Days 1&2 Portland to Buenos Aires, AR

Friday, March 20th -- Well, it takes two days to get to Buenos Aires.  We arrived today after an afternoon flight from Portland to Dallas/Ft. Worth taking 3 hours, two hours layover in Dallas, and then an overnight flight to Buenos Aires taking nearly 10 hours.  For perspective, it takes 10 hours or so to get to Sydney Australia or to Auckland, NZ.

I watched a couple of movies -- Dead of Winter, with Emma Thompson, playing a grieving wife in Upper Minnesota, with a Frances McDermott accent, F1, Brad Pitt as an old driver trying to make it again in Formula One racing, The Unholy Trinity, and Just Cause.  Betsy and I dined on good food and tried to sleep, somewhat successfully, for a few hours.  American Airlines fed us again about 90 minutes before landing (fruit plates with yogurt).

We arrive in Buenos Aires at around 9:00 am local time (4 hours later than Portland time), passed through passport control easily, reclaimed our checked luggage with no waiting, and exited the "secure" area.  Elaine, my sister who will be sharing our adventures on this trip, was waiting for us outside with the hordes of greeters.  She had scoped out how to transfer to our hotel.  The recommended firm did not have any vans suitable for the three of us, but we got setup by a neighboring company, which worked out well.  Diego, our driver, drove us to the Emperador Hotel, located in the center of downtown, taking about an hour -- lots of traffic and other "normal" stuff.   The last couple of miles was on a main thoroughfare and I snapped a few photos of what I thought might be important.

The Buenos Aires Airport

The Obelisk de Buenos Aires -- a national historic monument and icon of Buenos Aires, erected in 1936 to commemorate the quadricentennial of the city.

One of several buildings with Eva Peron "mural."  This is the one where she is smiling; the other one has her looking fierce and holding a microphone.  Some people thought the microphone was a hamburger which she was eating???

View from our 11th floor hotel room.

Ditto, looking NE over the train station/yard with the large estuary behind.

An enterprising dog walker....

After resting a bit and cleaning up, we went for a gentle stroll around the city, walking 2.4 miles northwest paralleling the water front, though the actual water was still a ways away across train tracks and the port facilities.

There is a large park area to the north of the walkway with a couple of statues.

Three photos of  Bunya Trees, a conifer native to Australia; not to be confused with a Banyan Tree which is a fig tree native to India. 

We took a drink break at this outdoor cafe - I had tea service complete with scones, ham and cheese sandwich, and several cakes, which I shared.  Betsy and Elaine had drinks.

We walked back to the hotel via a "busy" area of upscale shops and the like.  We stopped at a money exchange to get a few Argentinian pesos (ARS).  Strangely, one cannot purchase ARS's in the US (possible because the currency is very unstable), and the one ATM we looked at was unfathomable and not worth risking losing a credit card.  We stopped off for juice and water at a market and paid with our new pesos.  In the category of TMI but important for our recordkeeping, with $100 we got 132,000 ARS, which works out to be a $5.38 exchange fee.

A "record photo" of the Emperador hotel.