After our late night arrival in Buenos Aires, and a crazy accident with some wine glasses in our room, the hotel moved us to another one. This was our new view (quite a lot like the old one)…

We’d been hopping from place to place for days it seemed, and so we were happy we’d be staying in one place for the next week or so. We planned a low key day exploring the local area (Recoleta).

Recoleta is an upscale area in Buenos Aires and we wandered into a nearby shopping arcade / mall.

We’d been told that prices were cheap in Argentina and that many South Americans come to Argentina to buy clothes. Our first impressions were the opposite – prices were not cheap and much the same as America, England or Canada.

It was around this time that a good friend who comes to Buenos Aires a lot, reminded me that if you have US dollars (i.e. cash), you can get a much better (unofficial) exchange rate called the Blue rate. The official rate (during our trip) is 8 pesos to the dollar, but the blue rate is 12 pesos to the dollar – a 50% improvement. Months ago I must have read about this and forgotten about it. We had no dollars with us at all, and resigned ourselves to the rather depressing thought that we would be paying 50% more than we needed to for everything.

So much for shopping!

We wandered back to the hotel taking in the sights of Recoleta – beautiful buildings and a lot of older, wealthy people.

In the evening, Eli and I took a taxi to the downtown area not far away, to go to a cool restaurant named Dada (!) for dinner.

The place was full of locals and seemed like a real gathering spot. We were lucky to get a table.

Eli loved the paper mat which became our ‘games board’ for the evening – tic-tac-toe, flick football and hangman. We were clearly bemusing the locals.

After a decent meal and a fun ‘boys night out’, we jumped a taxi back to our hotel, and a relatively early night.