Simple Life in the Countryside

A few days ago Don and I spent some time with friends at Estancia Bella Vista, which is about 170 kilometers from Buenos Aires. This delightful place is 60 hectares of natural woodland on the banks of the Salado River. It was so peaceful and so nice to trade in the city sounds for nothing more than birds chirping. For the first half of the day we were the only four guests in the whole place. Some more people showed up later but there were never more than about 10 guests. It was cozy and everyone talked and ate dinner together. Here's the entrance to our room at the Estancia:

Our favorite activity was the horse back riding. We were used to the slow guided tours where the guide is teaching you about everything around you and you move at a leisurely pace. This guide just let us break out into pretty fast gallops and ride as we pleased. Man were our butts hurting the next day! The guide rounded up a baby cow with a lasso like a real cowboy. It was actually kind of sad because the animal was running so hard trying to get away and all the other cows were mooing like crazy. But, that's life in the countryside.

Feliz Navidad!

It's Christmas Day here in Buenos Aires and it's a blazing 90 degree day. The morning was eerily quiet after all the families in the city partied hard last night. Christmas Eve is a very important night here and at midnight fireworks started going off all across the sky. Our whole neighborhood was filled with bangs, booms, and streaks of color. But we really missed the Christmas movies that we would have watched in DC. The cable service we have in our apartment just wasn't providing the right stuff! What's Christmas Eve without watching "A Christmas Story"?

As our celebration today, we went to the Alvear Hotel for a long beautiful brunch. We, of course, met another couple--as we always do--and proceeded to tell them about all the best things that we had learned about this city and other places to see in Argentina. There is so much to do here and always so little time!

Boca Futbol

So, we finally made our way to a soccer (futbol) game and it was yet another interesting segment in the Don and Marie drama of living in Buenos Aires. This is a city where spontaneity does not breed success for us and everything must be carefully pre-planned with tons of questions. Well, we had let our soccer planning fall to the wayside so when a last minute opportunity arose to see Boca Juniors play in the last game of their season we jumped at it. Let's just say that everything we had planned to avoid about watching a live soccer game here in Argentina happened to us that day. Instead of the private car transportation we were expecting, we ended up on a school bus. No joke. And, when we were handed our tickets we realized that we had paid 10 times the face value for the "general admission" area. That means you are crowded in a bleacher-like section with no assigned seats with several hundred very passionate, screaming Argentinians clawing their way to see the action and push you out of the way. Oh, how we missed the Verizon Center at that moment. At least we won a raffle to get an authentic, Nike jersey of one of the most popular players.

We tried to make lemonade out of lemons and we held our ground in the crazy crowd. Did I mention that it's a dry stadium? We didn't even know those existed. It's not hard to imagine why when you see how crazy everyone is even without alcohol. The opposing team's fans have to sit in a special section and they enter and depart the stadium before the Boca fans. We ended up making it through the first half and we saw all 3 goals that Boca scored that day! Part of the fans' aggression was pretty contagious and we screamed and clapped with every goal. Even really old ladies, mothers, and little children squeeze into this suffocating madness and jump all over the place. We've never seen one crowd know so many different songs--and every single lyric--all devoted to one team. When four year old boys with their dads are screaming "putos" (bitches) at the other team, you know you're at a Boca game in the rowdy, low budget section. All in all, Boca beat Colon and we took great pleasure in that. I hope you don't think we got back on that school bus to go home. Fool us once...

Anniversary Tango Show

December 9th was our 3-year wedding anniversary and we decided to celebrate with a romantic tango show in San Telmo. We went to a place called La Ventana inside a historic, refurbished building and it was very charming. The evening started out with a gourmet 3-course dinner and we were seated right at the front edge of the stage with a good view. When the show started we immediately loved the band of musicians playing the piano, cello, violins, and bandoneon (which we always thought was an accordion). The dancers were all pretty exceptional, too. It was more of a traditional style tango show than we we had seen at the Faena and we couldn't help but compare things. But, in the end, the styles of the two shows just represented different interpretations and we enjoyed ourselves just as much if not more. We captured some video of the dancing:

Overall, however, the star highlight of the La Ventana show was not really the tango dancing or singing but rather the two artists representing northwest Argentine folk music and dance. Don was most impressed with the guitar player and I really liked the guy who played the Argentine drum or Bombo leguero. We hope to post videos of those acts elsewhere on the blog. It was a fantastic night and we definitely need to make our way over to San Telmo more often. Maybe this Sunday for more tango and shopping...

