Thursday morning:
We arrived in Buenos Aires at around 10 AM. Our cab driver looked a bit like Yanni. He drove us to the apartment rental office. It was kind of hard to find the office since there was no sign whatsoever. We had to wait around a while for the guy that Jon had spoken to walked into the office. Then, even when we saw the guy come in to the office, nobody told him that we had been waiting. It took another five minutes or so for him to be ready to see us. It took a while for us to work out to see the place because it required the owner to come with the keys. We met the owner, Amelia, at the location about 1 hour later. It was a nice apartment, although it kind of looked like an old person’s apartment.
Amelia made us go through the inventory of literally everything in the apartment down to the number of towels (strangely enough, I think I ended up taking one of them home with me by mistake). She was very nice though, and we decided to take the place.
We all went back to the rental office to make the payment, as we were to pay the rental office and they were to pay Amelia. We signed the contract and gave them the agreed upon sum. However, the rental agents began asking for a $25 referral fee. We had discussed this fee beforehand and the agent had said that it is paid by the owner. We relayed this information and it was not received kindly. The guy that we had dealt with before started screaming that we were lying and trying to take advantage. The manager said that they always received $25 from the renter. We said that while that may be true, that was not the deal that we agreed to. We were not going to pay the fee and were willing to walk out on principle, as it was easily worth it to us to pay the fee rather than spend time looking for a new apartment. We proposed splitting up the fee three ways between us, Amelia, and the rental office. The rental office was not willing to do that though. Amelia agreed to pay the fee because it was worth it for her to rent the apartment for $25 less anyway. We felt badly that she had to pay the fee, but we were just not going to pay it (I’d like to think it was out of principle and not just being cheap, but I’m really not sure.)
So we got to the apartment, put our stuff down, and went to do the first walking tour as outlined in our Frommer’s guide. Jon loves the walking tours from Frommer’s, and they’re actually pretty good. They make you go walk around and see the city, whereas otherwise you might just sit around and drink wine or coffee (not a bad option either). The walking tour was Florida street, which has a bunch of stores for shopping. Most of the stores aren’t that great, but the street is actually fairly pleasant given that it is full of shopping.
After walking around for a bit we went back to the apartment to take a nap. This was the beginning of our Buenos Aires sleep schedule. It consisted of a nap from 6 to 9 pm, get up and have dinner, go out till the sun was coming up, and then go sleep from 7 to 11 or 12. As an aside, when we talk about "sleep" here, it is in the very loosest sense of the word. The apartment that we stayed in was incredibly loud. Sleep was hardly possible, except for a 3 to 4 minute sweet spot between 7:05 and 7:08 AM when the street noise really quieted down. Needless to say, we tried to get home by this time to get in a nice sleep during that window.
After a nap, we took a cab to eat our first nice meal in BA. We were trying to go to an expensive steak place in Puerto Madero. However, the taxi parked next to a different restaurant, which Dash mistakenly identified as the one we were looking for. So we ate at that restaurant. It was nice seating because it was outside right by the water. We ordered a nice bottle of wine (not expensive, but delicious). This restaurant, which we didn’t mean to go to, was also a steak place. The steak was ok, but not great. We had to send it back after they brought out a well done steak and we had asked for medium rare. The next one they brought out was identical to the first one but we didn’t have the heart to send it back again. It was still a nice meal though.
We had written down a couple places that were supposed to be good for going out in the Las Canitas area. The first place we went to was called Super Soul Café. It was nice-looking, but not all that much was going on when we arrived. I think we had a drink, but then walked to another place down the street called Jackie O’s. This place was horrible and we left immediately to go back to Super Soul. A couple drinks later and we were having a decent time. A girl was sitting next to us, and I told Jon that she wasn’t that great looking anyway.
He did not agree and started talking to her. Her name was Gail Alexandra, and she had another last name too, but I can’t remember it. She was French but lived in Argentina. It quickly came out that she had a boyfriend in Mexico but allowed herself "Argentine candy" from time to time. She was a fun girl, but Dash quickly annoyed her when he seemed surprised at how old she was (maybe late 20s) and said that "she didn’t look so old". Not sure why that was annoying, but what can you do?
Gail asked us to come to a club where she was meeting her candy. We left at around 2 or so to go to the club called Jet Lounge. It was about as trendy as you can get, and not surprisingly, Jon and I had a difficult time getting in. Even Gail couldn’t get in for a while. Her candy came out and got us in, but we had to pay a bit in order to do so. No matter, we were in. Once entering, Gail almost immediately disappeared and we saw her one more time the entire night. The place was extremely loud with a lot of young, probably wealthy Argentinians milling about. The music was electronic and there was dancing, but the dancing was not too spirited.
I thought that if we had been dancing we would not have brought the level down, which is almost unbelievable given our inaptitude (ineptitude?) on the dance floor. Our efforts to speak with people (girls) pretty much consisted of saying "Hola!" as they drifted by. A couple girls stopped, but it was unclear whether it was to speak with us or because of sudden back pain. Here'a a quick picture of a girl walking away after touching a bunny rabbit on the nose. Dash is a happy camper. She'll come back later but Dash thinks she looks a little bit too Jewish, so will kindly give her a fake e-mail address.
At around 6 we left the club, went back to the apartment, and actually slept ok, at least relative to how it would go for the rest of the trip.