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We’d finally arrived: Buenos Aires, Paris of South America. We found a place in San Telmo, an older area of the city not far from down town. The whole place is full of Georgian buildings with crumbling molding and balconies of overgrown house plants. And the streets are cobbled.

Good food in "Good Air"

GringoAndGringa
2006-02-18 14:48:18

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pasta before the movie in a very fancy food court attached to the theater. Many of the “menus del dia” included wine.

As if that wasn’t enough for one day, we went out that night to a bar across the street from our hostel, which had a real live rock and roll band! Ok, it was sad white-boy blues with copious guitar solos, but still. The best part was when the waiter got up and sang a few songs.

On Sundays there is an antiques market in the square in San Telmo. It was pretty expensive, and mostly junk, but still fun. All kinds of street performers came, including a guy on stilts, an organ grinder with a parrot, a puppeteer with a little stage, several tango dancers and an orchestra (including piano).

Tuesday night we went to the opera, “Capriccio”, in the Teatro Colon which is really old and once very famous. Since the opera was in German with subtitles in Spanish and we couldn’t afford seats where you can see the whole stage, we had little idea what was happening. (I read the plot beforehand though, and really nothing does happen.) Everything else was fabulous though. We were up pretty high and had a good view of the fancier seats and all the crazy decorations and we could see the orchestra pretty well. Also, and most importantly, we got to dress up.

The next morning we left on a short trip to Colonia,
You order a "coffee" here and you get an espresso. Heaven! (This was a particularly good one)Uruguay. Uruguay is just across the river and there’s a really odd ferry service from Buenos Aires. I swear we had to wait in four different lines just to buy tickets. Then, we also had to get there an hour before sailing time to “check in” and go through customs. The ferry itself at least had reclining (if pretty dirty) seats and it took us (on the slow cheap boat) three hours to cross. Colonia is a laid back touristy place with cobbled streets, old buildings, and more restaurants than I’ve ever seen in one place. Our hostel had free bikes and we had a pretty great time biking around looking for a good bakery. Unfortunately the only ferry we could take back the next day was at 4:30am. BC Ferries is looking better all the time.

Back in B.A. we had a whole day to kill until our bus to Mendoza and spent it mostly at the zoo. The zoo was pretty impressive, as it is very old and many of the buildings and enclosures are covered in decorative molding and wrought iron. The zoo keepers had put up Christmas trees and other decorations in the larger enclosures and the
A great name for a beautiful opera theater, no? Andean bears had already destroyed their fake Christmas presents. They had a really amazing range of animals there, including two very depressed polar bears.

We also went to the botanical gardens next door, which are eerie and overgrown, and also completely overrun with feral house cats. The cats are very friendly and old ladies would come and feed them cat food out of plastic bags as if they were pigeons. There was a “no dogs allowed” sign on the park gate.

That’s it for Buenos Aires, and I guess “we had a great time, ate good food and bought lots of cheap shoes” makes for pretty boring reading, but we just can’t be risking our necks in thrilling feats of daring all the time now can we.

Kathleen