Argentina

We’re settling into a pretty awesome routine here in Buenos Aires.  Lots of sitting in cafes and studying, lots of good food, and lots of Spanish classes.  I’m very behind on emails, but will try to get caught up in the next few days.

We spent the past weekend exploring the city and had a really great time looking around.  Friday night was swing dance night and we were really pleased to discover that we could understand a LOT more of the Spanish than the week before.  On Saturday we went out to Palermo, the fancy area of town, on the Subte (Subway) and explored the giant complex of parks there.  We had thought to go to the Planetarium, but it was closed for renovation.  Instead we wandered around the rose garden and botanical garden and saw the outsides of the zoo and the racetrack.  These parks are truly enormous and really well kept up.  There were a lot of people lounging in the shade with picnics and it was a really pleasant place to hang out.

Click for Palermo Parks Gallery

On Sunday we had a busy day exploring the street market in San Telmo and going to the New Year celebration in Barrio Chine (Chinatown).  The street market was really colorful and fun to explore.  It was also a surprise to us that it was pretty low-key even though it was really large.  People were very laid-back and there wasn’t much persuasion to buy anything.  San Telmo is a cool old neighborhood, but I didn’t take too many pictures since it was pretty full of people.  In the afternoon we took a long subway ride and made it to Barrio Chine.  This was a bit of a disappointment since it was completely packed with people.  We could hardly even move, let alone look around.  We did get to see a dragon, but not a very good view.

Chinese New Year Celebration - Click for photo gallery

We’re dancing again tonight and starting to work on our plans for leaving the city.  I have to admit, it would be pretty easy to get sucked into spending quite a lot more time here.

This morning we headed out for a bit of an explore around the Plaza de Mayo.  This plaza has been the location of many historical and political events and has some pretty cool buildings.  We saw the Casa Rosada – we have a white house, they have a pink house!

Casa Rosada - click for photo gallery

Then we looked around the cathedral for a while.  My pictures really don’t do this justice as it was pretty impressive and the light was tough for photos.

Cathedral

We stopped at a cafe and sat outside enjoying the city and drinking a coffee.  There is a real cafe culture here and it’s fun to sit and watch the city go by.  After that we visited Florida St. which is known for it’s shopping – cool to see, but not of too much interest to us.  Then we walked up to school by way of the obelisk.

Obelisk

One of our most touristy days yet.  All of these spots were full of people with cameras, but it was still nice to see some of the big landmarks of this city.

We have had one negative note, which is that I accidentally left my memory card reader with my camera’s memory card in the computer at school and it looks as though it’s gone for good along with all of my New Zealand photos.  I had a lot that I hadn’t uploaded!  It’s pretty lucky that I’ve been uploading most of the major events, and I’ll be more careful from now on.  We’re also lucky because we have extra memory cards and a second reader and my camera is just fine.  Still really annoying, but of all the things that could go wrong it’s not too bad.

Well, you asked for it — some photos of our new apartment! Here you go:

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Not a bad place! It includes amenities like satellite TV (Los Simpson is a pretty good show to watch), air conditioning (!!!!!! muy importante!), and an easy walk to all sorts of public transportation. Second floor means it’s reasonably cool and not a long lift ride, and the neighborhood is not too shabby!

Buenos Aires the town is a lot more manageable when you have a space to yourself. Instead of going into a locker for your stuff, worrying about leaving food around, worrying about other people snoring, etc, you can have a nice relaxing evening after a long afternoon in school studying Spanish. Being relaxed allows us to enjoy some of the details of the town, like how there are little shops everywhere, selling fresh fruit! We made a ton of OJ out of 2 kilograms of oranges that we bought for a whopping 7 pesos (that’s $1.75 for those listening at home). Super sweet and delicious! Other interesting bits are the dogs lying around everywhere, busy following or imitating their owners, the way that little cafes and restaurants pop up in the strangest places, and the super cheap food. ¡Bueno!

