Day 7 of our time here and we have settled into a pretty good routine. Touring until about 2 or 3, home for nap/lazing around and then dinner at 8 or 9pm (the late eating is difficult as it has been conflicting with certain baseball interests).
Today we went to La Boca, the port area which is mostly working class except for the Caminito, a few blocks of brightly colored buildings and tons of tourist related merchandise (once again, Bob Marley seems to have special import for this area, as he did in Bangkok, Phuket and if I remember right from 1995, Kathmandu). Have been trying to do a better job of photographing, but picasa is giving me trouble so facebook is probably a better place to check.
We ate lunch today at Kentucky Pizza (slogan: the best pizza since 1942). We ordered their special, Gran Kentucky, sight unseen. I wondered what the Kentucky part of it meant. Slathered in a mint julep? Horsemeat? Sadly just cheese, ham and olives. I just hope the proud Kentuckians don't learn how their state is known here for mediocre pizza.
Tomorrow we are off to the Feria de Mataderos, which google translate tells me is the "Slaughterhouse Festival." Will report more then.
Friday, October 22, 2010
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Late nights
So the other night, we mosey out of our apartment and walk to a nearby restaurant for dinner. We get there and find the place is empty except for the staff. We're not open for another hour, the waitress tells us. Come back then.
It was 8 p.m.
The people of Bs As like their night life. Dinner before 8? Escandalo! It's the equivalent of the senior citizens' discount meals in the US. No one who is anyone dares eat before 8, and the preferred time is actually 9 pm. And it's not just the hipsters who are eating late. There are entire families, children in tow, sitting down for the start of their meals at 9:30.
It's quite an adjustment for hungry Americans, who start to feel peckish around 7pm.
Last night, though, we did really well: We didn't even leave the apartment until 9 pm. It was a Wednesday night so we figured we wouldn't have that much trouble getting a table at a recommended restaurant down the street. Who goes out on a Wednesday?
The lines were out the door every where we looked.
How does anyone get to work in the morning?
I think what I'm figuring out is they don't get to work early in the morning. Today, we tried to go to MALBA, one of the big museums there. We got there at 11 a.m. It didn't open until noon.
We eventually got into the museum and broke our own record for speed museum viewing: We were out in 30 minutes. Whole museum and a walk through the gift shop. We're just not the museum types.
Other things we've been doing:
1) Recoleta Cemetery: Love it! A city of the dead very much New Orleans style but even more elaborate. We got a guided tour so we heard charming stories of the bride who was killed on her honeymoon, the teenager who was buried alive and who allegedly haunts the city to this day, etc. We also saw Evita Peron's final resting place, which they say always has flowers on the gate.
2) Evita Peron Museum: Worth it to see the clothes. (Yes, I am shallow. I also went to see the traveling exhibit of Princess Diana's clothes in Philadelphia.)
3) Graffiti tour: Awesome! I'll have to write a longer post on the difference between public art here and in Philly. This wasn't just tagging. This was really beautiful art works done on buildings, usually unauthorized.
It was 8 p.m.
The people of Bs As like their night life. Dinner before 8? Escandalo! It's the equivalent of the senior citizens' discount meals in the US. No one who is anyone dares eat before 8, and the preferred time is actually 9 pm. And it's not just the hipsters who are eating late. There are entire families, children in tow, sitting down for the start of their meals at 9:30.
It's quite an adjustment for hungry Americans, who start to feel peckish around 7pm.
Last night, though, we did really well: We didn't even leave the apartment until 9 pm. It was a Wednesday night so we figured we wouldn't have that much trouble getting a table at a recommended restaurant down the street. Who goes out on a Wednesday?
The lines were out the door every where we looked.
How does anyone get to work in the morning?
I think what I'm figuring out is they don't get to work early in the morning. Today, we tried to go to MALBA, one of the big museums there. We got there at 11 a.m. It didn't open until noon.
We eventually got into the museum and broke our own record for speed museum viewing: We were out in 30 minutes. Whole museum and a walk through the gift shop. We're just not the museum types.
