An Appealing Couple of Days…

The last two days we’ve seen Buenos Aires return to ‘business as usual’ as restaurants and stores opened back up to the public.

We started out Friday by heading to Oui Oui, a French bakery that serves fresh and yummy salads, sandwiches and pastries. It came highly recommended by the tenants of the apartment where we’re staying.

We’re finding out that we can’t trust the maps in our Foder's Buenos Aires guidebook, which as you might guess, is less than ideal. But, thanks to Jeannie’s masterful Castellano conversational skills, we were able to find out that the Oui Oui had moved across the street… disaster averted.

We split a ham and butter-cheese sandwich on fresh French bread and a delicious salad with a poached egg on top.

Since the weather was gorgeous, we headed home to sunbathe and plan the remainder of our Argentinian adventure. We came to two conclusions: 1) We’re excited to head south to Patagonia where we’ll see and hike across glaciers. 2) Ari is ineffective at even sunscreen application. He’s a white, red and black chest-haired jack-o-lantern.

In case you were hoping for more culinary chit chat, we then went to dinner at Casa Cruz, which is touted as one of the best restaurants in the entire *country*. While the rabbit, roasted figs and pork loin held up pretty well to our lofty NYC standards, the dish of the night was a delectably chilled fava bean soup with peas and asparagus.

Our waiter was a nice young guy (Ari likened his cross-combed hair to a toupe) and we ran our post-dinner options by him. After firmly telling us ‘no’ to our initial choices, he made us a list of hot spots nearby. We’re thinking he may have contributed to our guidebook because he gave us cross streets to a bar that are actually parallel to each other, which we opted to avoid. Instead we walked to one of his recommendations with intersecting cross streets -- Kim y Novak. We were obviously early at 10:30pm, because they didn’t open for another 30 minutes. You'd better be a night owl out here because this bar was said to be a post-dinner/pre-disco drinks hot spot.

Not to be discouraged, we went to option numero dos called Mundo Bizarro which had lots of art dedicated to the female body on the wall, disco versions of American classic rock and countless overpriced fruity drinks.

After tossing back a couple drinks and eying a nearly empty bar at 12:30am, we headed out to the Plaza Serrano near our apartment and found 2,000 of our newest friends sitting outside a row of bars sipping beer. While they were just getting started on Friday night debauchery, we shared one giant Heineken and called it a night.

On Saturday, we did what any vacationer would do on a 90+ degree sunny day, with lounge chairs on a sundeck…we laid out, read books and figured out what we wanted to do that afternoon. (That's not us in the grass, but our sundeck is on the blue building behind the trees.)

Upon returning from walking around the park-turned-trader’s market just outside our apartment, we settled on going to see the Rio de Plata which is the river separating Argentina and Uruguay. While it is a massive body of water, we were not impressed with its putrid smell or muddy brown color. It apparently serves as a waste run-off area for both countries. In hindsight, it did not bode well that our cab driver gave us a horrified look when we said ‘take us anywhere on the Rio de Plata.’

Afterwards, we caught a cab to downtown towards Puerto Madero and Plaza de Mayo where we saw the pink presidential office (Casa Rosa – it’s always been pink and not just because they currently have a female president). There have been major riots and protests in this square.

We then toodled around the downtown shopping area in search of grub. Our guidebook fooled us a second time by misplacing the pizza parlor on our map. I think we’re just going to check the address from now on and figure it out on our own.

Once we found Las Cuartetas, we ordered a deep dish pizza with gooey cheese, tomatoes and “condimentos” which include basil, garlic and other spices. The missing ingredient was sauce…a cardinal sin in our book but one that did not stop us from putting down a slice.

After arriving home via subway and more walking, we took an 8:30pm siesta and got ready for our dinner at Bella Italia, which is supposed to have amazing homemade pasta and terrific wine list.

We’ll let you know how it turns out tomorrow!