July 25, 2008: It’s going to be an “early night”
After a 45 minute cab ride I got dropped off where the hostel was supposed to be but there was definitely no obvious indication of this being the right place. I walked down to the corner, found a cozy coffee shop and confirmed the address with the girl working there while enjoying my first Argentine espresso for AR$4.5 (exchange is currently 3:1 so divide all prices by three to get the dollar amount… Oh, cab ride from the airport was AR$95).
The hostel is definitely an interesting one. My friend Sam (who’s been traveling these parts for a few months) had heard good things about it so that’s how I found out about it. However, it’s not part of Hostelling International which can be a bad thing depending on what you are doing (and, in my case, it was not necessarily a good thing). I got put in a room with 6 other guys and sort of knew things were unusual when I’m arriving after 11:30am and I’m basically waking the keeper and most people are still in bed.
I rested for a bit and started getting my bearings. There were only a couple of people up at this point: a Brazilian girl who seemed to have her own thing going and an American girl named Sara who had arrived a couple of hours before me and was about as unprepared as I was. I teamed up with Sara and went out to look for a place to eat, ending up at Lo de Jesus off Plaza Armenia.
We had a common task to get accomplished: find a means to call people so we decided to go for it after lunch. We walked a few blocks down to Santa Fe where we had been told we could find a Movistar store and I ended up with a pre-paid sim for AR$14 (with no credit) and then picked up a AR$50 refil card which somehow got me and extra AR$40 balance bonus. Movistar’s rates are AR$1.18 / minute within Argentina and AR$0.20 per SMS. I called home and talked with Carrie for about 4-5 minutes and paid under AR$8. Not a bad deal at all (if you ever wondered why US carriers want to lock your phone, there you have it).
We caught the metro (or Subte), rode it down to Catedral and walked down the Plaza de Mayo and Casa Rosada (government offices / museum). Sara turns out to be a photography fan so it was nice to have someone who was not waiting on me to finish taking photos of whatever.
We kept going down toward Dique (quay) 3 where we ran into the Fragata Sarmiento, a 110-year old frigate turned museum, and el Puente de la Mujer. We easily spent an hour just checking out the boat since you could wonder inside it all the way down to the engine room.
Back at the hostel we rested for a bit and met some of the other guests. There was a Colombian, Peruvian and Argentine trio spending a month doing an animal genetics course at the university - 9 to 5, daily! I asked how the sleeping was and was told I won’t be looking forward to the guy on the bunk above mine.
We were recommended a place to grab the local asado (grilled steak), and off we went. As it turns out, I might not be much if an asado fan - I might try it again elsewhere but, since I est steak rarely, I just want it to be great and asado was just ok, in my opinion.
We decided to go elsewhere for another drink and ran into a huge 3-story lounge named Tazz. The place got packed around 1am and our bartender recommended a place named Levitar a few blocks away so we decided to check it out. However, while the music was also good, it was much smaller (like someone’s house) and it was really smoky. A lot of people were also partaking in a fair amount of extra-curricular activities.
From wanting to grab a quick drink after dinner, we now found ourselves walking back to the hostel at 3:30. I crashed and was totally out when I heard my top-bunk roommate arrive around 6. It took all of a minute for him to crash and start snoring like a freaking lumberjack. It was insanely loud and I could not go back to sleep. Around 7, Ismael (one of the students) then got up and got ready for class. I finally fell asleep and woke up around 9:30 when the snoring all of the sudden began again (I then realized he had stopped snoring for a good couple of hours and wondered what triggered it again). Needless to say, looking for a different sleeping arrangements is in the cards for today.