Escape to Argentina

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Day 3 of eight months in Argentina
I am typing this on the top bunk while Finn and Leah bat around a balloon. The home schooling is going very well. Adam is out looking for jobs so I have been exploring with the kids. They don't last long in the heat and noise of the big city. But today we discovered the port area, a bunch of old warehouses that have been redeveloped and now it is a very upmarket area of restaurants and luxury high rise apartments. Lots of places to wander without worrying about getting run over.
The flight was fantastic, valium worked ok - I was playing quiddler in the middle of the night with the kids. We are in a bunk room with a very high ceiling, two bunks and a cupboard. This is our little home. The hostel is for 18 to 36 year olds, but they have kindly let us stay. They play loud music from 10am to 2am. Serve us right for trying to be youth hostellers. Everyone pretty much ignores us and gets on with talkiong about their OEs. It is in a great barrio or neighbourhood of tatty colonial homes (Adam calls it faded beauty) and cobbled streets with lots of little shops and cafes and down the road a very old park when professional tango dancers do their thing.
So no fancy apartment yet. We think we will go on to Cordoba at the weekend. A man has offered us a room as "couch surfers".

Day4 ...
Today, I asked to see the manager! We had caught the bus to the Buenos Aires Club to go for a swim. Public swimming pools are very rare here and the man at the hostel recommended the club. So we hopped on number 29 on Defensa and sat on the bus for an hour and a half, going from one side of the city to the other, having conversations - or not having conversations - with the old lady sitting next to us on the bus, who chatted away in Spanish, did the sign of the cross every time we passed a church and stroked Leah's arm and velour skirt. It's a great trip through the different barrios, a monument on every corner it seems, past palacial museums and ornate churches.
The style of dress here is very casual, the girls and women all seem to wear short shorts or denim skirts - the occasional olive-skinned blonde in a white suit. There is a local, Larry King-type character on the tele who does chat shows. He wears all white, has sunbed tan and white hair and his chat set is all white leather.
Finally we arrived at the Buenos Aires club in a very chic part of town. It is guarded and gated you have to show a pass to get in. We asked the receptionist to use the pool. She said we'd have to sign up for a month etc etc, so we did the "but we're just here today, and we've come all this way!" "Try the Athletica Club;´she said, pointing to a building in the same grounds and off we went. We found a snippy young woman who told us it would cost 50 pesos each ($25 NZ) to use the pool and other facilities. So we thought since we'd come all this way we'd pay for the most expensive swim ever. Finn then decided he wanted to go on the running machine at the gym but the snippy recepionist said he was too young.. I said they should only have to pay half price, then asked to see the manager. He was in a meeting, of course. So I gave the snippy receptionist a short lecture on changing her attitude and stomped off. We decided to hang out at the club and use as many of the facilities as we could, made friends with the phys-ed coach, then hopped on the bus and came home.
We have adapted to Argentine hours very well. Slept till 1am yesterday after eating empanadas the night before at 10.30 (a free deal at the hostel) then going off for desert. The music is non stop and very loud till 2am at the hostel, then starts the next morning at midday. Its a party place - while we play cards, the other hostellers mingle and drink beer and chat each other up. We all share a tiny kitchen, there´s lots of food wrapped in plastic bags crammed into the fridge, much like flatt. So no different from our first OE except that everyone now has a laptop.


Day 5 ...
it is Saturday morning and we are packing up our gear and leaving our bunkroom home in Buenos Aires tonight and catching a bus to Cordoba. We are "couch surfing" in Cordoba with the family of an Argentine woman we met in Auckland. Buenos Aires has been a great experience. Haven´t done much in the way of touristy things but we have a favourite cafe just down the road.

