Bureaucracy, Varig and the broken myth of iPod...

I am back in town, that is, Brussels. Ouf... finally! Not that I am so happy to be back but happy to be quiet again after a stressful travel back.

The bureaucracy started in Buenos Aires with 1 hour queuing to do the check in with Varig... slowly, slowly (some things go slowly in Argentina, maybe because it was summer and hot), then one queues again to show the boarding pass to go in the gates boarding zone, then queuing again to check the documents for refunding of VAT (a couple of stamps & it continues), then a good 30 minutes more for the border passport control, then another line to get the money back from the VAT (couldn't it be done just in one go?) and yet another queue to change the Argentinean pesos for euros (or dollars) - pesos are not very useful here. Finally more queuing to board in the aircraft, this time only after long waiting, because the flight was 1 hour and half delayed! I can imagine that Argentina could save a lot of money and get more efficient if some of the bureaucracy could be cut, which seems to be a heritage from past times. But Argentineans are quite laid back and cool, have a positive attitude which helps a bit to make up for that. They usually take things with a smile and shrug the shoulders saying "que boludos, que pelotudos"...)
Arriving in S. Paulo (arriving at 22.50 when my connection to Lisbon was supposed to leave at 23.00) I hear that the flight had been cancelled due to technical reasons and we were supposed to get a flight the following morning to Lisbon at 7 am. After some complicated bureaucratic procedures (poor organisation, here one immediately notices that things in Argentina are quite well organised, unlike Brazil, it seems, or maybe it's just Varig) we are transferred to some hotel in the middle of nowhere. I'll spare you the details... we finally took off from Guarulhos (SP) at 7.30 am in a plane which seemed more a charter carrier than a regular line one. Nothing seemed to work, no leg room, but the engines finally made it to Lisbon... On top of that, in the middle of that looooooong and boring flight, my iPod got stuck in the middle of "Utopia" (yes; by Goldfrapp...) and there was no way to make it go (since there's no battery I couldn't remove it and start over, which sometimes helps with electronic things). Of course, after such great days in Argentina and Chile where nearly all went perfectly, it would have been too good to be true, that everything went on perfectly until the end... Murphy's law...
Needless to say I lost my connection in Lisbon to Brussels (which was planned 9 hours after the foreseen arrival!) so I had to stay there and only could take a flight today, wednesday, having to pay extra 100 euros (Varig didn't do anything to make up for the delay). So here's my advice, for the time being, avoid Varig... seems not to be very reliable there days. And pray that all goes well... sometimes it might help they say.By the way, the iPod is back to work again... but now under strict surveillance.