August 7th

It's been a busy week since I last posted. We spent five days in Buenos Aires/on the bus and classes started yesterday. Sitting down is nice sometimes. So let's talk about the bus ride to Buenos Aires. Ha. It's a six hour trip from Santiago to Mendoza, Argentina. You have to go through customs, which is in a giant, unheated warehouse thing in the middle of the Andes, at like 10 at night and it can take at least an hour, easily. A friend's host dad insisted he bring a parka specifically to go through customs. It was good advice. There are pretty mountains though.

That's the fun part of the ride. Once you get to Mendoza, if you're anything like us, you forget that you switched time zones and instead of having an hour to buy tickets for the last bus out of the station, you have ten minutes to locate and purchase tickets for 17 people at 11:45 pm. Then you have, I kid you not, 14 hours (sitting next to a profoundly disgusting bathroom, on an unheated bus) to be thankful that you're not sitting in a bus depot all night. All in all it takes a solid 22 hours to get to Buenos Aires by bus.

It's totally worth it though because Buenos Aires is genuinely one of the best cities ever. It's awesome. Even walking around in the rain in an almost deserted neighborhood, you wander across such wonderful sights as this:

Puente de la Mujer (it's supposed to look like tango dancers!!)

And then when it starts pouring and thundering and lightninging, you can just duck into a cafe and drink Paso de Toros (best soda ever, grapefruit flavored) and eat yummy zucchini tarta which is like quiche but better.

If it continues raining the entire time you're there, the obvious solution is to go to el Cemetario de la Recoleta where all the famous people are buried. Nothing says a good time like an overcast graveyard. In all seriousness though, it was very pretty and peaceful with a dash of creepy (where do all those staircases go, seriously.)

But actually, it just goes down...

Grave of Eva "Evita" Peron

Best statue

It was sort of like a quick tour through architectural fads

We concluded this tour with a test of Argentina's baked goods:

A++

We concluded our day of touristing with an empanada dinner/lunch in front of la Casa Rosada.

Only Argentina has pink government buildings

Okay, full disclosure: that was not the end of our evening. Our dear friend Andrew, henceforth known as the delicate flower, spent the day in bed, and, after vomiting all day, demanded to be taken to the hospital. So an ambulance was called. An hour and a half later the EMTs show up, pronounce him to be a big, whiny American, prescribe Cipro, antibiotics, and anti-nausea meds, and drive away laughing. So me, Becca, and BJ ventured out at midnight to find a 24-hour pharmacy to get anti-nausea meds, which was an adventure and a half. But when we get back, Andrew has projectile vomited his Cipro all over the bathroom and is demanding to be taken to the hospital again. So we called a taxi this time and loaded him and some other people and a lot of fluids in. Turns out the EMTs were totally wrong and he had some sort of stomach inflammation thing and all he needed was a lot of fluids via IV.

On our last day we went to a market that sells arts and crap and stuff. We tried mate and looked at stuff and made a quick trip to el Museo de Bellas Artes. We got fantastically lost on the way back to the hostel but ended up eating lunch at a very economically priced cafe with the sweetest waitress of all time. We wanted to bring her back to Santiago. Then it was time to get back on the bus.

It snowed while we were in Buenos Aires

Back in Chile at last!

School started yesterday and registering for classes has been obscenely complicated. I'm currently taking classes at two different universities on three different campuses. Yikes.