SCAMMED.

Well well well. I will get to how I got scammed later. First, I will start with the beginning.

On the plane from Santiago de Chile to Buenos Aires Jenny made friends with a lovely boy named Gersen (who I can't stop calling Gerken) who is half Peruvian and half Argentinean who helped us arrive to our apartment, which ended up not being available. Blah blah blah the Realtor was wearing a see through shirt and she helped us get a sweet apartment in the center of town with our own kitchen, bathroom and balcony. I wonder HOW SHE DID IT. I'm sure her stellar outfit had nothing to do with the negotiation process.

Anyway, that night we went out to dinner and met a GEM OF A MAN, named Jorge. Things we found out about him: he is a widower of 6 years who has three kids (oh HELL YEAH sign me up!), Buenos Aires has no racial problems because they have no blacks and a very low indigenous population, unlike Philadelphia (where we told him we lived and based on the movie he saw about Philadelphia it has lots of problems because of the blacks), and that Walt Disney stole all of his ideas from the magical town of "La Plata" which is his hometown, south of Buenos Aires.

So that was just the first night. Yesterday we wandered a lot and got some grocery shopping done. There are so many cool places around here. At night we met up with Gersen and we decided to all go to Puerto Madero which has really nice restaurants and a "nice bridge." When we got there it was POURING rain so we got completely soaked and ended up at a hooters trying to get dry and we all looked like wet dogs. Gersen currently has my puma's and my Live The Dream Martin Luther King shirt because we didn't want him to get cold on the way home.

Today, Jenny and I wandered, ate steak for the first time (glorious), and then got scammed by the bank. A couple days ago I took out money from the ATM and while trying to pay for our lunch today, the restaurant told me that my $100 peso bill was FAKE. Really? Because I got it from THE BANK. If the restaurant could notice it was fake, I don't see how the bank couldn't. Absurd, really. Long story short our door man helped me scam some pour sucker at the kiosk across the street to use it, but then later came knocking on my door telling me that the kiosk man had come to find him (angry) after realizing it was fake. So now I'm out about $30 bucks.. joy to the world!

Don't get scammed in the BA, that's today's lesson.