The road to - and day 1 in - Buenos Aires

Fortunately our bus for our 9 hour trip from Cordoba to Buenos Aires left dead on time at 11.15pm on Thursday night, but unfortunately we didn't manage to get anywhere near a full night of sleep despite paying extra for the fully reclining 'coche cama' (bus bed) seats. Even I - aka the Queen of Sleeping - struggled! I think it may have been because we weren't exhausted enough when our trip started, and also there seemed to be a few problems with the air con so we kept on waking up either boiling hot or freezing cold. We weren't too worried as we had already booked a hostel and so headed straight there feeling rather smug about our pre planning, and looking forward to a shower and a few more hours of sleep.

The best laid plans and all that! We were a little concerned that our taxi seemed to be heading a fair distance away from the central bus station, but decided that we were in a large city with a decent tube system (called Subte here) so it didn't really matter if we weren't staying right in the centre of town. We arrived at the hostel which seemed decent from outside, and the communal areas also seemed fine. However, when we saw the small and at best rough around the edges despite efforts to make it look arty room, the dirty pillows, the 2 far from great showers between approx 20 people and worst of all something that looked suspiciously like a dead bug on the lumpy bed we decided not to stick around! Unfortunately it ended up that we had to pay for the first night - reasonable enough I suppose, as our booking was for 6 nights and as far as I was concerned it was not a lot of money well spent to get out of there.

We left our stuff and headed out for breakfast then to a nearby internet cafe to check out a few more options in the city. Armed with our list we went off to check them out with the help of the very easy to use Subte, and although not brilliant found a couple of decent places which we would have gone with. However, bearing in mind we are planning to stay for a week we were prepared to keep looking despite it obviously all taking a bit of time. In the end we had everything sorted by about 2pm - including a return trip by Subte to the original hostel - and we were really glad that we hadn't given up our search earlier. We have ended up in a really lovely freshly decorated double room in a very recently converted, extremely central, reasonably priced hostel which actually feels somewhere between an apartment and a hotel. Have look at the link and you'll see what I mean: Hostel Suites Obelisco

The only real drawback is that is is pretty quiet in terms of meeting people (we've only met one other person so far) but then this is also advantage in some ways as we have our own - much needed at this stage in the trip - space. Also it is Friday night so most people are probably out (yes, I know we should be too, having a few drinks in the hostel bar where we are now and it is well past midnight if that counts?) and I'm sure we'll have plenty of opportunity to be sociable over the next week.

Andrew is also taking 10 hours of Spanish classes here, starting on Tuesday, as he has been increasingly keen to learn some more of the language as the weeks have gone by. He's picked up a fair amount already and I have been teaching him some of the basics e.g. numbers (something else to do on long bus journeys, especially when there's on-bus bingo!) but he's really looking forward to building on that with some proper teaching. He was able to arrange his classes easily through the hostel. I'm pretty sure that with his undoubted talent for learning computer languages he should do pretty well with the basically very logical Spanish language - not sure how he'll go with the irregular verbs though, should be interesting!

There is also so much to do and see here that we're looking forward to starting exploring properly tomorrow - so far we have just wandered around our immediate area which is pretty much the equivalent of London's West End. As some of your know I was out here for a few weeks 5 years ago doing some work for the company I used to work for, but I only had one day off so very much looking forward to seeing some of the things I frustratingly almost saw then. Also, Margarita & Amon (hi if you're reading this!), our Chilean friends from home who many of you will have met over our wedding weekend, have family here (Margarita's sister & family) so we will be contacting them over the next few days and hopefully we will have the chance to meet up.

All in all, we're really looking forward to spending time in Buenos Aires and the icing on the cake (and, by the way, there is a massive amount of very delicious looking cake on sale here)...no buses for a whole week!

PS It was really good to speak to Andrew's Mum, both our Dads and Helen on Thursday/Friday. Mum - very sorry I missed you, hope you enjoyed your evening on Thursday and I will give you a call over the next few days. Lots of love to all and see you all very soon xxx