BUENOS AIRES

 We are off on a new adventure and will be away for the next month.  I'll send you blogs over that period.  Our recent trips have had a few "adventures" and this one may be no different, although our struggles may have started a tad earlier.  Just before we left I discovered a leak in the roof of our bedroom addition which is my closet.  I chopped 10 inches of solid ice off, but then it turned cold so I don't know if the roof has stopped leaking or not.  Then I went to the basement and found that the main drainage pipe had split.  I only had time for a temporary fix before we had to leave.

The hard part of taking a cruise is the stamina required to fly to the first port.  We drove to the airport to find that the parking lot was full.  I had to leave the car in the expensive indoor lot, so Michael and Lu will need a bank loan in order to rescue the car upon their return from Korea.  After flying to Toronto we found that our next flight was delayed.  After sitting for 6 hours we then boarded our 10-hour flight to Sao Paulo.  Once there we had to leave the plane and go through security before re-boarding for our 3-hour flight to Buenos Aires.

We were met by our pre-arranged driver who took us the 35 kms to the city.  We checked into our lovely boutique hotel in Recoleta (our favorite area of Buenos Aires).  Exhausted, we wanted to find a restaurant within Betty's very short walking distance.  The closest one did not have an Argentinian menu.  The next restaurant had a lovely orchestra playing, but there were no tables left.  The third place had one table in their sidewalk section.  We only wanted Argentinian steaks, but by the time we had consumed complimentary gazpacho, a magnificent pate and some delicious rice balls we were only able to eat half our magnificent steaks (so much better than Canadian beef).  I wanted a bottle of Malbec and poured over the pages of choice.  I thought I was losing it when I reopened the list as the waiter approached and the wine I had chosen was no longer there.  I eventually realized that I had been looking in the pages of Mendosa Malbecs and now I was in the Malbecs from some other section of Argentina.  A small cultural difference was that every table in our section of the restaurant had at least one bottle of wine on it.  No beers, cokes, or other awful drinks that you would find in a Canadian restaurant.