Day 6 ...
Arriving in any town at 5.15 in the morning is never pleasant, specially after a long bus trip overnight. Wé paid for deluxe seats but it was like flying cattle class. So our first impression of Cordoba is a bus station - surprisngly lively. After a couple of hours lying on benches at the station we caught a taxi to the main city square - beautiful church at one end, monument in the middle, plenty of stray dogs, cockroaches, pigeons and people sleeping on the benches. We dragged our bags around the streets for a while searching for a cafe and filling time. Not a great introduction to Cordoba, in fact quite a depressing moment i.e what the hell are we doing? Adam assured me there would be an oasis very shortly. Sure enough when we pulled up at the home of our couch surfing family there was an oasis, complete with swimmng pool. The house is 70s-style, square, brick, courtyards etc. Spent the day lounging around the pool, sleeping and eating. Another family with two girls Leah´s age visited later in the day. We drank mate (local herbal tea) the girls all jumped in the pool, Leah chatting to them in English, Julia and Anna chatting to her in Spanish and they got on like best friends. We went off to kids´skate park just a block away, fantastic place with patter tennis court, toy racecar track, BMX bike track. You pay a small amount for a ticket and choose to play on something for 15 minutes. Great fun. At 10pm we went off to a barbecue at a cousin´s house across town. It was a farewell dinner to one of the cousins who is going to Ireland with her Irish boyfriend. Loads of different meats and salads, not unlike NZ. We finally climbed into bed at 1.30 and slept till midday! Such is our new life.

Week 2
Adam is doing a bit of home schooling with Finn - tricky maths questions. We have decided to set the kids tasks so that we don't drift from one day to the next without achieving anything. We thought we should leave our wonderful host family and found a hostel in downtown Cordoba today, but our family says we can stay on and right now a home with space, kind hosts, good food and confortable beds is the preferred option. Our routine is to get up about midday, have a breakfast of coffee and cereal or medialunar(half moons or croissants), then check emails, news, homework until the maid cooks lunch, then talk about going to do something, jump on a bus, wander around the city centre, have a drink, come back and sit around the table and talk to the family, watch a bit of Spanish tele and go to bed at midnight! I must get my act together and start speaking it myself. The family has given us a number of contacts for jobs teaching English and on Saturday we are meeting a woman who is an executive at one of the TV stations here.
Cordoba is roughly the same population as Auckland but is much more dense, street after street crammed with people and shops. It boasts a number of universities and a wealth of museums and cultural centres. So far I have only popped my head inside the cathedral and looked at the colourful ceiling.
Adam says his one gaol today is to watch a Manchester United game this afternoon on the TV.

A rainy Friday, March 12
I thought of Sunrise this morning when I got up at 11.30 and turned on the tele. There was a perky Dr John character talking about hernias and at the same time the presenters were learning to make tasty empanadas.
Wonder if my producing skills will be any good when I start teaching English at a local neighbourhood school next week. Sarita (the mother of Leah´s two friends) mentioned us to her daughters' English teacher who was desperate for someone from next week. I speak no Spanish so it will be total immersion for the kids. I think I will break the ice with a couple of kiwi action songs like "One day a Taniwha". It feels like we have be thrown into an instant community here thanks to the generosity of our host family. They have been calling friends about giving us jobs, have offered their holiday home to us and extended our stay here. But we feel it is time to move on and not outstay our welcome, which means hostelling again untill we can find an apartment.

Hablando Espanol
My very basic Spanish was put to the test yesterday. Adam went off for an interview with the head of the Communications degree course at Cordoba University. (They are going to see if they can find him a position on the communications degree course.)
The plan was to meet him at the Natural History Museum, a simple bus ride into town.
Buying the tickets was a mission in itself as the bus drivers only take tokens or a card. Went to the bus token kiosk at local shopping centre, Dinosaurio. The man rejected my 100 peso note - I thought he said he couldn´t break the note. Went to the supermercado and bought two yoghurts to break the note, went back to the kiosk but was rejected again. I gleened they had run out of tokens. He pointed down the road and off we went, walking half a kilometre, stopping at each block and asking at little kiosks if they "viende cospeles". Bought the tokens, then jumped on the bus but discovered after half an hour we were in unfamiliar territory with no sign of the high rises of downtown. Finn asked the bus driver "A-seis?" in his very fine Spanish and we got the gist from the driver that we were on the wrong bus.
He pointed us in the opposite direction, so trekked the dusty road for another kilometre to a gathering of people next to a pole and vaguely asked "el bus a centro?". "Si," they said
In town, we bought ice-creams for lunch (helados are a great bribe for the kids) and wandered through the pedestrian streets to Plaza San Martin, stumbled on a protest of gauchos, men and women wearing traditional berets and gaucho garb on horses. Though the policia were revving up their motorbikes it was a peaceful protest with some chanting from supporters waving banners. They marched through the town centre, causing major traffic jams, so we joined the long queue for an hour-long wait for the A6 home.

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