March 30, 2007
S 34°35.045
W 058°24.500
Today was the beginning of Fin de Semana largo, the first of two long weekends in a row, most people only worked a half day. Monday is Malvinas Day, similar to Veteran’s Day in the States, and honors those who fought in the Falklands Islands War which broke out April 2, 1982 between Argentina and the United Kingdom. The UK defeated Argentina in a mere 73 days; ultimately resulting in the expulsion of Argentina’s military government.
Next weekend is Fin de Semana mas largo which starts on Thursday to celebrate Semana Santa, or Easter week. Friday is an official holiday for Good Friday, but of course most people take the entire week off.
Man... if we had this many holiday’s in the States we wouldn’t need to take a year off to travel around the world!
It was a perfect start to Fin de Semana largo, since we awoke to massive thunderstorms in the middle of the night. The storms continued throughout the day, making a trip outside a drenching experience even with a rain coat and umbrella. The rain didn’t let up all day. It seemed you could collect a gallon of rain in less than ten minutes at any point of the day. Needless to say, we didn’t head to the racetrack to see the ponies run. We figured we’d go to the track on Monday when it’s supposed to be clear and sunny.
Since we were trapped inside all day, we took the opportunity to geek out a little bit and keep some of our techno skills in tune. We signed up for Google Analytics to see how many people really review our blog every day, where page views originate and other really cool and geeky statistical information. We also analyzed our daily budget and determined our Budget vs. Actual expenses.
I haven’t mentioned this, but I religiously track our expenses every day in my little travel notebook. Each night, after we finish our story for the blog, I update a spreadsheet that tracks, sums, forecasts and applies all of our expenses into pivot tables by category. The three main categories (Big 3), lodging, food and entertainment, have a forecast of $100 per day. In addition, we have two other categories, transportation and miscellaneous, that have a forecast of $25 and $10 a day, respectively. Today we graphed everything to make sure we are on track. The big three came in under budget, as expected; however, the other two categories are slightly over budget right now… but nothing to worry about.
We thought $25 per day for transportation was pretty generous, but after all the bus trips we have taken, not to mention two extra flights, we are a little over budget. We expect these numbers to
average out over time and we’ll be back on track.After I geeked out on the budget tracking, Marc took his turn analyzing all of the available information in Google Analytics. It’s a really slick tool, especially since the entire package is free!
We did step out briefly to take a quick walk, get some fresh air and pick up a few necessities (Latitud33 and beer). As soon as we got back in we started studying the Boca Juniors fight-song for the match tomorrow. We decided not to buy an over-priced jersey, so we figured we better know the words to the anthem! We’ll let you know how the match goes... hopefully we’ll see a Boca win!
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