HIGHLIGHT OF THE DAY: Speaking to Zeme
BUMMER OF THE DAY: Can’t think of a single thing
WORD OF THE DAY: I LOVE BA
Today was a bludge day. No consulates to visit, no jobs to be done. It is a Saturday and Kate and I briefly thought about doing one of the hostel pub crawls that was on tonight at 10pm, but we both know we will be buggered and not make it, but it was a plan.
With no alarm set again, my body clock woke me up at 6.30am and with the sunlight streaming straight into our room it was tough to get back to sleep, so I decided to shower and change and leaving a note for Kate went downstairs to spend some time on the computer. 7am in a hostel in Buenos Aires is a quite affair, so I decided to try and call Zeme from the hotel phones. For whatever reason, I think it maybe the carrier they use, I couldn’t get through, but at least I tried and I will try again later when we head out for lunch.
I checked my blog this morning and I have had 24,999 hits on it since leaving home 10 months ago and I am chuffed that I am still getting so many people coming back to read my stuff. When I first started the blog I would have never have thought that I would get so many people following my journey, but I am glad, as it keeps me enthused to keep it up to date, which is a good thing as I will have something pretty impressive to read once my Odyssey comes to end, whenever that will be. I am thinking of keeping my blog going once I move to Ethiopia and write about the highs and hopefully the not too many lows on integrating myself into a new culture, a new home with a new man. I know I won’t be writing a daily post, but I think it will be interesting for people to know about how things work in a different country and as unusual as Ethiopia. What do you think? So even though my travel odyssey may close, or not be as jammed pack, as I am sure we will still be travelling, I will still be able to keep in touch with the world with some African stories. I am sure I am going to have some crackers as I try and also learn their language called Amharic, which is a little like Arabic and it is written with Cyrillic letters, so I will have a tough road ahead that is for sure. I know I have said it several times before, but thank-you to the people who read my blog and come back and I know it has been referred a lot as well. It is a labor of love and me and my little laptop and my trusty notebook will continue to share the world with you where we can. BlogSpot is an awesome host. It is very user friendly and they give you a whole bunch of stats that you can always look at, from where the traffic is coming from, where the clicks are coming from, the stats can be found on a now, this week, this month and all time basis and also which blogs have been the most read. So the top five blog entries are:
BIG CITY, BOYFRIEND, SEATING SAGAS AND GOODBYES
WELCOME TO THE LAND OF KEBAB YIROS AND GYROS
EKATERINBURG – MILITARY VERSUS ROMANOV’S
GOODBYE TO MY SPANISH CONTIKI-ERS
A NIGHT SPENT IN A MONGOLIAN GER
So some surprises there for 4 of the top 5. But interesting all the same.
Since my blog was up to date and all my pictures were loaded up, I thought I better put some work into my actual blog site, tabs, information and pictures that have been long neglected. As I now have time and great internet speed. So I was updating and busy loading all my Bernstar jumps, I had a look at my Photo of the Day album that was also quite far behind with photos only loaded to Madagascar, which was day 175, and I am currently up to day 306 of my trip. So I needed to find 131 of my best pictures from each day. The annoying thing is I have corrupted my external hard drive where all my photos had been saved, categorized into countries and then days, so I had to put in the raw mini SD cards, that has all the original photos, in their original format that haven’t been turned, cropped or touched and look for the best ones that way. So you can imagine the time it takes to trawl through my thousands of photos to get the ‘winning’ pictures. TIME CONSUMING. But the longer I leave it the BIGGER the job will get, so I stuck with it and I think I now have all my days accounted for. I am still thinking of a way to categorize them all and I think I put them into Continent albums. That will make them nice and easy to look at, a lot more work for me as I will have to download and reload what I currently have into new albums, but I think that will be a nifty way for people to look at them. I will save that job for tomorrow though, as it was 10.30am when Princess Kate arrived into the common room where we started to plan our day.
