Get Your Reading Pants On: The Recap

So what have we been up to, you ask? A little bit of everything, I say.

More than anything, we've put a lot of wear into our shoes -- individually and together -- exploring our neighborhoods as well as other parts of the city.

Buenos Aires is huge. I'm not saying that just because I come from a tiny patch of non-state called Washington, DC. I mean it's actually humongous. Forty-eight barrios, each quite distinct, make up the fabric of the city, and also make it hard to get a grasp on this place as a whole. But we've made a few rounds, taken the trains, hopped on buses, and have seen why this place is known to be so dynamic.

These are just some of the bits and pieces of our lives so far:

Vinos y Bodegas

Around two weeks into our trip, we spent the afternoon in Parque Tres Febrero, the large park in Palermo. On our way back to the Subte (metro) later in the evening, we passed the Rural, which is an enormous convention center compound that has room for several major happenings at once, most recently ranging from High School Musical 2 (on ice!) to the open-air "Opera Pampa" to, in the case of that wonderful evening, wine festivals.

Vinos y Bodegas is an annual event centered around Argentine wines. For 25 Pesos (around $8) we were given engraved wine glasses and access to hundreds of cabernets, merlots, chardonnays, champagnes, sparkling wines, and Argentina's Big Deal, malbecs.


Between the three of us we know approximately nothing about wine, but we sure talked like we did, taking notes on each one. Needless to say, the impressiveness of our commentary diminished as the evening progressed, meaning we went from "oaky, with a nice depth of taste" to "it tastes like I just drank fart."

In any case, we had a fantastic night -- something that couldn't have come at a better time, as my own homesick nerves were dying for something big and exciting to happen.

Check out our end-of-evening commentary here!! (And please disregard our doe-eyed tipsiness!)

Café-ing

If one so wanted, it would be possible to spend an entire vacation touring Argentina's abundant cafés. Kind of like Radio Shack, you're never more than 10 minutes from a café here, and more than likely less than a block from one.

As Liz and I are quite fond of tea, croissants, and interesting places to write, we took to the sport of café-ing quickly, often arranging entire days around finding a new one to sit at for hours at a time. Sometimes we got no further than the bakery downstairs, other times we shlepped this way and that perching on the chairs of sidewalk cafés or hiding from the September rain and chill in downtown joints.

My favorite place for reading/writing/doing nothing is Plaza Dorrego, only two blocks from our old apartment. It's very European - a wide, brick plaza full of pigeons and lined on all sides by shops and restaurants. Those restaurants set up their patio tables and chairs out in the plaza itself, so close that it's hard to tell which tables belong to which place. There I spent time writing in my journal, taking pictures of the audacious pigeons that would stomp around my table, reading, and simply soaking everything in.

Since moving across town I've been doing far less café-ing, but I plan to start again. If nothing else, it makes me feel like I've accomplished something with my day, even if that "accomplishment" was engaging in a massive bout of YouTube procrastination and excessive tea-drinking.

Cooking

While not everything here is as cheap as we had expected, food has been a gloriously inexpensive thing to buy. Whether we're out to dinner at $10 per person (including a bottle of wine) or cooking for ourselves, eating is perhaps the least expensive part of living here.

Even so, we do our best to save our pesos for a night or two out a week, the rest of the time relying on ourselves for proper meals. Thankfully, Liz is an excellent cook and I'm getting the hang of mimicking my mom's talents, so we're generally lucky enough to have well-rounded, delicious meals.

I've never had much of a reason to cook for myself - when I lived in a campus apartment my last semester of college, my culinary endeavors rarely extended past scrambled eggs, frozen waffles and grilled cheese. But that's not to say I've never cooked actual food. If you know my mom and know me, you probably also know the epic story of how I cooked Rosh Hashana dinner in England. For everyone's sake, I will not repeat it. I also did that here, a feat I thought impossible considering the 2"x 2" kitchen we had in San Telmo. In any case, now that I'm cooking regularly rather than only in extreme circumstances, I'm growing to really enjoy the time I spend working in the kitchen to get those dishes on the table.

