Bienvenidos a Argentina y Venado Tuerto

We have a week out of country but not a week in Argentina.  It has been a long week!  We took off from Salt Lake, Monday, March 25, 2019.  Our flight was supposed to leave at 1:50 but was delayed until 3:25 pm.  This made it a tight schedule in Dallas as we had only about 1 hour from the time of landing to take off on the next leg of our journey to Buenos Aires.  Luckily, (we think it was a tender mercy of the Lord) we sat next to a stewardess who was off duty flying home and she helped us locate our gate number before we landed and let us get out quickly from our row so we were able to make a beeline to the other terminal and had didn't even have to break out a sweat.  But it meant that we were unable to get any photos of our travels.

The flight from Dallas to Buenos Aires left at 8:30 pm and landed at 8:30 am, however Buenos Aires is 2 hours ahead of Dallas so it was about a 10 hour flight.  Another tender mercy was the plane was not fully booked and we were able to have the center section of 4 seats all to ourselves.  This allowed us to take turns laying down across 3 of the seats.  Still didn't sleep much, Dave more than I, but it helped us make it through the next day, which was a lot of waiting around.

We spent 1.5 hours in line to get through customs.  Then when we went to pick up our luggage, we couldn't find one of our green duffle bags.  We found out that the bag had been tagged for Indianapolis instead of Buenos Aires.  We got that fixed but they said it would take a few days for it to arrive.  They would drive it up to Rosario and deliver it to the mission home.  We then were met by a driver hired by the church that loaded up our bags and took off with us still having no idea where we were going.  We had to exercise faith in every footstep for awhile!  After about an hour's drive we pulled up to another airport where our flight to Rosario was scheduled to take off, but we had not been given tickets or boarding passes for that flight so I was a bit worried about that.  However, there were a number of individuals at this new airport, again hired by the church, that kept us all straight as to what to do. I say us because there were other groups of missionaries coming to report to their missions and going home from completing their mission.  We visited with them and exchanged some money to Argentinian pesos but it was a very long wait - 4 to 5 hours long.

Argentina has a problem with inflation and the rate of exchange is costly changing.  Fortunately, it works in our favor since we are working with the dollar but it is hard on the Argentinian people.

Here is a sample of some of the bills.  The line was a bit long so it took awhile for me to exchange some money.  When I started in the line, the rate of exchange was 41 pesos to the dollar.  By the time I got to the window it had gone up to 41.40 per dollar.  And the week we've been here the exchange has gone up to 43 pesos per dollar.  We exchanged $200 and the wad of bills we received was quite thick!

Finally we were able to board the airplane shown below and after a short flight of about an hour we landed in Rosario, which has a very small airport.

The view of Mar del Plata - Atlanta Ocean where the Parana river flows into the ocean.  It was very silty, thus the brown color.

  President and Sister Allred walked in just as we came out with our luggage.

Pres. & Sister Allred

(our stake president in Pleasant Grove previously)

They took us to the mission home/office and fed us dinner.  We visited for awhile but we were pretty beat.  Tuesday night we slept at the mission home and took off early Wednesday morning to head out to Venado Tuerto, the town we have been assigned to.

This mission is going to be very different from the one in Peru.  To start with we have a car!  

Suggestions for what to name our car?

Since we are assigned to work with an entire district and a small town without a lot of public transportation, Pres. Allred felt we would need a car and we are so grateful to have it and have already seen the wisdom of having one.  So we followed Pres. Allred as he led out to Venado Tuerto - which means one-eyed deer, by the way.

The other thing that is very different from Peru is there are absolutely no mountains.  We are in the flatest possible country and not very far above sea level.  Cuzco had been like living on the top of Mt. Timpanogos.  Baking is going to be a breeze here.  Here are some photos we snapped on the drive out.

We definitely saw signs of fall here.

Most of the way was a two lane highway, one lane each way and because it is harvest time the road was filled with large diesel trucks shipping the produce that has been harvested.

 I think we are going to be seeing a lot of the above and below while we are here.

Venado Tuerto is a city of about 100,000 people and their economy is all based on agriculture.  This is farm country.  We've even seen a tractor driving down one of the city streets today.  But the streets are tree lined and very pretty.

