Maps shmaps.

Finally the sun peaked through the grey clouds and we ventured out at an acceptable 1 p.m. with the intent to walk 5 kilometres to El Museo Participativo de Ciencias, the hands on Science Centre.  Their motto is Prohibido No Tocar, which translates to, It’s forbidden not to touch.  We are still without a simcard or a map of Buenos Aires.  As an aside, we’re not too worried about going out without maps.  We once drove to central Argentina using the information map in the front of a Lonely Planet book.  As semi digital natives, we took some screenshots off Google Maps of the Science centre, convinced each other that we have photographic memories and an innate ability to triangulate off the Sun while sensing the Earth’s magnetic force and taking into the account the direction of the wind.

We missed our first major landmark but ended up in a cute little café where we broke our rule of no soft drinks or papas fritas whilst in BA.  To help offset the French fries we did have some salad too.  With some local knowledge bestowed from the owner of the café we resumed our trek. 

By chance we came to the Cultural Centre Recoleta, which was free and had some cool art spaces in it.  We wandered around for a bit admiring oversized black and white photos of famous Argentinian people, places to draw, nooks to rest in and thoughts to think.  Next stop was the Science Centre.  Due to a solar flare our innate ability to find things in foreign cities suddenly went haywire, our memories glitched and north became south and west became a monkey on a unicycle.  A friendly beer vendor, vending from a beer van pointed us in one direction.  The woman he was serving pointed us in a different direction.  Our memories pointed us in a third direction.  There was nothing to do but wander some more and ask a police man who pointed us in a forth direction.  Time was slipping away from us, today is our last day in BA for some time.

The police officer had mentioned a shopping mall and we still needed our simcard and the kids were due an ice cream for trudging along with us even though they offered to pay for a taxi.   Once the simcard and ice creams were inserted in the right places we searched on the Internet for the Science Centre and somehow it came up as being at the Cultural Centre.  The same Cultural Centre we had been at a few hours before, the same place the beer vendor was set up outside.  With slight disbelief, but feeling refuelled from ice creams we lolloped once more to the Cultural Centre and there sitting on the front desk was a little sign pointing us around the corner.  We had been ten metres from the front entrance and not realised it.

One other thing, Science centres are very hard to understand when you have to read everything in Spanish.  However, now we know that waves are made by tiny sea fairies flapping their wings at the same time, at least, I think that’s what the sign said.  

Tomorrow is the day we arrive in 9th de Julio and set up our home for the next 11 months.  We may be without internet for a few days but as soon as that WiFi is buzzing through our house we'll be blogging as per usual.