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Accor ibis hotels are known for their very small rooms and very small bathrooms, but they tend to be some of the least cost hotel rooms around the world and yet offer quality amenities. We've stayed at ibis hotels around the world including London, England, and Sydney, Australia. They also tend to be right in the heart of the city and near subway and bus transportation. They always provide free high speed WiFi and always have a nice lounge and restaurant. One place we stayed even offered a mobile phone with free local calling throughout the city. Accor owns a lot of hotel brands throughout the world. The one you may be familiar with is the Fairmont hotel chain which they also own.
Don't think of Argentina as a thrird world country. They used to be considered the Paris of the west. They have a long history and many colonial landmarks. From the above photo you can see they even have a bidet in this low cost hotel. I would guess that this nation considers a bidet to be an essential part of any bathroom, even at inexpensive hotels, something not considered essetial in most American bathrooms.
During its economic heyday, the exchange rate in Argentina used to be 1 Peso to 1 American Dollar. But due to raging inflation, 1 US Dollar is now worth roughly 1,000 Argentine Pesos! Imagine if we had inflation like that in the United States and one day you found that $1,000 US Dollars would only buy what you can buy today for $1 US Dollar! This hyper-inflation rate affects everyone, but affects retirees more than working people. Wages have grown along with inflation so people now earn 1000 times what they used to earn while everything costs 1000 times what it used to cost. But if you are a retiree that just put their funds away in a savings account, you could be wiped out. If you saved up $300,000 for your entire retirement, you would find that $300,000 can now only purchase $3,000 worth of essentials.
Argentina has a very large Italian and Jewish population. For many years the immigration policies of the United States were very strick such that immigrants found it very hard to come to the United States. Instead, many came to Argentina where they were welcomed with open arms. There are many Italian and Jewish restaurants in Argentina. Pizzeria Guerrin is one of the oldest and most iconic Italian restaurants in Buenos Aires. All the staff wore white uniforms with the colors of the Italian flag. I don't think this is a tourist trap as it is in the middle of the theater district where all the performances are strictly perfomred in Spanish. Also, very few of the staff spoke English and we didn't hear any other customers around us speaking in anything but Spanish.
The food here was really really good. We could only eat half of our pizza so took the rest of it back to our hotel room. It was a very thick pizza with a huge amount of cheese and not much sauce. Deep dish pizza like this is popular in Chicago and in Sicily, but the deep dish pizza in Sicily is usually square unlike this round pizza. The house red wine was also excellent. It was probably a Chianti which would be a the right thing for a house wine for an Italian Pizzaria.
As you can see above, 25600.00 Argentina Pesos were charged for our meal. At the moment, the ratio of Argentina Pesos to US Dollars is roughly 1000 to 1. In other words, at the "Blue Rate" this meal should have cost us about US $ 25.60. But there are many exchange rates in Argentina. According to the "official" exchange rate, we should have been charged about US $31 for this meal. But according to the "Tourist Rate" we should have only been charged about US $18.00 if we paid in US cash. We were charged $26.69 US on our VISA credit card. Though not as low as the US Dollar cash exchange rate, it was much lower than the Official Exchange Rate and not much higher than the Blue Rate. Notice that each glass of red wine was only about $2.50 per glass. Not bad for a pretty good wine!
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