Philip Fibiger

We spent eight days in Argentina at the end of July, most of it in Buenos Aires with an overnight trip to Iguazu Falls. Rollins does a lot to support faculty traveling abroad, and in looking into potential destinations Argentina quickly became the obvious choice. It was nice to get out of Florida in the middle of the summer. . . . Iguazu was warm (I haven’t really figured out the meteorology of that one, it was winter), but Buenos Aires was nice and cool, in the 50’s and low 60’s for most of the trip.

The strength of the dollar compared to the peso was another huge factor. The peso spends about like the dollar, but the exchange rate is three-to-one. The nicest boutique hotels in the city were around $120/night. A stunning meal for two ran 150 pesos including appetizers, dessert, and wine. As expected, the comparable meal in a major US city would be around $150. Coming back to a credit card statement with these $40-45 charges was very nice.

My mighty dollars also made it a great place to shop. Palermo, the neighborhood for our second stint in Buenos Aires, is a bohemian shopping district full of local designers. I ended up getting an amazing leather messenger bag for a fraction of what it would have cost in the US.

Buenos Aires felt very comfortable and western, and with our rusty Spanish we were able to get along ok. Our only real communication problems had to do with people expecting Castilian pronunciation: “Hon-dur-as” “Que?” “Hon-dur-as” blink-blink . . . we show written address “Ah, On-door-as.” Taxis were cheap and made it very easy to scoot around town, even for short trips.

Our two day trip to Iguazu turned into a one night plus one day trip after LAN airlines overbooked and booted us from our flight, leaving us to hang around the domestic airport for over four hours. In the end we arrived in time to enjoy caipirinhas on the patio of our bed and breakfast followed by a tour of the town (complete with views across into both Brazil and Paraguay) and a nice dinner out. We had a full day at the National Park / Falls, and that was plenty. We were able to cover all the network of trails and vantage points. It was absolutely stunning; Eleanor Roosevelt’s “Poor Niagara” quote definitely rang true.

I’ll make some recommendations for things to do and places to stay/eat, hopefully helping out any future Argentina travelers who might happen upon this:

Hotels:
Home Hotel: In Palermo, this boutique hotel was absolutely pitch perfect. An amazing complimentary breakfast, impeccable design, effortless service.
Art Hotel: In Recoleta, it was in a nice quiet location but was close to everything. A small room, but very cozy.
Secret Garden B&B: In Iguazu Falls. Comfortable rooms, John makes a mean caipirinha (or more accurately, three) and is happy to chat, dispense advice, or give you a tour of the town.

Restaurants:
La Cabrera: The steak was delicious and never-ending. An outstanding meal.
Cluny: Right in the shopping area of Palermo, we had a great prix fixe lunch here.
Gran Bar Danzon: It was a little hard to find at night, but the cooking was inventive and the wine selection was stellar. In a really nice room, too.
Un Altra Volta: Supposedly the best ice cream in Buenos Aires, it didn’t disappoint. We still dream of the dulce de leche ice cream.

Shopping:
Qara: This is where I bought my messenger bag, they had without a doubt the nicest leather goods in the city.
Papelera Palermo: As the name might suggest, they had a huge selection of very cool homemade paper goods.

We just got back from eight days back east, most of which was spent at my parents’ summer house on the Goodnow Flow in Newcomb, NY. It’s a relatively small lake, about three and a half miles long, a couple hundred yards wide, and no more than 20 feet deep at its deepest. The weather couldn’t have cooperated any better, it was warm enough to swim but not insanely hot or humid, there was often enough of a breeze to keep the insects at bay, and it didn’t rain until the last day and a half we were there. For a vacation of doing nothing, we ended up packing in a lot of activities, but it still felt pretty restful. Em’s parents came up for a few days, and we went with them to Montreal. We went fishing, plinking with my .22’s, and I went motorcycling with my Dad and my Uncle in cowtown around Glens Falls. It was nice to spend a week with no television and (almost) no internet access.

The view from my parents’ dock on the Goodnow Flow. Posted from my T610 en route to Montreal.

Em and I just got back from our trip to Thailand. We spent two weeks at Amanpuri, an incredibly swanky resort on the island of Phuket with 3 of my cousins and their wives/girlfriends. Through the generosity of a very wealthy parent of one of my cousin’s wife’s students, we stayed in a stunning 5 bedroom villa at the resort with with our own full-time chef and usually 2-3 housekeepers. I can’t really describe the intense level of luxury at this place, I think you’d do better to check out the photos. Most of the photos are from Amanpuri and Phuket, a few are from the last two days that we spent in Bangkok.

We had custom suits tailored ($199 for 2 nice wool suits perfectly cut, 2 custom dress shirts, and 3 silk ties), went on an elephant trek, saw temples in Bangkok, and ran around the island on our ridiculously underpowered $4/day motor scooters, but mostly we hung around the private pool(s) and drank a lot of beer. And ate world class thai food. And sometimes had massages at the beach. It was worth every minute of the 36 hours of travel hell that it takes to get from Los Angeles to Phuket, and then some.

Three and a half days is really pushing the limit, in terms of acceptable short vacations that require a trip across the country. Especially when there’s two three hour drives between Albany and Ithaca included in that three and a half days. We went back east for my sister’s graduation and a wedding shower Emily’s sister was throwing for us, and while both the graduation and the shower were a lot of fun, I definitely felt like I was almost always in transit or adjusting to time/location changes.

It was neat to be on the other side of the graduation, getting to watch the entire processional rather than just being surrounded by a sea of people in black gowns, sitting up in the bleachers and realizing how many graduates they pack on to the football field. Emily was an R.A. her junior year in a freshman dorm, and so she got to see a lot of her residents walking in the processional.

James Carville gave the convocation address on saturday afternoon to a very partisan audience. He has great command of a room and I thought he was a very relaxed and comfortable speaker. His speech was strikingly short, but I didn’t feel cheated. I guess it was “refreshingly short.”

The weather was great, in my skewed California opinion. It rained most of the time, which was a great change from Los Angeles, but it cleared up for the day of the graduation. Everything back east was really strikingly green and lush. I miss that a lot.

I brought my new camera and found myself taking tons of pictures. The built-in memory stick slot on my little Sony Vaio laptop that seemed so useless when I bought it turned out to be wonderful, letting me easily dump the contents of the digital camera to the laptop hard drive. Every 50 or so pictures, I’d just dump the 128mb memory stick to the laptop, wipe it clean, and start taking more pictures. Someone needs to invent a multi-card reader (compact flash, smartmedia, SD, memory stick, etc) that has a little processor in it that pretty much only knows how to read and write to a firewire device. It could even draw a little power through the firewire cable. So, you could plug it in to any portable hard drive (like an iPod, or one of the other available firewire drives), and have it just automatically dump all the pictures to that hard drive. It’s not too bad to have a little 4 pound laptop to store the pictures on during a longer trip, but it’d be great if I could store all the photos from my trip on my iPod, and not have to lug a laptop around.

Anyway, here are the pictures from the trip.

I spent last weekend up at my parents’ house in the adirondacks. Those pictures are from last year, and there aren’t any of the lake (the one of the house was probably taken standing on the dock), but you’ll get the picture. Anyway, the weather was great and as much as I love living in Los Angeles, it was nice to get away from everything for a couple days. The water in the lake gorgeous, warm enough that you could swim forever, but cool enough that it was still refreshing. The freeway driving north out of Albany was empty, a far cry from the 405. At night, the frogs and crickets were just about the only noises.

It was a good break.