Spring Break Part 1

I have completed my midterm exams and am officially on spring break! Actually, I've been on spring break since last Thursday night. It has been nice to have some time to relax and not have to worry about school. I've had a bit of time to explore the city more and spend some time with the friends who are still in Buenos Aires. Tomorrow afternoon, I'm leaving with Costa and Stephen (2 friends of mine) for Uruguay. We are going to Colonia del Sacramento and Montevideo and will be returning on Sunday night. There should be a blog post with some pictures from that adventure coming up.

To start off, I made a little map so that everyone can see where I have been and where I'm going.

So now you can kind of see that I basically went from one end of the country to the other in the space of a week between my trip to Bariloche and Iguazu.

This week, I've mostly just been relaxing. On Friday night, I had a meeting with my language partner Marcelo. We meet about once a week and I practice my Spanish with him and he practices his English with me. I still don't have a picture of us hanging out yet, but one will come in a future post. We went and got some dinner at the Burger Joint (delicious hamburgers!) and then went and met some of my other friends for ice cream. On Saturday, I went to la Fiesta de las Colectividades, which was basically a big culture fair celebrating lots of the different cultures that are present in the city. There were lots of different countries present (although not the U.S.) and they all had food from there cultures and other stuff they were selling. There were also some pretty neat performances of cultural dances/music and such. That night, Patrick, Stephen, and I went to Benihana's for dinner. It was basically the same, delicious food that it is in the U.S. (although the meat was better if you ask me), but it was WAY cheaper. Between the 3 of us, we spent less that $50USD for the whole dinner (including drinks). It was awesome! 

On Sunday, I went to an artisan fair in the neighborhood of San Telmo. I was kind of disappointed in the fair, because it was mostly antiques that weren't very interesting to me. However, I found one stand who had some old Argentine money that they were selling. Being the money/currency collector that I am, I stopped and sorted through the money for about half an hour before buying some neat old Argentine currency! It was pretty exciting for me. Tuesday was another adventure when Stephen and I had to go to migraciones (immigrations) to get our permanent visas. We had tried to go on Friday around 3pm assuming that the office would close around 5. We found out that the office we had to go to closes at around 1pm, so we had to go fairly early on Tuesday to make sure we could get our visas before the office closed. But I am now officially an Argentine resident! Woohoo!

That's about all the news for now. I'm headed to Uruguay tomorrow afternoon with Costa and Stephen, so I'll post a blog from that adventure when I can! Love to everyone reading this!

-Ryan

Iguazu Falls Weekend

So this past weekend, 20/9-22/9, I went with some friends to Iguazu Falls. Originally, the trip started with 6 of us. However, a day or two before, we had two people who decided not to go after all. So, we had a good group of 4: Costa, Matt, Becca, and me. The day of, Matt showed up late to the bus station and had to take the bus after ours to get there because he missed ours. It was about a 20 hour bus ride to get there, so once we finally all met up in Iguazu it was already Saturday afternoon. We got checked into our hostel, had some dinner and went to visit Las Tres Fronteras where Paraguay, Brasil, and Argentina all border each other. It was a pretty neat place to go, and we had a good time there. We took lots of pictures, watched the sunset and then headed back to our hostel.

The next day, we woke up and went into the park for the falls. It rained almost the entire day we were in the park and everything (including my "waterproof" rain jacket) got absolutely soaked! It didn't even matter though, because we had such a great time! There are not even words to describe how incredible, amazing and beautiful these waterfalls were. The pictures simply don't do them justice, but they can show better than I can describe with my words, so without talking anymore, here's some pictures!

These little guys are called Coatiés. They are little robbers and this guy was trying to steal my backpack and the sandwiches that we had inside :)

This was the boat tour that we did. They basically took us right up next to the waterfalls and even under a couple of them!

And here we are soaking wet after that tour...

On some other terms, I'm no longer sick! So that's pretty exciting! I just finished up with midterms this week which is why this post is coming so late. I can't even believe that my experience down here in South America is already half way over! However, looking back so far, I don't have any regrets and I'm looking forward to taking advantage of these next 3 months before I come home!!! I think that's all from my end now. I hope you enjoyed the pictures from this one!

