Life has changed quite a bit around here due to me getting laid off from the Las Vegas Art Museum at the end of February. My job at the Museum brought us to Vegas, and we aren’t really sure what the future holds for us except for Carlo finishing his MBA at UNLV in May 2010.

In the meantime, Carlo and I started a fun new project: Recession Recipes, a blog about cooking good food cheaply during these tough economic times.

The rest of the Argentina photos will be posted here soon…

We are finally back in Vegas with a reliable Internet connection and more importantly the time to update our blog with photos from our incredible honeymoon to Argentina.

I’m sure the following posts over the next few days will be gushing odes to Argentina, but neither Carlo or myself can stress what an amazing and beautiful country we were blessed to experience for 2.5 weeks. Hopefully through these photos and blog posts, we can capture just a hint of the beauty of the country and all of the amazing experiences that we had. Without farther ado….

On December 23, Carlo and I headed to El Calafate, which is one of the most southern most cities in Argentine Patagonia and is located on Lago Argentino, Argentina’s largest lake. I really had no idea what to expect, apart from seeing glaciers and hopefully seeing some penguins. Let me preface my ignorance by saying that Carlo did pretty much all of the honeymoon planning and booking since I was crazy with work and planning a wedding, but he did an incredible job at organizing the perfect honeymoon. Thanks Carlo!

On the 3.5 hour flight from Buenos Aires to El Calafate, I took the window seat like I always do when we travel and was absolutely amazed about how there were very few basic signs of life on the ground from the outskirts of Buenos Aires all the way to Patagonia. We passed by all of these huge islands off of the coast of Argentina absolutely void of any signs of life, which was so strange to fathom especially after the hustle and bustle of Buenos Aires.

When we arrived in El Calafate aka literally the middle of nowhere, we had to take a staircase down from the airplane onto the runway where we were blasted by the most insane gusts of wind that we’ve ever experienced. Everyone disembarking from our plane was trying to shield their faces and eyes from a barrage of grit and gravel that was being thrown at them by 50-60 mph winds — seriously, it took us a few days to get all that crap out of our hair and bags! Little did we know that these gale force winds are a prominent characteristic of Patagonia! Turns out they blow from the west through the Pacific and across Chilean Patagonia and through to Argentina. I thought we had experienced new levels of windiness in Vegas, but El Calafate’s winds were really insane so I can’t imagine how bad the winds would be in Chilean Patagonia which gets the brunt of these wind streams! (Even though we really want to explore that part of the world on our next trip to South America).

Although El Calafate may be in the middle of absolute nowhere, it is actually a rather small and bizarre tourist hub for those visiting Southern Patagonia and was filled with an odd blend of well heeled Americans and grungy backpackers (predominately German and American). After being in Buenos Aires for a few days and rarely being around many tourists due to where we were staying, it was a bit of a culture shock to be in such a town and it reminded us of how annoying Americans can be when abroad. We hope that we don’t fall into that annoying category!

We stayed at the beautiful Design Suites, which was a 10 minute shuttle drive away from downtown El Calafate with a beautiful view of Lago Argentino, so we had the perfect balance between the isolated splendor of the area and enjoying the luxuries of all of the high end camping stores downtown where I was able to buy some new Merrell mary janes to wear since the gazillion pairs of shoes that I had brought to Argentina had already given me blisters in our first few days in BA!

Carlo and I at our hotel standing in front of Lago Argentino. My crazy hair is evidence of the gusting winds of Patagonia.

The view of Lago Argentino from our hotel window. Pretty spectacular and it doesn't even capture the true turquoise colour of the waters from the pure melted glacier waters.

We could sometimes even see icebergs floating in the lake which had fallen off of the glaciers. It was beautiful!

The Design Suites Hotel - our room was the one of the far right on the lower level.

Carlo and I at our meat and wine Christmas Eve feast! Happy Christmas everyone!

How did Santa find us all the way in Argentina?

A typical Patagonian landscape. There isn't much vegetation and all that can be found is very close to the ground due to the crazy winds. In fact, this area of Patagonia reminds me a bit of some parts of the greater Las Vegas Valley.

Tomorrow: Alex and Carlo’s adventures on Perito Moreno Glacier.

We are having a great time here in Argentina. Buenos Aires is fantastic, it’s a great city with a lot of culture that’s very relaxed and lots of friendly people. Some highlights thus far have been lots of great food (of course), the Recoleta Cemetery, the MALBA art museum and exploring Las Cañitas, the neighborhood our hotel is in. Here are some photos:

Alex in front of this art thingy at MALBA

Alex in front of the Floralis Generica, which opens at sunrise and closes at sunset

Carlo and Che

You'd be disappointed if we didn't find the good pizza place, right?

Alex at the "gringo table", just outside the bathrooms

The house pizza, displaying the Argentine affection for cheese

Some of Buenos Aires' most prime real estate -- Recoleta Cemetery

One of the ornate tombs typical of the Recoleta Cemetery

This tomb had multiple levels holding the caskets of several family members below ground

Evita Peron's tomb, which is the most popular, but one of the more visually unremarkable, tombs in Recoleta

I can’t sleep because I keep coughing, so I decided to come downstairs to glug some cough syrup and noticed it was snowing again. Snow really is beautiful to watch coming down, or at least it is when it is a once in a blue moon freak occurence. I can’t imagine it being fun having snow everyday since your shoes and pants end up getting gross and wet when you go outside.

