Day Numbro Uno
Early wake up call due to airline security.. flight is at 10:00 but we need to be there a lot earlier! We end up in a very nice, new airplane, complete without your personalized air vent, but with new improved cold air coming at the feet.. maybe not too good as it makes your feet very cold (as I don´t wear shoes when I´m in a plane for a long time!) it has another disadvantage that I don´t want to get into at this point in time 😛
The airplane does have a nice up-to-date entertainment system (sorry, the geek in me), so watched quite a number of movies, 300 (for the second time… Tonight we dine in Hell!), Shrek 3 (don´t we all love the green ogre), Spiderman 3 (was not too impressed with that one), some cartoons, one episode of the Apprentice US, where Donald Trump fired 4 people at once… there goes the serie schedule!
Anyways, after 13ish hours, we finally land in Sao Paulo in Brasil for a stop-over. Some time to stretch the legs… and stretch the legs.. the airport is not a really big one, everywhere nice signs and commercials on Visa Card, however, nobody accepts them… Also the International part (where we were stuck in) didn’t have many places where you can get anything.. there is a nice view on the Domestic part where you see nice ice-cream and chocolate bars just to annoy the foreigners that are foolish enough to travel somewhere else… must be a conspiracy of some sorts!
Anyways, finally managed to change some money and get a cup of nice Java and then it should be time to walk to the gates… but there is a huge queue at the transfer desk (that wisely enough didn’t open until 1 hour before the flight.. which was the time we arrived). OK, our first encounter with South American bureaucracy… it takes 1 hour and 5 minutes to get our original boarding pass torn and replaced with a new identical one.
Nobody paid any attention to the fact that Jacques´s name on the boarding pass – e-ticket and his passport are different.. excellent! Anyways going to another airplane, not as new, but not too bad… It takes off about 45 minutes late and it takes (to me) ages to get to Buenos Aires! About 3 hours or something… it felt much longer than the KLM flight to Sao Paulo.
At about 22:00 local time, we arrive at the beautiful Buenos Aires, as I´m going through the customs, I see that they stamped the entry visa in the Children section of my passport.. so till 10/2009 I´m not allowed to have any kids… dOw
We order a taxi to get to our hotel… which the taxi driver can´t find, but after a while of driving through one-way streets (Buenos Aires consists solely out of one-way streets) we arrive at our destination ¨the prince hotel¨.
The hotel is quite nice, cozy and has excellent staff, after dumping our stuff, we go food hunting in the City. We end up in a nice place that actually has a terras for us to sit and enjoy the art of ´watching people´. I order a small pizza with mushrooms and a random beer from the list and Jacques orders a Tortilla and a wine. The waiter seems to ask the question to Jacques a couple of times whether we really want that beer… anyways.. I end up drinking an alcohol free beer… dOw but at least the view was nice and it was quite crowded at 01:00 to enjoy a late night snack!