Other things we've been doing:
1) Recoleta Cemetery: Love it! A city of the dead very much New Orleans style but even more elaborate. We got a guided tour so we heard charming stories of the bride who was killed on her honeymoon, the teenager who was buried alive and who allegedly haunts the city to this day, etc. We also saw Evita Peron's final resting place, which they say always has flowers on the gate.
2) Evita Peron Museum: Worth it to see the clothes. (Yes, I am shallow. I also went to see the traveling exhibit of Princess Diana's clothes in Philadelphia.)
3) Graffiti tour: Awesome! I'll have to write a longer post on the difference between public art here and in Philly. This wasn't just tagging. This was really beautiful art works done on buildings, usually unauthorized.
Some other observations:
1. The double L in words like “pollo” is pronounced as “sh” here, not as a ‘y’ sound. A 'y" as in Mayo is also a "sh." It’s weird. “J” is also pronounced “sh,” so “Shordan” has a new nickname.
2. The advantage of having a fractured foot: I only had to pack half as many shoes – left shoes only – and I didn’t have to worry about dress shoes or heels as it’s impossible to walk in anything other than flats with the surgical boot. Plus, some man gave up his seat for me on the Subte.
3. The disadvantage of having a fractured foot: It tends to swell up after a day of walking, resulting in J.K. Swellington III. It could wreak havoc on our tango lessons. Will advise.
----NXPTuesday, October 19, 2010
Shame of the City
This lady, from somewhere near Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, is the worst fellow traveler we have seen. We were on a tour of the Recoleta Cemetery (oldest in BA, famous people buried, etc. etc. blah blah, ). The guides there do the tour pretty much on tips alone. This is pretty obvious because it SAYS SO RIGHT WHERE YOU ASSEMBLE FOR THE TOUR.
Anyways, Pursed Lips McGillicutty decides to leave the tour halfway through. In front of the tour guide and everyone else she opens her wallet, looks through the bills that are clearly in her wallet (we can all see them) and then decides to leave without giving the guide any sort of gratuity. Listen lady, I saw the 5 dollar bill and the multiple pesos in there, you can afford 1/20th the cost of your bad hair dye job to help the tour guide eat.
FROM NATALIE
I like the Argentinian way of dining: Slow. You order an appetizer, you sit for a while. Then you order dinner, then sit for a while. You think about coffee and dessert, then you sit for a while. Our first night’s meal lasted for more than two hours.
On our first night, we went to an Armenian restaurant called Sarkis. It’s a very local place, -- there were huge lines outside the door when the doors opened at 8pm -- and we’d been warned that the menu was neither in English or Spanish. I don’t know about you guys, but my Armenian is pretty rusty. There was a lot of, “That word has a ‘c’ in it. ‘Chicken’ starts with ‘c.’ Let’s try that. “ Then we’d end up getting some vegetarian dish.
But it was all delicious and cheap, considering we had three appetizers, two entrees and two bottles of wine for less than $50.
I also like the Argentinian way of preparing food. Yesterday we took a cooking class. And by “cooking,” I mean we did a bit of chopping, a little stirring and a lot of wine drinking and empanada eating.
Our lesson was in the art of empanada making, taught by the very sweet Teresita. Imagine us and about 8 other people crowded around a kitchen island depitting olives with this cool gun thing and measuring flour on this old fashioned weighted scale. Then we had to shape the dough into balls and roll it out into circles. Just a really good time, even if rolling dough into circles is easier said than done. (Some of our misshapen pieces resembled various continents.)
As Jordo noted, he’s not a natural when it comes to rolling dough. But as I so kindly pointed out, he has a lot of other skills. Like he can kill bugs without flinching. I’ll happily roll empanada circles if he slays cockroaches. Marriage is a give and take.
Then we stuffed the dough with either a meat mixture or a corn mixture that we’d made. That’s also not as easy as it sounds, and let’s just say there were some very special empanadas.
