Buenos Aires Argentina

I am sorry but I have no pics from this part of my trip. I lost them when my computer crashed before I had backed them up. It was a good lesson to me.

I decided to see if I liked living in Argentina so I flew down to check it out. I had heard that there was some awesome trout fishing there for gigantic trout. I arrived after a 23 hour trip from San Francisco, California. I was exhausted from the long flight and the delays in the trip. Travel days involving international airports always hurt me because I have mobility issues walking and trouble sitting for long periods of time. They both cause my chronic pain to increase dramatically. After a long trip like this one I am sometimes unable to get around for several days. So in anticipation I had already arranged a week in a nice hotel with transportation from the airport prebooked.

I arrived at my hotel in Recoleta after a nice ride from the airport. I went straight to my room, took some meds and crashed for a couple of days. I was barely able to get up to get food. After a couple of days I felt better and took a short walk around the neighborhood of my hotel. The first thing I noticed were all the young men and women that were obviously hookers along the streets. Prostitution is legal in Argentina and it is clearly popular judging by the amount of workers on the streets. The second thing I noticed is how cheap everything was, especially meals in nice looking restaurants. For five to ten bucks I saw great looking fixed price meals. The fixed price seemed to be a popular option in the restaurants. There were a lot of places specializing in grilled meats, in fact most of them did. Beef is king in Argentina. Huge steaks with sides included were the favorite choices in the restaurants. I picked a place that had a sign for six bucks and went in to eat. I sat down and told them I wanted the fixed price steak dinner. It was around 9:30 at night and I was the only person in the place. The waiter asked me if I was eating this early or was I going to have a few drinks first. I chose to eat then so he told me it would take about a half hour to serve me because they weren't quite ready to serve dinner yet. Argentinians eat their dinner at around 11:30 to 12:30 at night so I was a couple of hours early. The meal included a huge steak, potates, salad, mixed vegies, two tall glasses of wine, bread, coffee and dessert for six bucks. I could not eat it all. I took my time and watched all the nice girls walking by my outdoor table, and there were lots of them. I thought right away that if I don't get some self control started right now I am going to gain a ton of weight eating like this every day unless some of these hotties walking by were going to help me work off some calories on a nightly basis.

After I ate I had to walk around to feel better. I headed for the famous graveyard in downtown Recoleta. It was too late for me to want to walk around inside but it clearly was not too late for the local people because the streets were packed with people. It was around 11pm and the sidewalks were crowded with well dressed people. I half expected them all to be fat with the cheap food but almost all were very fit looking. They were not real friendly. I did not see many people greeting each other or acknowledging it when I said hello to them. They all seemed kind of cold. But if they were greeting one of their friends then they were effusively friendly but in kind of a mechanical way. I did not see much warmth.

I continued walking and saw lots of theaters with various plays and different types of music in them. The theaters were very popular and even the small ones had long lines of people for the shows. The cafes were all crowded with people drinking coffee or wine and beer. Most of the tables were crowded with groups of four or more people all talking together and drinking. It was fairly reserved for the number of people and the amount of booze being consumed. I found out later at around 2 in the morning that the booze does indeed do its thing as the crowds were loud and very animated by then. I went up to my room at that point because I was still tired from my trip here. Three or four am is the peak of the night for entertainment in Argentina. Most of the clubs don't even open until at least midnight or 1am and then they party hardy until dawn when everybody spills out into the cafes again for some coffee to wake them up before going either home or frequently straight to work. I don't know how they do it staying up all night and going straight to work. They have to still be drunk when they get there no matter how much coffee they drink. But they do.

I looked around for an apartment to rent the next day and I found a very nice one bedroom apartment fully furnished with all utilities included for six hundred dollars a month. It was right in the heart of Recoleta which is the heart of Buenos Aries. I moved in a couple of days later. I was on the ninth floor so I had nice views out my windows and from my balcony. The store down the street where I went to stock up my new apartment with food and drinks was a very modern American style supermarket. The food prices were kind of high except for the staples which were cheap. I stocked up on all the usual foods I like to eat. Anything imported was very expensive. So if you wanted to eat American foods from the States you were going to pay dearly for that. I don't eat much prepared foods so to me it was no big deal that imported goods were expensive. The ice cream was my weakness and they had Hagen Das if you were willing to fork over the cash for it and I did.

In my neighborhood there was a bar called Shoeless Joe's that gave away free local draft beer. No bull just free beer. The place was packed. There were a lot of American students hanging out in this bar which was run by a couple of Americans. They had sports on like baseball, football or basketball. They took the signals from the internet so the pictures was kind of bad a lot of times but when the playoffs were on the picture was good enough to follow the game as you pounded down free beer. The had a restaurant with typical American bar foods and comfort foods. They made their money on the food and the hard alcohol that people drank.

The place was a lot of fun for me. I picked up lots of the young American college aged students and some tourists from this bar. There were also the usual hookers working the bar. I got to know all the ones in this bar after a couple of weeks. Not from going out with them but just from talking to them in the bar. I helped them write their online profiles in English. The internet was a popular way to find the prostitutes for tourists that came to Argentina for the sex trade. There were a lot of sex tourists. Some of them were American but there were planes full of Europeans that came on packaged sex tours from Spain and Germany. It was a crazy place.

I also hung out at an Irish pub a couple of blocks from my apartment. There was dancing there and a lot of girls were available any night of the week. I just wish the places started earlier. The American bar and this Irish one were the two earliest starting places I found and they were just a couple of minutes walk from my place. I met most of my friends in these two places.

There was a lot of other things in the area including a zoo, polo field, soccer fields, pools, lots of parks, a yacht club, a fishing club, horse racing track, malls, movie theaters, clubs of all sorts, good medical care and just about anything I could think of or want.