Don`t Cry For Me, I`m not Evita

About two weeks ago I met a couple of Canadian girls on a bus going to Florianopolis. Actually I had heard them complaining for hours so chose not to reveal my gringa status until the last minute. They were nice but whiney. However, we shared a cab to the hostel together so all was good. In our several hour stopover somewhere we got talking about plans for South American travel and when I said that I was going to Argentina the girls went all misty-eyed, similar to the way that I do when people say they are going to Colombia, and one of them gave me a 50 peso note.

Handy. That is around ten quid so not bad.

Yesterday I left Brazil (sob, sob) and arrived in Buenos Aires after minor delays in Brazil (caused by me screaming, shouting and holding onto various parts of the airport refusing to leave- or not, given my poor command of Mickey Mouse even after all these weeks, I have no idea what the delay was) and unbelievably my luggage reached the baggage carousel at exactly the same moment that I did. My luck continued and before I had even had time to make my first Argentinian trip to the loo, I was on a bus heading to my hostel. The bus fare was 45 pesos.

Handy again.

I left my stuff in the hostel and set off in search of an ATM to fill my purse with pesos. Easily found but not so easily negotiated with. First there was a long queue which dispursed when a guy came out of the bank and shouted something. Everyone walked away and I heard `about half àn hour` for the resolution of the problem.

The next few banks I saw had out of order signs on their machines.. not looking good. About half an hour later I joined a queue of eager Argentines and took my turn at the machine.

It took visa, great. It knew my name, spooky. It refused to give me money, droga!!!!

I tangoed from cajero to cajero but nothing. I tried all three of my cards but nada came out of the machine for me, just a blank refusal to furnish me with the necessary funds.

Arse.

However, I just tried again and was greeted with the glorious ticking sound of a machine counting the bills loudly to let everyone else in the bank know that you are withdrawing a rather large sum of money so if they fancied a bit of pickpocketing then you would make a good potential target.

I dont care- I can eat today:)

And so off into the sun- the cool cold Argentinian sun.