Day 11, Exchange Pt. II

(Tuesday, the 19th of January, 2016)
We woke rather early today, (although not as early as Day 7) to head to a major town about 1 km away. The main purpose of this trip was to exchange money, because we spent all of our cash buying the tanks yesterday. We were initially headed for a "casa de cambio" a currency exchange business, but after we saw the expected exchange rate in the window, my uncle called some guy and he would offer us a better rate. I thought we were headed for another casa de cambio but instead we found ourselves in a cafe a few blocks down the road. A few minutes later after ordering some coffees and pastries, some guy walks up to the window of the cafe from the street and gestures to my uncle. So he heads out and they are exchanging wads of cash on the street. He then comes back in and starts passing me wads of cash, it doesn't really help that thanks to the inflation, their biggest bill, the 100 peso bill is only worth about 10$ CAD.

It seems like the cafe was trying to get rid of a commercial juice press. This caught the eye of my uncle, so he ends up buying the machine off of the cafe and we load it into the back of the van. Back at home we had a super lunch (I've been slacking on my food blogger pictures) followed by a siesta, then a quick dip in the nearby river to cool off. We then had a lazy dinner and finished that off with some yerba mate.

Yerba mate is this leaf mixture that you add water too, similar to tea. You add 85-95 °C water to (traditionally) a hollowed, dried out gourd, or other cup filled 3/4 of the way with the mate leaf. You then drink the infusion out of a metal straw. It's a very social drink here in Argentina and Uruguay, people will pass the mate around and talk for hours. It's so prominent, that you can buy specially made bags that have three pouches, one for a thermos (of hot water) one for the mate gourd and one for the yerba mate leaf itself. But anyways, that's besides the point, I just thought it was interesting, it tastes quite good too.

We believed we were done for the night but the sky was threatening a storm, and everyone here says that I have to see an Argentinean storm, cause they are a lot stronger than the Ontarian equivalent. Even though the storm passed us by, I definitely could tell that it was massive, lightening was always flashing somewhere in the sky that there was like 45 minutes of constant light somewhere in the sky, which was amazing. After that though, we were all tired and we finally called it quits on the day.

See all of my pictures here!

Today's  musical feature is  "Eric Kurimpski" and the piece is titled "New York Titan".