Beautiful Buenos Aires in 3m30s
Have a look at this….
Author: kymdt
Tokyo…..
Joyce and Margaret’s excellent adventures continued in Shizuoka Prefecture and Tokyo… Check out this 4 minute snapshot.
Kyoto and Kobe in less than 4 minutes
Margaret and Joyce with their very excellent guides Kym and Helen in Kyoto and Kobe. All summarised in less than 4 minutes.
Foodie report.
You might be wondering where all the reports about food are. Well worry not, South America is not a foodie desert. There is an abundance of great food.
I could start with with Easter Island’s fantastically friendly Japanese restaurant using local fish to prepare great sushi or sashimi. Or the great empanadas we’ve had in Mendoza, Córdoba, Santiago, or Easter Island. Particularly the empanadas with cheese and locally caught tuna on Easter Island,
Or I could start the three amazing restaurants that are easily amongst the best in the world.
Amazing foraged tastes at Borago in Santiago
The best steak cooked with fire at 1884 in Mendoza
Urban chic in Palermo, Buenos Aires
Or I could start with the fact that Argentina seems to be one of the few countries that know how to cook scrambled eggs properly. Yum!
Or I could start with the amazing private and romantic dinner on the roof terrace of our “hut” with a wood fire over looking the Andes….Magic! Or maybe lunch amongst the vineyards of Mendoza.
Well, I haven’t even really started.. I’ll share more with you tomorrow. I can tell you tonight, however, that if you like food you will love Chile and Argentina!
Sometimes its the cities without expectations that delight the most.
Santiago is a great city. Laid back vibe with an amazing backdrop of mountains. Great parks, good street art and fantastic markets.
It reminds me of the joys of the less talked about cities such as San Diego, Kumamoto, Hull, and Adelaide!
This is a post for those cities that are sometimes overlooked.
This place is so relaxed about thing that stray dogs have their own houses in the parks
Can you tell I like this place?
7 hours and 29 switchbacks
That is all it takes to cross the Andes from Mendoza to Santiago.
We took an Andesmar bus, one of the more respected private bus companies in Argentina. There are hundreds! They are a very efficient, we easily bought our tickets online in Australia and were lucky enough to score front row seats on the top deck. I was pretty excited… But when the bus turned up at Mendoza station, our front window was covered with that horrible holey stickers that are used for advertising on Adelaide buses. There should be a law against this. You can see the impact on the photos through the front window for yourself.
Fortunately many great photos were taken from the side window.
Entertainment was provided with a number of action films, including Robocop and Three Days to Kill. Oddly the sound was in English with Spanish subtitles. Food was provided a glass of coke with sandwich and some fine biscuits with tea/or coffee.
All up for less than $40 each, the value is pretty good. Especially given the roomy seats which are wider than economy class on plane and more legroom!
My only complaints are
1) The anxiety you feel when you get told the bus will leave from one of the gates 16-22 and the bus not being listed on the departures board. To be fair, it turned up with 10 minutes to go. It was loaded up and left before 10:40 not too bad for a 10:30 scheduled start.
2) The strange process of being lined up like naughty children in front of desks at Chilean customs. We became the audience as some poor travellers were admonished for trying to smuggle in too much wine…
Taking one from the team…
Some of you have an expectation that everything we eat is always amazing. Well Helen wasn’t feeling so well yesterday (she is much better now) so we weren’t focussing so much on looking for amazing food experiences…. So this food experience is for the team!
It is important to try and get a sense of the place. We were looking to see what middle class portenos do on a Saturday afternoon. Is it any great surprise that they go to the mall. We found this out at the Abasto mall quite an amazing mall built in a former wholesale fruit and vegetable market.
It has one of the biggest food halls I’ve seen, but get this… you can get a rib eye steak here for about $10 and the food hall serves wine. You can imagine that I was heading there… and I did. I was in the line waiting. At that point I realised there were going to be at least three interactions in Spanish 1) selecting and paying 2) selecting salads and 3) pickup. Not at all confident with my Spanish, I freaked out and left the queue. But the problem was where to find food that was easy to order.
You would have guessed McDonalds? Well close, I have an abiding dislike of McDonalds, so instead I chose the local alternative Mostaza. On a cultural side note, I did notice a teenage worker at Mostaza commencing her shift. She greeted each staff member as she arrived with a peck on the cheek the universal way of saying hola to your friends here.
Well you’ve scrolled past the picture to find out if it was any good. I can tell you that it was put together with as a much love as McDonalds and is about as good as it looks!
As a consolation, I did arrange for room service steak sandwich with a glass of Malbec. Total cost around $10. Try that an Australian hotel.
And… yes success at last…. this was very yum!
Latin America Art
If you happen to be in Buenos Aires and want to see some good Latin American art, that’s not on the street, I’d certainly recommend a visit to MALBA – Museo de Arte Latinamericano de Buenos Aires.
We saw a retrospective of the Argentine master Julio Le Parc. A fantastic exploration of his work that paints with light. Completely darkened rooms, with specific lights illuminating moving objects to create part visual art part movement art with light.
Equally impressive was its permanent collection. For which you can see a few photos below. As Helen will tell you, you can also get some excellent value piece of contemporary jewellery.
Palermo…
We are staying in the Palermo suburb of Buenos Aires. I understand that this is the largest of the barrios. It is itself broken down into a number of sub-barrios. Each with their own name and character. Trust me… we did a lot of walking yesterday and they certainly do feel quite different from one another.
Our hotel is located in Palermo Hollywood, so named because the existence of tv and radio producers are here. This area and adjoining Palermo Viejo are loaded with restaurants, bars and boutiques.
Now, Adelaideans will appreciate the problems of Plane tree lined streets on an early windy spring day. A lot of the streets here are like Frome Street in terms of having mature Plane trees, well we are hear in early spring. All I can say the joy of Plane tree pollen is no less over here.
We are seeing a few bikes around. It seems to me if Buenos Aires can manage bike lines, many of them separated from the road, with its traffic, then perhaps we could do a little more back home than carp and complain.
Viva bici in Buenos Aires
Helen is sound asleep and I am drinking Quilmes. At around $3 from my mini bar, that’s certainly a bargain.
Today was our first full day in Buenos Aires. To get ourself oriented we thought we would ride a bike. Fortunately for us Santi, Ben and Taylor from Biking Buenos Aires were only too happy to show us the ropes…. for the required fee of course!
We toured through San Telmo, La Bocca, Puerto Madero, Recoleta, Retiro and Centro. All up good fun. Lunch was had a permanent “truck” where plenty of porteno office workers had lunch (hopefully Helen will upload her lunch photo shortly). I know I’d be a regular if I worked here.
Some photos for you
To see some more go to Flickr
