Wine, Recoleta and Robbery

We then moved to Stuart and Ashley's place in San Telmo. They were Americans living in Buenos Aires working in wine tastings and buying and they had a really sweet pad. A nice house with a big sunny kitchen, three levels with a Parilla and a table up top for drinking wine. They also had flatmates from Germany and France so quite an international bunch. The first night we went and bought some meat and vege (meat was cheaper of course) and cooked an asado (the BBQ food), complete with good wine and salad. We chatted a bit about their experiences in BA and their travels round Europe...how they find it difficult to do business with Argentineans and are thinking of working in the wine industry in NZ or Australia...

During the next few days we went to other areas of the city including the famous Recoleta Cemetery (which I had seen but Derick hadn't). On the way walking there we bumped into a girl asking for directions to an Art Gallery nearby. We told her that we were going the same way and we ended up spending the day together, joining a tour group at the cemetery to hear about the graves in Spanish, and then going to the Museo de Bellas Artes. Mariana was from Brasil and in Argentina for a mid semester break. She invited us to a leaving party of an Aussie guy that night and told us there would be some Brits there aswell.

We popped home first, got some wine and food and then began to walk the 15 Minutes to Mariana's house. While crossing the biggest intersection in Argentina (the world?!), stopped in between about 10 lanes of traffic either side of us, three homeless-looking guys came up to us out of nowhere. 'moneda, moneda' they said, which means 'coin'. Derick thought they were beggars but then they put a blanket around him to block the view and showed him a knife. 'billetes, billetes' they then said ('bills'). They mostly left me alone but one came up to me and said 'billetes', I just replied 'no tengo dineiro' I don't have money, which was a lie but how where they to know? they started rummageing through Derick's pockets and pulled at his wallet which they found was chained to his pants. Someone came over yelling 'what are you doing?' to dispell the robbers and they grabbed a light GOLD! and ran. We kinda wanted to get out of there pretty fast after that in case they came back but had to wait til the traffic lights allowed us.

It's kinda funny now but what I wanna know is how does a professional robber not notice a girl has a bag with valuables like a bottle of wine, a blackberry and a camera and try to take that? Also with Derick's wallet they could have opened it and taken the money...I think next time though we'll just yell 'Ladron' thief and make a scene and that should scare them off...

Nevertheless, we enjoyed ourselves a Mariana's friends party and met some guys from England and girls from Wales who've been living in Buenos Aires for a while. There's people from all over the world here. Mariana said she'll see me in Sao Paulo and also gave me slack about not doing enough PDA. She told everyone that she didn't even know we were boyfriend and girlfriend at the beginning as we weren't holding hands and we should do it all the time and kiss in public...hmmm well that's a brasilian for you but yeah they're way more into the PDA here..

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