Back to Buenos Aires and then onwards again…

Finally back to our house in Buenos Aires for just two short weeks. So good to see the dogs after such a long absence! Inga didn’t recognize us, and thought we were tired, stinky burglars with large backpacks. Chris and Courtney had been dog/house sitting while we were gone, they were excited for our return because it meant that they could leave town and start their own big South American adventure. We were very excited to be on home ground and have good long hot showers in our own bathroom, wash our clothes, clean our blisters, eat good food, sleep long hours and generally regroup for a day before beginning the next leg of our crazy transformation.
Immediately after touching down in Buenos Aires, we had to start planning our attack for packing and cleaning and moving overseas! I had to catch up on a bit of work, so Mike handled most of the paperwork and bureaucracy related to bringing our dogs to the United States. We bought some boxes and bubble wrap, packing tape, and started furiously sorting and packing EVERYTHING in our house. We wanted to ship some boxes via container freight, but were uncertain whether it would be prohibitively expensive or impossible due to impenetrable mazes of paperwork and typical Argentine bureaucracy. As the designated Expert Spanish Speaker of the house, it fell to me to handle most of the phone conversations and paperwork surrounding this scary and stressful task. We basically had NO IDEA how to go about doing this. Everyone we talked to said “I can’t tell you what to do, you should talk to someone else.” Our bargain-priced shipping agent said “I’m not sure what you need to do, maybe you should talk to the people in the port.” We ventured down into the strange world of the shipping port in person, and the people in the port said “Your shipping agent needs to handle this for you.” When we said that our shipping agent had sent us to the port in the first place, the port agency told us to go see a public notary. We begged them to give us a recommendation for a notary who could help us; when we went to see that notary, they were perplexed by our needs and said “Tell your shipping agent to call us.” When we called the shipping agent, she said “I’ve never heard of this notary, I don’t work with them.” Ultimately, NOBODY would advise us about what we needed to do and how to do it, nor how much it would cost. And all of these conversations were in Spanish which made them 10% more confusing and frustrating! We could’ve gone with a full-service shipping agent but we didn’t want to pay for it so we’d chosen someone who gave us a rock-bottom price and offered absolutely no service other than giving us a cargo spot on a boat. So, despite great adversity, we did cobble together a terribly vague idea of what we kinda imagined that maybe we could try to do in order to get our stuff shipped. Nothing to do but try it, hope for the best, and see how it goes. After much labored sorting and organizing and packing and taping and bubble-wrapping, we had 38 small cardboard boxes plus one bike in a cardboard box, ready to go. We hired a van and driver to pick it up and drive us and our cargo down to the shipping port. It’s a strange no-man’s-land out there, beyond the edge of the known city, a kinda fascinating maze of mud roads and container stacks and shipping warehouses, populated by truck drivers and stevedores, shipping employees, forklift drivers and team captains, almost exclusively big burly industry men. Normally, shipping agents handle this side of the business and they all know the warehouse managers by name. We were the only disoriented and confused gringos in the whole port. We got totally lost driving around this maze and our poor driver was very patient as we made phone call after phone call to locate our specified warehouse complex. When we got there… bad luck, it was 11:45 and the whole place closes down for 2 hours for lunch break. They wouldn’t even let us through the door to drop our cargo. So we had to pay our driver by the hour to sit outside the door in the van with us for two long hours, waiting for all these guys to finish their lunch and let us in. When they finally got around to dealing with us, of course we were missing important papers that nobody had told us about… there were more phone calls and more hours of delays… finally we were admitted and our cargo weighed… in a giant warehouse filled with pallets of wine and flat-screen tv’s, we met a customs agent who ripped open a few boxes to make sure we were really exporting personal effects, not contraband. Bla, bla, bla, more hours of paperwork and confusion, finally after about 8 hours we got home with a stack of papers in spanish, to show that we’d left all our goods for shipment!
Then on to packing the suitcases and cleaning the apartment, farewell dinners and despedida parties, last dates with friends and a few quiet moments to enjoy our beautiful neighborhood and quiet terrace for the last time ever! Wednesday, March 3rd we left home at 5:00 pm with two dogs in travel crates and six suitcases, never to return again…