Estoy aquí en Buenos Aires!

Hello, folks! Glad that you are reading this, it makes it so much easier for me to tell everyone what I´m up to without sending multiple emails.

I left Edinburgh at 7pm last night, flew to Frankfurt and then on to... Sao Paolo! I wasn´t expecting that! So now I can say I´ve seen Brazil, even if it was through a grimy plane window. As you may or may not know, I absolutely love airline food and think it´s almost worth flying for the meals alone. I think it´s the tidy wee packets everything comes in. I always challenge myself to eat everything they provide, and so far I have only been beaten by a radish (!) and something that looked like a giant pretzel. Yesterday we got yummy sausages and a tasty omelette, among other small treats! I made the mistake of accepting the free wine, though, which made me feel rotten. I managed to fall asleep 15 minutes into both the in-flight films, so am none the wiser about what happens in Ocean´s 13 or Shrek III, both of which I mistakenly tried to listen to in German because I didn´t understand how the audio system worked. Phew! When I first got on the flight, a guy was sitting in my seat and I was glad to budge him over. I got the last aisle seat on the flight (phew again!) and was not about to give up my rightful claim! The girl next to me tried to get me to swap to a middle seat - no chance! She was really grumpy about it and spent the rest of the flight sticking her elbow into mine and hogging the armrest. She foolishly did not accept the sausages either. I later realised that the pair were from the Judo team of Kazakhstan - it was printed on the back of their tracksuits. I couldn´t help wondering if they´d seen the Borat film, and what they´d make of it. I particularly enjoyed watching her doing a crossword in cyrillic script too!

Despite the elbow jamming and hostile atmosphere, I did manage to get a bit of kip over the western tip of Africa and the Atlantic. It was funny thinking that I was flying over all these exotic places while completely oblivious. On my flight to Canada in August, we flew over Greenland and the views were amazing. But I suppose one bit of ocean looks very much like another!

After the stopover in SP it took another couple of hours to Buenos Aires, by which time I was beginning to feel like part of the seat. I got a taxi into the centre of town, but we drove through all the crappy bits in the suburbs first. I have to admit I was really shocked to see the shantytowns - there are all these sprawling "developments" that are half-build brick structures. They look really flimsy and uncomfortable. There were loads of these on the way in. I couldn´t believe how poor it was. I was also shocked by a group of kids who went to each of the cars in turn at the traffic lights, begging, and the families sleeping under tents made of cardboard and blankets on street corners. Later on, I saw several people and their children going through the binbags on the street - it seems so much worse that the children were involved. Naive westerner or what!

Asides from that, I was struck by how cool the city is. It reminds me of Paris or Lyon, and it´s hard to believe it´s in the Southern hemisphere, except... did I mention the weather? It´s very clearly winter here, which has really screwed up my already shattered and jetlagged brain. There are no leaves on the trees and I´m sure I saw my breath earlier! Luckily I have my Roxy jacket (the one I got for 14 quid and 1 euro at Dunstaffnage!), and I certainly needed it this evening! My hotel is in Avenida Callao, which is a busy 5 lane main street with loads of interesting stuff on it.

I met up with Oliver, who is also going to Posadas with i-to-i. It was really good to have someone to talk to who is feeling the same as me! We went for something to eat in one of the huge shopping centres. He is only 19, the same age I was when I went to Lyon. I remember how clueless and scared I was and how unable I was to do anything on my own. He seems to have travelled quite a lot already, though, so we had lots to talk about. We went to the Cemetery (actually, it was more of a necropolis - that´s the word I was trying to think of on the phone, Mum!) where Evita is buried. What a weird place - it´s basically laid out like a small town, except the doors don´t lead into houses or shops, but to crypts. Some of the doors had glass that gave you a clear view of the coffins. Really rather unpleasant! As was the fact that we stumbled on a burial without realising - we assumed it was just another gathering around a famous grave, as there had been tons of people taking photos of Evita´s tomb. I felt awful about that. The place would make a great place to play hide and seek if it wasn´t so creepy (and disrespectful!). Adding to the Omen-style atmosphere was the ubiquitous presence of some creepy and knowing-looking cats. These weren´t nice moggies! They must be part of a feral population, but they looked like guardians of the place to me! I have some photos, but I can´t see how to plug my camara into this PC so they´ll have to wait.

After that rather weird experiend, Oliver went home and I went for a long walk down Callao. I spotted what I thought was a cinema, but it turned out to just be a cafe called "the Cinema". To be honest, I should have twigged, because it was the English word for cinema, not the Spanish (cine). I have only just realised that! But all this had put me in the mood for seeing a film, so I tracked down the nearest cinema. It was huge and really confusing, not helped by the fact that I didn´t understand why the ticket booth and the screens were on 2 different floors, with another level between them - ???! I ended up seeing the Bourne Ultimatum, thinking it would be dubbed into Spanish, like they do in France. I was rewarded, though, as it was in English with Spanish subtitles, and some of it wasn´t directly translated! The subtitles were really useful when they were whispering things over the phone and so on as my left ear is blocked due to a combo of the flight pressure and a cold that seems to have moved in on me. What?

Anyway, I´m back at the hotel now and starting to feel sleepy. It´s 2:53am GMT according to my phone. I need to get some decent kip as tomorrow I´m meeting Oliver to see the Palacio de Congresos (where the Parliament meets) as we have found out there´s a FREE tour at 11am! We were also planning to go to the Plaza de Mayo, where every Thursday the Madres de Plaza d e Mayo - women whose sons and other relatives were disappeared during the Dirty War -still hold their protest march. This was apparently the only form of anti-government resistance tolerated by the regime of the time, as mothers are so highly regarded by Argentine society.

Ok, history lesson over - thanks for sticking with this so far, I know it´s a long entry! You have my mum and dad to thank for that, after years of making me write a detailed chronological diary of all the holidays we went on. M&D, I have started saving up things to stick in a scrapbook! But I forgot to bring Pritt Stick with me - oops!

Hope this finds you all well!