Anyway, the snow doesn’t appear to be sticking by our house due to the rain/sleet from last night, but I did find this awesome photo of snow on the Strip.

What? It snows in Egypt too?

Wes, one of my co-workers, took this photo of the LVAM parking lot.

Snow day at the Museum

When I first twittered on Monday that it was snowing in Las Vegas, most people didn’t believe me. But huge fluffy flakes fell over the West Side of town where we live blanketing everything in white. It looked incredibly beautiful although it was very strange considering we live in the desert and snow isn’t the norm here! By yesterday, most of the snow had melted only to leave a few fallen parts of snowman as evidence that it did indeed snow the previous day.

It started snowing again at work this afternoon and went from small flakes to huge flakes again. Instead of just snowing on the West Side which is at a higher elevation than the rest of the Las Vegas Valley, it is snowing throughout the Valley! I got to leave work early because there was the possibility of roads and highways being shut because obviously Vegas doesn’t have a multitude of plowers and sand machines hanging out to be used in case of freakish snow.

I’m watching the news right now and the Vegas newscasters have totally fallen into winter weather hysteria, much like they did in Austin whenever the weather turned bad. Unfortunately, the Vegas newscasters haven’t come up with quite as snappy a name for this storm unlike the great names like Arctic Blast 2001 etc that they coined in Austin. Anyway, this boringly named Winter Weather is expected to get bad and there may be even more snow than the last major snow storm in Vegas in 1979 when 7.8 inches of snow were recorded at McCarran airport. For those familiar with Vegas, the airport is at the lowest and usually warmest point of the Valley so that means we will receive quite a lot more snow in Summerlin since we are 1,000-1,5000 feet higher in elevation.

All that I’m hoping for is that our flight at 6 am on Friday morning is not delayed or messed up because I really want to get to Argentina to celebrate our honeymoon!

Since I was sick on Monday and it was too dark to take photos on my way home, I’m stealing some photos of the Vegas Winter Wonderland we are experiencing right now. Hopefully the snow will still be around tomorrow so we can take some photos.

Palm trees and snow just don't go together

The sign should read Welcome to Snowy Las Vegas

So most people think that in Vegas anything goes and you can never know what to expect when you visit here, but I didn’t think that was so applicable when you lived in the ‘burbs of Vegas. Turns out I was wrong.

Last month I woke up to some one doing falconry outside of our bedroom window and then I saw something strange and robotic being built in one of our other neighbors’ driveway last month. Turns out that they are master Halloween costume makers:

Bethany was in town a couple of weekends ago, and we took her out to Red Rock Canyon for a hike. The Alex-led excursion involved a hike that was a bit more difficult than we remembered it, but we still managed to enjoy ourselves, not least because of this:

In the middle there amongst the branches, the eagle-eyed amongst our readers will spot Bethany’s head. Feel free to ask her what she’s doing.

Bethany at Alex at the end (finally).

The view from the end of the hike, looking from the far western side of the Las Vegas valley over to the east. You can make out the Strip in the background.

Alex/Jacques Cousteau of the desert pointing out some deserty feature.

I’ve spent the morning catching up on uploading photos to my Flickr account, clearing out a, uh, year or so backlog. Thought I’d share some here.

Mom and Dad were in town last week, and we took them to bingo at Red Rock. I found the seriousness with which they took this noble game impressive for first-timers

The weekend before that, my friend Tarek was in town from England, and we did our best to immerse him in American football (and booze).

Hi Isla!

Last November, I went to Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks up in Utah with Les. It was amazing up there, here are a couple of pictures from Zion:

And here are some from Bryce Canyon. Bryce is up there with the Giant’s Causeway as the most impressive natural area I’ve seen.

Carlo was very excited this weekend because the limited edition Marc Ecko Storm Trooper hoodies arrived at Fashion Show mall. He of course had to go out and get one!

Ready to defend the Death Star kitchen

Back to my regular geeky husband

There are basically three “seasons” in Vegas: hot, hotter than hell, and very cold and windy. Thankfully we survived the 3 or so months of hotter than hell weather this summer and have been enjoying just plain hot weather the past month with highs still in the mid-90s. Today ushers in the brief transition between seasons before it gets cold and I need to start wearing my jacket everyday for the next few months before we go back to hot weather. Here is the forecast for the weekend:

While I don’t really love the wind so much in Vegas because the Valley just then becomes one huge dust bowl, it will be nice to have some fall weather at last, as well as some possible rain. I miss rain and overcast skies! The dryness and ever blaring sun gets a little old after 6 months of the same forecast every day.

We were supposed to go camping at Mt. Charleston this weekend but ended up canceling the trip because you had to stay both Friday and Saturday night, and Carlo only wanted to go for one night on his first camping experience in 20+ years. Somehow I think it worked out for the best because while we may be having some great weather at 3,000 ft in Vegas, things are a little different at 8,500 ft! I don’t think Carlo would ever want to go camping again if he had to deal with snow on his first time out.

Instead we will spend the weekend enjoying the cool weather, watching Texas hopefully slaughter OU, and bringing out the knee high boots that have been in hiding for the last 8 months.