We arrived in Buenos Aires without any hiccups. This city is much more European than I imagined and has tons of plazas and cafes all over the place. Our hotel room was in the San Telmo neighborhood where we just hung around for a couple days waiting for our friend Allison Ellis to come meet us - what a great time! We walked around the city her first day then sort of took it easy; since she had the brilliant idea of eating sushi before she got on the plane :( For dinner we went to one of the many parrilla´s around town which is just a place that serves a bunch of meat with some sides. Each of us got a steak and a salad, and split a bottle of Malbec - a typical Argentina meal. On Sundays San Temlo turns into a huge street market that took up the first part of our afternoon. It is supposed to be an antique market, but it is really just handicrafts and touristy souvenirs. We found some good stuff though. Then we ventured off to the La Recoleta Cemetery where Eva Peron is buried. It is really impressive with all the mausoleums and stained glass, but a lot farther away than we thought; we took a cab back. Since BA is so big we decided to change locations to the Palermo neighborhood. It is really cute with more cafes and little boutiques on every corner. We stayed in a hostel that really wasn´t the best - I got bitten by bed bugs, but we figured we would only be here for two nights. There is a museum close by that we checked out - not really that impressive - and a Japanese Gardens. One night we went to a local soccer game, Velez vs. Boca, and it was nuts! We went through 6 different security checks before we were even in the stadium and even then we were behind a barbwire fence because we were with Boca the away team. The field even has a small moat around it to make it harder to charge the field! I have never seen fans sing and scream the entire match like that, it was a really good time even though we thought the company was going to take us for pizza beforehand and didn´t, so we were starving the whole time.
The next day we took a cooking class that taught us how to make empanadas and Argentina BBQ. Empanadas are great little pastries that are stuffed with meat, they are delicious and very cheap around here. Their BBQ consists of some different kinds of meat: Blood Sausage, Intestines, Short Ribs, and Flank Steak; our own personal parrilla with unlimited wine! It was so much fun and we had a really good group of people. The food was great and we drank plenty of wine, breaking two glasses in the process (neither of which were broken by us thankfully!).
Afterwards we decided to get out of the city for a bit and went to the Tigre Delta. It is only about 1 1/2 hours from the main train station. We found a great place to stay that we actually had to ourselves the first night; took a boat tour to 3 Bocas and ate some good food and drank some good wine. The delta is much more relaxing than the city- the town is right on the channels and the people seem to spend their time chilling along the water rather than inside cafes. It was a great way to end our time. Allison has to go home unfortunately and we have a 40 hour bus ride ahead of us getting to the south of Argentina to hike the Fitz Roy!
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