It was just a really good time. We met some nice people, who we plan to see again while we’re here and we got to slurp Mate, the national drink. (They really want you to slurp it. It’s good manners.) We ate and drank so much that we were pretty wiped out by night time. I even fell asleep during the Yankee game.
Speaking of the Yankees, during Sunday Mass, we stopped in for a visit at Iglesia de San Jorge (Posada, as I mentally added). We lit candles and I prayed for the Yankees to win the World Series. I think I looked suitably holy and somber when I did this, so I’m sure the lady who sold me the candles thought I was praying for my dying relative’s good health or world peace. She didn’t know that I routinely make baseball bets with the heavens in an attempt to prove or disprove God’s existence. (Thus far, “disprove” is winning. During Game 1 of the ALDS, I swore I would go to church every week for a year if CC Sabathia pitched a perfect game. The minute he gave up a run, Jordo was like, ‘You sure dodged a bullet there, friend.”)
Three days into our trip and we still haven’t had any steak. But lest you think we’re total failures, we’ve polished off 8 bottles of Malbec. Priorities.
On our first night, we went to an Armenian restaurant called Sarkis. It’s a very local place, -- there were huge lines outside the door when the doors opened at 8pm -- and we’d been warned that the menu was neither in English or Spanish. I don’t know about you guys, but my Armenian is pretty rusty. There was a lot of, “That word has a ‘c’ in it. ‘Chicken’ starts with ‘c.’ Let’s try that. “ Then we’d end up getting some vegetarian dish.
But it was all delicious and cheap, considering we had three appetizers, two entrees and two bottles of wine for less than $50.
I also like the Argentinian way of preparing food. Yesterday we took a cooking class. And by “cooking,” I mean we did a bit of chopping, a little stirring and a lot of wine drinking and empanada eating.
Our lesson was in the art of empanada making, taught by the very sweet Teresita. Imagine us and about 8 other people crowded around a kitchen island depitting olives with this cool gun thing and measuring flour on this old fashioned weighted scale. Then we had to shape the dough into balls and roll it out into circles. Just a really good time, even if rolling dough into circles is easier said than done. (Some of our misshapen pieces resembled various continents.)
As Jordo noted, he’s not a natural when it comes to rolling dough. But as I so kindly pointed out, he has a lot of other skills. Like he can kill bugs without flinching. I’ll happily roll empanada circles if he slays cockroaches. Marriage is a give and take.
Then we stuffed the dough with either a meat mixture or a corn mixture that we’d made. That’s also not as easy as it sounds, and let’s just say there were some very special empanadas.
It was just a really good time. We met some nice people, who we plan to see again while we’re here and we got to slurp Mate, the national drink. (They really want you to slurp it. It’s good manners.) We ate and drank so much that we were pretty wiped out by night time. I even fell asleep during the Yankee game.
Speaking of the Yankees, during Sunday Mass, we stopped in for a visit at Iglesia de San Jorge (Posada, as I mentally added). We lit candles and I prayed for the Yankees to win the World Series. I think I looked suitably holy and somber when I did this, so I’m sure the lady who sold me the candles thought I was praying for my dying relative’s good health or world peace. She didn’t know that I routinely make baseball bets with the heavens in an attempt to prove or disprove God’s existence. (Thus far, “disprove” is winning. During Game 1 of the ALDS, I swore I would go to church every week for a year if CC Sabathia pitched a perfect game. The minute he gave up a run, Jordo was like, ‘You sure dodged a bullet there, friend.”)
Three days into our trip and we still haven’t had any steak. But lest you think we’re total failures, we’ve polished off 8 bottles of Malbec. Priorities.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Getting Settled In
For someone who planned to eat a ton of steak while on vacation I am off to a pretty bad start. 50 hours and so far the closest I have gotten was some random milanesa that was an afterthought last night. I gotta get working on that.
