been a very eventful week, so we were looking forward to sleeping in that morning. We were surprised when the phone rang at 7:30 because our guide was downstairs. We had 15 minutes to get out the door to catch our ferry to Uruguay. Our itinerary said we’d be picked up at 9:45, so we were completely unprepared. On the way to the ferry we expressed our frustration to our guide. This is the fourth time this week that there’s been a major schedule error by the vacation package people, the first of course being when they failed to pick us up at the airport. Our guide promised to contact the company for us, and we went on our way to board the ferry to Uruguay.

We were traveling on our own once we got to the ferry terminal on the Argentina side of Rio de la Plata. The police report we’d gotten helped us get through Uruguay immigration with a minimum of fuss and we were on our way. On the hour-long ferry across the river we had some coffee and relaxed, resolved to meet the chaos with good spirits. Then we discovered that our return tickets didn’t agree with the time our guide said she’d be meeting us on our return to BA! So the first order of business upon reaching Colonia was finding a locutorio (basically, an Internet cafe with rentable cell phones) and calling our guide in Argentina to let her know she was picking us up a few hours later than she thought. That settled, we began exploring the tiny town of Colonia.

A street in Colonia, Uruguay. The lighthouse is visible in the distance.

The town itself is quiet and tree-lined cobblestone streets with small houses, restaurants and stores. Motorcycles, small cars and golf carts run here and there, but on a gorgeous day like this, many people were out on foot.

We started with a leisurely lunch of steak (for Jason) and gnocchi (for Heather) followed by bread pudding with the local specialty, dulce de leche. It’s sold everywhere, both in Argentina and Uruguay, and we’re definitely bringing a jar of it home with us. We finished it off with cafe doble for each of us. ALL of the coffee we’ve had on this trip has been incredible, courtesy of the Italian influence and the Brazilian coffee beans.

We realized pretty quickly that much of Colonia is a tourist trap. Think Colonial Williamsburg but with mate gourds instead of tricorn hats. Our tickets included a bus and walking tour, which could have been titled “The Portuguese Sure Are Dumb (Ha Ha).” Our guide told us the bloody history of the town as though it were a cartoon with the Portuguese playing the role of Wile E. Coyote, constantly hatching plots that were doomed to fail. “The Portuguese tried to establish a colony and take the area from Spain, but that was a dumb idea, because the Portuguese weren’t very good fighters!  Ha ha!” “The Portuguese decided to hold off the Spaniards by building a wall, but that was a bad idea because the wall wasn’t very long and took them 47 years to build! Ha ha!” At the end of the tour our guide said that “we Italians” were smart enough to wait until the Spanish and Portuguese had settled the town and finished killing each other before taking over. Ouch. Pretty spicy.

Centuries-old house of the Portuguese style.

We were glad when the tour was over and we could explore on our own. The town really is lovely with its cobblestone streets and views of the river, even though we were keenly aware that absolutely everything was carefully presented for us. We wandered through dozens of little shops in the historic area, took photos from the top of the lighthouse, and enjoyed each other’s company.

View from the top of the lighthouse.

In the lighthouse.

It was the very first time since arriving in South America that we’d encountered other norteamericanos (outside of the U.S. Embassy of course) which was actually a bit of a shock to the senses. On the ferry back we laughed at the Ricardo Montalbaln sound-alike voice of the English version of the announcements. “Ladies and gentlemen. We are pleased to announce that the catering services are now available for your disposition.” The ferry back to B.A. in the evening was a enormous catamaran with luxurious seats and complimentary champagne and was an unexpected treat.

This is by far the weirdest thing on this trip. Found all over the gift shops in Colonia.

Thereafter we were picked up at the terminal and whisked back to the apartment. All in all, a good day.

Jason writes:

As devastatingly glamorous as Buenos Aires is, sometimes, you just want to veg. Maybe you’ve been up all night at a milonga or hiking across town all day, and now you’re back and you want to park your ass on the couch and flip on the TV. Especially with all the amazing news lately.

Obviously you can watch local TV. I watched the election results on CNN Español. Having a political Rosetta Stone really exercised my crude Spanish linguistic abilities. But that aside, TV is pretty bad here. True, there are babes galore on just about every channel, but I’m really not into breathless telenovelas or badly dubbed American shows that were bad to begin with.

So what to do? Use the Internet. Two primary options for TV are Hulu and Netflix. Which is great, except… If you visit either from an Argentine IP address, you get terse apologies about international content licensing restrictions, and little else.

