No wheels blues

Unlike Ethiopia, public transit in Buenos Aires is extensive, safe, and cheap. Nevertheless, we miss having our own car to run errands and drop/pick up various and sundry children at social occasions and activities. So far, our grand plan for getting a car here has been thwarted.

We sold our Nissan Patrol 4x4 in Ethiopia - for what we paid for it two years before :-) - because we didn't need such a huge gas-guzzler in Argentina. We wouldn't even be able to park it in the garage here, Argentina has good streets and roads and a European-style small-car culture.

Realizing that renting a car during our seven weeks of home leave and training would have cost us upwards of $1600, we decided instead to buy a 2006 Honda Accord, thinking we could then ship it to Argentina. We hadn't counted on the continuing effects of a scandal here, which broke in January. In short, with the illicit cooperation of some corrupt people in the Argentine Ministry of Foreign Affairs, some diplomats imported some very pricey vehicles tax-free and sold them to locals for huge profits. The entire MFA section responsible for customs clearance of all diplomatic shipments was fired.

Since then, air freight and household shipments have been cleared fairly rapidly, but the Ministry has been denying many automobile import requests. There also doesn't seem to be any logic to why some cars are permitted and others aren't, despite multiple requests for guidance and information.

Thus our perfectly-good Honda is sitting at my uncle's house in Florida while we await MFA's ruminations of whether we can import it. If they deny entry to it, our alternatives are inconvenient or expensive.

We're waiting and seeing while we hail another cab.

Arrived and Highspeed in Buenos Aires

Howdy folks. We arrived in Buenos Aires on July 31 and are settling in nicely. We moved right into our 5 BR, 4-1/2 BA mansion in the tony suburbs, about 10 mins. walk from school and the same distance from the train that takes me downtown to the Embassy. Clara and Gwendolyne started school and are enjoying it so far. Patricia plans to start Spanish classes at a private institute downtown on Monday, and I'll take classes twice a week at the Embassy starting Friday.

We still don't have our car - that's a whole other story I'll relate later - but our air shipment arrived and we have the first 700 lbs of our stuff.

We got high-speed Internet installed on Tuesday - 3 Mb down, 256 kb up, so we're able to use our Lingo VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol). This allows those of you who remember our telephone number from Arlington (and if you don't remember it, just e-mail us and we'll remind you) to call us - the phone rings right here in Buenos Aires. Ahhh, the wonders of modern infrastructure!

I reached an important milestone on July 28 - I received tenure! It doesn't come with a raise or anything, but now I can't be fired short of a criminal conviction. I'm in good company too, as all the IT guys I started with also received tenure, as did many of my colleagues in the other specialties.