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Published: January 9th 2008
Obelisco
Every great city needs a huge throbbing phallusSo, we have decided to write a travel blog, to keep all our people back home informed on our lives down in South America. We spent our first months down here in the amazing city of Buenos Aires. Though we are excited to move on and start life on the road, there is much we will miss about the city we have called home for the past two and a half months. As it would be impossible to describe everything we have done since our arrival in Buenos Aires, we decided to do a list the 10 best/most memorable aspects of our time here.
1. Palermo Viejo/Palermo SoHo Tree-lined streets filled with countless bars, restaurants, boutiques, art galleries and plazas that would swell with people on the weekends...this is a neighborhood we could happily live in for the rest of our lives.
2. Affordability With a ratio of 3 pesos to a dollar, we were able to live the good life here, even on our traveller's budget. We ate dinner out at nice restaurants almost every night. We drank liters of Heineken and Stella for $1. We took taxis across town for $5 or less. We paid $15/month for
Mmmm
Sample picada from our favorite spot, Al'Manger a gym membership...you get the idea.
3.Plazas and Picadas BA mastered the European art of placing open air plazas in the middle of busy city centers, and so John and I spent many an hour sitting in them people-watching and sipping on cafes or vino while nibbling on picadas--aka amazing platters of salami, prosciutto, cheese and olives.
4. Cafe Culture Porteños love to order a càfe and sit at the same table for mas o menos 3 hours without ordering anything else--and their server is happy to let them do so. We felt like guilty campers, but we did it anyway.
5. Empanadas, choripan and steak As far as Argentine food goes, there are three clear winners. First, we'll start with the empanada, as that is the way we also start a lot of our dinners: a delicious flaky pastry either lightly fried (frito) or baked (del horno) and then filled with your choice of delicious insides...we usually prefer carne yum. And you can usually get one for 1-3 pesos (less than a dollar). Next, the choripan...an amazing street snack comprised of sausage (the chorizo) and Italian bread (the pan). That's it. It can be topped
Japanese Gardens
With ponds full of bloodthirsty Koi with a delicious chimmichurri sauce as well, but its natural sausage juices usually make it so you don't even need a sauce. MMMMMMmazing. And they usually cost about USD$1 as well. And of course...there's the steak. Any part of the cow you'd like is available, but we usually stick to the bife de lomo (filet mignon) or ojo de bife (rib eye). $10 or less for a perfect cut of meat? Yeah, it's heaven.
6. Parks and Màte Buenos Aires doesn´t have beaches but it does have beautiful parks (probably the greenest city we have ever seen) and every day they are filled with tons of people hanging out and drinking màte...a national obsession: literally, every group of people in the park (or on the subway, or the gym or walking down the street or breathing) has a thermos filled with hot water that they pour into a little gourd filled with dried yerba leaves and drink through a metal filtered straw, and its passed around in a circle like a joint.
7. Vino Good and cheap and all grown domestically, we drank a lot of it.
8. Excursions We took a few awesome weekend trips:
Tigre´s Vino
Quite a collection Delta : a nice break from the big city, only 40 min. away...sort of like Venice, in that it has no streets, only rivers, and you get from place to place by water-taxi. We stayed in a cabin on an island with our friends where we ate and drank all night. Biscuits.
Oktoberfest in Villa General Belgrano: The 3rd largest in the world. Argentina has a lot of German ancestry and so beer is big down there. It was awesome to drink delicious artesanal beers with a bunch of drunk Argentines singing and dancing to folk music and fùtbol chants. It rained the second night and mayhem broke out. Awesome.
San Antonio de Areco : El dìa de Tradiciòn is a huge guacho festival, a celebration of the culture of "Argentine cowboys" (these guys are MEN, it´s not for show, it´s their lifestyle, probably not much has changed in the past 100 yrs). There are asados (a bbq pit the size of a basketball court), rodeos, so many horses roaming free, and traditional dancing (every person in the town, 4 yrs old to 104, danced every song in unison, it was amazing to watch...we actually learned a few
Oktoberfest
"Nice hat, Claus." "Thanks Gunda." steps). 12 of us went and stayed on a beautiful campground on the river (we rented tents but oops, none of us had sleeping bags or pillows).
9. Argentines They´ve been through a lot of shit. Despite a rough history (the Dirty War, where 30,000 citizens "disappeared" i.e. were tortured and killed, and more recently, the biggest economic collapse in modern times), most Argentines we´ve met are warm, friendly people who work to live and don´t live to work. No matter how broke they may be, they have great style (minus the mullets and unibrows), eat out and party til dawn.
10. Amigos The people you are with definitely can make or break your experience somewhere.
We had an awesome time with our friends from home who came to visit...Brett and Daryn, you guys are AMAZING for making the trek all the way down here, and taking embarassing pictures of me; Jenny and Mike, great travelling partners, the legend of Shithead lives on.
We also met some really amazing people here that we hope we know for the rest of our lives...Troy (pretty chill, possibly sketch), Cynthia (No...you´re not gonna forget), David (Zoots aka the king
Hardcore
Breaking a bronco of that dirty duss), Yalda (one of our favorite people, when she´s awake), and Ni´chelle (Nicole and Michelle, our most Argentinian of friends, with a pair of stilleto boots for every occasion)...you all be the FIYA.
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Stacy
non-member comment
ummm
May I just say that you guys have the most amazing life! Anddd... I miss you both so much please come back to FL! The wine isn't as cheap but I am here so that pretty much makes up for it :) Love you guys!