So, give up? Hell no! The Internet was made for hacking/cheating. (Cue “information wants to be free” or your favorite alternative Wired cliché.) There are always options. In this case, the best one is to use a proxy.

For those who don’t know, a proxy is basically something that represents your computer (to Hulu etc.) with another computer. The other computer bridges data to and from you, while seeming to be some other computer.

So, you may be wondering, if you haven’t yet fallen asleep or returned to Facebook, what? Ok, here’s what. We’re going to use an American proxy to get the video to us, this fooling them into thinking we’re in America (where the content is accessible without restriction) rather than Argentina (where apparently it isn’t).

We tried a few and settled on Hotspot, which is Googlable and free. You have to put up with some annoying ads, but they’re ignorable. It’s usable within the browser, and the setup is pretty easy, it takes about five minutes. The UI is repellant, but it works. If you want to watch Colbert in Argentina, it’s the way to go.

Jason writes:

In just a few minutes we’ll be off to Tigre, so I’ll make this quick. Here’s a glimpse of a famous street in barrio La Boca of Buenos Aires known as Caminito. We went there on Tuesday. This is the place where tango was born, and where you can find it danced in the street. Aside from Caminito, La Boca’s reputed to be a very rough place, and probably it always was.

Here are a few pictures of this exceptionally vivid part of town:

Heather writes:

Jason finally has a new passport, and now the last bit of business is to file a police report, or else Jason could get in trouble when we try to leave Argentina. His new passport has no entrance stamp, which will be checked when we leave. We have a day trip planned to Colonia, Uruguay on Sunday, so it’d be best if we have this taken care of before then.

On Wednesday we explored a bit more of Buenos Aires on our own, and stopped in a bookstore that had been recommended to us by one of our guides here. It would turn out to be the first of two historical theatres we’d visit that day. El Ateneo on Avenida Santa Fe was originally the Teatro Gran Splendid. Now all of the seating areas, including the main floor and the balconies, house books, films, and music. The box seats are seating areas, and the stage is now a cafe. I took a photo of Jason as we stood on the third-level balcony. If you look below him you can see a TV interview going on on the second-level balcony and the cafe on the stage.

Jason standing on the third mezzanine in El Ateneo.

All of our guidebooks and our Spanish-English dictionary had been in Jason’s bag. We were able to replace one of the guidebooks here, and we selected a paperback Spanish-English dictionary. We also purchased two tango CDs.

The bookstore was a real treat to visit, but the dictionary we purchased there has been a source of disappointment and amusement. The first half-dozen words we looked up weren’t in the Spanish side of the dictionary at all, but I really began to doubt the dictionary when I started looking up words on the English side. Now we’re afraid to use the dictionary at all, imagining ourselves in a recreation of the infamous Monty Python “Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook” skit.

Here’s a sample of words that I’ve found in the English side of the dictionary:

aitchbone
froward
bantling
bradawl
commination
eleemosynary
hooping-cough

As it turns out, these are all real words, but fairly useless unless we were trying to translate something like the Canterbury Tales into Castellano. Meanwhile, words we actually needed like “outlet,” “plug,” and “adapter” aren’t anywhere to be found. I take that back–“plug” is in the dictionary, but the first translation is “taco.”

On Wednesday evening we went to Piazzolla Tango for dinner and a tango show. We didn’t know what to expect, didn’t even know where we were going when the car came to pick us up. We were the first to arrive, so when we were first seated we had the entire theatre to ourselves for a few minutes. The theatre is absolutely stunning, and we learned later that the Art Nouveau theatre had been closed for 40 years and recently restored. The theatre soon filled with tour groups, although Jason and I had a table for two. The show was “stage tango” and very different from what we’ve studied. We expected this, but we haven’t seen much stage tango at all before this. It was also the first time we’ve seen tango with live music. Between and sometimes during the tango dancing were songs from a male and a female singer, sometimes singing duets from opposite boxes of the theatre. Unfortunately I didn’t understand a word of it, although the crowd really enjoyed it. As expected, the dancing was highly choreographed and sometimes barely recognizable to us as tango. Before we leave Buenos Aires I’d like to see at least one more tango show. They are advertised everywhere, so I’ll need to ask around and find out more about which one to see. There are some free shows as well on Florida, and some of the dancers we’ve met perform there.

