Enjoying Buenos Aires

The day we left for Buenos Aires turned out QUITE interesting!  Our friend Sergio took us to the airport at 2 in the afternoon, for our 5:09pm flight, and he thought we were leaving SO early for the airport.  It did seem like we were getting there with so much extra time to spare, but that was ok - we had stuff to read and besides they were showing the World Cup game on the TVs there, so there was stuff to do to keep us occupied.  At the check-in counter, the lady suggested we get on an earlier flight (4:03pm) since we were there in such good time.  We agreed, and went on to the gate.  When we got to the gate, we saw that it was raining outside (the remnants of Hurricane Alex - which we thought wasn´t going to affect us much) and we settled into our seats and watched the game on TV.  Well, it turned out that the plane that was already at the gate couldn´t leave because of the weather in Houston, and that the plane we were going to take hadn´t even left Houston yet because of weather.  Apparently the same weather system from Alex was affecting flights up there.  Then we found out that our ORIGINAL flight of 5:09 was cancelled, so we were glad the lady put us on the earlier flight.  They moved us to another gate, where they had brought in another plane, but we eventually learned that THAT plane had a mechanical problem, so they moved us back to the original gate and now our plane was due to leave at 6:20.  We were glad we had built in a long layover in Houston and it was SO nice to finally get on that plane and take off. 
We really, really didn´t want to get to Houston too late because we were going to meet Rebeca, Jason and Dave (Jason´s advisor) there and fly with them at 9:25 to Buenos Aires.  When we got to Houston, fortunately the weather was not an issue and we were able to land and get off the plane quickly.  By the time we took the tram and finally reached our gate and found Rebeca it was probably about 8pm, giving us only an hour or so to get something to eat.  Rebeca was the one who saw us first, and called out to us as we passed below where they were eating.  So, it was good to finally be with them! 

Our flight to Buenos Aires was 9 hours and 56 minutes - quite a shaky ride at times (especially over the Gulf), but it was a good flight.  Of course, there´s no way to get comfortable in those seats, so there wasn´t any really good rest for us.  By the time the taxi got us to our hotel, we were all very tired, BUT Argentina was having a soccer game that day against Germany and we all really wanted to watch it, as tired as we were.  And we wanted to watch it along with the Argentinians - so we went to Plaza San Martin, where they had set up a giant screen, and we joined the massive crowds watching the game.

Every now and then we'd get a good view of the screen....

But this is mostly how it looked to  us.

Even though it was so crowded and most of the time we couldn´t see the screen that well, we had fun just being there.  We didn´t stay for the whole game and actually went back to the hotel when Germany got ahead by 3 points.

Once back at the hotel, we all finally rested.  After resting, Rebeca, Guillermo and I took a taxi to Tortoni´s cafe where we asked about making reservations for a Tango show.  We also stopped in at the Hotel Gran Hispano (where we had stayed back in 2008) and made reservations for the night of the 16th.  Then we took a taxi back to the hotel, met up with Jason and Dave, and then walked up to the Plaza de Mayo, where we thought we´d find a Spanish restaurant some people had recommended.  We never found it, so we tried to get a taxi to take us there, but it soon became apparent that they didn´t know where it was either. Finally the taxis dropped us off in front of a Spanish restaurant, but it looked WAY too fancy, so we walked up Avenida 9 de Julio looking for a place to eat.  We found a little sidewalk restaurant, had a nice dinner there, and then walked back up Avenida de Mayo and back to our hotel.

That was our first full day in Buenos Aires.  :-)