 Above is as we came into the city.  First impressions.  Below is a typical city street.

Most of the roads are one way with a few two way streets, which is taking us time to get used to.  Also most of the intersections do not have any kind of traffic regulations so it is proceed at your own discretion.  But the streets are cleaner than Cuzco's and there seem to be less dogs roaming the streets.

We learned that Venado Tuerto still lives by the "siesta' rules.  Which means most shops, etc. close down about 12:30 pm and are closed until 4:30 pm and then stay open until 8:30 pm.  This did not happen in Cuzco, probably because of tourism.  Even the missionaries do not go out and work during those hours.  The Argentine people keep to themselves during those hours, apparently.

We were taken to our apartment where we will live for the next 18 months.  They call it a "pension" here, not "departamento" like in Cuzco.

 Outside view of our apartment.  The black door to the right is our garage.  There will be two apartments above us but right now they are being renovated so no one lives there.

The keys here are the old fashion kind.  Take a look.

Our apartment was not fully furnished and so we spent the day Wednesday shopping.  Here are some initial photos of our new home.

 Dining Room

 Fireplace

Looking into the great room from living room, which currently has nothing in it.

The apartment has only one bedroom that is facing the street, which is a downside as you can hear the cars passing by but fortunately this is not a big town so traffic is minimal.  

 Our bed is very firm.  We've been tired every night so we can sleep but not very comfortably.  We tried buying some foam to put on top but found out the foam was probably even harder than the bed.  We're still working on a solution for that.

The far wall of our bedroom has this nice closet system.  Much nicer than the closet system we had in Cuzco.  Our utilities are limited to what is on one of our other bedroom walls. 

A small electrical heater and a small air conditioner.  But hey, that is more than we had in Peru.  It is pretty warm even though we are heading into winter here and the humidity is real but not unbearable...right now.  But the humidity is sapping us of our energy.  Hopefully we will get acclimatized and by the hottest time of year it won't be so bad.  One can always hope.  It does cool down at night right now as well.

The kitchen and bathroom are small and long and narrow with not a lot of shelf space/storage space.

 These photos were taken standing in the middle of the kitchen and then looking left and then right

This is looking into our laundry room.  There is a sink on the other side of the refrigerator and where the brooms sit there is going to be a washer/dryer combo that is hopefully going to be installed today.  Not sure how much we will use the dryer.  Most of the people hang their clothes out to dry so we will do that as much as we can, but during the rainy season we may have to depend on the dryer.

I was excited to find out the gas stove did not use a portable gas tank like in Cuzco.  They actually have a gas line that comes into the kitchen and hooks to the stove.  You don't ever have to worry about running out of gas in the middle of cooking something.  But you do have to use a lighter every time you want to turn on a burner or the stove.

Here are a few photos from the bathroom.  

The shower is at the end of the long narrow bathroom.  It's bigger than the shower we had in Cuzco which is nice and it has hot and cold water.  Look how deep the shower is.  That is a tall shampoo container sitting on the floor.  Then against one wall you have a sink, and right at the door sits the toilet with only enough room for one person to walk around.  The toilet right by the door is not a good configuration.  Oh, and between the sink and the toilet we have....

yep, a bidet.  I may need to learn how to use that while here.

We have a nice entry way with a bookcase that I don't have a picture to show but we do have a beautiful private walled back yard with large picture windows that look out onto it.

 Top photo is looking to the left and the bottom is looking to the right.  We have some flowering bushes right now that make it very pretty.  Since mosquitos are a problem here we will probably enjoy it from the view inside rather than outside but here is where we will have a clothes line to dry the clothes.

We live on the same street (Junin) as the church building for Branches 1 & 2 and it serves as the district center but we are probably about 8 blocks away.  We could walk but so far we have been rushing around all the time that we have driven.

All in all this could be a very nice assignment once we work out a few kinks and get used to a few new ways of doing things. A second post will be forthcoming with our first week's activities.

Spiritual Thought:  Doctrine & Covenants 109:8  

"Organize yourselves; prepare every needful thing, and establish a house, even a house of prayer, a house of fasting, a house of faith, a house of learning, a house of glory, a house of order, a house of God;"

We feel this scripture mirrors a lot of what we did this week.