Frankfurteria

That´s on a sign that I can see through the window of the cybercafe that I´m in. It makes me laugh. There are also a whole bunch of pigeons right outside the window, not all of them obese. Unusual.

So Peter and I are going to Iguazu falls next week. We leave on Monday and it´s a 6-day trip. It cost around $200 US each, which, considering it includes transportation, hotel and two meals a day, is pretty good. The hotel looks really nice, too, which will be a welcome change from Hotel Arapey, which only heats its rooms at night, despite the rainy 10-degree weather. But, to be fair, it´s nicer today, maybe as warm as 15 degrees, and it´s only partly cloudy.

But, good lord, did we have a hard time getting this trip booked. We went to the travel agent yesterday and talked to a really helpful woman who spoke English (yay!), and we were given an itinerary and quoted a price and shown a hotel brochure and all kinds of good stuff. She said that she could book our tickets when we came back with a tourist visa from the Brazilian Embassy. It was closed by that point, so we went there this morning. The guy gave us a form to fill out and told us to come back. We went for breakfast (Cafe Central is a wonderful place) and filled out the forms. Mostly. We had to stop back at the travel agency to get the address and telephone number of the hotel, which was just fine. So then we go back to the Embassy, wait around for a while (I don´t know why the people who work there aren´t at the windows. They just seem to come out every 20 minutes or so to see if there´s anybody there that needs their help). We wind up talking to the same guy as before, and he asks us for picutres. We show him our passports, and he tells us that no, we need seperate pictures taken. He directs us to the AGFA shop on the corner of the block. We go down there and get pictures taken. Both Peter and I look horrible in the pictures, of course. Peter looks stoned and I look ghostly. I decided that we need to doodle on them and attatch them to the postcards we send to people. (Sidebar: We´ll be sending you postcards from Iguazu Falls, so next week.) Anyway, we go back to the Embassy again, and wait around for about 45 minutes. Yawn, etc. This time we talk to a different guy, and everything goes well until he asks us for our tickets.

What?!?!

We tell him that the travel agent told us that we needed the visa to get the tickets. He tells us no and gives us a list of thing that we need in order to get a visa. We leave again. I really wish that we´d been given that list along with the forms to fill out. But we head bravely back to the travel agent and explain things to her. The Embassy closes in half an hour by this point. She tells us that she can´t give us our not-quite-tickets-but-something-similiar until tomorrow. That´s all right, because that way we can still pick up our visas on Monday morning. (The travel agent said we´d get them the same day, usually, but the list the Embassy gave us said it takes two buisness days.) The travel agent then tells us that they currently can´t accept credit cards. She does tell us, however, that we can pay in either Uruguayan pesos or US dollars, and (thank God) that we don´t have to pay it all now, that we can pay the rest when we pick up our `tickets` tomorrow. So after paying half each, we´re finally finished. For today. We have to buy an alarm clock before tonight, though, so we can make sure to wake up in time to get to the Travel Agent at 10am so that we can get to the Embassy ASAP.

In other news, I had another disgusting Uruguayan classic for dinner last night. It´s called a Parilla, and it consists of various parts of a cow cooked up and served to you. There were piece of steak, churizo sausages, kidneys, blood sausage and something deep-fried that looked like KFC chicken fries. I wasn´t adventurous enough to try anything but the churizo and the steak, especially since the steak was rather disgusting. It was like it had been soaked in oil before cooking--I´d never tasted steak that fatty and greasy before. But I´m glad I was around to have been part of it. Now I can say that I´ve done it, and I´ll (hopefully) never have to do it again.

Hmmm... What else? Peter and I are going to be buying Yerba Mate (a kind of tea) and the... I forget what they´re called, but they´re the cups you drink it out of, kind of carved gourds, and they start with a B. Bambedas? Something like that. I don´t want to ask Peter for fear of people looking at me funny. The only problem with this plan is that we have no way of boiling water. Oh, well, though. I don´t particularly feel like buying a thermos (where you keep the water to refill the rather small cup), either, so I guess maybe we´ll just bring the stuff home and drink it here.

My iPod is still frtizy, despite successfully resetting it. My camera is still dead, but I have bought a disposable one. It has one picture on it so far, but I plan to take many more. The power converter my mom gave me is now working; we put an elastic band around the components to hold it together properly so the connection doesn´t cut in and out. This was not before we accidentally bought a cable for Itialian laptops in South America, though. Oh, well. It cost roughly $3.50 Canadian, so it´s not a horrible waste. And, no, we can´t return it. We tried.

And today we bought more goodness from a Patisserie a couple blocks down from our hotel. That place is straight out of Paris. So, Colbert, I may not have eaten something deep-fried and yummy, but I´ve definately eaten something unhealthy and yummy. :-) They have the `macaroon` things that Peter brought me back from France a couple of years ago. I´m pretty I made just about everybody I could try on of those. They don´t have as many flavours as the place in France, but they´re still soooo yummy.

Anyway, I´ve been very verbose today. I´ve caught up on everyone´s blogs except Angela´s and Jenilee´s. And Fiz´s, I guess. I haven´t even been to that one, yet. But I´m glad to hear how everyone´s doing. Jo, you made me totally want to go to Las Vegas! Maybe I can take the debt I wind up with after this trip and put it towards a weekend there. If only things actually worked that way... ;-)