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The trip to Buenos Aires was amazing. Really, it was. There are few places I've visited that I will remember more fondly than that fantastic city.

My mother, my sister, and I arrived at Ezeiza Airport via the BusinessFirst cabin (the planes don't actually have a real first class cabin) of a Continental Airlines 767. When we met my dad outside customs at the airport and walked outside to wait for our remise, I saw the Argentina I imagined: bustling people, small cars, little traffic control, and many people eager to earn a few pesos by helping in some small way.

As the airport is about 35 km outside the city center, we rode in the remise along a tollway for about half an hour. Much of Buenos Aires I saw during this ride was old high-rise housing, home to many of the metropolitan area's more than 12 million residents. Incidentally, as a result of urban sprawl in the mid-20th century, the Aglomerado Gran Buenos Aires is the eighth largest metropolitan area in the world.

Our flight had arrived around 9:00 AM local time, so by the time we had settled into the hotel (Caesar Park, in La Recoleta) and slept for a couple hours, the prospect of eating lunch loomed in front of us. We wandered to a café through dirty urban streets surrounded by tall, ornate buildings, passing the new embassy of Vatican City on the way.
An outdoor café in San Telmo. Click to enlarge.Somewhat tired and somewhat confused by the menu, I ended up with a glass of water and, essentially, a ham and butter sandwich.

I will spare you the details of the remaining visits to restaurants, but I would like to make some summary comments.

First, many of the meals we ate had a specific order to them: appetizer, main course, dessert, and then coffee. A meal like this requires a couple hours and involves at least one bottle of wine. Meals also tend to occur a few hours after they do here in the States: lunch-time starts around 1:00, and the beginning of dinner-time ranges from about 8:00 to 11:00. The coffee I drank in Argentina (usually an expresso doble) was some of the best I've ever had, and I never had anything even close to a mediocre cup of coffee there.

Also, Argentina has fantastic beef. The cows are mostly free range, grass fed, and never subjected to chemicals or hormones, so the beef has many very natural flavors that are foreign to much American meat.

And, many restaurants make their own mozzarella cheese and serve it as an appetizer along with sliced fresh tomatos and basil or pesto. This, along with some sort of cured meat plate, usually served as the first part of our meals

Lastly, the Argentines have also developed a wonderful dessert called the Don Pedro. This concoction is basically a Scotch float, topped with whipped cream and nuts. My dad and I had Don Pedros at a steak house the last night we were there (they were not on the dessert menu), and my mom had one on the flight back to Houston.

There is so much more to say about the wonder of Argentine food, but I will leave the exercise of experiencing it to the reader.

The second day we were in Argentina, we went to a tango show. The tango is a form of music and dance that emerged and developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the lower-class districts of Buenos Aires.
A tango store near the port in the district of Boca. Click to enlargeIt has a long and rich history, and it has since branched into two commonly-found styles in Argentina: the traditional tango and the "tourist" tango. The tourist tango, like that which we saw, is glitzy, somewhat like a fast-paced opera, and comes with a nice dinner and lots of wine and champagne. The show we saw at the Carlos Gardel theater (Carlos Gardel is widely known as the father of the tango) contained many very intimate acts and was consistently surprising in terms of the dancers' abilities. Everybody should see a show like this at least once. The pictures we took at the tango show are on my mom's camera, so I'll have to get those from her and display them here.

The following day, Sunday, we hired another remise and visited San Telmo and Boca.
Taylor and my mom in the doorway of the shop full of fantasy crafts. Click to enlargeEvery Sunday, the famous Fería de Antigüedades de San Telmo, an antiques and hand crafts fair, takes place in San Telmo, so we browsed that for a while and then visited some local shops. Taylor and my mom bought some very intricately crafted elven dolls (in U.S. Dollars out of my pocket, no less) in an especially neat shop full of fantasy stuff.

The part of Boca we visited is near the port where ships for the Argentine navy were once built. Much of the leftover paint was used on the sides of the buildings, so the neighborhood is very colorful. One street, in particular, was full of merchants selling art, and the combination of the colors in the art with the colors on the buildings was very pleasant.

A street in the Boca district of Buenos Aires. Click to enlarge


Tango art for sale, on display on a street in Boca. Click to enlargeWe also visited the port in Boca, near where I took the photo of the Caminito Tango shop, and though the water smelled ungodly, I managed to hold my nose and steady my camera (no tripod small enough to fit in my duffel bag, but it would make a nice Christmas present *grin*) long enough to get some photos for Taylor. I believe she's interested in painting some of them and is especially concerned with the reflections of the ships on the water (particularly the photo numbered 0534). The photos are here, and they are the full-size, real deal, not resized for screen resolution, not tweaked in Photoshop, wonderful data that came out of the camera, so please do not rip them off or do anything other than look at them unless you are my sister and I am aware that you are my sister.

La Recoleta Cemetery consuming my dad. Click to enlarge


Me, standing in front of the mausoleum of the Familia Duarte. The nameplate of Eva Perón is visible (top). Click to enlargeFurther adventures in Buenos Aires took my dad and me to La Recoleta Cemetery, where my dad deftly found the way to the mausoleum of Familia Duarte, the tomb under which Eva Perón is buried. It is said there are two sub-basements in the tomb, accessible by secret trap doors, that lead to her coffin. The story of Evita's corpse is very interesting; it includes cutting off her hands, necrophilia, and a number of other exciting things. It is well worth the brief read.

After the cemetery visit, my trip to Argentina was almost at a close. Of course, I have omitted a zillion other things about my trip in this post, but I could write a book just from my experiences there. I flew back to Pittsburgh yesterday evening, after spending two more days in Houston and then finding out how it feels (and smells) to be on a plane whose jet engine is leaking fuel (thanks, Continental!).
The cabin on the return flight, somewhere over Bolivia. Click to enlargeToday's high temperature was a very ridiculous 88 degrees, so I am now the proud owner of a portable, 10,000 BTU window venting air conditioning unit. It actually feels quite nice in here now, but I'm sure I'll rethink that statement when I go upstairs to go to bed later.

Now, I'm going to read some emails, catch up on my Mensa mailing list, and probably play some World of Warcraft. It has apparently taken me just under three hours to write this entry — wow!

Also, a big Happy Father's Day to my dad, who enabled us to go on this extraordinary trip to Argentina. Kudos!