Sounds Good on Paper

Category: Argentina

  • Traffic in Buenos Aires

    We are staying in the neighborhood of Palermo. We are in a very  residential part of Palermo. There isn’t much traffic on our street, but what there is confuses us.  This intersection has no stop light, stop signs or yield signs. There are cross walks, but they seem to be more for decorating the street than stopping cars for pedestrians.  Its seems that there are 100 near misses every hour. Although in the month we’ve been here there haven’t been any accidents.

    Even when there are stop lights, the traffic can be daunting in our neighborhood.  This street has a stop light, but you have to hussle to cross it before it turns from green to red. This is the street we cross every day to get to our gym.    One day after a particularly hard workout I only got across 10 of the 12 lanes of traffic while the light was green.   There were a few horns that day.

    And then there is this street.  9 de Julio.   This is the widest street in the world. It has 9 lanes but seems more like 90.   This street is in the middle of downtown, so nothing we’ve had to cross on a daily basis.  But on the days we did cross it we were happy to have the medians in the middle of the street.

  • Eating an Entire Cow (not in one sitting) part 4

    When I decided to eat all the edible parts of the cow, I really didn’t think it would be that hard.

    I am a big eater and like almost everything. I can count on one hand the foods I dislike.  I assumed with the cow eating there would be parts that sounded gross and things I would not love. I had no idea there would be parts that I honestly couldn’t swallow.  That is, until I tried  chinchulines. (more…)

  • Yerba Mate in San Telmo

    On Sundays there is a huge and I mean HUGE street market that stretches from the downtown area for block and blocks down a narrow street to the neighborhood of San Telmo.  San Telmo is famous for the street market, tango bars, and people doing tango in the street.    We actually somehow missed everyone doing tango in the street. Every time we came across someone that looked like they might do tango in the street, they were resting, eating, or standing on a box playing guitar.

    The street is so narrow and filled with people that claustrophobia overtook us at one point and we had to go down the street to a cafe for a relaxing cup of coffee. Although for me it wasn’t too relaxing.

    The vendors I found the most interesting were the ones selling mate cups and the straws called bombillas.  Yerba mate is a type of drink that Argentinians are crazy for. In the grocery stores there are bags and bags of yerba mate lining the shelves.  You can’t easily get it at restaurants or cafes in Buenos Aires, so we hadn’t really seen it being drunk.


    Once I knew what to look for I realized every vendor, no matter what they were selling, was also drinking yerba mate.

    On the walk home we passed a park where everyone was also drinking yerba mate. If you look at the guy in the background (the one that’s not Jeff) you can see he’s drinking out of a bombilla.

    Makes me want to give up coffee and try mate for awhile….maybe.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Eating an entire cow (not in one sitting) part 3

    After three weeks in Buenos Aires I’m finally getting slightly tired of Argentinian food. Not dulce de leche, I could never tire of that. but steaks in general.

    The beauty of  beef is Buenos Aires is, the butcher will take a “bife de lomo” steak and grind it into ground beef for you. And, he won’t even mind when you panic, forget every word in Spanish and just grunt and point at his case filled with meats.  And, when he finally picks the one you want and you have no clue what the word for “to grind” is, he looks around his shop until he spots the grinder and suggests he uses it.  And, when he asks you if you want it put through the grinder once or twice and you just stare blankly because not only do you not know all these words, but even if you did, you didn’t know you could have it ground twice, he just does it once for you once and wraps it up with a smile.Another amazing thing about Buenos Aires is you can get Mexican taco makings at the store.

    Tacos made with an Argentinian tenderloin steak are so good it’s almost like cheating. It’s tempting to eat the rest of the cow ground up in a taco, especially since you can eat brains and tongue in a taco in Mexico. But, after this taco (which was amazing) I am going back to the Argentinian parilla for the rest of the cow.

  • Tango at the cemetery

    One of the biggest things to see in Buenos Aires is the Recoleta cematery.    But, we are Recoleta cemetery challenged.  The first try we took the wrong bus and ended up at a polo stadium. On the second try we walked. By the time we got there we had heat stroke, and the cemetery was long closed for the day.

    So instead we decided to go to a different cemetery,  Cemetario de la Chacarita.   Not only is it the biggest cemetery in South America,  the world famous tango singer Carlos Gardel is buried here.

    And, you can get there by subway.

    It was his birthday, (He lived from 1890 – 1935 when he died in a plane crash.)  so it seemed fitting to visit his tomb.   It sounds strange to visit a cemetery, but his gravesite was anything but somber.

    The cemetery is enormous. Each tomb is like a little house, rows and rows of them, it was like a small city with streets and blocks of granite and marble tombs.

    Here’s a video of our entire trip soup to nuts.