Buenos aires

I don't even know if I slept on the bus...it was definitely one of those sleepless bus nights. We didn't arrive in Buenos Aires until the afternoon and after the brownie they thought counted as both breakfast and dinner the night before, I was definitely ready to get off the bus, get settled and get some real food. We had to take a cab to the hostel because there was no metro or bus station close and the cab ride took forever. When we arrived, the meter said $86 pesos which was astronomical! We knew we were being swindled but having just arrived, we didn't know how much it should cost so we just paid it. We had the cab take us to "Rock Hostel" which was located in the city center instead of Pallermo (which is the more popular area of town), so the rooms were a little less expensive. When we asked the girl working at the hostel how much our cab should have cost, she said $20-30 pesos so of course we were pissed and determined not to use a cab for the rest of our time in Buenos Aires. We were able to get a private room in "The Doors" room. All of the rooms there are themed after a different band and painted with their lyrics which I thought was a cool idea.

We went out in search of food and found a cafe where we could get coffee and sandwiches and decompress a bit. Alyssa also needed to get cash and we were depressed by the official 1 to 5 rate that the ATM will give you. Apparently you can exchange American dollars at a 1 to 10 rate on the "blue market" but we didn't have any more cash to exchange so we were stuck paying the higher prices. After lunch, we headed back to the hostel to figure out our plan for the evening. We wanted to try to go to Pallermo, but for being such a large city, Buenos Aires had very confusing public transportation. They have a metro but it doesn't take you everywhere in town and stops running at 11:00pm, so that's not always a good option. We decided to try to take the bus. You needed a bus card called a "Sube card" in order to take the bus or change; they didn't take cash. Ironically, getting change in Argentina is extremely difficult as they really don't have enough. Usually when you buy something, the cashier ends up just rounding up or down to avoid the whole change issue. Luckily, the receptionist at our hostel was able to give us some coins so that we could get there. There is a website that tells you which bus to take based in your start and end points but there is no bus schedule. The bus comes whenever it wants, so you could be standing there waiting for 45 minutes. There was a huge protest going on where our bus stop was supposed to be, so the bus route had been diverted and we couldn't figure out how to make the bus pick us up with no stop. Finally, someone flagged the number 60 bus, which was the one we needed and we got on board. You needed to tell the driver where to go so that he could charge you according to your destination but of course we didn't know that, so the driver took pity on our obvious ignorance and let us get on board for free. He did however, want to talk to us the entire ride which got pretty annoying but we obliged since we didn't have to pay.
We got off on the main street and began walking toward another hostel in the area that we had heard of. We thought it might be a good idea to move to Pallermo since the transportation back and forth was proving to be difficult, but sadly we could not find the hostel. In fact, we couldn't find anything! We wandered the area for over an hour trying to find somewhere to eat but came up with nothing. It was so confusing because everything we had read about Buenos Aires said that Pallermo was full of bars and restaurants; we clearly were in the wrong place.
Finally, we decided to turn around and head to the main street where the bus had dropped us off. We found a little cafe where we could order pizza and a salad and ate dinner feeling slightly defeated. As we ate, a local guy began talking to us in English. He said he could tell we weren't from around there based on how we ordered (ie because we clearly have no clue what we are doing, lol) and asked if he could help with something. He marked the areas in our map where the restaurants were located and we determined we'd have to come back the following day to check it out since it was already after 12:00am. We paid our bill and caught the return bus, using our change to pay this time. It was quite an adventure and we were beginning to understand how to navigate Buenos Aires. The first day is always confusing but then before you know it, your new city feels like home.

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