Hola Buenos Aires!

Hola Amigos y Familia!

Whoa, me thinkas me speako Espanol, but me Espanol is as bueno as me Mandarino. The only Spanish I know I learned from the song Mentirosa by Mellow Man Ace. But unless I want to call someone a liar or a Skeeza, then it's not really much use.

We arrived in Buenos Aires yesterday, and the only thing that's put a hamper on our delirious happiness is the fact that we didn't have electricity in the apartment until about 8 hours after we arrived, we didn't get our phone working until a couple of hours ago, and we still don't have internet yet. The apartment owner had promised to fix all this stuff yesterday - what a mentirosa!!!

Buenos Aires is a big city with a lot of different neighborhoods called barrios. We are staying in the barrio of Palermo which has a lot of cute restaurants and shops. There are also a lot of dog lovers who live in this hood, but apparently none of them are dog-poop-picking-up lovers, so there's dog crap all over. The hubby and I have almost stepped onto dog poop so many times, only to avoid/jump over it at the last moment. We coined the term "Palermo Hop" to describe this little move.

Here are some of my observations of Buenos Aires so far:
- No one uses Kleenex here, we were looking for a box at the supermarket and it was crazy expensive (probably because they only sell 2 boxes a year).
- People don't clean up after their dogs.
- There are very few Asians here, and they all own little grocery stores.
- Portions are HUGE. The hubby and I shared a steak and they gave us 2 giant pieces that we couldn't finish.
- People eat dinner really late here. We walked into an empty restaurant at 8:45pm, and it was full by 10:00pm.
- The dulce de leche here is out of this world.
- The pizza here is pretty darn good too - apparently there are a lot of Italian immigrants here.
- The damn bugs here like to bite me as much as they do in Asia.
- Argentines don't recycle.
- People don't give a flying squirrel about fire hazards here. Our apartment door requires a key to open from the inside (great for security, terrible in case of fire.) We've been too nervous to start the fireplace because of this.
- There are these awesome outdoor shutters that we put down at night. They are great for insulation and keeps the apartment so warm.
- Very few people speak English here, but everyone listens to American music. So far, we've heard Curtis Blow, The Bee Gees, Culture Club, Duran Duran and Divinyls. As I'm writing this, James Taylor's Handy Man is playing on the radio.
- There are traffic lights at some intersections, but no pedestrian lights. So, to see if it's ok to cross, we have to make sure the opposing traffic has a red light.
- Both of us find that we almost say "arigato" to everyone instead of "gracias".
- In China, we can kinda almost understand what people are saying in Mandarin because we speak Cantonese. In Argentina, we can kinda almost understand what is in writing because we can read English. We don't exactly know which is more useful.