Buenos Aires T+2 - Friday
Rafe and Alan arrived this morning. They checked into their apartment and needed a few hours to get settled after the overnight flight. Quite understandable. Jim and I were off to the grocery store for some essential items. Plans for a city tour, lunch with a relative and late afternoon meet the family in place. Through a communications mixup, we needed to reschedule everything. It worked out that the city tour was do today. Too many sites and too much history to list them all here. I didn’t take notes either. We did see the Olympic torch runner go by. Actually, we were stuck in a traffic jam about 5 cars back from the torch route, so by standing outside the car, I snapped a few torch photos. We saw much more of the city than listed here. Check the gallery for lots of photos.
We stopped for a late afternoon snack – that turned into 90 minutes then finished the tour in a barrio near the apartments. The snack we ate at Aires de Patagonia in Puerto Madero was very tasty – see the photos.
We’re back at the apartments for a few hour siesta before dinner and going out this evening. The Porteños (people from Buenos Aires) don’t eat dinner until 9-ish and don’t go to clubs until midnight or later for dancing.
Dinner was at a steak house – we had water (con/sin gas), beer, wine, steaks, potatoes and a server who didn’t know what was actually in stock from the steak, beer or wine menu. For each of those items, she returned saying they were out of the cut or beer or wine that we’d ordered. Jim’s Spanish was very helpful. According to some tests that he’s taken, he’s at the high-intermediate level. I find that easy to believe. The steaks were tasty and the potatoes (fries and chip-like) were ok.
After dinner, we headed to a cafe owned by a part of Jim’s family a block or so away for some caffeine. Al and Rafe were off to meet some girls at a club as previously arranged earlier in the day, the other two had a good walk back to the apartment.
Due to the 12pm caffeine, we were up until 4am.
