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Published: November 9th 2018
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After nearly 2 weeks here I’m down to my last night and trying not to get too excited about going back to Buenos Aires tomorrow and having mates to go out with. It has been OK here, and Tiendas Naturales has been a lovely haven for cocktails and dinner, but it is nothing special. There is a fiesta tonight down at the flag memorial, organised by all the expat groups, but I don’t fancy walking back on my own with my phone/money. It would probably be fine but I just don’t have the energy.
The last few days I’ve worked in a different venue every day, which has been great as I’ve seen a lot of different areas of the city. And learnt how to pronounce them. Calle isn’t cayé as in Spain, more like cadgé. New word of the week, cascanueces, nutcracker, as there is an advert for a Disney film everywhere. Fairly low frequency vocabulary, therefore I’m likely to remember it.#notuseful.
The Cabify app has been working wonderfully well. My rides have arrived at the right time and I haven’t had to part with actual cash. My Argentinian colleagues don’t use it. They prefer easytaxi. The only
mistake I made when registering was to choose the ‘I like to chat’ option. Yesterday Juan Pablo rocked up, a stranger to dentistry. Zero teeth. He chatted for the entire 30 minutes. Questions included, how old was I (he is 59) was I married, did I have a boyfriend, did I like living alone? That will learn me, as they say. By the end I thought if he asked me out I was just going to have to throw myself from the moving taxi. Luckily I escaped. There were many other questions, all blurred into a mess of vowel sounds by the lack of teeth.
When I got back to the hotel I asked the receptionist, Matías, to help me book a taxi for today. Cabify wasn’t going to work as I was going miles out of the city and needed the driver to wait for me while I was working. How much fun was THAT going to be? He called the recommended firm and checked the price for the outbound journey and the waiting time rate, 220ps an hour. The return journey was free. It sounded iffy but apparently is quite normal. So the total ended up being
358FB8B0-81C6-4229-B23F-5D61986801AA.
A third car wash. These guys were MAD quite enormous but better for me than the option of getting the bus at 7am for 2 hours and then leaving Las Parejas at 4.30 for another 2. Matías said they would call back in 2 hours with the name of the driver and his car registration, and try to find me one who spoke a bit of English. This didn’t happen.
I was not looking forward to this at all but at 8am a super posh car rocked up with everso smiley Claudio. He looked quite respectable and I sat in the front with him. Zero English. The journey out to Las Parejas was 1h 15m, and despite Matías promising me a hive of activity along the way, lots of agricultural activities to observe, there was NOTHING of interest the entire way. He lie! Flat, flields, nothing interesting growing even, tiny soya, tiny corn, wheat. Ditto on the way back, after poor Claudio had to wait for 6 1/2 hours. I hope he had a good book. On the way back I made the rookie error of asking him about his family, which ALWAYS means they get on their phones and show me photos while driving.
When
we finally got back to Rosario, which for once I was glad to see, I took some photos along Pellegrini of the many car washes. This is Car Wash Street, at least it is this far out of town. Quite poor and run down. Claudio obligingly slowed down for me, producing outrage when we drove off. Then at the traffic lights there were guys washing windscreens. I asked how much you should pay and he said how much you like. I prefer more specific informatio. There was a juggler at one set of lights-see pic- with a football spinning on the end of a pole. By the time he dismantled his equipment we had driven off. There was no time to give him a tip. He needs to work on that.
Tomorrow my bus is at 9am, Cabify booked, back in BA and at the hotel around 12.30. I sure hope my buddies are in a partying frame of mind! No work until Tuesday, flipping awesome job I have!
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