Settling In

 After nearly three months in Buenos Aires, we're finally settled in.  Last week, all of our household effects arrived at one time, resulting in an explosion of stuff.  Shannon and I each had a shipment of goods from Caracas (Shannon's was misrouted to Vienna and back), and then we had another shipment of goods from DC containing our wedding presents and consumable. Overall, we had over 8000 lbs of effects. When Shannon and I departed from Venezuela, we each had our own separate apartments, filled with our own separate belongings, enough to fill two separate 3- bedroom apartments.  Now however, we're married and living together in one 900 square foot apartments, so by the time the movers unpacked everything, the apartment was filled to the brim with nowhere to even sit down.  After a lot of emotional compromises, we managed to thin through our items, donating at least a thousand pounds of duplicates and other stuff we didn't have room for.  We managed to fit everything we wanted to keep, all while maintaining an open feeling in the apartment.  Fortunately we have a small storage space down in the basement of the building where we were able to fit a lot of superfluous things, along with the Christmas tree and other holiday trinkets.  Now our apartment feels very much like a home where I look forward to returning to after a long work day.

We are also getting much more acclimated to the city and have been venturing out beyond our neighborhood.  Up until now we have been taking taxis most places, but the expenses were adding up fast, so we decided to take a stab at learning the local bus routes.  There are buses, trains and a subway here that cover every part of the city, but figuring out what to take where is incredibly challenging.  Most public transportation zig zags through the city, and most roads are one way, so if you take a bus in one direction, it can be challenging to find the bus returning in the opposite directions.  Nonetheless, we've found a handful of transportation options that can get us to many of the places we want to go, for about 25 cents each way.
For our first bus trip, we went out to the country to a "petting zoo."  I'm not entirely sure what the purpose of this zoo is other than to let people go into cages with dangerous animals to pet them.  Against our better judgement, this is exactly what we did.  As shown in the pictures, we went into lions and tiger cages and petted all of the wild cats.  Supposedly in over 20 years of operation, no one has ever been hurt, or at least that's what they tell the patrons, i.e. victims.

Finally, this past Saturday we went to the LDS Buenos Aires Temple open house.  The temple, which was first built in the 80's, has been closed for the last three years for renovation.  Supposedly the work was only supposed to take about a  year, but after recent restrictions placed on imports, they were unable to get the materials they needed to complete the project and had to locally source everything which added two addition year to the project.  Again, we took the bus which ended up taking about two hours each way, and then stood out in the outing rain to get inside, but the trip was well worth it to see the beautiful interior.

Argentine Flag and Gaucho Cap

Mate Tea Set