Hello everyone! After the surprise farewell committee had assembled at the airport (thank you Volker and Matthias!) a fairly uneventful trip evolved. Maybe I just did not notice much, since I slept like a baby after the two glasses of champaign I had so early in the morning. I was surprised, however, that Iberia would only sell overpriced sandwiches on the three-hour flight to Madrid and that, on the 12 hour flight Madrid-Buenos Aires, they would serve just lunch and a snack! More impressive was the drinking ability of many of the Spanish and Argentinian guys on the long flight. The highlight certainly was when one of them even lit a cigar at some stage. I have never seen so many heads turning in a plane...
With one of the chaps who certainly belonged to the top group as far as boozing up in no time was concerned - he happened to sit in the seat row behind me - I had my first real conversation in Spanish. Sort of. I have no real idea what it was about, actually. But he kept shaking the half empty wine bottle in front of my face and was really friendly. Later, he switched over to just burping and snoring.
And then Buenos Aires. I believe many books have already been written on the driving habits of the Argentinians, so I will keep my comments brief. But I am impressed! First I noticed, that nobody seems to really care about switching on the lights when driving at night, not even on the motorways. That said, many cars certainly do not even have a single functional light source anymore. I have never seen so many obviously totally crashed cars actually driving! This is clearly a miracle I will have to investigate a little more. Then I was pleasantly surprised about the paintings of the streets - in Europe we tend to call them lane markings. Here, they clearly serve only decorative purposes. And then I came to realize for the first time that you really do not need any more then about 5 cm distance between cars while driving, not even when going at 120 kilometers an hour... The taxi driver gave perfect proof for that. He was a very skilled also at managing to squeeze his vehicle into impossibly narrow-seeming spaces between other cars and elegantly taking over on the right-hand side wherever possible. Whow!
Today, I spent a couple of hours walking about. And yes Buenos Aires is big. Very big. And very crowded. Berlin seems a rather provincial town compared to this (not to speak of Dresden). And I do have to improve my Spanish. I am very grateful that all the folks I met were happy to have conversations with me in my non-existing Spanish, but it sure is frustrating if you can not even communicate the most basic things...
And it is a beautiful city.
