2016 - FIP Buenos Aires and Iguazu: Day 5: Mon 29 Aug

Another good sleep and early breakfast (7am) to be at the Hilton for a 10am meeting/brainstorming session on Humanitarian pharmacy.

The rest of the day was spent attending various meeting and sessions.

Back to the hotel to change for the MEPS Meet and Greet which was held just down the road at the Ministry for Defence HQ. This building was huge and the reception hall and were very large and quite grand. The building is over 100 years old and very solid. There were more high ranking officials there than we'd seen anywhere, even the Minister for Defence! Of course, very few of us can speak Spanish, and very few of them can speak English so it was hard to mingle and chat. They served finger food and red wine - Malbec. There was also beer, which I consumed and was told off by some Brigadier that "you should be drinking the red wine, it is the best Malbec in the world". I replied that I was Australian and that we like to drink beer, to which he was sometime perplexed, but anyway.

It was a very good night and I think the people that have just joined MEPS were suitably impressed with everything. Hopefully we can get hold of a South Korean tomorrow night at their reception to get a military contact to begin negotiations with for next year. The buses left about 9:30pm to take us back to our hotels and I was in bed by 10:30pm.

A side note: the hot water pipe in the hotel burst sometime during the day so there was no hot water to prepare for the M&G. I had to wash my hair in the hand basin and had to contort myself to get my head under the tap. Anyway, I managed that and with a bit of deodorant and perfume, no-one was any the wiser! The hot water was back on when we got home, thank goodness.