22/12/2019 – Pilar to Buenos Aires, Argentina

We woke up at around 0800. We had coffee, finished packing and got our bags downstairs and ready to go at 09:45. Liliana drove us to the bus terminal on her way to her art coffee morning. We said our goodbyes and had a final squeeze, before running for our bus, which was there and ready to leave. The roads were clear as it was Sunday morning, so it took just over an hour for us to pull up in Plaza Itallia, our stop in the Palermo district of Buenos Aires. We loaded ourselves up with our luggage and walked to a café in Palermo near the Plaza de Armenia, which was a familiar area that we had visited last week. We found a café that we could tuck ourselves and our luggage away in whilst we waited to be able to check in to our air bnb. We had coffee and some brunch, and caught up with mum and dad on a video call. At 15:00 we got an Uber 5 minutes down the road to our air bnb. We got let in. We have our own little studio apartment for the next few days, with a small swimming pool on the roof. It was a good deal, I think because most people leave the city for Christmas and New Year. This is definitely a rental apartment though and not somewhere that anyone has lived. We were let in by our hosts father who showed us around and said he lived two buildings away. We got ourselves settled in and unpacked and danced around the flat, we are happy to have our own space for a little while, it has been a bit of time since we haven’t been staying in someone else’s house alongside other people. We walked a couple of blocks down the road to the local supermarket. It was heaving with people, I guess stocking up for Christmas. We also grabbed a trolley and stocked up on all sorts of treats! Cheese, wine, crisps, pasta, olives and all sorts of yummy things! They almost didn’t serve us because we didn’t have our passports with us – they have this weird thing in South America that they always ask for ID when you pay for groceries, I guess to prevent fraud. When they saw how much we were buying they decided they would accept our card payment, not the first time this has happened! We walked home, stocked the kitchen up and pretty much immediately got stuck into some snacks. We chilled on the sofa for the evening.