We made it to Argentina!!! Still working on getting our feet back on the ground, but so far Buenos Aires has been pretty good to us. It was a looooong trip to get here. We woke up at the holiday park in Auckland at 5 am and then got a taxi to the airport. It was a 3 hour flight from Auckland to Sydney and a pretty bumpy one at that. We only had about 35 minutes in Sydney to transfer and found out when we got there that we had to go through security again. I was bummed because I had bought a bottle of water in Auckland for the long flight and not even opened it yet and it got taken away at Sydney security. We had just enough time to get another bottle of water before our flight started boarding. This flight was the longest that either of us had ever done at a little over 13 hours. It was a nice flight on a giant plane and the food was actually good. My favorite part was right before it began to get dark outside they came by and gave us hot chocolate with a marshmallow and a cookie as a goodnight snack. I was able to sleep a little, but Justin didnt get any.
The airport in Buenos Aires was incredibly chaotic. It took us over an hour to buy some shampoo, get some money from an ATM and get change for the bus. By this point we were pretty exhausted and quickly realizing that we dont speak Spanish. We somehow managed to get the city bus and arrive at our hostel in one piece (2 hours later).
Since then weve managed to get around a little better and are starting to lose the deer in headlights look when people talk to us. We have registered for a Spanish class and will spend 4 hours a day for the next 3 weeks learning how to speak. Weve had one day already and its incredibly helpful to hear a native speaker and start to get our ears used to the language here. Its actually quite different from Spanish in Spain or Latin America.
The Spanish school has internet, so we should be able to check in fairly regularly. Thanks to everyone who is keeping us up to date on everything going on at home! And sorry for the weird punctuation in this post…I havent quite figured out the keyboard.
A Mame cabinet at your school?! My robotron record is 800,000 Justin, but don’t neglect your studies trying to beat it, we will need your translating services in Spain.
Interesting. I’d better get to work on local dialect versions of ‘una cervesa por favor’. Four hours a day, you reckon? Even with international “I’ll have a beer” sign language as a cover, it would be dangerous to travel abroad undermedicated.