The Little Engine That Could

I forgot to mention that Greg and I rented a house. It is at KM 21- which needs some explaining. Bariloche is a mountain town of about 150,000 people. The ski season ended about 5 days before we arrived. It is surrounded by mountains and on a huge lake, large enough to have tides (250 miles around I think...) The entire town- grocery stores, shopping, pharmacy, etc... is in town. Restaurants and breweries are the few things located randomly outside of town. There is one bus that will take you to where we live, and it comes once every 30 min. or so- no schedule, of course, as this is Argentina.

So- if you haven't guessed by now, we live 21 km outside of town. When we booked it, we were training for the marathon and running 21+ km on a regular basis. It really didn't seem that far.......

So now we have a car (details of buying it are worthy of their own blog post). A 1990 Renault 12- that runs off natural gas. Natural gas is 1.25 pesos per liter, and regular gasoline is 3.57 per liter. For those of you living in the US and not living like the rest of the world and using the metric system, there are approx. 4 liters to a gallon. We can switch to regular gasoline if needed- but find the natural gas to be the best thing about the car.

The best part is that we can probably sell the car in 4-6 mo. for exactly what we paid for it, if not more. Used cars are ridiculously overpriced here- so if you have an old car that is worth nothing in the states, bring it to Argentina- you will instantly triple the value of the thing. Needless to say, we can now drive and explore the rest of Patagonia- spending about 16 pesos for every 400 km we go.

A few fun facts before I go. The speedometer on the car does not work. While we were worried about speeding tickets- police in Argentina are not allowed to pull you over for anything at all.... there are no such things as moving violations. Government offices in Argentina- those needed to fill out the paperwork for buying a car- are only open from 9-12 M-F. You need to go to 4 different government offices to get random papers in order to buy the car. You need to go back to three of them to get stamped after completing different forms. Shaving cream stops windows from fogging on a car. Stereos are not common in cars- and are commonly stolen out of cars. Water pouring in through the window seal can be fixed with the addition of a few towels in the car. Locks on cars are overrated. Stop signs are arbitrary- just pay attention and honk a lot.

More on this another time :)