-Ryan

Bariloche Weekend

I spent this weekend in the city of San Carlos de Bariloche, which is located in the northern area of Patagonia in the province of Rio Negro. The city is mostly known for its skiing at Cerro Catedral which is the biggest ski resort in South America. I spent my weekend skiing here and enjoying this town. It was a weekend full of adventures with my friend Matt Stockamp (from SCU) and his housemate Agustin Ducdoc (from BsAs). Before the story, there’s a couple fun things to know about this weekend: 1) we stayed in a 4 star hotel for free. Agustin’s dad owns a nice hotel chain that conveniently has a location in Bariloche. Every room has a view of the lake, and it is beautiful. In addition, everyone who works at the hotel treated us like VIP’s the whole weekend, which was pretty awesome! (see below for some pictures!)

We started our trip at the Jorge Newberry Airport in Buenos Aires where we met on Thursday night. Many of the flights leaving here to Bariloche were either delayed or cancelled and there were a lot of very upset people in the airport. Our flight to Bariloche was the only one that was on time, so we started off the trip on the right foot!

From left to right is: Agustin, Matt and me. We're just waiting in the airport for our flight!

We flew from Buenos Aires to a small airport called Neuquen, which is located about 6 hours north of Bariloche. We took a taxi from the airport to a bus station and hopped on a bus from Neuquen to Bariloche.

Me and Matt in front of our bus from Neuquen to Bariloche!

By the time we arrived in Bariloche, it was about 6:00 am. Our room wasn’t going to be ready until 12:00pm, so we slept in the pool area on the pool chairs. It definitely wasn’t the most comfortable way to spend the night, but I suppose it was better than nothing. We woke up around 10:30, had breakfast at the hotel and headed to Cerro Catedral (the ski resort). We got our gear all rented, bought our lift tickets and headed up the mountain to do some skiing.

Here we are with our gear all rented!

The snow for the first day was alright. What was really amazing from the first day was the views from the mountain. They were just about as beautiful (if not more so) than those you might get from a mountain in Tahoe. There is a HUGE lake in Bariloche that is visible from the mountain and is amazing. In addition, there are at least 3 different little rivers that run down the mountain in different places. Fortunately, the visibility from the first day was good enough to see the nature that surrounded us.

Just some of the amazing views that we had during our time on the mountain!

After skiing the first day, we grabbed a bus that we thought would take us back to the hotel. Instead, it took us into downtown Bariloche. We figured since we were already in downtown, we would go get some dinner, but the restaurant we wanted to go to didn’t open until 8 and it was only 6. We decided to walk around downtown (still in all of our ski clothes) until the restaurant opened at 8. When it opened we went in and had the most wonderful dinner. Where we went was called El Boliche de Alberto, which is a “parrilla” or a BBQ place. Basically, it was an Argentine steakhouse. It was the first parrilla I had been to, and I can’t believe that I had waited this long to go to one! The food was phenomenal, and there was lots of it! Comparatively to a U.S. steakhouse, it was dirt cheap and better!

Here's the grill getting fired up for a night of STEAK!!! :)

The plate of french fries that we ordered was more like a mountain of fries! How exciting!!! :)

This is what happens when you order steak at an Argentine parrilla. The "portion" of filet mignon was actually 3 6oz. filet mignons! Not only was it better than the steak in America, but it was cheaper! Only AR$107 for the filet portion (divide that by 8 to get the USD price).

Som nice Patagonia artisan beer to accompany a perfectly cooked steak! Couldn't ask for much better than that after a great day of skiing!

After dinner we took a bus back to our hotel. However, we thought that the hotel was at km marker 17 (when really it was at km 7). We even ended up going past km 17 and got off around km 21. Thinking we were only a few km away from the hotel, we decided to try and walk it. After a while, Matt and I started trying to hitchhike our way there. Agustin told us that it would never work, because Argentine’s don’t trust anyone who isn’t a friend of theirs. Fortunately, Matt and I were able to prove him wrong when someone finally stopped and picked us up. He was very friendly, and when we passed km 17 and didn’t see our hotel, he called his girlfriend to help us figure out where the hotel was. We found out that it was at km 7 and he dropped us at km 12, because that was as far as he was going. From km 12 we walked to a little restaurant that was close by and asked them to call a taxi for us to take us the rest of the way there. We finally got back to the hotel around midnight and all crashed out.

