Buenos Aires in July

Hello all, just wanted to let you know that I just posted a bunch of pictures.

Buenos Aires was absolutely beautiful. It´s a really old port city and so the buildings were fabulous, and the downtown is much more centralized than Santiago because everything is centered around the port. We met up with our friend Magali and her mother to see the city. Magali was born in Buenos Aires, is %100 Italian heritage, and grew up in California. Talk about a multi-cultural chica! She goes back to visit her family every summer for a month so we took advantage of having a personal tour guide.

We got into Buenos Aires and headed straight for our hotel. The Lola House is run by two sisters... who also happen to be Italian-Argentinian. They were the most amazing hosts we have ever had at a hotel. They served us up with a late breakfast, and all the drip coffee we could want (which was a lot b/c we'd been living off of instant coffee for 5 months!) If anyone is ever traveling through Buenos Aires we highly reccomend the Lola House.

The next biggest attraction (after the drip coffee) was the tango dancing. They have tango shows all over the city... some are short exhibition dances and others are more like broadway productions. We went to a broadway production and it was fabulous. Talk about your professional athletes. I never realized before what a versatile and intricate dance the tango was.

Our biggest adventure in Buenos Aires was the great search for Matt's family in Buenos Aires. We opened up the phone book and looked for Arcuri's, which is Matt's greatgrandmother's maiden name on his dad's side. The phone book was loaded with them! We started with Anna Arcuri and worked our way down. We got some pretty crazy responses. Lots of people thought we were playing a prank, some of the older gents couldn't get their hearing aids turned up high enough, and I'm not sure what the others were thinking because they just hung up on us. We finally had the luck to get ahold of a gentleman by the name of Hector Arcuri. His grandfather, Bernardo Arcuri immigrated from Conzensa, Italy about 100 years ago. Which is the same town that Matt's family is from. He was as excited to talk to us as we were to talk with him, as he has been trying to work on family geneology and had had a hard time building the family tree. Unfortunately we weren't able to meet up with him as we weren't in Buenos Aires very long... so I guess that means we'll just have to make another trip! If any of y'all in the States have any names or dates/birthdates that might help us, let us know. It's been really fun to work on.

Loves, Blessings and Big Hugs,
Janelle and Matt