Off to Buenos Aires!

Greetings from San Diego!

And we're outta here! Leaving for our two week trip to Argentina, there will be some exciting posts coming up upon our return. Eva and I are both keeping journals so needless to say the trip will be well documented. I'm a little nervous about my "one bag" travel as it's stuffed to be brim and I'm only taking the bare minimum. In order to make our travels a little lighter I've also created a spiral bound book, that combines the best of our guide books and online research into one "everything Argentina" resource.

Here is the table of contents for my awesome book! ...It's about 1.5 inches thick! For the notes section I downloaded the always awesome Doane Paper and printed double sided copies!

Buenos Aires

LP | BA : Lonely Planet Buenos Aires Guide

NG | BA: National Geographic Buenos Aires Guide

Maps | BA: Frommer’s collection of Buenos Aires Maps (Dinner, Sightseeing, Shopping & Nightlife)

Suggestions |BA: Frommer’s Itinerary & Brian Duncan’s E-mail

NG Traveler | BA: National Geographic Traveler Articles and Must See guide

Mendoza

LP | Mendoza : Lonely Planet Mendoza Guide

NG | Mendoza: National Geographic Mendoza Guide

Suggestions, Maps |Mendoza: Frommer’s Wine guide, Mendoza Restaurants Map & Wineries Map

Notes: Doane Paper (Grids + Lines) for additional notes and thoughts

Adios! Back in 2 weeks!

Let's eat out!

"Choices"

I ate out 240 times between March 2010 and January 2011, so 71% of the days you'd have a good chance of finding me at an establishment that sells prepared consumables. I'm counting Jamba Juice, Starbucks, Pizzaria Bianco to Wineries in Jerome, AZ and everything in between. With Argentina around the corner, I found myself creating a budget for the trip when I realized "damn eating out everyday  for 10 days is going to get expensive". Then I wondered, how many times do I eat out now, and how much do I spend? Turns out if you keep track of all your expenses on a monster excel spreadsheet that categorizes every dollar spent for a year, you can get your answer in less then fifteen minutes.

The results were close to my expectations; I frequented fast food restaurants more often than I'd like to admit, and spent more money at expensive restaurants. I suspect most people could speak to those results without a fancy spreadsheet. However thanks to the spreadsheet I can mine for interesting tidbits like...51% of my restaurants were unique visits, 123 of my overall visits were to places I've never revisited! Granted some of the visits were out of state, which could account for how I spent almost $4 more per meal on average versus restaurants I've visited twice or more. Upon further analysis, as the number of times I visit a restaurant the overall amount I spend at the restaurant goes down. The statement holds true for all restaurants except for Fast-Food which is a gold standard in terms of stability, the amount of money spent is fairly constant. However my first memory of east fast food was throwing up after eating McDonald's, so maybe I'm still scarred from that experience and refuse to spend more than $5-6.   

Getting back to unique restaurant visits, Why so many? It’s not because I'm a picky eater, hardly, I'm the guy that ate Chipotle almost everyday for 2-3 years! It's because my girlfriend insists on finding the newest undiscovered "non-chain" restaurant in town, which my adventurous side agrees with. The caveat however is that she's a vegetarian who refuses to eat salads, good luck finding a restaurant that is unique, caters to a non-salad eating vegetarian and has good wine. The graph below outlines MY struggle during the time it takes for her to choose a restaurant.

We've all experienced this curve at one point or another, fortunately for my girlfriend the restaurant decision is usually made a few seconds before I reach my "Very Grumpy" point. The times when I reach the far end of the curve we'll usually opt to eat-in, we ate out 240 times. We're pretty damn good at picking a restaurant.

Side Note: I typed this blog in Notepad, which does not have a spell check, after I finished I copy/pasted into MS Word, only to find that I’d spelled “restaurant” incorrectly EVERY single time!...there were a lot of red squiggly lines :(

The Bag Trade!

The Bag Trade

 "Backpack, Bag 1"                                                      "Big Dawg, Bag 1"                         

In my earlier post "One Bag Lifestyle," I detailed my One bag travel lifestyle (or philosophy). Now, thanks to a trade or sale rather I only have one bag left. Willingly and now without choice I'm a one bag travel sort of guy. A few weeks ago I had placed the "other" luggage on Craigslist citing the end to my polygamist luggage lifestyle (Posted in least smug way possible). After few weeks have passed since my post, I assumed my listing was in the purgotory of Craigslist. 

Luckily, just as my girlfriend was suggesting it was about time to donate the bags to Goodwill I received a buzz on my Android. I held up the sush finger to parlay the importance of me checking my phone for a possible spam e-mail only to notice someone was interested in one of the two bag's I'd posted. Before I delve into the details of my bag trade, here is a brief history of my trades on Craigslist...

1. Traded my Nintendo Wii (which I found out is a great cure for hangovers, play an active game and you're back to normal in no time!) for a plant my butt on a couch gaming comforts of a Sony PS3, which does not cure hangovers. I met the guy I was trading with at a grocery store parking lot, then took him to my house to test the merchandise...which defeated the purpose of meeting in a parking lot...but the trade went smoothly and both parties were/are happy in the end.

2. hmm...well I guess I only traded one thing on Craigslist. But I could write a book (pamphlet) about selling on Amazon.com, the jacket would read, "Learn to secrets of selling your junk on Amazon!"

Back to my bag trade, I called up the guy who asked to purchase one of my two bags, based on the accent I could tell he was another Indian guy. I was expecting to haggle for an hour, throwing in extras like a midnight infomercial in order to make a sale of something I was willing to donate. I'm Indian, and I like to haggle, a lot. So much like a boxing match let's begin with Round 1!

Ding Ding!

Round 1:

Guy: I'd like to buy just one of your two bags! The smaller one!

Me: Ok, that'll be $25 (45% of the combined $55 price)

Guy: Ok deal!

My Internal monologe....Wait, what the hell! I'm confused, did this deal really just end!?

Me: Ok let's meet up in the parking lot near In-N-Out, and trade.

Guy: Wait do you live at the Grigio? I live there too! Let's meet there.

Me: Done!

Break... 7 hours later. 

Round 2:

Guy: Hi Boss, where do you live?

Me: Apt # xyz.

Guy: See you in 5 Minutes

20 minutes later (Indian Standard Time folks!)

Me: Hey! Here's your bag, all the zippers work!

Guy: Ok cool, hey can I get both bag's for $40?

...Here comes the haggling! too bad this guy decided to haggle after I'd spent the day wine tasting and driving 5 hours! (More on that later!)

Me: Yeah Ok.

The guy probably had the same internal monologe as me, he's Indian down to his time management skills. It may not be entirely too clear who won, but considering I was on the verge of donating the luggage, and it was already a sunk cost, so I call me the Winner! The extra $40 in my pocket will vouch for that! So there you have it a literal blow by blow account of my one bag traveldom. True test will begin soon on my trip to Argentina!