Rosario, ARGENTINA Business Trip, May 1997
Between November 1985 and February 1999, I worked for a company that provided Energy Management Systems (EMS) to Electric Utility companies. We had two customers down in Argentina. One was the transmission company, which was a private company that had been spun off from a public monopoly, and the other was the "control" company still funded by the government. I worked on both projects and really wanted to someday go down there for a support business trip
My opportunity came when the lead for the group was supposed to go when one of our communications vendors from Norway needed to go down there to resolve issues that the customer was having and they needed a representative from my company. The problem was that my lead's father was supposed to be getting surgery and he didn't want to make the trip at that time.
I was scheduled to be gone for a week and we were coming up on my nephew's high school graduation. No problem--I would be back in time to attend the graduation, even though there was a conflict my older brother's wedding to his third wife. I had been the best man at the marriage to the second wife.
The flight was in three sections. I would first catch an American flight to Miami and then catch an Aerolineas flight from Miami that took off around 12:30 at night and would fly to Buenos Aires and arrive around 8 or 9 AM. The timezone is about 3 hours ahead of Houston time. The trip to Miami was rather uneventful, but the flight down to Argentina was rather unique. I was on a row of three by myself, but there was a family in the row behind me and the husband sent his wife to spread out in my row, so that he would have extra space to sleep during the wee hours of the morning. Most of the announcements were both in English and Spanish, but unfortunately not all.
In the morning, there was some announcements about filling out the visa forms and getting off of the plane. Evidently, there was supposed to be a split, with people connecting to Argentina locations taking a right and staying in the secured portion of the airport. The people going to Buenos Aires were supposed to take a left and go through customs. I only heard and understood that portion and ended up going through all of that mess. When I got through the gauntlet, I reentered the secured area through one of the entry points. I almost didn't make the connecting flight to Rosario.
Rosario is the second largest city in Argentina. It isn't a usual destination for the tourists. Unlike Buenos Aires, the people there generally do not speak English. No problem for me as we had a partner company there in Argentina and I had become close friends with Christian. He would be both our interpreter and driver back and forth between the hotel and the control center outside of Perez. It was 20 some odd miles outside of Rosario in an old railroad town that had lost their working railroad.
We would have breakfast in the hotel in the morning, generally a continental breakfast with several kinds of croissants and dulce de leche. Christian would pick us up from the hotel. In 1997, they were slowly adding traffic lights to the downtown area, but most of the one way streets didn't have traffic lights. When two streets intersected, the traffic on the right would have the right-of-way. This meant that as you travelled, you would alternate with having the right-of-way and not having it. Most everyone would drive at high speed through these intersections, only half of which you could safely proceed without stopping. It was completely unnerving to me and I was just sure that we would be involved in a traffic accident.
The cars down there were all primer grey and many of them held tanks for natural gas in the trunk. The cars were equipped to operate with either gasoline or natural gas, but the natural gas was cheaper to run on in the cities. When you got out in the boonies, you had to switch over to gasoline, which was much more expensive than the U.S. Being hit with a natural gas tank in the trunk of the car was not my idea of a good way to depart the earth, particularly with a wife and two children waiting for me back in Houston.
As I mentioned, we would have breakfast in the hotel in the morning. The control center had hired a dietician to oversee the lunch meals. It would be a good meal with a desert. Sometimes, we could choose a regular flan, but every 2-3 days you had the choice of chocolate flan. I've never eaten chocolate flan anywhere else.
We would work until around 5pm or so and then head back to Rosario. You would normally think that we would eat dinner, but this was a Latin American city and that just wasn't done. We had heard that some people would go to the restaurants around 9PM, but it was supposed to be better to wait until at least 9:30 or 10 at night. I never thought that I would ever get used to eating so late, but the schedule that we kept, it somehow worked out. I didn't seem hungry at 6pm and always seemed to be able to last until the restaurants would open at 9 or so.
Anyways, after returning to the hotel from a day's work, I would head over to the pedestrian mall, which was a couple of streets in the downtown area that they blocked off automobile traffic. The traffic is blocked like Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas or Bourbon Street in the French Quarter (New Orleans).
The shops would be playing American music. The irony was that most of the merchants and people there didn't speak English. I would head to that area each evening and cruise up and down. Mostly window shopping, but I did score some dulce de leche before I came home. Dulce de leche is carmelized milk and it goes really good with the croissants, as I mentioned above.