So far the trip has been, if not exactly a whirlwind, at least pretty packed full of fun. We landed in BA on Saturday morning, took a pretty quick taxi in and spent the day wandering around a small street market near our apartment in Palermo (did I mention that we have an apartment? It’s a 300 square foot beaut with minimal storage space and a deck that serves as our baseball watching wine drinking HQ. From now on we are renting apartments whenever we travel. Cheaper and more space.) We found some rings and then wandered to dinner at an Armenian restaurant nearby, which was awesome. Apparently there was a big influx of Armenians and they have quite a few restaurants. As the Lebanese women we were making empanadas with noted, Armenians are good with their hands. Which is odd, because the only Armenians of notoriety that I know either dated or provided legal counsel to professional athletes (ok same family but still). Either way, great food, including a moussaka that seemed more like a slow cooked eggplant dish but was wonderful.
The next day we first stopped at a local Catholic church so Natalie could make sure and engage in her regular day of worship. Or alternatively, the Yankees are in the playoffs and someone needed to light a candle and ask God for his help in the playoffs. So Natalie lit a candle to ask God to shine down on the Yankees, I lit a candle to ask God to not smite us for only going to church to ask him to help a sports team and we got a third candle for tonight.
Trinity done we wandered down to the market which was, as far as mostly overpriced tourist markets go, pretty impressive. Ten to twelve blocks chock full of 70% tourist tchotckes, 20% fabrics and 10% jewelry. Nat snagged a nice ring and we found a random café where we learned of the “completa” sandwich. Apparently, no sandwich is complete without cheese, ham and egg, so if you get a hambuger completa, be prepared for one of those heart attack specials they seem to serve at various chain restaurants. Good, but a little much.
Anyway, after that we wandered home to sleep of the food and then for dinner went to Club Eros. I know I know you hear “Club Eros” and it must either be a swinger’s club or strip club. Oddly neither, it’s a social club with an indoor soccer field and a small dining area. Sort of like the snack area at a municipal golf course but with steak and salad and wine. Pretty great place, groups of old men yelling at the tv showing a soccer match and a couple of young couples grabbing food. The food (fries, salad, pork chop) was excellent and insanely cheap (with two botltles of wine the bill came to about $30 US).
Today we spent the day in a suburb learning how to make empanadas. Natalie can share more about the actual making but I learned (1) empanadas are insanely tasty with cumin and (2) if I ever want to make empanadas again I am going to get a bunch of suckers/friends to do the heavy lifting. Rolling dough is not my strong suit.
So far the trip has been, if not exactly a whirlwind, at least pretty packed full of fun. We landed in BA on Saturday morning, took a pretty quick taxi in and spent the day wandering around a small street market near our apartment in Palermo (did I mention that we have an apartment? It’s a 300 square foot beaut with minimal storage space and a deck that serves as our baseball watching wine drinking HQ. From now on we are renting apartments whenever we travel. Cheaper and more space.) We found some rings and then wandered to dinner at an Armenian restaurant nearby, which was awesome. Apparently there was a big influx of Armenians and they have quite a few restaurants. As the Lebanese women we were making empanadas with noted, Armenians are good with their hands. Which is odd, because the only Armenians of notoriety that I know either dated or provided legal counsel to professional athletes (ok same family but still). Either way, great food, including a moussaka that seemed more like a slow cooked eggplant dish but was wonderful.
The next day we first stopped at a local Catholic church so Natalie could make sure and engage in her regular day of worship. Or alternatively, the Yankees are in the playoffs and someone needed to light a candle and ask God for his help in the playoffs. So Natalie lit a candle to ask God to shine down on the Yankees, I lit a candle to ask God to not smite us for only going to church to ask him to help a sports team and we got a third candle for tonight.
Trinity done we wandered down to the market which was, as far as mostly overpriced tourist markets go, pretty impressive. Ten to twelve blocks chock full of 70% tourist tchotckes, 20% fabrics and 10% jewelry. Nat snagged a nice ring and we found a random café where we learned of the “completa” sandwich. Apparently, no sandwich is complete without cheese, ham and egg, so if you get a hambuger completa, be prepared for one of those heart attack specials they seem to serve at various chain restaurants. Good, but a little much.