Last night we had an amazing date at the parrilla (grill) at which we sampled some beautiful food and drink. For our wine we had a Malbec “Alamos”, which was really quite a delicious drink. I think it may be available in the US as well! For the “plata principal” Hazel had “Bife de Lomo”, an enormous Sirloin steak, cooked as the Argentines like it — “a punto”, which means medium-well in US steak terms. It’s a bit of a change, but the flavor of the Sirloin really comes out when the steaks are cooked to that doneness. I had pork chops ‘a la riojan’, which means that one chop had an egg on it and the other had ham and red peppers. This came with potatoes and peas. Along with a side of steamed chard we were in heaven! That was before dessert which was just a sugar overload. We decided to have the homemade chocolate mousse (Delicious) and a side of dulce de leche, which was almost too much!

It turns out that there is in fact dancing in this town, even in enero (January) when it seems many of the dances shut their doors for the holidays. We found one on Friday that was at a cute little space near our apartment! Hazel had the great intuition to pick a place that is only 7 blocks or so from a couple of dance venues in the city, including the main swing one here:
View Larger Map

We had a lot of fun trying to understand things like “put your weight on the right foot” or “stop on 6” etc all in very fast Castillano. It was a trip! The dancing was really entertaining too — there were about 30-40 dancers there of all levels. We’ll be back next week!

Avenida 9 de Julio with the Obelisk in the background

It’s such an adventure learning our way around this city.  Last night we decided to go out dancing and even managed to figure out the subway to get there.  We were a little early, so we found a restaurant and had a really nice dinner.  Even though we’re starting to understand the menus a bit, there’s a lot of guesswork involved every time we eat.  Justin has a very brave strategy of picking something at random and seeing what shows up.  So far this has resulted in a really tasty beef sandwich and a nice chef salad.  I’m a little more careful and have mostly not been surprised.  Our dinner last night was $7 each for dinner, dessert and a glass of wine.  All of the food here is very expensive and very delicious.  We then went over to the dance, and were surprised to hear loud thumps instead of music.  Turns out the dance doesn’t start up again until February.  Oh well.  We’re anxious to get out dancing soon.

Avenida 9 de Julio

Time for Spanish class now.

We made it to Argentina!!!  Still working on getting our feet back on the ground, but so far Buenos Aires has been pretty good to us.  It was a looooong trip to get here.  We woke up at the holiday park in Auckland at 5 am and then got a taxi to the airport.  It was a 3 hour flight from Auckland to Sydney and a pretty bumpy one at that.  We only had about 35 minutes in Sydney to transfer and found out when we got there that we had to go through security again.  I was bummed because I had bought a bottle of water in Auckland for the long flight and not even opened it yet and it got taken away at Sydney security.  We had just enough time to get another bottle of water before our flight started boarding.  This flight was the longest that either of us had ever done at a little over 13 hours.  It was a nice flight on a giant plane and the food was actually good.  My favorite part was right before it began to get dark outside they came by and gave us hot chocolate with a marshmallow and a cookie as a goodnight snack.  I was able to sleep a little, but Justin didnt get any.

The airport in Buenos Aires was incredibly chaotic.  It took us over an hour to buy some shampoo, get some money from an ATM and get change for the bus.  By this point we were pretty exhausted and quickly realizing that we dont speak Spanish.  We somehow managed to get the city bus and arrive at our hostel in one piece (2 hours later).

Since then weve managed to get around a little better and are starting to lose the deer in headlights look when people talk to us.  We have registered for a Spanish class and will spend 4 hours a day for the next 3 weeks learning how to speak.  Weve had one day already and its incredibly helpful to hear a native speaker and start to get our ears used to the language here.  Its actually quite different from Spanish in Spain or Latin America.

Language school common room

The Spanish school has internet, so we should be able to check in fairly regularly.  Thanks to everyone who is keeping us up to date on everything going on at home!  And sorry for the weird punctuation in this post…I havent quite figured out the keyboard.

View from the language school