December 16, 2021 – Buenos Aires

I didn’t sleep well last night l My room was too warm and I woke up frequently. I gave up trying to sleep at 4am.
They have a private room for us to have breakfast in. It was a very nice buffet with an omelet station. Coffee was free flowing so that made me happy.
The exchange rate is strange. If you go to a bank or ATM, you get 100 pesos for $1.00. If you go to an exchange place you get 190 pesos for $1.00. The U.S. Dollar is safer so people pay a premium to get them. I exchanged $50 and got 9500 pesos. Yesterday’s tgree empanadas cost 400 pesos. Steak dinner out costs under 2000 pesos including wine.
We had a bus tour of Buenos Aires. We stopped at Casa Rosada to see the Evita balcony. We visited the Catholic Cathedral were Pope Francis served before being named Pope. We went to La Boca which is famous for brightly painted buildings, tango dancers, and the soccer team La Boca Juniors. While there we were treated to Chorizo con pan which is a large sausage on a soft roll. They offered chimichurri sauce for those of us who like it. The sandwich was very delicious.
We are divided into 4 groups named for different types of penguins. I am in the Adelie group. They had an artist in La Boca that is painting pictures of these penguin with named our ship.
We got back to the hotel around 2pm. I went to my room and slept for 2 hours. I went out about 530pm to get my favorite ice cream, dulche de leche, at Volta. I continued on to find Brian and my favorite restaurant, Los Pinos. It hasn’t changed at all. It didn’t open for dinner until 7pm so I didn’t stay to eat.
Since I was still full from lunch, I decided to skip dinner and just have a beer at the hotel.
Tomorrow, we need to out our big bag out by 7am. We’ll leave the hotel at 9am to go to the pool farm. We should get to our boat around 4pm where we each need to have a covid test before embarking.
I’m not sure after leaving Buenos Aires how much wifi access we will have. Don’t be surprised if there are days with no blog and the 4 or 5 blog entries all at once.