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Tag: Buenos Aires

  • La Boca – tourist vs traveler

    Jeff and I are very different kind of travelers.  I am a full blown tourist.  Jeff is a true traveler.   This difference isn’t too apparent until we go to something touristy.

    La Boca is such a place.  La Boca is a neighborhood in Buenos Aires that is rich in history. Tango started in this barrio in the bordellos in the 1800’s.    The area is still “rough” according to the guidebooks, but a section of the neighborhood has been turned into a tourist destination.  There are brightly colored buildings, street vendors, outdoor restaurants with continuous tango shows, and artistic statues of people. Due to the warnings that the area around the tourist section was dangerous, we decided to take a tourist bus there instead of try our luck with the local buses.


    This chart shows the difference in our travel styles when faced with different situations.

    Jeff on a tourist bus.
    Sheryl on a tourist bus.
    Jeff and artistic people statues.
    Sheryl with artistic people statues.

    I don’t know if one travel style is better than the other, but I do know one of us had a hell of a lot more fun that day.

  • Drinking Yerba Mate

    As I explained in an earlier post, Jeff and I went to the neighborhood of La Bocca for lunch. I order the chinchulines (cow intestines) and couldn’t eat them which caused the waiter great disappointment.   In order to get back into his good graces, we ordered a “service of mate.”

    The green tea-like powder that makes up yerba mate is sold in all the grocery stores and the mate container and bombilla straw that you drink it out of is sold in street markets all over Buenos Aires.    When we saw it on the menu we were excited to order it. It’s rarely offered in restaurants, I figured I could get in good with the waiter again.

    The service came with a thermos of hot water, a bowl of sugar, a bowl of green tea like herbs, and a silver mate container and silver straw.  The waiter put the straw in, packed the mate full of the herbs, spooned in sugar, and poured hot water over the entire thing.

    He gave us very specific instructions. We each take a sip and then pass it to the other person who takes a sip then you pour in more hot water. “Do not, under any circumstances stir or pull out the bombilla (metal straw),” he warned. He made it sound like pulling that straw out would ruin not just  the mate, but perhaps the rest of our trip.    I have to admit I was worried about the straw.

    The waiter stood attentively as we tried it. Thank God I liked it and could smile instead of gasp for air.   It tasted really good, somewhere between green and black tea with lots of  sugar.   Satisfied that we wouldn’t mess up the mate service the waiter left our table to stand in the doorway.   He seemed pleased with our mate drinking until Jeff made the mistake of pulling the straw out. The waiter then ran over to fix it.   I’m not sure what he did besides shove the straw back into the cup, but it looked very serious.

  • 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.