El Fin del Mundo - The Old Sea Lion Hotel

All over Ushuaia you see signs saying, "El Fin del Mundo", which means The End of the World. Everyone seems to be very proud of being at the end of it. I was a bit afraid that we'd fall off the edge, but there wasn't any edge that I could see. (I know, I know ... the world's a sphere, but all those signs made me feel a bit nervous anyway.)

Fernanda and I stayed in a hotel called El Viejo Lobo del Mar. That means "The Old Sea Lion" in Spanish. I hoped that there'd be sea lions inside, but I couldn't find any. The hotel was a big yellow building with a clock tower on the roof. I'd never stayed in a hotel before, so I didn't know what to expect. Mostly it was full of bedrooms. Somebody gave Fernanda a key with a number on it at the front desk, and we went upstairs to the third floor. There we walked along a long hall full of doors, until we found one with a number that matched the key. Inside was a bedroom with a windowsill where I could sit and look out over the city.

The bathroom even had a jacuzzi tub, but no sea lions were in there either. The water in in the tub was over my head, so I had my baths in the sink instead. Since there weren't any sea lions in the hotel, Fernanda and I pretended to be sea lions. We barked at each other, and used our hands as flippers to splash water. Then we had to mop up the bathroom floor!

(Speaking of pretending, how do you like this picture of me pretending to do an Olympic dive into the toilet? Or the one of me on the fire extinguisher, pretending to be a firefighter like Cole's and Caleb's dad?)






Here's a photo of our hotel from the outside, and here are Fernanda and I in front of a map of Ushuaia. I was so cold after all that time in the tropics that I kept my hat on most of the time. (I kept on my sunglasses too, but that's only because they made me feel cool.) I tried going out just once in the overalls Theresa Christina made me, and then went right back inside to dig my winter clothes out of my suitcase.



Once we'd gotten settled in the hotel, and Fernanda had found a warmer scarf, we went off to explore Ushuaia. Look at what we found - a double decker bus! It takes tourists all around the city, so Fernanda and I hopped on and went to the upstairs part of the bus.

I've got to say that the weather in Ushuaia is just plain weird. In just three hours it snowed, it rained, it hailed, and then the sun came out. I was so cold on the bus that Fernanda had to tuck me into her coat until I stopped shivering! I really enjoyed driving around Ushuaia, though. I think that they should put a second floor on our school buses, because the view from the top is wonderful. A lot of grown-ups seemed to think so too - look at how many people are upstairs with us.

Then Fernanda and I went looking for penguins. Every year these little magellanic penguins migrate south to Ushuaia to make their nests. The trouble is that now it's fall here, and the chicks had grown up and all the penguins had gone north for the winter. Fernanda and I looked around the beaches just in case a few had stayed in their burrows, but the nesting grounds were deserted. Apparently there aren't nearly as many penguins here as there used to be, even in the summer, because of oil spills and climate change.

These were the only penguins we found, on a poster outside a gym. (My favourite is the one on the exercise bike.)

We finally found the sea lions, but I'll tell you about those in the next instalment of this blog.

besos,

Sally