Buenos Aires with Aaron and Brett as well as Starting Work at CHRW and my Business Trip to Las Rojas

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So it’s been nine days since I last wrote and a ton has happened since then!!! So I got back from Paraguay and got all set to go to work on Monday the 1st of June however I received an email from my new boss that I wouldn’t be able to start until June 6th because the guy I am reporting to, Julian, who is a hell of a guy by the way, was on vacation. So that left me a week to dick around some more in BA and hang out with ABC (Aaron Berry Cook for those of you who haven’t been keeping up). So Monday I got back here and checked into my new hostel, had to leave the madness of the Milhouse because honestly it was killing me slowly. The new hostel is very cool and very chill, it’s more like home and I can actually sleep at night! The owner is an American guy who is very cool and I am just down with the ambience. Monday night I went out to dinner with ABC and we had some Chinese food and then went back to the Milhouse for the party. I had a couple beers but was feeling fairly ill still from the “Iguazu Incident” as we’re calling it these days, so I just went back home to the hostel and passed out. Tuesday I am not 100% sure what I did, ABC’s woman Lauren got here and he was hanging out with her all day. I am pretty sure I just illed around the hostel and didn’t do anything at all. I am fairly sure I did the same on Wednesday and tried not to spend any money which worked really well. Actually I think I walked to my future, now current, office to time how long it took from the hostel to the office and it was only about a fifteen minute walk. In fact now I do remember just hanging out at the hostel those days. I met a nice girl named Jackie from Massachusetts who wanted to go to El Tigre because she had never been and it was her last week in BA so I said I would go with her since I had already been and it is a nice chill place. So Thursday we went to El Tigre and did basically the same exact thing that ABC, Joey, Brett and I did when we went. When we got back to the hostel, Brett had returned from Paraguay and checked into the hostel but wasn’t there. We had bought a few things for dinner so Jackie and I were cooking and Brett got back which was pretty cool because I hadn’t seen him in a minute. We hung out and drank some wine and decided that we weren’t going out no matter what. So we started drinking rum with these two guys from Venezuela, one of them lives in Barcelona and the other is from Caracas, however we finished the bottle and decided at around 3am that it would be a good idea to go to the bars. So we went to a bar close to our house and got really fucked up, we lost Brett and Gustavo, the guy who lives in Spain, so Carlos, the guy from Caracas, a tall guy who is soft spoken but hilarious in his own right, also one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet, decided to go to a more banging club so we headed to Club 69. We stayed there for a while and got fairly fucked up and then went to a late dinner, or early I guess you could say around 6am at some random ass restaurant near our hostel. I slept most of the next day. Aaron, Lauren, and Simon met us for dinner at a place in Palermo called Las Cabras or “The Goats” for you non Spanish speakers…it was really delicious and the place was filled with Argentinians so we knew it would be. After dinner and a lot of conversation we went to a place called Milion, which is a super swanky place in Recoleta and was basically like a converted hotel, or a bar with three levels that served food and had a DJ but it was more like a swanky before club place. We had some beers and enjoyed the atmosphere and then headed off to Crobar. It was packed as usual but we got up into VIP and bought a bottle of vodka because I mean as Aaron always says, WHY NOT?? Hahah. We got fairly hammered and I think we all knew it. After Crobar we asked the taxi to take us somewhere that was open and he took us to a club that was in fact closed as it was nearly 730am. However the bouncer knew of a place really close so we walked there and it was what we affectionately call “the Vampire Bar” because this place was a dark as I have ever seen a bar. There were no lights on in what was basically a basement with very strong electronic music playing extremely loud. We danced and bought canned beer for about an hour and when we came out of the club it was light out. I got back to the hostel and basically slept all the next day as well! The vampire bar turned us into proper vampires. I started work on the 6th of June which as a Monday and it went really well. I have to say that my head was hurting like crazy from all the Spanish speaking and learning how the office works. It was fairly overwhelming the first day but the second day was a lot better. A guy I work with Fernando Mauriz is really cool and kind of took me under his wing and has helped me get acquainted with everything and the office as well as how things work down here. We’ve gone out to lunch a bunch of times and he takes me to the Argentinian places that I would never go to if I didn’t have someone like him. My boss Julian, took me out to lunch one of the first days which was really nice, we had some steak. And my big boss, German, whom I met with originally took me out with Juli a few days later so it’s been a pretty solid gig so far. I think there is a ton of potential in this office and being a part of their growth and their expansion into using Express has been great. Aaron left a week after Lauren arrived and coincidentally Brett left on the same day so we had a last supper farewell dinner at a place called La Brigada which had some delicious salad and steak. It was really sad to see both those guys go, they have been my travel buddies for a long time and now I am flying solo in Buenos Aires!! The hostel has been pretty wild, last weekend I didn’t want to go out but Carlos; my Venezuelan friend had his flight cancelled due to the volcanic ash from a volcano that is erupting in Chile. This was happening to a lot of people but since he was still here we decided to have some drinks. We ended up going out till six am again which was just silly. I recently returned from a trip to Las Rojas, where CHRW has an office on site of a huge seed plant. It’s the largest plant of its kind in all of Latino America. I went with Juli, Maru, and Nico. Also many of the other managers from the BA office attended this trip. It was a meet and greet for me but it was basically a huge lunch for the people that work in Rojas to show them how much the company appreciates them. We had a huge asado lunch, just me and thirty Argentinians! They served short ribs; flank steak, two different types of salad, one house salad and one with just shredded carrots and boiled eggs, there were also French fries and gasiosa. It was a really great experience eating with all those people and talking to most of them, I had never eaten a huge asado like that with just me and no other gringos!! After the day was over Julian put me up in a really nice hotel in the city for the night, it is by far the nicest place I have stayed on this trip thus far. I went to dinner with four guys from the office, Marcos, Juan, and Franco, we went to a bowling alley type place in town and it had good food and some beers, I was exhausted though and didn’t really feel like hanging out too late so after dinner they took me back to my hotel. Today I woke up in a fog and didn’t really feel like getting out of bed that is for sure, it was rainy and cold. But the day passed very quickly, after I got to Rojas with Juli and Maru, we talked a little with the people who worked there. After about an hour of chatting, I went with a guy named “Rana” or frog in English, because he looks like a frog (and he really did) to some depositories or warehouses that are around the seed plant. Frog’s job is to basically make sure that all the trucks that are loading the product in the warehouse are up to par, clean, dry, odor free, all that good stuff. These depositories are pretty strict so he says that he doesn’t usually have problems with having to reject trucks because the drivers know that if their shit isn’t together they aren’t going to get loaded. After that we took off back to Buenos Aires. We said our goodbyes to everyone and bounced. Me, Juli, and Maru drinking Mate and smoking cigarettes in the car on the way home. Juli and Maru smoke so much it’s really unbelievable!! Anyways now I am back in my room just hanging out and about to make some dinner. I’ll touch base soon, less than three weeks until I am off to Spain and Holland  !!!!

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