Author Archives: ryan

About ryan

My name is Ryan Fuller and I was a consultant. Now I'm in rehab in South America. It's better.

Week 1 in Buenos Aires

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We’ve officially been Argentinian for a full week now! Soon, we won’t even remember how to speak english.

We’ve been bad about updating the blog, mainly because we’ve been mostly out exploring, and then the little time we do spend online has been prioritized for one or more of the following:

-Researching spanish school:   We start on Monday at Vamos Spanish

-Looking for a longer term apartment: There are roughly a bazillion apartment rental companies and it is a bit overwhelming to sort through all of the options–I think we spent 8+ hours researching yesterday alone. We are going to visit our first couple of apartments this afternoon, so we’ll see…

-Trying to figure out where to eat:  We had some good and some very bad luck with walking into random restaurants on the street.  I think we don’t yet know how to recognize a place that sucks, so we’ve been reading more reviews lately.

–Using Google Translate: To prepare ourselves to go out and do things like drop of laundry:  “Para lavar y sacar.  debemos regresar manana a las 11?”

-Using our spanish learning software Fluenz:   Expensive, but really good!

-Trying to figure out what futuristic Argentine technology makes this possible:

Buenos Aires 25 hours image

Anyway, we promise to post more regularly and do more than just bullet point summaries (especially once we have a more comfortable apartment), but for now here are some pics from our first week:  Buenos Aires Week 1 pics

Ciao!

Quick catch-up on first few days in Buenos Aires

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We have been lax in posting over the last couple of days, and we don’t have much time now, but we thought we should do a quick summary of some highlights of our first couple of days here in Buenos Aires (with more details to come later):

-Our apartment is just ok, but it is in a cool neighborhood

-Jen found a cockroach in the bathroom; this is worrisome.

-There was a failed attempt by 3 hoodlums to steal Jen’s purse in the park yesterday–we will definitely write more about this as it was quite comical

-We went on a cool free walking tour and saw Retiro and Recoleta; we also learned that if you have private health insurance here (~$120/month) you get one free plastic surgery each year. Our guide pointed out all of the artificially enhanced locals along the tour.

-It seems that Argentinians walk very quickly as we frequently get passed on the street which didn’t happen back in SF–though, this could be because Jen is always gawking at a building

-We have had some very good food and some VERY bad food so far–walking into random places off the street has not gone well for us; we will seek out recommendations going forward

-The wine is good

-Tomorrow we start spanish school and have to be across town by 8:30am–this will be very hard seeing as though we have not yet woken up before noon.

-We don’t have to go to work tomorrow, do you 🙂

More to come, and pictures!

Take two

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Things have been getting better today-united seems to realize that they were bad and is doing a decent job of recovering.

Having a glass of wine before we board and then we’re off on our 11 hour journey

See you on the other side

Questions that need answering: When stranded overnight without your bags, what do you use for hair gel?

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Jen did some swat web research on this and it turns out that lotion and shaving gel are both good substitutes that will get the job done if all you have to work with is hotel amenities.

So far, the lotion in my hair is working quite well, maybe I’ll switch…

Dear friendly United Airlines rep from Seattle… (we just sent this, will see what happens)

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Hi xxx,

I’m hoping you remember me and my wife from this morning when we checked in for our flight to Buenos Aires from Seattle at ~5:30am–we are the newlyweds (Jen and Ryan) that quit our consulting jobs recently, got married and are/were headed to Buenos Aires for the next 6 months.  You were very friendly to us and also left us your contact information, so I was hoping that maybe you could help us or at least advise us on what we should do given how poorly United handled our LAX-IAD-EZE flight.  Here is what happened:

We arrived in LAX on time at ~9am and saw on the connection board that our flight to Buenos Aires (flight 847 with one stop in Washington DC) was delayed and they were expecting it to leave at 1pm instead of 12:48pm.  Obviously a 12 minute delay is no big deal, but as we got closer to 1pm, they moved it back to 1:40, and then 2:40 and then 3:40pm.  All they told us was that an aircraft was coming in from SFO and was delayed, no other info was given despite repeated questioning by us and other passengers.  The flight from SFO finally arrived at ~3:15pm and only had a handful of united crew members and no other passengers, so this was clearly not a normal flight.