I wanted to speak to Zeme today, so we headed out from the hotel to look for a cabina that would work to start with and then we were going to have a bite to eat and then attack the rest of the day. I have worked out the Claro (phone company) doesn’t let me call out to Ethiopia, but I have found there are cabina’s that use another phone company called Telefonica, and I can get through with them. It does take a few tries to get through to Ethiopia, I find this all the time, no matter what country I have been in, but by the third or fourth try I normally get through. Patience is of a virtue making these calls and just makes you think that we take something as simple as making a phone call for granted back home. I think that is where my frustration lays; I’m not used to it. So the good news is that Zeme's passport went in yesterday to the Brazil Consulate, Friday, and will be back in 5-6 working days. Thank goodness it is finally in. That will give him a week to get his visa for Venezuela when he gets his passport back from Brazil, which apparently they won’t need all that time and then he will be on a jet plane to Rio!! So that is awesome news and has put my mind to rest. There are only 19 days till I see him, which is 18 days till he leaves and I know it will be here before we both know it!
There was a jewelry shop that Kate’s mum had recommended so we were going to have a look at that and if we ran out of things to do, we had checked the movie times for Sherlock Holmes and we would head back to the river front if we didn’t find something better. After finding the shop, we were lucky we didn’t have to walk too far as it was on our street, Florida, but it was closed. I think it may have been a blessing in disguise, as they looked like they had some nice stuff through the window, and I got to keep some money in my purse for a while longer.
We were starting to get hungry as we had skipped breakfast when Kate piped up about eating at TGI Fridays which we saw on our last taxi ride along the river front a few days ago. What a great idea, I was starting to think about their potato skins and the large Kahlua milk shake things you can get from there as well. Yeah let’s have TGI Fridays for lunch. So we hailed a taxi, which I have to say is never an issue getting one in this city, and paid the very worth it 5AUD to get us to the waterfront. It has been so hot the last few days with temperatures around the 35C. It is a dry heat, but it’s still bloody hot and there isn’t a cloud in the sky to even give you a small reprieve, so we are also getting some colour as we do all our walking. I had the cinema address written down in my notebook so we got dropped down there again not knowing what number TGI Fridays was, but we knew we saw it along here somewhere, how far can it be? It was a little like Newfarm where they have converted wharf sheds into shops, restaurants and a Catholic University. So we walked and walked and walked and after 25 minutes walking we decided it was a little further than first thought and with a time to keep of a 2.30pm for the movie, we turned around and went to one of the 50 restaurants we passed in the hunt for TGI Fridays. The restaurant we picked was a pasta pizza set up that had river views, so we had a leisurely lunch in the shade as we watched people walk the boardwalk and a single rower rowing back and forth up and down the river. The beauty of this restaurant was it had free Wi-Fi, a great waiter who spoke enough English and kept on bringing out stacks of ice for our drinks and it was right next door to the cinema.
It is a pretty cool movie theater and to ask for tickets in Spanish for Sherlock Holmes was Sherlock Holmes, not too hard this time. We decided not to buy the popcorn package this time as I was not sure after a chicken Caesar salad for lunch with some calamari rings that I could eat a monster bag again, so I went for the mini monster (which wasn’t that much smaller) and a bigger drink and we had 5 minutes to spare till the start of the movie. It’s all in the timing people, all in the timing. The movie was great, but I still think that Tower Heist was better. I am lucky as Kate and the guys have seen 2 other movies on the trip so far in Salta and Santiago and apparently they were both busts!!!
So back to the hotel and back to some more internet. I kept plodding on with my Photo of the Day pictures and the updating of my blog till 8pm when we decided we better get something to eat but couldn’t be bothered going to a proper restaurant, so we walked 5 minutes out the front of the hotel and had Macca’s. I know, I know again, but it is quick and simple and it was good and we were back again within 40 minutes. A quick one sometimes is a good one. That also included a stop at the Pharmacy to get some new shampoo and conditioner. I have been using the same brand since July and I think my poor hair needs a change as it just has a mind of its own after it has been washed and feels like straw. So I lashed out and bought Pantene, its only 2.50AUD a bottle here, so I doubly lashed out and bought a bottle of conditioner as well. I haven’t even had a conditioner bottle in my toiletry bag since leaving home, so this will be a little luxury that I hope that my hair will enjoy!
I was then up until midnight still pulling off photos from my thousands in preparation of loading them all in the morning pre-empting that my internal alarm clock would be getting me up and not letting me have a sleep in no matter how late you go to bed……
Another glorious day in Buenos Aires
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