I'm not in Kansas anymore...

Greetings from Argentina! I knew right away that I was no longer in the United States when all of the blogging instructions on this site appeared in Spanish rather than English! After a six hour delay in Miami, our flight took off at 1am for Buenos Aires. We were on one of those big wide planes that have 2 seats on each side and four seats in the middle. Guess where my seat was? Correct-in the middle. The good news is that I was seated next to a lovely Argentinian woman named Laura. As soon as we reached a comfortable cruising altitude of 37,000 feet, we enjoyed a nice dinner at 1:30am of chicken and red wine and talked about her recent visit to America and where I should visit in Argentina. Thank goodness she spoke English!

It was an 8 hour flight and I was lucky enough to get about 6 hours of good sleep, sort of. My tailbone was a bit sore when I woke up and got up to use the restroom. It turned out that I had been sitting all night on the complimentary headphones for both me and Laura. Other than that, it was a decent night's sleep in the cramped middle seat of economy class. :)

Now I am in the Marriott Plaza in Buenos Aires, relaxing after a nice 4 1/2 mile training run with a caiprhana, watching the US-Canada hockey game in spanish, and typing this blog. I am rooming with Sarah from Washington, DC--a great gal who is celebrating her 40th birthday with this trip to Antarctica. (She is the one in the picture from my last posting). We travel far to meet our neighbors. Our training run was lots of fun--about 40 of us running the streets of Buenos Aires around a park near the hotel. There were lots of people enjoying the 77 degree weather around the park--laying on the grass, watching street performers, eating snacks from the local vendor carts, and even a few people cheering us on. I think we ran through some sort of performance and the announcer made a joke about us running a race through the park. Everyone started clapping so we started waving at the crowds. Hopefully we got the translation correct!

Tonight we are off to a tango dinner. I think that means we eat dinner and watch professional dancers demonstrate how to do the tango. Again, it is hard to know what people are saying if you don't speak the language...