As they continued to move back the departure time, they came on the intercom once and said that they were working on connecting flights.  We were initially told that we would have no problem because we were continuing on the same flight (#847) to Buenos Aires, so we should be fine regardless of how delayed we were.  Later we were told that there was actually a plane change for the Buenos Aires portion of the flight, so they weren’t sure whether or not we’d make it and were unwilling/unable to tell us more until we arrived in Dulles.  Throughout this process, the gate agents made it fairly clear that they really didn’t care at all how things went.

When we finally landed in Dulles at ~10:25pm, they came on the intercom and said that all connections had been missed and that anyone connecting should check with customer service for overnight accommodations and rebooking.  Our flight from Dulles to Buenos Aires was scheduled to depart IAD at 10:07 under the same flight number, but apparently it left before our leg of flight 847 landed by ~15 minutes.

The customer service reps rebooked us on the only available next flight which is not until 10:07pm tomorrow night (24 hours later), gave us a hotel voucher and a $15/person meal voucher and told us that we could not get our bags back.  On top of that, they apparently didn’t call the hotel that they had booked us and all of the many other travelers who got stuck here, so after waiting outside for the shuttle, when it finally arrived we were told that there was no room and that it was the last shuttle (and the hotel is 20-30 minutes away from the airport).  So, we had to go back into the airport, wait in line again to get taxi vouchers and barely made it the hotel by midnight (which is when they stopped serving food).

So, we are now sitting in a hotel somewhere in Virginia with none of our baggage (e.g., no clean clothes) and are stuck for 24 hours with only $15 in compensation from united for a 24 hour plus delay on two ~$1250 flights.  The united reps in LAX and IAD all were completely apathetic and did not seem to care one way or another that this had happened (let alone on our honeymoon, let alone that I am a premier exec and Jen is a premier).

Suffice to say, I’m quite shocked that it has been handled this poorly.

I absolutely understand that this is not your problem at all, but am wondering if you have any advice on how we should proceed?  At this point I’m not even sure who to complain to, but it doesn’t seem appropriate that we should be stuck for this long without our baggage and forced to spend quite a bit of money on clothes/laundry and food to get us through tomorrow, does it?  Please let us know what you think and if there is anything you can do to help us, or even just advise us on who we should call or write to.  We have both been quite loyal united business travelers for a long time and this day has been absolutely horrible 🙁

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide,

Ryan and Jen

on way to dc (finally)

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gotta love getting up at 4am to then fly to lax and sit there for 6 hours for delay after delay. Even better, they don’t think we’ll make the flight to ba (even though it is the same flight #)…. United’s plan is to “just see what happens when you get to dc.”.

Thanks united

Why did the trail go to Oregon?

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Possibly another question that needs answering…

Last night we stayed in the super romantic TravelLodge in Newberg, OR.

Pure luxury

In particular, the view from our room was breathtaking:

Jealous?

But, for $48, it was actually pretty awesome.  We will be doing a complete comparison of Hotel Healdsburg, the Redding, CA Red Lion Inn, the Newberg, OR Travelodge and the East Portland Sheraton Four Points (tonight’s home) in posts to come.  I think the Travelodge may be the front runner…

We did some Oregon wine tasting today and were eager to compare it to Sonoma/Napa.  The verdict… kind of a rip-off.  $15 tasting fees for 3-4 very small tastes seems to be the norm and they don’t refund the fees if you buy wine.  Also, very new, big, fancy wineries–kind of felt like being at disneyland rather than wine country.

Also, can someone please explain this?

You can't make this up

We were just driving by, why is it our responsibility???

Stay tuned, and check out our new FAQ page:  FAQ (AKA what is this?)

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