Final Countdown

This might be the last time that I write this. On the other hand, it might not! I am certainly down to my last few hours in Buenos Aires. I'm now quite glad - I'm really tired, covered in bleeding and itchy mosquito bites and I want to get home. I'm not much looking forward to the flight, though - 11 hours from here to Frankfurt, an hour stopover, then 2 more hours to Edinburgh. I am so excited about getting on the plane to Edinburgh. One of the times I flew back from Spain or France, having been away for several weeks, I flew back over the Forth Bridge, which was all lit up. It was a good feeling!

Well, after much fanfare and excitement, Sile and I didn't make it to Uruguay. I'm annoyed that I didn't get another random South American stamp on my passport, but it was going to end up being too complicated. When we got to the port, we queued at 2 different places that looked like ticket desks, only to be moved to another desk. When we finally got to the real ticket queue, there was a man who must have been booking 100 different trips as he was there for ages. By the time we got up to the desk, we had missed the 11.15 sailing to Colonia and the next one wasn't until 2. We then tried to book that, but we told that we would have to wait until 8pm to come back. I have heard that Colonia is beautful, but I think it´s probably about the size of Dalkeith and I'm not sure if we could amuse ourselves there for that length of time. We decided just to leave it, and went for a walk around the Plaza de Mayo instead.

Sile was pretty tired, though (we were both tempted to have a little nap on a bench down at the waterfront, even though we would have probably looked like well-dressed vagrants), so she headed back to her hostel for a siesta. I decided to check out a couple of places I still wanted to see - the Manzana de las Luces and a couple of the Cathedrals. I saw them both, but didn't really enjoy walking around today the way that I did on Saturday.

The reason I didn't really enjoy it is also one of the reasons I'm looking forward to getting home - the annoying attitude of the men here! They all stare quite openly and if they are feeling particularly ribald, they will hiss at you or make a comment. I thought it would be quite warm today so I wore a skirt, sandals and leggings (obviously I was also suitably dressed from the waist up. I'm not going to give them ammunition!). This seemed to be an invitation for men to stare and generally harrass me, and I wasn't in the mood for it! At one point I was hissed at and received 2 brazen comments in the space of 5 minutes. The last one was about my eyes being pretty (standard fare, it would seem), which wasn't so bad, but just after that, when I had decided to cut my losses and go back to the hotel to change into trousers, some guy was so busy staring at my legs that he walked into a scaffolding pole. All his friends laughed, and I did too, but I still felt really self-conscious and scuttled off as quickly as I could.

I find all this unsettling and not in the least bit flattereing. I had asked Pepe about it last night, him being a local. He said that if women look pretty, the men here like to show their appreciation - Sile and I argued that it was actually quite threatening and sometimes a bit scary. He claimed this wasn't what the men were doing, which made me feel a bit better, but when you have to walk past someone who is going "ch ch ch" at you or muttering something about you under their breath, you can't help but feel embarrassed and a bit scared. I don't like it! The hissing is the worst - I feel like saying "is that the best you can do?". Apparently there were 12 women for every man in Posadas, and with that kind of technique I imagine the men still struggled to get the ladies to be interested!

My psuedo-sociology aside, it's almost time to sign off. I fly out of Buenos Aires Ezeiza Airport at 14.40 tomorrow. I get into Edinburgh at 12.45 local time... I can't wait! Did I mention that?

If this is my last entry, thanks to everyone who has been reading it, leaving comments, Facebooking, texting and emailing me. It has been great to hear from you all and I can't wait to see you in person. I have one reader who says he is miffed that I'm coming home as he won't be able to read my blog anymore. I am thinking about falsifying some entries detailing wild escapades just for him.

Hope you've enjoyed it. I will miss writing this as it has become something of an obsession. What will I do with my time?

I may be back. Watch this space.

¡Hasta nos vemos!