Brad Turns 40 in South America

Our Big Adventure South

At long last we have our photo's posted. There was a bit of a hiccup. Lesley agreed to do some "improvements" offered by Blogspot and afterwards the Blog was toast. It wouldn't accept any pictures. Lesley thought she could wait out the problem (yes she did reboot her computer several times). After a month, Brad took charge and basically the weekend was spent doing work arounds. We have disabled the router, found a new website for posting pics and I have no idea what all the code below this says. Hopefully you will just see this message and be able to put your curser over the picture and bring up a gazillion pics from our trip.

When you click on the picture, it will bring you to a website. Choose "slideshow" it is on a 4 second delay. After the slideshow click the "x" and you will end up someplace else - hopefully not in OZ.

The trip was great. BA is an amazing City. The architecture is beautiful - both the old and new. We tended to avoid the $5.00 steak places but ate like millionaires for $30 - 50 bucks for two. The only sad thing was to see the poverty up close. As you can imagine, a girl from Ridgetown has never seen street urchins picking through the garbage to earn their way in the world. Nor have I seen entire families living in abandoned buildings.

On the positive side, there is next to no american influence. We felt totally away from things. There were next to no name brand american labels and junk food restaurants were few and far between. The BA cafe con leche beats anything Starbucks puts out so I didn't even miss them. The wines are amazing. I think they drink almost all of what they make so we really don't get a good sampling of Argentinian wine in Canada. The food was good but not spicy. We even had to ask for pimento negro with our meals. For Lesley, having 3 types of Salami on the breakfast buffet was like some sort of homecoming. For Brad, it was the Dolce de leche.

The politics of Argentina is interesting. We were staying close to Plaza de Mayo where most protests take place. The riot gates where always kept close by - just incase. There was one protest when we were there. After reading about some of the economic debaucles and the mass executions of people, it makes you realize how fortunate we are to have a stable government. Ad-scam while bad, really didn't impact us.

The weather was sunny and above 30 everyday. We had to be careful with the sunscreen. BA is a fully modern city with full sanitation so drinking the water was no issue. You will see we even indulged in some street food.

For the traffic engineers, private cars are banned from the financial district during 9-5 Monday - Friday. Only taxis and buses were permitted. We didn't get to a soccer game. They are on Sundays which were our travel days. Tourists are generally escorted to soccer games. The stadium near La Boca was huge.

Punta Del Este was described in the New York Times as the "Hamptons" of South America. I'm not sure about that but it is lovely. Brad tells me that is where some of the SA celebs have their homes. High season doesn't start until Christmas so it was quiet. We got to see some real surfers doing their thing. The area is on a bit of a point so one side has the river and the other side has the ocean. You can choose what type of beach experience you want.

Our hotel was in a residential district about 2.5 km from the downtown. We found our $5/day rental bikes were the best way to get into town for lunch and dinner. Safety wasn't an issue. I hear it is in Montevideo, the capital, but not here. We couldn't even really lock our hotel room. Virtually no one spoke English. A couple times I freaked out about the 1000 peso dinner only to realize that they are at 0.039 rate. It also makes me feel bad about haggling over the 200 peso lush beach towel ($7.8). Doesn't the City charge $5.00 to rent you a brillo pad when you work out?

The hotel was all about the chill. It felt like we were at someone's cottage but our turn at the dishes never came up. The rainy day we hung out at the pool and read. Brad had brought his MP3 player and his PAL. We ended up entertaining the workers and the other guests with our music.

I'm going to sign off because I'm dying to see if this is actually going to post.

Buenos Aires

Punta Del Este, Uruguay