The day of my flight, I walked to a remise business (car service) to arrange a ride to the airport. Usually you call, but it is much harder to communicate over the phone in Spanish than in person. There happened to be one a few blocks up the street from us, so it was convenient to just swing by. When I left the remise place, I felt about 85% confident that I had communicated effectively and that a car would show up at 8pm to take me to the airport. =)

So then I went about my day, ran my errands, and ate my ridiculous lunch. I had started feeling sad about leaving while running my errands since I had grown pretty accustomed to life down there. It was just starting to feel like home!

But my departure was set, so I arrived at the apartment about 6:30pm to sort everything out for leaving. Packing was easy. I was so full from lunch that I had no interest in dinner before leaving, so I was just relaxing for the last hour at the apartment. Just before 8pm, the buzzer rang, and it was my ride! So I said goodbye to Beatrice and Kragen and hopped in the car. The ride was about 30 minutes to Ezeiza (EZE) airport, and there was no traffic. I had a good, if not a bit jumbled, conversation in Spanish with the driver. We arrived at the airport around 8:30pm. My flight was at 10:55pm. I was thinking, man, I'm waaaaay early.

But the American Airlines checkin queue was enormous! They had it divided by flight. I swear there must have been a queue of 100 people in front of me with a single person attending to the line. This was my first sense that my 2.5 hours of time might not be as ridiculous as I had thought. After about an hour or so, I made it through that line (they had added more attendants at some point, thankfully). After I checked my luggage and got my boarding pass, I was told I had to pay an airport tax before leaving. Airport tax? Isn't that usually covered in the plane fare and paid to the airports by the airline? But whatever, airport tax, sure, just tell me where to pay it. (Beatrice assures me this is common practice in South America). The agent points me to a window at the end of the checkin area. So I walk down there only to be told that window is closed, and I must pay my airport tax upstairs. Okay, no problem, so I go upstairs and there is quite a queue forming. It might look like there are two agents tending to the line in the photo, but the lady on the left has a 'caja cerrada' sign, meaning that she won't be helping any of us, and there was another guy standing next to her, also not helping. At this point I look at my watch, and I still have a reasonable amount of time, but I still have to go through security, immigration, etc, so I'm not totally in the clear. I finally get to the front of the line and pay my 56 pesos ($18US) to get a little bar code sticker on my boarding pass that allows me to enter the security check. The good news is that the queue is so long and slow to pay the airport tax that the security line is non-existent, so I just sail through....(continued on next picture)...