Things I have learned about Buenos Aires

Audra:
1. This country has a shortage of change. As in, metallic money in small units. Vendors will go to great lengths to avoid giving you any coins, including in many instances sell you something for which you don't have exact change. Unfortunately, you cannot ride the bus with anything other than coins, so we spent about an hour one time going from one kiosk to another trying to buy gum and get coins for the bus. Finally we found some friendly auto mechanics who made us a trade. But it's pretty hilarious that a country's economy can function with a dire shortage of a unit of money.
2. Argentinians do not like beef jerky. We produced a bag of it brought from the US and 'our' family produced the following reactions:
-asked if it was for the dog (mom and Javier, separately)
-declined to taste it (all)
-asked us to please close the bag because the smell was making him nauseous (Quique)
-begged desperately for some (Hilary, the dog)
3. This shouldn't surprise me, but we had some steak and it was UNBELIEVABLE. I don´t even like steak. I've probably eaten about 16 ounces of steak in the past ten years. But doggone if I didn´t find myself, the day after we went out to dinner, picking at the leftover steak from our to go box. For breakfast.
4. People party late. We were out dancing last night until 4 in the morning! Our schedule has not really adjusted to the fact that it's 4 hours later here than in California...but we love it!

Other than that, we've done a lot of walking and sightseeing. We took a Brazilian dance class, which was fun, and we cooked dinner last night for the family. We rented a little apartment for a week, and it's been great to be on our own in the big city. I've never done travel this way before, to just settle into a place and take it slow and experience what it would be like to live here, rather than cram in a bunch of tourist sites and move on. It's quite nice!