February 11, 2008

  • Day One

    12 Hours into our trip

    I'm still on a plane and getting a little restless. In Southern Argentina, Bariloche. It was one of my stops on the way to the Glacier Park, By bus, its 22 hours. I am not quite sure how I can handle that bus ride. I think the best way, when we're ready to get out of BA would be to fly. Luckily, JC feels the same way.
    THe plane food is good, but then again, I'm not a picky eater. We keep collecting non-perishable snacks, and we're coming off this plane with more snacks than we boarded with JC started turning down the pretzels because he doesn't want to be stuck carrying them anymore.

    I'm running a text editor intead of Open Office to save on battery. I'm not really sure if having a processor intensive application has anything to do with battery life, but I'[m happy so far!

    On a deeper level, this trip is still novel and fun. I already miss my family, and the sentiments loom deeper when the realization of 7 months sinks in. I'm very excited, but its a little hard to get out of the melancholy when you've been stuck in a plane for so long. We get off in two hours, BA time:9:30pm.

    Mental note: Call the folks!

    +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

    5 hours into our trip.
    Car service picked us up at 3:00 am I guess the driver knew it was a special occaision for us, and went to go wash the car before he came to our address. We loaded our two backpacks into the trunk and tried to get into the car. Amazingly the temperature dropped to feel like the coldest day all winter. We were desperate to get into the car. I tugged and tugged at the door. Both JC and the driver tell me to pull harder... which I was already doing. JC wasn't able to get it open, and neither was the driver. With the frigid temperatures in New York, the doors were frozen shut. We ended up crawling through the drivers seat into the back passenger seat. Then off we were to the airport.

    We had already decided to check my bag, since I didn' want to bother trying to get through baggage check with a swiss army knife and too many bottles of lotion. For whatever reason, the front desk is asking us to pay another $40 for each of us for changing our flights. We assure the front desk that we've already paid the balance. After checking the system repeatedly, we gve up and hand over our credit card. She then has problems tryng to execute the transaction 10 minutes and an additinal representative later, we all reach the same conclusion.
    "I'm sorry, there's no balance on your account. You may proceed to the boarding gate"

    "... bebir?"
    "Manzana, por favor."
    He hands me the apple juice... "Senora"

    I have never felt so old in my life! Not even when I gave away all the red envelopes for Chinese New Year. Its still sometime hard coming to grips with the fact that I'm grown up.