A Mess of a Morning Trying to get our Visas for Paraguay

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Last night was our last night with Joey here in Buenos Aires. Aaron, Brett, and I went to his apartment and had dinner with him and Jessie. We made some rib eye with a red wine reduction and also made some pasta tossed with onion, garlic, and a white wine cream sauce topped with sautéed red peppers. It was a delicious meal. We all hung out and chatted until about 1am and we said our goodbyes. Brett and I had to get up this morning and go to the Paraguayan consulate this morning to get our visas to enter the country in a couple days so we were trying to get a good night’s sleep. However about 3am the club next to our hostel started just RAMMING and they played ridiculous dance music until literally 745 this morning. I didn’t sleep all that well to say the least probably got about an hour and a half or so. I was cranky when I woke up and we went to try and find a bank that would give us American dollars, none would because first of all the banks aren’t open until 10am here, neither are the money exchanges. It is totally ridiculous, and none of the ATM’s would dispense us dollars even though they said they would on the outside. We went to three or four different ATM’s and the third one we went to had some bums sleeping in the vestibule, I didn’t really want to go in because well hey they looked dirty but I did anyways because I needed to see if we could get some dollars. The smell was the most foul thing I have ever smelled in my life. It smelled like decrepit human flesh and human feces mixed with cat urine all rolled into one. I literally gagged the entire time I was in there, Brett almost puked. It was awful. Just another great icing on the cake since we couldn’t get any dollars there either. We decided to wait until 10am for the money exchange to open so we could go get dollars. The problem we were facing is that we needed to get to the consulate early enough to obtain our visas same day because we don’t want to stay here in the Milhouse any longer, it’s just too much. So we went back to sleep for a while, or more appropriately actually got some sleep for about an hour and then got up again and headed to get our dollars. We had to put our bags in the basement because we had to check out of our room at that point and then after that we went to the cambio. There was of course a ridiculously long line as is the case here with pretty much everything you need to do that is important. It took forever and cost us 14 pesos extra but we got the dollars and headed to the consulate. So as if anything could have made this morning more trying, we arrived to the consulate to find literally 100-200 people waiting outside and inside the place for god knows what, probably some type of visas or who knows but it was crowded, hot and disorderly. We made our way up to the front however and we were astounded that the guy was accommodating and told us that if we came back today at 1500 he’d give us our visas! So basically we gave this guy $100 and our passports and he gave us a small piece of paper promising us these things back in a few hours. I guess you have to take some things on faith. We’re heading to Iguazu tonight and then to Paraguay, the falls should be amazing, I really can’t wait. I’ll update from there, sorry I don’t have any pics but hopefully this bit of text will tide you over for a while.

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