1. Buses- we were really positively suprised by the buses in BA. They look really nice, kind of old school American style full of charm and all the colours in the world. You can either buy a ticket with coins or say to the driver where you're going or how much you want to pay and use a special card on which you put money prior to the bus ride. As far as we heard max price with the card is 4 pesos (40 euro cents) but like everything here the rules are not written anywhere (at least not that we know or see). It's also not really clear to us where does the bus stop as only some stops are marked. Once in the bus there is no indication of next stop or the route so it can be adventurous. But what is the biggest suprise is that in this seemingly chaotic system there is an order. Besically waiting for the bus people create a line, really straight line, one by one. If there are multiple buses stopping in one place there are multiple lines. Amazing way to see the city:)
2. Paying by card in a supermarket- everytime we do it we get a different kind of transaction but it's always fun. We always need to show our passport, sometimes before the transaction, sometimes when we say that we pay by card. Many times few workers of the supermarket need to think together how it could be done. Sometimes they need to fill in all of the passport and card info to the cashier machine. And that when the problem starts because our passports are not in Spanish and our passport number doesn't only have numbers...:) and today we discovered that the workers copy the card with a pan and piece of paper.
3. Buying a ticket for a bus to get out of BA- well that's a challenge and a suprise. So it seems easy bacause you can buy in online and pay with all the cards that you can imagine except that you can't... Because when you fill in all the info and go to payment there is no other option than visa. Since we don't have one we needed to go to an office. Seems simple, we entered one, there were many desks and many ladies to sell us the ticket. All of them not really busy. And no wonder because they don't sell tickets... They only give numbers that you have to call to get one and number of a cabin that you can use. So we called.... And than we had to wait and wait and wait. Finally when we proceeded we needed to spell all of our data and on the phone the "p" became "b" etc. Then when we spelled everything we got an option of payment to choose: one was by cash.... Unfortunately when we came to passport details we realised that we didn't have my passport. And too bad because I would love to see how we could pay cash on the phone....:)
4. Fresh fruit and veggies- we expected Argentina to be meaty!! That's for sure (and it is) but we didn't expect it fruity ! There are plenty of small shops run mostly by Bolivians or Peruans which offer a big selection of fruit and vegetables. Everything fresh and for very, very good prices!