Two weeks ago today I left my (admittedly comfortable) life back in London to come to Argentina for the year. For the next 7 months I will be writing short, bitesize blogs with maybe the occasional inspirational story thrown in. Alas, not today - but welcome to my 'breakfast' blog episode one.
First impressions:
- Cross a road at your peril. Much like in Rome, zebra crossings and sometimes even traffic lights are pretty much for show.
-Despite most people casually hating the British for the Falkland Island's (here 'las malvinas'), people here love Polo, Rugby and many speak/want to be English. In fact, the local's are so angry with their own government and economic woe's that the Falklands barely ever come up in conversation.
-Jibberish. Or that's what it felt like everyone was speaking for the first few days until I started to get used to their unique dialect of spanish (here, castellano).
-If you have a world map handy, take a quick glance. Yep, it really is right in the corner of the world and extremely out the way - and the people here know it!
-It's common to see roads with no dividing lines at all. So the cars pretty much make it up, swerving left and right.
-Looks like i'll have to spend all my pesos (7 pesos to the pound) before I leave as the government recently introduced a law almost totally banning converting the currency. This essentially means that if a product is imported, it is done so through the black market and so for example an iPhone out here will equate to way over £500.
-In fact, the only saving grace is that public transport is dirt (!) cheap (about 20p per train journey).
- Although I was told it would be to the contrary, on the whole it's no Nottingham (if you know what i mean...)
OK - all for now. Episode 2 to follow - 'how to survive in the deep end'
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