24 Hours Later...

It's 8am, and with the aid of our remiso driver,we've finally arrived in Buenos Aires proper. Woo-hoo!  But we can't check into our apartment until 10am, leaving us almost two hours to kill.  I deposit both Derya and our stuff at the first cafe we seen and venture out in search of an ATM.  After about 20 minutes of wandering, I still have not found one.  I make my way back to the cafe and chagrined, ask the proprietor where I might find the object of my desire.

Why didn't I do this in the first place, you ask?  Sure, I can muster up the words to ask the guy where to find a "cajero automatico," but I won't really understand what he says back.  Because what he says back doesn't really sound like Spanish.  Welcome to Argentina.

In this particular case I understand the words, more or less.  He tells me to go out to the main street and go up two blocks to find "la estacion servicio."  After having him repeat that phrase, I figure I'll know if when I see it.  And then at some point it dawns on me that he meant the "service station," aka, the Shell station I'd just walked by.  See?  Even sometimes when I get the words, I still have no idea what the heck someone is talking about.  Makes me feel like a total idiot.

A cafe con leche, a capuchino, and two medialunas later, we're caffeinated, but we still have an hour to kill.  We are not happy about this.  We come to be extremely unhappy about this.  We are misery.

But at last the hour arrives, and after some figuring out of things, we arrive at our departamento for the week.  It's architecturally amazing.  Oddly enough, San Telmo was originally built as tenement housing.  Which makes me wonder who the apartments in West LA were built for...

This particular apartment is a loft, so the ceilings are really high, and there's an open second story over the kitchen, which is original and currently the master bedroom, and another open second story a bit haphazardly placed above the living room, not original and a bit iffy in terms of navigability.  The apartment has a lot of exposed brick (even on the ceiling, which we looked at a bit nervously) and really nice details.  There's an outdoor vestibule area that's especially pretty, with really old glass, some of it a really nice blue color.

I'm being extra descriptive here, because I forgot to take pictures and I left there this morning.  I'll see if Derya took any.  This blog is running with about a week delay.  Sorry.