Kosher Night

As always, Don and I are on the constant look-out for new restaurants. We keep our eyes trained on new signs and fliers in Palermo searching for something new and interesting. Well, since we got here in September, there has been a huge purple wall announcing the arrival of an Asian steakhouse on Cordoba Avenue. We've waited patiently and walked by every week or so to monitor the progress of the construction. Finally, it was open! We tried to go there for lunch one day and ran into a security guard in an ill-fitting black suit standing near the elevator entrance. It was then we discovered that the restaurant was open only for dinner and that it was "Jewish food" as he called it. Kosher-style Asian only, so we probably wouldn't want to eat there, he assumed. Don and I are no quitters so we politely informed him that we would return at a later time for dinner. That dinner came a few days ago and we ran into him and yet another security guard. After a lengthy conversation about us 1) not having a reservation, 2) not being part of the "community", and 3) being from the United States and aware of what Kosher means, we were finally allowed to take a seat in the restaurant and order dinner.

The duck rolls were rather tasty but didn't really surprise us. Don was a bit reluctant to order the deep-fried gizzards but we relented after the waiter insisted. They tasted like sweetbreads wrapped in dough as one would imagine. But man, oh man, did we get a big surprise when our rack of beef rib steak came out. It was a massive sight to see. They like to serve the meat on the bone here a lot and this thing looked like it came from a brontosauras and it was covered in barbecue sauce. A little overcooked for us but we were so excited just to figure out how to eat the thing. A successful Asian Kosher dinner if we may say so ourselves.

Don't you see the resemblance?

Feeling Festive and Stuffed Like Turkeys

The past few days have been full of fun and FOOD. Wednesday was Don's birthday and we hit up two of our favorite places, La Cabrera and Osaka. He's been going to the dentist a lot lately and we were afraid that he wouldn't be able to eat. Luckily, he felt okay so we headed out to make the best of it and had a great time on a blazing hot day. It turned out to be a wonderful birthday for him despite experiencing our first black out here. Not a thing worked in the apartment, including the air conditioning, so we didn't stay in long. Here's a snapshot of some of our feasting:

Oh, and then there was Thanksgiving on Thursday... Another blackout all day. So, of course we were missing our family and we decided to have a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant called Kansas. We had turkey with gravy, stuffing, cranberry sauce, glazed carrots, broccoli, mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie, the works! It was wonderful. We even went to two more American-style places (Casa Bar and The Alamo) to watch football and have seconds with yet another Thanksgiving day dish, which we shared. We ended up seeing the Dallas Cowboys win, wrapping up a great day for Don, no doubt.

And, if we hadn't had enough...we baked homemade macaroni and cheese and brought it to our friend's house for another Thanksgiving dinner on Friday. Yes, you read that correctly. We baked. Macaroni and cheese. Just a big pan of scrumptious, creamy cheese! We love the holidays.

Patagonia III: Villa La Angostura

Hotel Correntoso in Villa La Angostura was the perfect way to end our tour of Patagonia. We were intending on staying at Llao Llao but our apartment owner suggested this alternative and he was right on target. After tons of excursions we needed a relaxing way to decompress with less people around. We ended up getting 4 days of much-needed spa time, fine dining, and beautiful lake views. They knew us really well in the spa as we had different treatments 3 days in a row and they couldn't keep us out of the pool! Las Balsas restaurant deserves a special mention here because our lunch there was exquisite and we had our first encounter with a really helpful sommelier. We both think the food was probably the best we've had since being in Argentina overall.

We did drag ourselves away from the hotel to take a private boat tour along the Nahuel Huapi Lake and a walk through the Arrayanes Forest. The picture above is one we really like of an old bridge that is near the entrance to the national parklands where the boat docks. It was much different having a small boat and a gourmet lunch to ourselves versus being on a catamaran with hundreds of people and a tour guide trying to speak English over the loud speaker! But we feel like we got a full spectrum of the Patagonia experience.

Click on the title of this post to see our picture slideshow.