Buenos Aires, ARGENTINA

Its about time that I write something about Buenos Aires -- or BsAs or BA as the locals refer to this city. I'm frankly not too sure yet how I feel about BA. It would be unfair to describe this as a great city as there are a great too many people living in poverty here. It sure hurts to see young people and children digging through garbage bags with their parents at midnight. As garbage are only collected in the wee hours of the morning, by midnight most bags have been opened and scoured for anything valuable such as bottles and card board boxes. I must admit that BA is the city with the most visible poor people I have seen so far during this trip. Sadly enough, most of the poor seem to be very decent people -- certainly not the typical poor folks I have seen in other places such as America and Eastern Europe. Poverty to the great extent as it is, is a fairly recent problem here which started with the financial collapse of the Argentina economy in 2001. Since then unemployment soared.

Poverty aside for a moment, this is a great city. While the infrastructure is falling apart, here are many beautiful old buildings, very friendly people, and probably the best to me......tons of excellent Parrilla -- BBQ -- restaurants. A huge 5 star buffet with eat-as-much-meat-as-you-can from the spit, with a bottle of wine, cost only US$7. Not bad! I am eating very well!

Tomorrow afternoon, Sunday Sep 4th, I am flying down to the world's most southern town -- Ushuaia at the southern tip of South America. See you there and hopefully we can hop on the Russian icebreaker to Antarctica!

Give more than you expect -- always. Happiness will flourish inside you!