Guide dogs, and back to BA

I Keu Ken did not come through on the laundry, so I can only give them a qualified endorsement, but it was overall a very nice place to stay, and they set us up with a pretty decent hostel in Buenos Aires as well.

Here´s what happened... 2 days ago. We were a little exhausted with touristy things, so we decided to take it easy, stay in El Calafate, watch some sports (that was more my initiative), and explore a little. First we watched the US dominate Argentina in the Olympic basketball semifinals (with me celebrating and shouting at the TV at exactly the opposite times as everyone else giving me dirty looks in the cafe), then decided to go "bouldering," or climbing on big rocks, a pasttime suggested to us by our cab driver from a couple of days before.

As we walked out of the town and towards the hill (and boulders), 2 dogs, the same ones that ran with me a couple of days before, decided to tag along with us. What followed was incredible -- they hung out with us for the whole afternooon, and became our guide dogs, consistently running ahead of us and helping us find the best way to get where we were going. At one point we came to a wire fence that would have been easy enough to climb through or over, except we were worried it might be electrified. At this point the dogs disappeared, reappearing a minute later on the other side of the fence. One dog then led us to the point on the fence that was the easiest to get through, then himself went through the fence and back, demonstrating its non-electrifying-ness. When he later attacked a sandwich I had been saving for later, I considered it more than fair payment.

Also, we saw a cow/horse skeleton/carcass that one of the dogs started gnawing at, were in an open field with no fence separating us from grazing horses, and climbed to a giant rock/cliff with incredible views that resembled the place in The Lion King where the monkey holds Simba out over all the cheering animals. Pretty awesome.

And later I watched the gold medal soccer match (Erika skipped this one), which started at 1 in the morning, in a bar with a projector screen, and at the moment of Argentinian victory turned around to see the guy running the hostel, so I had someone to high five. Overall, people didn´t go as nuts as I had hoped watching soccer in the Olympics, but it was aiite, and to be fair I didn´t watch any in Buenos Aires.

I´ll do the next couple of days in the next post.