Friday, November 21, 2008

Still Trying To Leave

Pat didn't want to leave Mendoza and in a way we have succeeded by missing our flight back to Buenos Aires. It's not like we weren't warned. A local had told us the flights were marked for BA time, which is an hour ahead of Mendoza. Despite ample opportunities to reconfirm the flight, in the boneheaded move of the week, we took Aerolinias Argentinas at its word that the flight departed at 9:50. Wrong! That's 8.50 Mendoza time. Ironically, if the cab we had scheduled for our morning pickup would have arrived on time, instead of 15 minutes late, we would likely would have squeezed on the plane at the end. Instead, they had just shut the doors. Muy stupido as the locals might say. (Or something like that.) Actually, they might call it a qui lombo, as in a big mess on our part. Qui lombo probably isn't correct as that is more of a slang phrase akin to a snafu in english.

So, we stashed a bag with the customer service people at the airport -- charge of six pesos (lesss than $2) to watch it for up to 24 hours, and took a cab back to Mendoza centro. Ok, it wasn't our favorite locale but it's nice enough for shopping, so we we took care of souvenir shopping so as not to waste the time. We're back to a cafe on a closed shopping street where its warm outside (mid 80s, looking forward to those 30s back home), so could be worse. Could do without the jackhammer in the background from some street repair project, but what are you going to do?

Our only concern now is that Aerolineas shows up on time for the afternoon flight; that would be poetic justice but such is travel. In the scheme of mistakes, it could have been worse. All in all, a minor glitch in an otherwise good trip.

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