Buenos Aires

It's been about 2 weeks in Buenos Aires and thing have come together quite nicely. Work is going well, circus is keeping me in shape, and Spanish lessons start tomorrow morning. I believe Amy has some pictures up on facebook, and I'll try to get a link to them soon for those that need it. I have to apologize for taking fewer and fewer pictures. As we settle in and live more and more like locals, we tend to have our camera on us less. Perhaps I need a camera phone.

Over the past two weeks I've come across some things I love, and some things I love less. For example, I love biking in this city. There are no real laws, and bikes compete with cars and motorcycles for space, jockeying for position as if it were Nascar.

Two-wheeled unicycle. I call it a two-nacycle. Fishy.

What I love less is the 4-5 hour journey that was our trip to the international shipping office. It was taken over by the government at some point and went down the tubes. In short, if you're feeling like sending me a gift/package/whatever, don't do it unless you hate me or you think it's worth waiting forever for. What I love is that I consider every day that you each haven't shipped me a package a little gift. Thank you so much, to reciprocate, I have elected to not write you a thank-you letter.

I also love the little cafes that are ubiquitous in this city. What I love less is the feeling that bringing my laptop into them will get marked for a stabbing/robbing if I do it for long enough. On the plus side, it keeps me from living on the Internets.

Medialuna = sticky croissant = lounging

I've just taken some pictures of our current apartment and I'm sure they'll be on facebook soon. Now that we've settled into this place (in the middle of a 2-month stay), we're looking at weekend trips out of Buenos Aires. This last weekend we went to Tigre, an enmorous delta that we'll have to return to kayak to. It's fully populated, with river signs that read like street signs. Next weekend we're aiming to stay at an estancia outside the city for some horse-play, canoeing, and living like a gaucho.

[photo album link misplaced due to time rift]

Backlog: Final Days in Peru to First Days in Buenos Aires

It's been a while since I've posted, so here's a quick rundown of what's been happening.

The end of Peru was delightful. Arequipa was the last city we were in, and it was delightful. At the time, I had remarked that it was my favourite (and largest) city we had seen in America del Sur. I find that the more people you meet (in more than a casual way) the more you feel like the city you met them in is 'awesome', so there may be a bit of bias here. So what happened? Here are the coles notes:

1) The food was awesome and cheap (even for Peru standards!).
2) We went river rafting and did a minor cliff jump in the process. Our guide was the first guy I had a real (mostly) Spanish conversation with and my first friend for partying that was a for-real Latin American.
3) We went mountain biking down El Misti, with quite the cool guide. This is a mountain that's rolls right into the city of Arequipa, we're looking at about 4400m to about 2500m. Stupendous. The guide has some great stories too. (Un)fortunately he was too excited and fluent in English for us to really practice our Spanish with.

After Arequipa, we (foolishly?) decided to bus through Chile to Buenos Aires. The short of it is that we spent around 60 hours on buses, broken up by a night in Arica and Santiago for dinner. On the plus side, we earned passport stamps for Chile!

We've been in Buenos Aires, Argentina for a full week now and I have plenty to say about it, but I'll save it for later. I will say this though, CAD $3 bottles of wine are more than twice as good as CAD $1.50 bottles of wine.

There is a severe drought of pictures from Chile (understandably) and Buenos Aires (less understandably), but here's some more Peru for you:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=322904&id=667531677&l=a9115f53dd