My proudest (if modest) creation so far has been My Beautiful Chicken. Sure, roasting a chicken is a painfully easy thing to do. But this was one fiiiiiiine roast chicken, with skin so perfect and crispy that I feel it warrants its own entry into this blog of Very Important Things.


Tigre

Tigre is a delta town about an hour north of here by train. It's built along the Parana River, the longest after the Amazon, and which leads out to a major delta that hosts thousands of islands and waterways. We had read that it's a favorite day-long getaway for city-goers, so we picked ourselves up one Saturday and got on our way.




Our plan was to rent kayaks and do a tour of the river, which leads to islands covered in sub-tropical vegetation and is supposed to be quite beautiful. Instead, we were so hungry upon our arrival that we decided to comb through the dozens of riverside parillas (grills) to get some lunch.


We had eaten in a parilla before, but never went for the major and more traditional format: the pile of meats. First you decide if you want the parilla for two, four, or six people. Then they grill up an assortment of meats and sausages and serve it all on its own mini-grill right there on your table. It's up to you to figure out what's what, which means navigating your way through ordinary cuts of meat mixed in with intestine, pancreas and blood sausage. Call me a baby, but I stuck with the familiar cuts and the chorizo, as did my dear companions... Aside from all that, though, it was a wonderfully tasty meal, accompanied by a chilled, sweating pitcher of sangria shared between me and Liz. Which brings me to the next step: nap time.

We all decided that we were feeling pretty slow, what with full bellies and the fact that we were out until 4am the night before, so we wandered further along the river, found a nice grassy spot in the sun, and I promptly fell asleep. Liz and Eriks played cribbage and read, and in no time the sun was slipping away and it was time to head home.

We missed a lot of stuff that day -- the open-air market and the outlying islands being the biggest. No worries, though. The trip cost about $3.30 Pesos, or about $1. We'll be back there soon.

Konga

Where to begin with Konga?? Well, it was a drag cabaret that we got free tickets to through a Catholic priest. Go figure.

When we accepted the tickets to the show, we were told it was a cabaret of sorts, but were given no other information. So, all gussied up for our night at the theater, Liz, Eriks and I met with the visiting parents of a friend of Eriks, along with their travel companions, one of whom was the priest.

Walking up the stairs, presumably to our balcony seats, the reality of it all became clear. Through breaks in the wall between the stairs and the room we were about to enter, I saw painted men draped in sequins, feathered and bejeweled headdresses exploding from their tops. A man in a hot pink suit and full makeup greeted us at the door, handing us dry beans and ushering us to our seats.

The seating was a pattern of small tables and chairs that allowed for a T-shaped runway leading from two back entrances up to the stage. While people were still arriving, taking their seats and giving their cocktail orders to the lone server, the performers pranced around, taking pictures with people and dancing with each other. Some were dressed as men, or not dressed, as was the case with one muscley little man in plastic gladiator armor, cheeky little bottoms and a masquerade mask. On the stage one queen spun a wheel of destiny on which patrons were to bet their beans, and in the back of the room sat the lone female of the group, looking much like a witch and telling fortunes.

The show itself was a funky mishmash of lip-synced show tunes, interpretive dance and strange re-enactments of movies we'd never seen or heard of. The number of costume changes was incredible, and while at times the acts were cheesy and/or downright strange, it was all-around pretty entertaining.

My take by the end of the night?

You haven't lived until you've watched a drag queen on point doing his rendition of Swan Lake while sitting next to a Catholic priest.

Conclusion!

That's kind of a wrap-up of the bigger happenings and doings, though there is plenty more to tell. I've been bursting with things to say, but I couldn't move on until I got you all caught up!

Now that you are, I'll be sure to drop some new notes in here soon. Until then, ciao!