Well here I am in Argentina. I flew into Buenos Aires, arriving not so awake on Saturday morning. I managed to get myself to Florencio Varela, (about an hour outside of BA) which is where my friend Kirsty now lives. Some of you may remember her from my trip to Mongolia that we had about an adventure a day. Anyways, she now teaches english in Argentina. So we met up after 3 years, but it didn´t really seem like 3 years. She has latin dance classes every Sat., so I went along. It must have because I was so tired that I couldn´t catch on. (must have been). I looked quite the fool. Later that night we went for dinner at the house of the guy who runs the school. His family was very friendly, and I managed to half understand the conversation (it was in spanish mostly). Much later that night we went out dancing. People here only go out around 2:00 am, even that is a bit early. We got home around 6:30.
The next day me & Kirsty and one of her friends explored around BA, saw some tango in the streets, tried to see Eva Peron´s grave but it was closed for the day, then I took off by bus south. I ended up in Puerto Madryn (where I am now), which is probably too small to be on most maps but it´s just outside Peninsula Valdes. The peninsula is a reserve, where today I went to see right whales, elephant seals and sea lions. The right whales were huge! We went out in a boat into the bay, and then they cut the engines and we just floated. Some of the whales came right up to the boat and swam under it. They were bigger than the boat I think. Took lotsa pictures. Maybe some will turn out. Then after we saw where the elephant seals were nesting (?), there were two born while we were there.
It´s much warmer here in Pto. Madryn than in BA, I think it went up to 19.3 degrees today. (well, that´s what the sign said anyways). In BA I thought I was going to freeze to death, but I guess I can always buy winter stuff. The spanish here is weird too. The double ll, which is pronounced as a ´y´ everywhere else, is ´sh´. On the plane over, the flight attendant asked me if I wanted carne or posho for dinner, and because I had no idea at the time what posho was, took the meat. Only later I found out she was trying to say pollo, which is one of the first words you learn travelling in latin america (it means chicken). But for a while I thought that my spanish had really deteriorated because I had no idea what posho was. But today I managed to do okay again, I´m starting to understand people when they speak which I could never do before (unless in context).
It´s also pretty cosmopolitan over here, I have no idea who is a tourist and who´s local. There´s a lot of mixed european backgrounds.
So tomorrow I´m headed for eventually El Calafate, which is near the Moreno Glacier near the border of Chile.
Well hope everything is okay over there. I saw that Canada now has something like 9 bronze, which ranks us 26th? Go Canada!