5-26 Here We Come! Buenos Aires!

By: Eric

We arrived in Argentina to a wonderful sight… people wearing surgical masks. Since the flight was coming from America, to prevent from getting the flu if people on the plane are contaminated, the workers at the airport wore the masks. They checked us to see if we had the flu also. A doctor stood by one of the first doors who checked out our eyes to see if there were any signs of the flu. There was also a camera with a thermal lens to check our core body temperature. It was a great start to our wonderful trip we were about to undergo. We arrived at our hotel. Gran hotel Argentino. It seemed like a nice place and the spiral staircase was a cool accessory, but when we arrived in our rooms we soon realized it wasn’t the BEST hotel we could be in. The first clue was the old key that we got for our room. The streets were amazing, and just walking out of the hotel you could see the main avenue with the 16 lanes.
All of us were pretty much dead. We were given very little time to rest before we went on a walk around the city. It was chilly. We walked for quite a while and we arrived to a pedestrian shopping mall. Basically like a normal mall just not inside. Walking through the stores we saw interesting sights such as the drug store that has the slogan “open 25 hours,” along with maybe about 3 burger kings on this street as well. We went into an enclosed mall and the first thing we saw was the beautiful fountain right in the middle. It was amazing. The roof was painted on. There were some cool shops such as a Sony shop there.
The lunch at the hotel was wonderful. The three course meal seemed to be a bit too much for everyone it seemed... except me. It started with a salad and this tortilla looking thing with a nice sauce. The entrée for the day was a piece of steak on a bed of vegetables with a side of French fries, very formal French fries. The desert was a little bit of vanilla ice cream with an amazing brownie drizzled in a warm fudge sauce.
We went out shopping and browsing afterwards. We went to an interesting place where the buildings were all different colors with outdoor restaurants and free tango performances. We were all given time to browse the shops and many of us found some nice things… shot glasses, shirts, magnets.
It was around 6 when we returned, and most of us were dead tired. We were given some time to sleep until we had to be downstairs and ready to go to dinner around 8:30.
I was woken up abruptly by loud banging on our door and what seemed like people breaking in. The door opened showing Tiffany, Zach, and Ian. All of them screamed that we had swine flu (we didn’t of course.) At first I thought we had swine flu and were to be quarantined in our rooms but they explained that it was actually North Hills High school that we were to attend. A student returning from Disney world got sick and the entire school is closed for 14 days. We were unable to go and stay with our families. We were all pretty much depressed and mad and tired and bored and everything.
After the bad news we went to la bistecca, an all you can eat restaurant with an interesting choice of foods. Everything was amazing. Even the water and the soda tasted better than the stuff in America. We went back the hotel with time to hang out and sleep before waking up early tomorrow morning to go to Uruguay.