In the next entry Jason will write about the dance classes we’ve been to so far and our first milonga experience.

Heather:

I promise that I’ll write about the city tour and the other fun stuff we’ve done, but first I want to capture the last few days as we’ve tried to recover from the theft and what it’s been like as Americans watching the election from Buenos Aires.

I’m looking forward to the day that we can just be vacationers and not be dealing with bureaucratic tangles. Arriving in Buenos Aires on a Sunday complicated matters, since nothing is open on Sundays. Banks are only open from 10 to 3 on weekdays here, and at many banks I’ve seen lines that stretch outside the building and down the block. The U.S. Embassy has limited hours as well. Monday and Tuesday we went to our tango classes and on our planned excursions, determined not to let the rough landing ruin our trip. We decided that we needed to postpone our planned classes for today and try to straighten everything out.

We’ve made two visits to the U.S. Embassy so far to get a new passport for Jason. I think I had some preconception from watching TV that we’d arrive at a big gate, say the magic words, “We are U.S. citizens,” and we’d be escorted quickly inside by concerned American officials who wanted to take care of us. The whole experience was rather more like going to the DMV, except that most of the people there spoke little to no English. The security is apparently provided by a private Argentinean company, so until we made it all the way to the passport windows we had to get by on our limited Spanish. I would guess that 80% of the people going to the Embassy are there to get visas to enter the United States. We picked up the forms on Monday, and returned today to get the passport, however it turns out that today is an administrative holiday (the security guard explained in halting English) so we’ll have to try again tomorrow. We’re supposed to go to Colonia, Uruguay on Sunday, but Jason won’t be able to travel without his passport. I hope we get this all worked out.

I told Jason that the silver lining to this is that he needed a new passport photo anyway. I think his old photo looked like an angry terrorist, someone who sends letter bombs and lives alone in a shack.

After realizing that the embassy was closed today, we sat down on a park bench across the street to look at a map and discuss our next steps. After a few minutes we were approached by a uniformed officer who spoke no English. At first I wasn’t sure if we weren’t in some kind of trouble for loitering, but then I realized that he was just trying to find out if we needed directions. I’m not used to armed men in body armor trying to help me find my way.

Our other main objective was to replace the cash that had been stolen so we could pay our rent to the landlady, who will only take cash and only take it in U.S. dollars. I was not at all sure that I’d be able to navigate a local bank and get U.S. dollars. I ended up calling American Express and asking about how I could get an emergency cash withdrawal. They directed me to the local American Express travel office. Fortunately everything went completely smoothly at the travel office. I explained that I needed the money in dollars, not pesos. I was concerned that this would be a problem, since I’d gotten some conflicting information about whether it was even possible to withdraw cash in dollars. Fortunately it turned out not to be a problem, although I had to show them my U.S. passport and sign an affidavit that I’m not a resident of Argentina nor do I plan to be here for more than a year.

So far on our trip, we’ve been reminded again and again that the exchange rate of pesos to dollars is favorable to us and disadvantageous to Argentineans. One of our tour guides told us proudly that, “we used to be a rich country,” and that the exchange rate of pesos to dollars used to be 1 to 1. We’ve had the now-defunct Harrod’s on Florida pointed out to us several times, with wistful descriptions of how posh and beautiful it used to be. One of our guides remembered fondly of what it used to be like for Argentineans traveling abroad. Now they can’t afford to travel abroad, but we Americans can afford to visit them. The exchange rate today is more than 3 to 1. It is telling that our landlady absolutely refuses to take pesos from us for the rent and that I could only withdraw dollars because I could prove I’m not Argentinean.

We watched the election news last night (actually early this morning) on CNN Espanol, and today every news-stand in Buenos Aires is covered with photos of Obama. I saw one newspaper with the headline, “MARTES NEGRO.” I really wonder if they understand what connotation that phrase has, and how completely offensive that headline is. I hope not. Everyone else we’ve met has been very interested in the U.S. election and happy with the result. In a bookstore today Jason used his CA driver’s license as identification, and the cashier asked us if we’d voted and who we’d voted for. “After Bush, anyone would be better,” was the cashier’s opinion.

OK, hopefully all the heavy stuff is behind us and from now on we can just talk about the adventures we’re having. We’ve got some photos to share that I’ll post later. Tonight we go to a dinner and tango show, so it’ll be our first taste of the famous Buenos Aires nightlife.