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Published: December 6th 2023
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Francisco Pascasio Moreno (1852-1919)
The explorer who is responsible for a lot of the border between Chile and Argentina. Our rest day started off with hotel breakfast (so I did have to set an alarm). We did a little exploring after, and found a cute park with very informational signs near the hotel. We couldn't have asked for better weather! Sunny and warm, about 70, with no wind.
Part of our wandering included a typical part of travel for us: stop at an ATM to pull out some local currency for cash on hand. An odd thing happened-- every ATM at the bank looked like it would work, then said it couldn't fulfill our request. We even tried very low withdrawal amounts. Nothing. Everyone takes credit card, so we just moved on for now. After a little more wandering, it was about lunchtime. We stopped at a nice place for empanadas. Oh my gosh they were amazing! Great choice. After that we stopped back at the hotel to regroup.
This is when we had a chance to do some digging about the ATM issue, and stumbled onto some other interesting information. Argentina uses the Argentinian peso currently (ARS), though that may change with their new president (elected right before our trip, and word is he's looking to use
Enchilada lunch at La Tolderia
92 cents each. Can't beat that! So good! the USD as their official currency). They've been struggling with astronomical inflation and it's made their currency extremely unreliable. The USD or Euro, however, is very stable and reliable, so there is a black market for US dollars. They actually call it a "blue market" because of the stripe in $100 bills. It's not legal, but it's common. We didn't know about all that so we didn't get into that. (There are whole articles about wiring yourself money through Western Union to exchange on the blue market).
We learned 2 extremely useful pieces of information. 1: Americans (and likely others, maybe everyone) are not allowed to withdraw more than something stupid like 300 pesos from the ATM at a time (about a dollar). And here's the second awesome piece of info: THEY HAVE A SECOND OFFICIAL EXCHANGE RATE FOR VISA/MASTERCARD PURCHASES. What the what??!! It passed into law last year, and it's called the MEP (Electronic Payment Market). There's actually an official Visa website you can use that shows the cost on their cards on the day of purchase in your local currency.
https://usa.visa.com/support/consumer/travel-support/exchange-rate-calculator.html This rate is a solid 65%!l(MISSING)ess than the other official exchange rate (like
Lunchtime buddy
One of the many street dogs. This one just chilled out with us. Not begging, just happy for the company I think. for Amex and cash). Many businesses will post a lower cash price, but the Visa rate beats even that (I say Visa not MC because while everywhere took Visa, we did find at least one place that didn't take MasterCard). Prior to this, we had almost exclusively been using Amex (the preferred card for all of us). The official exchange rate put things around the cost of NYC, or a more expensive tourist area, maybe more (beer was like $10-15 each). With our new rate, suddenly it was the cheapest place I've ever visited, by far. Beer was like $2-4 each. That lunch that was $60? Would have been like $20. Dinner last night for $100? Under $40. All of a sudden, we wanted to go on shopping sprees and eat at the most expensive restaurants there. I should mention that we did a test charge first and confirmed the extremely favorable Visa exchange rate (and extremely unfavorable regular one that Amex uses). We're not exactly sure who eats the difference, but we really hope it's not the businesses and I want to think that if it was, they would just stop accepting Visa/MC.
Armed with this newfound knowledge
Yeti Ice Bar
-15deg Celsius in there! They had cups and shot glasses made out of ice. we set off anew. We realized that this explains why the second hotel reservation that John booked (on a Visa because the hotel didn't take Amex) was one third the price of the one I booked. And we also were very much lamenting that the glacier tour, the most expensive part, was on Amex not Visa. You win some you lose some.
But we did have an amazing and wicked cheap dinner, followed by an ice bar experience! I've been to one in Vegas, and it was very similar, maybe just a little bigger. But first time for Jamison and John. They limit you to 25 minutes inside as a group, which is probably perfect for that temperature. We had entrance and open bar for 3 people for about $20.000 (20,000 pesos), which is roughly $20 at the new exchange rate. I thought it would be a preview of what we'd feel the next day (spoiler alert, this was WAYYY colder). We planned to try a different place for dinner, but ended up back at La Zorra. Another awesome meal! And we fed some of the many street dogs on our walk home with some yummy leftovers. There are
Polar bear
We found the bear in the ice bar! probably about 20-30 dogs that wander those particular streets, mostly big mixes of German shepherd, golden retriever, and husky type of thing. All medium/big mutts. But they are very well-fed, and some of them are actually obese. They're all extremely friendly though -wagging tails when you get close or pet them, walk with you for a while just because, lay near you when you eat at the restaurants (obviously haha). The perfect dog if you had a huge piece of land for them to wander! We again had eaten dinner around 10, so by the time we got back to the hotel it was probably midnight. Hard hours to keep without a siesta! But we had an early day the next day for the glacier tour, so we didn't stay out long. It was a nice day off, and much needed in a busy schedule!
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