WARNING – take a good look at this place.
The foxercambio is located at 540 M. T. de Alvear. This is a touristy part of town close to the Marriott Plaza hotel at Plaza San Martin. There is a good tourist information booth nearby and several banks and money exchanges in the area. Leave it to me to pick the most corrupt money exchange in the area. Normally, I would go to the bank to exchange money, but since there was a lineup of about 30 people, I headed next door to this place. The swine behind the counter gave me half the money in counterfeit bills. Since I knew that we would be taking taxis throughout the day, I asked him to give me small bills. He said that he didn't have any and gave me a bunch of hundred dollar bills. I thought this was rather strange. After all, why would a foreign exchange run out of local currency so early in the morning?
My friends and I left the exchange and hopped into a cab right outside the door. When we got to our destination, I tried to pay the driver. His English wasn't very good and my Spanish was even worse. I couldn't figure out why he didn't want to take the local money, so I ended up paying him with American dollars. Later, when I tried to break a hundred dollar bill at the bank, I found out why – it was fake. The bank teller immediately rejected the money the same way the cab driver had. When I compared the fake bill to a real bill, I immediately noticed the difference. In fact anyone, not just people who handle money all day, would have been able to tell the difference.
As per the law, the bank seized my fake money and I was forced to spend a lot of time explaining myself (in broken Spanish) and filling out page after page of paperwork. Like the other banks, there were tons of people waiting in line and I was holding up the queue. It also didn't help that I was the only black person in the bank and everyone was staring at me like some kind of criminal. Needless to say, I was furious about losing my money and my friend's money and wasting so much time filling out paperwork. (The wasted time was the real irritant, not the money, since the cash involved was only about $30 US). Believe me, this is not how I expected to be spending my time in Buenos Aires.
The next day, my friends and I went down to confront the assholes at the foreign exchange office. The first guy laughed at us and the second guy said that it was impossible that I had received the fake money from them. Needless to say, we didn't get our money back, so vengeance is mine! I'm going to post the address of this corrupt exchange office all over the web and let people know about their shady operation. So spread the word and avoid this place if you ever visit Buenos Aires.
I would like to say that things improved from here on, but things only got worse. We boarded a hop on/ hop off bus for a tour around the city. It was one of those double decker buses with an open roof on top. Of course, we ran up and got seats on the top. As soon as the bus was full, we headed off to see the sights. Not more than 20 minutes into the tour, it started to pour like hell!
I don't just mean a little rain; I mean a flood! Water poured down the aisle of the bus like a dam had burst. I opened my umbrella, but that didn't help at all because the rain was coming in from all sides. We looked like drowned rats and decided to cut our losses and return to the ship while we were still in one piece. Today was definitely not our day.
No comments:
Post a Comment