Buenos Aires Round II

Greetings!  In order to make up for our recent lack of blogging, we´re doing a double today!  Sabrina is taking on the task of reporting on Puerto Madryn, while I´ll fill you in on our time in BA.  Also, check out all of the earlier blog as we´ve finally managed to add photos!  (When you do, make sure you click on ´view more photos´ as only a few are initially displayed.

After a week of loafing in Uruguay, Sabrina and I felt ready to take on the monsterous city of Buenos Aires again.  Our last visit to the city more or less culminated in our fleeing desparately for somewhere smaller and slower paced to adapt to the culture, and we were left with the feeling that we did not truly experience what BA had to offer.

We ate ice cream and felt very much like tourists

On our first night we stayed in the district of San Telmo, a very old neighbourhood composed primarily of antique shops of all different shapes and sizes lining cobblestone streets.  We followed this up with three nights across town in Palermo, an ethnicly diverse neighbourhood located a little farther from downtown, before finally heading south into Patagonia.

The following are some notes of interest from our experiences in BA:

The Zoo:  Buenos Aires has an absolutely massive zoo, complete with a pretty solid line-up of beasts.  Rhinos, Kangaroos, Mandrills, Lions and a White Tiger were among the highlights, but they all seemed pretty dull cooped up in their tiny cages.  We were far more impressed with a strange variety of muskrat which was apparently allowed to roam around freely all over the zoo ground.  We found these little guys popping out of bushes all over the place, and they loved to be rubbed.  We ate ice cream and felt very much like tourists.

Recoletta Cemetery:  Buenos Aires´ famous city of the dead.  Unlike contemporary North American cemetaries, there was not a single patch of grass anywhere to be found.  The cemetery is full off all of Argentina´s presidents, generals, writers, poets and politicians, and none of them would be caught dead without at least a single story, ornately decorated mausoleum.  As I see it, this fact in itself demonstrates the spirit of the Argentina.  These people hate to be outdone.  You see this fact all over the country.  If a restaurant hires someone to holler loudly, hand out menus and blow a whistle pretending to be traffic director to misdirect cars into their parking lots, every other restaraunt on the block will hire someone to do the same thing.  Anyways, the cemetery was absolutely stunning.  One trend that we found somewhat strange, however, was the portrayal of people in their dying moments; many of the tombs were decorated with giant statues of individuals on their deathbeds with statues of their families breaking down in grief all around them.  Unfortunately, we unthinkingly chose to visit the cemetery during the heat of the day, and were forced to leave early in order to avoid being thrown into a couple of the tombs ourselves.

Buenos Aires was hot, mid thirties, and humid the whole time we were there.  The season in Argentina right now is about the equivalent of late July in Canada, and the hottest time of the year.  Fortunately, we found comfortable, air conditioned retreats within the city´s many fine restaraunts.  Meals are very different in Argentina than they are at home.  The hardest thing for us to adapt to is the lack of a sufficient breakfast.  People seldom eat anything other than a few hard chunks of bread, sometime with butter, and sometimes with Dulce de Leche, a milk caramel spread that you can never seem to escape in Argentina (Sabrina can´t seem to get enough).  Another major difference is the hours: lunch is about 1:30 to 3:30, dinner is 9:00 to 12:00.  Many restaraunts are closed outside of these times, and at first we found it strange to see families out for dinner at midnight, but we´ve gradually been creeping our hours later and later.  Like pretty much everything else in Buenos Aires, restaraunts are dauntingly classy.  Everywhere you go you find waiters in fancy suits and tuxes, even in mall food courts.  When you order a bottle of wine you always go through the ritual of first being shown the bottle, then being poured a tester sip, and when you approve of that, finally having your glasses filled.  Dressed in our grubby travelling clothes, Sabrina and I both felt a little out of place in BA´s restaraunts, but the prices were unbeatable.

Main courses, including the best steaks in the world, are available for $4-6 US a piece.  Fancy bottles of wine seldom cost over 4 or 5 dollars as well (and about 1\3 of that in grocery stores).     Needless to say, we ate very well.  The staples of Argentina are everywhere. Parilla, or mixed grill, containing steak, ribs, sausages, chicken breast, kidneys, intestine, blood sausage.  This proved to be a bit too broad a range of animal parts for poor Sabrina on one of our first nights and we´ve been careful with our orders around the parilla lately. Pasta and pizza are also key elements of the Argentine diet, and they vary from lousy to unbelievable, but the prices are always quite low.

Some of the stranger highlights:

Sudestada:  A fusion asian restaraunt.  Absolutely delicious food.  Including a pork, vegetables and hashbrown stirfry.

Olsen: A Norweigan restaraunt separated from the street by gigantic wooden palisade walls.  You sit in low chairs in a grassy garden area with strange trees and a big waterwheel and enjoy a seafood platter with Caviar and other delecasies (us $3) and a 3 oz shot of world class vodka meticulously kept at its optimum temperature of -18º celsius ($2 us).

We also enjoyed a dinner at a downtown Parilla where tango dancers danced around the restaraunt floor and the waiter would not sell us white wine (gotta be tinto, red) with our steaks.

Random Notes: -If you´re into shopping, Buenos Aires is the place to be.  Everything is cheap, and many stores sell totally unique items, especially for women´s shoes.  No two stores seem to have the same pair.  I was very impressed by the individuality of style displayed by the city´s residents.  Unlike North America, you hardly ever see someone wearing a piece of clothing with a huge name brand written on it.  Popular fashion allows for people to make much more unique choices, and the result is quite distressing to haggard travellers such as ourselves.

-Traffic lights go from Red to Yellow to Green, allowing drivers to get sneak starts through red lights.  Also, while lanes are sometimes painted on the roads, nobody seems to abide by them.  You just drive whereever you can find space.  This is quite scary when you combine it with the fact that Buenos Aires has the world´s widest road.

-Parking cars is a downright savage process.  Its always bumber to bumber contact.  The other way I witnessed a strange spectable.  A cabbie, looking for a place to park, stopped in the road, put his hazzard lights on, got out of the car, hopped into a parked one, put it in neutral and pushed it into the next car, and repeated the process with a row of parked cars until he had room to park his own.

-We´ve both discovered new favourite treats.  Sabrina enjoys churros pumped full of Dulce de Leche, while I´ve discovered Coffler Blocks, Fudgesickles dipped in chopped peanuts (unreal).

After this visit, we felt that we had sufficiently checked out what the amazing city of Buenos Aires had to offer, and by the time we left we were glad to put the pollution and the smothering heat behind us.

Well, that´s probably enough for now!  I hope you´re all doing well back in Canada.

See you in the summer,

Eubie