The next morning, we got up had breakfast and hit the mountain. From the base of the mountain, we could see that the upper part was covered in a cloud. The visibility that day was pretty bad. We couldn’t really ever see where we were going, and the majority of the time, we couldn’t tell if we were on a real run or not. There were 2 good parts about this day though: 1) it snowed all day, and 2) lunch.

 This is what you get when you order a steak sandwich in Argentina.

Here's me and Matt as we enter the cloud that we skied in the second day. You can kind of tell that the visibility is already starting to go away, and that wasn't even halfway up the mountain!

That night, we went to a German restaurant that Agustin likes called Familia Weiss. The food was yet again delicious! We all got Goulash with Spatzle (which doesn’t really have an English translation). It was phenomenal!

 My plate of Goulash and Spatzle. It was delicious!

 The three of us enjoying our meals

After dinner we attempted to go to an ice bar in downtown Bariloche. Unfortunately, the bar cost AR$140 to get in (to put that in context, we could have had another delicious steak dinner instead of going here), so we decided against going in.

The next day was our best day of skiing yet! Since it had snowed the whole day before and over night, we had awesome snow! In addition, the visibility was better, so now we could actually see where we were going. I got to make some fresh tracks, which was pretty exciting for me! It was a great day to end the skiing on.

After skiing, we went back to the hotel for a little bit and then went out to another hotel called Llao Llao (pronounced “shao shao”). This is the most expensive, nicest hotel in all of Bariloche. We ordered some tea/coffee here (although not very much because everything was about double the price it was supposed to be). We then took a self-guided tour of the hotel to see what else there was and snuck into the game room to play some pool and ping-pong for a little while. After Llao Llao, we went back to the hotel and Matt and Agustin had to pack up and head out. I stayed that night at the hotel by myself and the next morning, I headed into the downtown area to do some shopping and enjoy the nice weather of the day. I bought some stuff for myself and some gifts for others and then enjoyed some chocolate and ice cream from Abuela Goye (one of Bariloche’s most famous chocolate shops).

This is the Llao Llao hotel.

I called a taxi from Abuela Goye to take me to the airport. When I arrived at the airport, I was informed that my 5:30 flight to Jorge Newberry (the airport near my house) had been cancelled. The next available flight they could put me on left at midnight. They gave me a voucher for a free snack and dinner at the airport restaurant and told me to go wait. I sat down in the restaurant, got my snack and started working on homework. After a while, I got up to look at one of the departure/arrival monitors and realized that the flight I was on was supposed to go to the Ezezia airport (the big international airport far away from my house). I went to the desk to find out if they had made a mistake and was told that I would have to take the flight to Ezezia and then a bus to Jorge Newberry. I was also told that the flight had been even further delayed and was now scheduled to take off at 2am. Not wanting to sit at the airport any longer, I asked if there was anything they could do for me. They sent me back to downtown Bariloche and put me in a hotel with dinner included. I worked on more homework there and had some dinner before returning to the airport. I returned later and the flight took off around 2am. I got into Ezezia at about 4:30am and took the bus to Jorge Newberry. I arrived at JN at about 5:30am and called a taxi to take me home. I got home at around 6:20am and had about 2 hours to sleep before I had to get up and go to IES for classes. It was certainly a trip full of adventures! Here are some pictures of the hotel we stayed in:

This is the living room of the hotel room with a big window and a beautiful view of the lake and trees outside!

The bathroom had a nice big jacuzzi tub. Also... the floor was heated. You can tell that I'm really roughing it as a college student here.

 Another picture of the view from our balcony.

And here's the room from the doorway. Oh and did I mention that every morning they brought breakfast to our room with whatever we ordered the day before? :)

On another note… I’ve got a pretty bad cough and a sore throat that has come because of it. The doctor who came and looked at me yesterday told me I have pharyngitis (which is basically a fancy way of telling me that I have a sore throat). Prayers are greatly appreciated to help me feel better and get rid of this. Fortunately, I can still sleep peacefully without the coughing keeping me up.

On a little bit happier note… I am going to be headed to Iguazu Falls this weekend in the northern part of Argentina in the province of Misiones. Watch out for another blog post with some more pictures from there! I’ve heard that they are some of the most beautiful waterfalls in the world, and I’m very excited to have the opportunity to go see them! That’s all for now from down here. As always, love to you all! Thank you for the continued support and prayers, and thank you for following me along my journey.

-Ryan