Anyway, after that we wandered home to sleep of the food and then for dinner went to Club Eros. I know I know you hear “Club Eros” and it must either be a swinger’s club or strip club. Oddly neither, it’s a social club with an indoor soccer field and a small dining area. Sort of like the snack area at a municipal golf course but with steak and salad and wine. Pretty great place, groups of old men yelling at the tv showing a soccer match and a couple of young couples grabbing food. The food (fries, salad, pork chop) was excellent and insanely cheap (with two botltles of wine the bill came to about $30 US).
Today we spent the day in a suburb learning how to make empanadas. Natalie can share more about the actual making but I learned (1) empanadas are insanely tasty with cumin and (2) if I ever want to make empanadas again I am going to get a bunch of suckers/friends to do the heavy lifting. Rolling dough is not my strong suit.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Argentina
Testing...1...2...3...
We leave for our next adventure in a week! Stay tuned, loyal reader(s)! (Margee and B, this means you.)
We leave for our next adventure in a week! Stay tuned, loyal reader(s)! (Margee and B, this means you.)
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Home!
I added that exclamation point in the title so it seems like I'm excited to be here. (I was excited to vote today. We got in line before the polls opened.)
So we made it. The flight from Tokyo to JFK was long, as expected, but we managed to amuse ourselves with movies. Jordo chose the girliest movies he could find, including, "Made of Honor" and "Sex and the City." I refused to watch either on the grounds they would annoy me so I watched a depressing British film about a woman abusing illegal immigrant workers and a Discovery Channel special on the Great Plains of the Earth. (Odd choices, true, but still better than his movies.)
At the airport in Saigon, Jordo had noticed how a lot of people were spending extra money to have their bags wrapped in tape and plastic. Probably precautions in case someone stuck something illegal in there? We didn't know. We chose not to follow suit and take our chances with Tony Montana. Then, while we were waiting for our baggage at JFK, one of the drug/food sniffing dogs became obsessed with my bag. The handler asked what I had in there and, besides from some foreign peanuts, there was nothing in there to set off the dog's nose. The handler kept pushing: Had I had meat in there at some point? Fruit? No and no. I offered to let him search, but he declined. Since he kept asking about food, we imagined that he could go through my bag, pull out a few kilos of heroin, then put it back, and say, "OK, looks like there isn't any illegal produce in here. You can go."
(The whole incident sent me back to the early 90s, when Jaqui came back from France with cheese and was chased through the airport by security dogs.)
So Saigon flew by. On one of our last days, we went to the War Remnants Museum. (It was apparently once called "The House for Displaying War Crimes of American Imperialism and the Puppet Government (of South Vietnam)" but the name was changed to be more tourist-friendly.) It was a wow. One whole room was devoted to all of the journalists who died covering the war, including Errol Flynn's son. We got to see some of the last photos these journalists had taken before their deaths, as well as some of the shots that then became iconic of the war. Some of those who died did so in combat. A few were on helicopters that crashed. A few just disappeared and are presumed dead. One journalist, who had no wife or kids, left everything he had to a fund to help Vietnamese orphans.
Another room was about war atrocities, and so you can imagine it wasn't too "Go, USA!" It was just plain stressful. They had a lot of pictures and accounts from My Lai, which were chilling. There's a section of former Sen. Bob Kerrey, who in 2001 admitted to his involvement in killing civilians while a SEAL leader in Vietnam. More than one wall was devoted to pictures of people killed or disfigured by Agent Orange or Napalm or other chemicals, be it first hand or because they were the children of soldiers or villagers affected by this chemical warfare. (They included some American children, too, including a boy who was one of the first poster children for the March of Dimes, whose father had been a soldier.) They had deformed fetuses in jars to further show what damage the chemicals had brought to following generations.
