Ezeiza

[Maryanne]Work has been crazy busy and I've been working 12 hour days for weeks, with the occasional weekend work on top of that; I was so happy and excited to be headed off on a 3 week vacation - one that we'd planned for years - yay!!!

[Kyle]We arrived at the Buenos Aires, Argentina airport stiff and tired from the 10-hour flight from Houston. The flight to get us further south is inexplicably scheduled a couple of hours before our international flight arrived in Ezieza. This left us needing a hotel, but without time to explore Buenos Aires, we picked one close to the airport to minimize travel time an maximize rest time before an early morning flight.

Selecting a cab when arriving at a new airport can be anxiety producing; you can be swarmed by locals offering 'taxi' as soon as you leave immigration, but we stuck with the easy route and just pulled up at one of the outside stands and verified we could pay in $US.

The cab driver turned out to be quite the entrepreneur - he offered us tours of the city (and any other place we wanted), on line Spanish lessons, and money exchange. We attempted gratitude while decline all 'for now', but really we were too exhausted and excited to focus. It turned out the exchange rate he was offering was pretty good... but ... too late after the fact. But he did also give us a bit of background about the area we were staying in, aside from the airport it is also Polo club territory, where many of the city elite have second homes. For us it was simply a place to rest up while waiting for the following flight onwards.

The hotel ended up being in a (modern) Medieval-Italian-themed self-contained shopping plaza - with restaurants, boutique stores and high end fashion stores (our driver explained that not only was the area the hub for the Polo Set, but also where Many of the richer Buenos Aires residents kept a get-a-way home). While the complex we found ourselves in was totally fake, it was a really pleasant and easy place to spend the few hours we had. We ambled around and sourced breakfast, and lunch provisions (from bakeries and delicatessens) and a cute Rosé Malbec from the wine store (it seems that 90% of the wine on the shelves here is some form of Malbec).

Scenes from our stop over - Maryanne found a cook shop, and we ate well from the restaurants and delicatessens at this pretty Medieval mall

Despite little sleep on the flight, we were also hungry so we decided to eat a late lunch/early dinner in one of the restaurants available; we were pretty much between meals I wasn't sure if it was open, Maryanne encouraged me in and it turned out to be open with friendly staff and great food.

We returned to our room for a quick nap, woke up later than expected (just as the last light was leaving) and broke into our supplies for 'dinner' and were asleep again within an hour. Poor Maryanne was so exhausted that she managed to sleep through all my clank and clatter as I packed and cleared up ready for an early departure.