It's been so fun to have Myers here to hang with. We've done so much walking and looking we thought we'd do some driving and looking tomorrow. We have to pick up the car at 8pm, so we left the hostel early to have time for some wandering.
 
With four of us taxis are as cheap as the bus, so we took one to Plaza Independencia trying to find the Carnaval drummers and dancers Bob and I had seen the night before Myers got here--the ONLY time I didn't have a camera with me. But they weren't there so we just roamed the artists' stalls, then went to pick up our rental car.
 
But our taxi!! The driver thought he'd pull a fast one on the dumb tourists and tried to charge us 3x the meter price for our ride. The crook. I got out and could see Bob had given him 20 pesos and was waiting for the change when I heard all this commotion. Bob looked at me like...what the heck is this guy saying? when the driver explained to me he was charging meter price for each one of us. 

 NO! I hollered...solo meter--that's my emergency spanglish pulled out whenever I'm angry or excited--and I grabbed the 20 pesos out of his hand and gave him instead 3 2-peso bills and and we all walked off. Inga turned around and watched him sitting there cussing and fuming in his cab as we left...ugly.

 That's our second run-in with a crooked cab driver. The first was in Buenos Aires a couple of years ago. The guy didn't have a meter and tried to charge us twice the going rate, but we'd done that same route before and knew about what it should be. I threatened to call the police on that guy and he calmed down.

 You really have to stand your ground with these guys. In this country you can report them to the police and they'll loose their license, I'm told.

 Earlier in the day we'd taken a cab to the Campo de Golf--the golf course--and the driver was fun. We were talking amongst ourselves about the fishing in Bariloche, etc., when he asked where we were from. When we told him he said he started to tell us, in English, about some of his favorite fishing spots in Argentina. Oh, you have to go here and here, and here they'll even rent you a grill so you can cook your fish right on the spot, and you rent a boat at this place, and here you have to rent a 4x4 but the fishing is worth it...on and on. He was so excited. 
When we got to our stop he wrote down where all these places were--some near Mendoza, some in San Rafael where were planning to go with the car the next day, and some in Cordoba where we'd be in a few days.

 So in one day we'd met a crook and made a friend. But that's how it goes.