I believe that I flew down there on a Tuesday or maybe Wednesday. On that Friday, we were heading over to the control center. Christian was a likable young fellow, but he did lack a bit of maturity. Anyways, on the way over, we were following behind someone going slow down this 2 lane road in the middle of nowhere. Christian pulled in the left lane to pass, and the car ahead then pulled into the left lane as well. I think that he must have gotten it into his head that this maneuver was done to slow us down. Christian pulled back into right hand side of the road and attempted to pass on the right.
The truck or whatever ahead of us had pulled into left lane to perform a right turn. When the truck did turn right it hit our car on the left and knocked us into a culvert and a fence post. I was sitting shotgun, so the fence post that we ran into hit near my door. It bent the door in so that I could only get out of the car by going out the driver's side. The guy from Norway bumped his head, but other than that, no one was hurt in this accident.
We navigated a trip back to Rosario that evening with a Remise (private taxi). On the way back, I believe that we dropped Christian off at the bus station, so that he could get a ride back to Buenos Aires. His folks lived there and he was bummed out by the car accident. The car was a company car and he knew that his boss was going to let him have it.
I decided that we would take Saturday off and work on Sunday. I know that a lot of people tend to just work straight through when out of town, but I wanted to get a chance to take in the town and do a little bit of sight seeing.
On Sunday, we used the front desk to arrange a Remise to take us to the control center in Perez. We were told that the weekend staff didn't speak English, but that we could go in and continue debugging the code. By five o'clock, we were ready to go home, but I realized that we were stuck. We were miles away from Rosario and we couldn't just hail a passing taxi out in the middle of nowhere. The staff there didn't speak English. Fortunately, I had a business card for one of the regular employees, I called him. He then called the hotel to call a Remise. It was a bit cascaded, but we got our ride back to town.
On a number of evenings, we would go to restaurants that would serve Argentinean steak. If you ever go down there, order the Lomo. It's hard to describe, but it seems like it is Filet Mignon, but cut a different way. Lomo became somewhat of a metaphor for having a good treat at the end of the day to make up for the insanity of driving through downtown to get to the control center, working that far away from home, and the general surreal nature of being on the bottom side of the earth.
By Tuesday, the guy from Norway had finished and they let him fly home. By that time, they had found some other emergency for me to get involved in and they started to extend my stay. I started several days of checking out of the hotel in the morning and taking all of my luggage with me to the control center. At the end of the day, they would decide that I needed to stay another day and I would re-check into the hotel. Since I wasn't checked into the hotel during each day, I couldn't send out my laundry, because I never knew if I was staying or leaving. By Thursday, I had to go out and purchase clean underwear, because I had simply run out of clean underwear. This was quite a challenge, because they didn't have normal places where you could just go and get briefs or boxers. I ended up with something that looked like those skimpy swimsuits that the swimmers would wear in swimming competitions.
I also had to purchase a jacket, because the seasons were opposite of ours and it was getting colder with each passing day. I believe I ended up with something more like what my wife would wear, because my Spanish was pretty rough.
I finally got the go ahead to travel back on late Friday or Saturday, but the time of arrival had missed a threshold for my wife and kids, who were driving up to Ft. Worth to go to my nephew's high school graduation. I would just have to divert to DFW instead of Houston on my last leg.
On the trip from Rosario to Buenos Aires, I had seat 2E or some such. I showed this to the flight attendant and received "No Hay!", which translates to "there isn't any" or "I don't have any". Bogus seat assignment. I just took an unoccupied seat. This flustered me and probably helped to get me to not check in to the airlines at Buenos Aires to make sure that they informed the airlines in the states that I had been delayed and thay I would be flying back to DFW and not Houston.
When I got to Miami, I had to negotiate customs with several large bags and not an easy way of carrying them around. Next time this happens, I'll just eat the cost of one of those carriers. I finally got through and made my way over to the airline with the final leg, and they claimed that they could not honor the ticket, because it was for 2 or 3 days previous and they hadn't been informed about the change in plans. I then had to head back to the original airline with the flight back to Houston, but they balked as well. I had to show them my boarding pass from the Aerolineas flight from Buenos Aires to get them to allow me on a flight that would take me back to Texas.
The only problem was that my wife and kids were up in Ft. Worth for my nephew's graduation and would not be able to pick me up from the airport. Fortunately, my mother was still in town for my brother's wedding and she came by and picked me up from IAH and drove me back to my house in NW Houston.
Since this was my first and only trip south of the equator, I did get to see the Southern Cross up in the night sky. It doesn't match up with the celestial southern pole, but it does rotate around it during the evening.
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