"You should count it if you want" he says in pretty good english. We figure after trading him 10 US bills for this wad, yup, sure, we will definitely count it, even though it will take quite a while!
Argentina is kind of a first world country, but their economy has been totally messed up by their government. They defaulted on their government bonds twice in the last few years, so their currency is in a free fall. Inflation is very high. The official government rate for currency exchanges is 8 pesos to the U.S. $. Yesterday we traded money on the "blue" (not black - EVERYBODY in the country uses the blue market) for 13 pesos to the USD. We went to one of the shopping districts, haggled with a couple of guys, went to a small office in a strip mall, counted out our US cash (which we have been hoarding) and then the guy dumped a brick of money on his desk. The biggest bill in Argentina is 100 pesos = $8, so when you change a thousand bucks, you get a wad about an inch thick. Hilarious, but it's saving us a ton of money in Argentina!
Buenos Airies is a beautiful city. We are here in their spring, so there are flowers everywhere, along with many people out running, cycling or doing a kind of cross exercise thing using little plastic cones on the grass.
Wine is very good and CHEAP! Almost mandatory to have a little champagne with lunch!
Across the street from our hotel is a cemetery that is hundreds of years old.
Apparently, Evita Peron is buried here, but we could not find her mausoleum.
It was super cool to arrange to meet our friends John and Shelley for dinner. They had just come back from an Antarctic ski trip.
We will be hiking and camping for the next three weeks. We collected our sleeping bags and tent from Argentina post yesterday - we were worried about that they would not hold them, since Canada post told us that it would take 6-8 weeks to deliver them, and they arrived in 6 days. Argentine post was supposed to send them back home after holding them for a month (I.e they should have shipped them back to Canada about 5 weeks ago). Fortunately, they are inefficient, so they were still being held at the post office. By the time we took taxis, stood inLine, got tracking numbers, stood in line, paid import duties, stood in line and had our stuff inspected , it only took us 5 hours to collect them!
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