Happy New Year!

It may be February when you are reading this – but it’s New Year in blogland! And what better place to spend New Year’s eve than in the breakfast area of the Hotel Los Acantildaos!

We had had a long hard day of walking around and looking at nice scenery and birds, and so we retired to the hotel for a dinner of crackers, cream cheese and sliced vegetables. As it was New Year’s eve, we allowed ourselves to spend $8 AUD on a bottle of wine – however due to my spectacular ineptitude with my penknife bottle-opener, I managed to break the top of the glass bottle off….sending glass around the room and in the wine 🙁 Yeah, how the hell did I do that? And also, why are there still corks in Argentinian wine bottles…..

Ah well, while CC ran off to get another bottle, I had the job of requesting a dustpan and brush from the hotel reception. After some bad spanish and a few gestures I had obtained my clean-up materials, and CC was back with another wine bottle. Not such a good start……

We were done with wine and dinner by around 10pm, and so were debating whether to go to bed and declare this our first ‘old persons who don’t stay up till midnght New Year’. The only other people in the area where some Brazilan motorbikers who were doing the same us as, and eating sandwiches with wine in the hotel breakfast area.

Then, at around 11pm, a member of staff from the hotel appeared, and started laying out things on the breakfast area…. champagne…. cakes…. snacks… WHAT WAS GOING ON? What kind of hotel puts out a New Year buffet for it’s guests?! Not any hotel that I have ever been in, that’s for sure!

With free stuff on offer, it seemed wrong to go to bed 🙂 So we waited for the moment… Around 4 other people turned up at around 10 to midnight, and sat down at the tables…. they must have known about this….

When midnight came, it was kind of funny, because nobody announced it, and there was no countdown, and everyone was looking at their watches, trying to work out if it was midnight or not. Then the hotel staff member said ‘Happy New Year – help yourself to the buffet.’

And that was it, the New Year party was born…. 3 Brazilian bikers, an old man from Misiones province, a middle-aged couple from Buenos Aires, and us. The champagne flowed, and we raged into the night – until around 1.15am – which for us is PRETTY LATE…. and we were the last people there…  2018 here we come!