Buenos Aires, San Clemente, Uruguay, and Out

So the show is all wrapped up now. I finished with 9 more days, mostly in Buenos Aires, but with a couple dips into other spots in the area. Buenos Aires was great. It's got tons of great turn of the century architecture, so I was able to amuse myself for a couple days just walking around the neighborhoods and soaking it all up. Other highlights include the food. Everybody talks about the great Argentinean steak, but while that was quite good, I generally preferred the more sophisticated restaurants where you'd get cuisine prepared with a little more flair and panache to the parrilla joints where you pick up a mountainous pile of grilled meat with side salads and bread. The highlight was the 8-course me we got at Pura Tierra on Thursday (thanks for the tip, Audi!). All 8 courses were at least very good, and often excellent, and we were able to get a wine pairing including 4 full glasses. We actually ended up getting more as they were actually refilling our glasses as we emptied them. Due to the quantity of wine consumed, I’m a little foggy on what all the different courses were, but overall it was a fantastic experience, particularly when you consider that this feast cost us a paltry $65 each.

The other big food highlight is the Italian grub. Because there were so many Italian immigrants to Argentina, the Italian food is plentiful, of generally very good quality, and an excellent value just like everything else you put in your stomach there. The highlight here was the house-made black squid-ink seafood pasta I had right before skipping town on Saturday night. And as with any place with serious Italian roots, there’s great gelato. Several times I ended up skipping breakfast so I could have gelato for my first meal of the day.

While there I of course did a lot of your standard BA stuff: went to the Recoleta cemetery, caught a tango show, went to a milonga/tango club, Boca, did some shopping, etc. The tango show we went to was touristy, but really fantastic. Laura, who is somewhat of an authority on such things, said it was by far the best tango performance she had ever seen. The tango club we went to afterwards was also pretty cool, although not being a tango dancer this got old for me pretty quick (social tango dancing isn’t exactly the most exciting spectator sport). Nevertheless, I think it’s obligatory to at least check out a milonga, so I went and watched Laura and all her tango pals dance around in slow circles for a couple hours while I pounded cocktails and empanadas.

While in BA I spent one day doing a day-trip to Colonia del Sacramento in Uruguay. It’s a neat place, but I’m glad I just did a day-trip instead of spending the night like I had originally planned. You can easily check out all the historic parts of the city in a couple hours. Also, the place really slows down at night and there aren’t very many interesting places to eat at after 4:00 PM. This was particularly aggravating for me as I wanted to get a second nice meal in before catching the ferry back across the delta to Buenos Aires. As a result, I had to settle for a basic parilla place and some blood sausage. Don’t get me wrong, I love blood sausage, but the same thing is available all over Argentina and I was hoping to partake in that reputedly great Uruguayan seafood instead. There was, however, plenty of opportunity to suck down some Uruguayan wine. What I had I was pretty impressed with.

After arriving in Buenos Aires we also took a 2-day trip with Laura’s aunt and uncle to their vacation house in a small beach town called San Clemente a few hours south of BA. Since school had recently started in Argentina, the place had officially hit the off-season and things were pretty slow as a result. It was also a bit more mellow since our buddy Diego wasn’t able to join us, so it was a pretty small crowd. It was nice to relax for a couple days, though. We hit the beach, drove around in her uncle’s ATV, hit the saltwater springs and spa, and got to enjoy her uncle’s fantastic cooking a couple times.

Overall this was a really great trip. I could definitely go back to any of these countries a second time. I think I’d like to do Bolivia, possibly some of Peru, and the northern parts of Chile and Argentina (Atacama desert, Salta, Iguazu) for one trip. I could easily make a trip out of southern Argentina and Chile (Torres del Paine, Tierra del Fuego, Perito Moreno Glacier, Lakes District), as well. There are some spots I’d like to put more due-diligence into Colombia on, too, particularly other areas on the Caribbean coast and some of the archaeological sights in the southwest. Looks like I’ll have plenty of tough decisions to make for next year…