They had replicas of tiger cages, where Viet Cong prisoners were held, and a guillotine used by the French. (And yes, weird tourists in front of us posed with their heads leaning towards it like it was Disney World. And I thought it was bad for us to take smiling pictures in the Cu Chi tunnels.)
There was a statue made of metal collected from bombs and ammo that was called "Mother." It purported to show a woman in agony during the war. It was fitting, as so many of the pictures we saw were of women trying to protect their children, women wailing before they were to be shot.
The guestbook was filled with anti-American sentiment, including things like, "Americans are the real war criminals." A tank was parked outside the museum, and "Fuck" had been written in the dust before "USA Army."
Oh, reputation in tatters. Here's hoping all that changes in the years to come.
So we made it. The flight from Tokyo to JFK was long, as expected, but we managed to amuse ourselves with movies. Jordo chose the girliest movies he could find, including, "Made of Honor" and "Sex and the City." I refused to watch either on the grounds they would annoy me so I watched a depressing British film about a woman abusing illegal immigrant workers and a Discovery Channel special on the Great Plains of the Earth. (Odd choices, true, but still better than his movies.)
At the airport in Saigon, Jordo had noticed how a lot of people were spending extra money to have their bags wrapped in tape and plastic. Probably precautions in case someone stuck something illegal in there? We didn't know. We chose not to follow suit and take our chances with Tony Montana. Then, while we were waiting for our baggage at JFK, one of the drug/food sniffing dogs became obsessed with my bag. The handler asked what I had in there and, besides from some foreign peanuts, there was nothing in there to set off the dog's nose. The handler kept pushing: Had I had meat in there at some point? Fruit? No and no. I offered to let him search, but he declined. Since he kept asking about food, we imagined that he could go through my bag, pull out a few kilos of heroin, then put it back, and say, "OK, looks like there isn't any illegal produce in here. You can go."
(The whole incident sent me back to the early 90s, when Jaqui came back from France with cheese and was chased through the airport by security dogs.)
So Saigon flew by. On one of our last days, we went to the War Remnants Museum. (It was apparently once called "The House for Displaying War Crimes of American Imperialism and the Puppet Government (of South Vietnam)" but the name was changed to be more tourist-friendly.) It was a wow. One whole room was devoted to all of the journalists who died covering the war, including Errol Flynn's son. We got to see some of the last photos these journalists had taken before their deaths, as well as some of the shots that then became iconic of the war. Some of those who died did so in combat. A few were on helicopters that crashed. A few just disappeared and are presumed dead. One journalist, who had no wife or kids, left everything he had to a fund to help Vietnamese orphans.
Another room was about war atrocities, and so you can imagine it wasn't too "Go, USA!" It was just plain stressful. They had a lot of pictures and accounts from My Lai, which were chilling. There's a section of former Sen. Bob Kerrey, who in 2001 admitted to his involvement in killing civilians while a SEAL leader in Vietnam. More than one wall was devoted to pictures of people killed or disfigured by Agent Orange or Napalm or other chemicals, be it first hand or because they were the children of soldiers or villagers affected by this chemical warfare. (They included some American children, too, including a boy who was one of the first poster children for the March of Dimes, whose father had been a soldier.) They had deformed fetuses in jars to further show what damage the chemicals had brought to following generations.
They had replicas of tiger cages, where Viet Cong prisoners were held, and a guillotine used by the French. (And yes, weird tourists in front of us posed with their heads leaning towards it like it was Disney World. And I thought it was bad for us to take smiling pictures in the Cu Chi tunnels.)
There was a statue made of metal collected from bombs and ammo that was called "Mother." It purported to show a woman in agony during the war. It was fitting, as so many of the pictures we saw were of women trying to protect their children, women wailing before they were to be shot.
The guestbook was filled with anti-American sentiment, including things like, "Americans are the real war criminals." A tank was parked outside the museum, and "Fuck" had been written in the dust before "USA Army."
Oh, reputation in tatters. Here's hoping all that changes in the years to come.
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