Argentina 2013: An interesting morning...

Today we had a relaxing morning, ate breakfast in our apartment, and then decided to head once again to Microcentro, the central downtown area of the city.

All was going well as we put on jackets and called the elevator in the hallway of our apartment building (we're on the 9th floor). But as we descended, suddenly the elevator came to an abrupt stop somewhere halfway between the 5th and 6th floor. Instead of counting down the floors, the display just read "FS" (which we later figured out meant "Fuera de Servicio"...Out of Service).

Hmmm...I tried pressing buttons, opening and closing the sliding internal door, and turning on and off the lights. Nothing.

We just stood there for a minute, Gemma in her stroller and Pauli, Isabel, and I wondering what to do, yet thankful that none of us is scared to be in a stopped elevator or claustrophobic. After re-trying all the buttons, I pressed the yellow emergency button, which omitted a shrill ringing bell sound. Nothing.

I pressed the emergency button again and again, hoping that Andrés the doorman was up and around. Luckily, he was! He yelled up through the elevator shaft "¿Qué pasa?" and I informed him that we were...um...stuck between floors. He took the other backroom service elevator up to us and tried opening the outer door, but it was clamped shut because the internal elevator sensors weren't lined up to let it open ("a safety feature" Andrés told us...humph!).

At this point we naturally started thinking about how on Earth we might escape from the present predicament, and Andrés began scurrying up and down trying different ways to get us out. The following photos are what the view looked like to us.

First, looking down still a yard short of floor six, with inner elevator door slid open manually and brown outer door locked in the closed position:

At least Isabel is too young to feel scared:

Andrés came up with the bright idea to completely turn off the power, count slowly to 10, then turn it back on. Hey...maybe that will work???

Nope. Just 10 seconds of pitch blackness inside a cramped elevator. Gemma was not impressed.

Eventually, Andrés found a manual crank in the basement equipment room, and after a few minutes of literally inching upward (or "centimeter-ing" upward in a metric-based country), we arrived a few feet up at the door to floor six, where the sensors lined up and the outer door opened. Free at last! And facing a poor, sweaty Andrés, who had spent 10 minutes manually cranking us slowly northward to freedom. What a way to spend the first hour of the day!

Once out of danger's way, we caught the bus to downtown. After almost getting the stroller closed in the bus door as we exited (due to an impatient bus driver), we decided it was definitely time for a café con leche and 3 medialunas, so we stopped at a local spot.

The coffee was fine, as was the place...until 4 workers in street clothes arrived to remove and replace a giant floor-to-ceiling broken pane of glass along the street. So, as we merrily sipped our coffee, they cut out open pieces of sharp glass, dropping a few, and sometimes as they held it they even wore gloves. Safety first!

We escaped that one unscathed too, so could continue enjoying our walk around downtown.

We decided that since tomorrow we travel up to Iguazu Falls for a couple days, we should change money (dollars to pesos). Luckily, there are countless sketchy guys in the street amid all the tourists and shoppers saying in quiet voices, "cambio cambio" (change change). I asked a friend here if it is safe, and he said yes...and the street guys give way better exchange rates than banks. So we gave it a try.

I found a guy and asked him about changing money, and he quoted a rate of 8 pesos per dollar. Banks are now paying only 5.5 pesos per dollar, so this street guy is a full 50% better. On our five minute walk snaking through a side-street and into the back of a clothing store, I asked the guy how he can pay such a good rate. He said that since Argentina has high inflation (officially it's about 10%, but unofficially it's closer to 25%) everyone wants dollar bills instead of pesos. So, $250 dollars and 2,000 pesos later, we had much more cash than we would have gotten from the bank down the street. Good decision!

We walked around a bit more, eventually running into the Feria de Libro Infantil y Juvenil (a giant indoor kid's book fare). We had a great time, especially listening to the shows and storytellers.