Since we were so close to the Brazilian border, we decided to hop over for a day trip to visit. Not really knowing what the story was in terms of visas, etc. (U.S. residents, for example, now must pay a $100 fee to enter and sometimes must get fingerprinted), we just hopped on a local bus that brought us to the border. Breezing through the immigration on the Argentine side, we exited to see our bus had taken off. Nobody else on our bus seemed to know what was going on, and none of the border guards were very adept at explaining what we needed to do. I went around asking several officials what was going on, whether we could walk across or had to wait for another bus. All the while, an elderly Brazilian in a baseball cap and toting a massive bag of chorizo followed me around asking me in Portuguese what was going on. Eventually it transpired that we simply had to wait to board the next bus that dropped off people at immigration, so we sat down next to where the border control were noisily marking the new cars that crossed the border with an indelible paint spray coder.
Once we got to the Brazilian immigration control, the bus just kept on going, and so we never even got our passports stamped. In effect we were refugees for the day with no official status in any country, since we had been stamped out of Argentina but not into anywhere else.
After hopping off the bus in the middle of Foz, we walked to the tourist info office inside the bus terminal and got some info about the city. It was my first time really speaking Portuguese outside of a class setting, and it went very well...the tourist officer couldn't believe I had never been to Brazil before.
After the fairly complex process of changing money over, we headed to a recommended eatery with a Japanese name, but good cheap Brazilian fare. For about $1.50 we got an all-you-can-eat buffet including salads, feijoada (rice and beans), churrasco, and pasta plates and dessert. Quite tasty and very cheap. After lunch we could have headed to the Brazilian side of the falls, or up to the nearby Itaipu hydroelectric dam on the border with Paraguay, but decided instead to simply walk around Foz. It is a very clean, modern city, and is much larger and more prosperous than its Argentine counterpart. The people were incredibly friendly wherever we went, which were mostly eateries and cafes.
Foz, though not very historical or typical in many ways, was still a very positive entrypoint to Brazil and made me want to go back and see more of the country. Returning to Puerto Iguazu, the piddly little Misiones town was a bit depressing in contrast, but after a walkabout down by the riverfront, and a stop in at a small neighbourhood open-air wine bar (actually run by a Brazilian) where we saw the news and the Flintstones in Portuguese, we headed up to a Parrilla for a lovely meal in the middle of Puerto Iguazu.
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