Thursday, July 4 2019

Something a little closer to home: yesterday's sunrise over Playa Pastillo.

We have three young people working for us now and they start at 7:00 AM (not my choice!). So I have to get up earlier and get out faster to make sure Coda Bear gets a morning walk. Yesterday we were out just before sunrise.

Happy Fourth of July. Here's hoping we get to continue to celebrate our freedoms. The cheeto-in-chief is acting more like a dictator every day. My conservative friends (yes, I still have a few) are screaming about the dangers and evils of socialism. I am much more concerned about a dictatorship. I fear it very well could happen.

More Buenos Aires to come.

June 16, 2019 in Buenos Aires

Woke up to a rainy Fathers' Day (and my birthday) Sunday in Buenos Aires. It was eerie - no streetlights, in fact no lights on the street at all except for a lone bus, no traffic. Lights were on in the hotel, some at least, but I could hear generators running. Ah, power outage!

The generators in the hotel couldn't power the elevators so we walked up and down to the seventh floor. For some reason, the generator(s) vented into the stairwell. The fumes became more concentrated as you went higher. That wasn't fun.

Some people went into a mild panic about the outage. For me - unh! No biggie. We got breakfast, we got coffee. Life was fine.

We found out later this outage was huge. More than 50 million people lost power for about eight hours. All of Argentina as well as parts of Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Brazil were without power. I still don't know what caused it. Someone said it was because of all the rain in the area. We were told that Argentina had three times more rain during the week we were there than they normally get in the entire month of June.  

Tuesday, July 2 2019

Wow! A new month already. Where did June go?

Obviously, I'm a little behind so I'm going to try to catch up. There are still things from Buenos Aires that I want to share.

A lot of the people in our group wanted to shop, especially in the stores on Florida Street.

Shopping is not really my thing. I would much rather people watch. So, this is me being a street photographer in Buenos Aires.

Wednesday, June 26, 2019 Food, glorious food!

The sweets are incredible!

Yes, the last one is flan in a bowl of dulce de leche. I can't even talk about it!

Fresh breads? Amazing! (But they don't serve butter with it. Not that you really need it.)

There is even a restaurant called "El Palacio de la Papa Frita," the Palace of the Fried Potato. We tried to eat there but it was closed by the time we got there.

But the beef...it's really about the beef! Oh, my, the beef! I ate more beef in one week than I do in a year.

This is parrilla (pronounced par-ē-cha), sometimes called asado, which is everywhere. This platter was for four of us. The platter contains two kinds of steak, short rips, chorizo, blood sausage, and in this case, chicken (sometimes yes, sometimes no). You dig in, cutting off pieces of whatever you want. They serve it with big plates of french fries and salad.

This is how it's cooked, on big charcoal bar-be-ques.

On the left side of the grill those yellow-ish disks are provoleta. They take thick slabs of provolone cheese, brush them with olive oil, and throw them on the grill. Oh my god!

There are some amazing - and amazingly inexpensive - wines to go with it. We drank a lot of local Malbec. If beer is more to your taste, you're in luck: it comes in 1,000 ml bottles

Dinner is frequently quite late in the evening. We hit this already crowded restaurant about 10:30 one night.

There were 20 of us, 11 adults and nine kids. We all ate. the adults went through five bottles of really good wine. The tab was about 8,700 Argentine pesos. At the then current exchange rate of 45 peso to the dollar, dinner was just under $200 USD. Unreal.

It seems like all we did was eat. And drink wine. Or large beers.

This was at a pizza place called Kentucky's at 11:30 on a Sunday night:

  The pizza was so-so. The empanadas were wonderful.

We took boat cruise out of Puerto Madero, one of the three ports in Buenos Aires, down the Rio Plata to get to this restaurant.

It was too chilly to sit outside so we all piled indoors.

On other note about the food: everything else - pasta sauces for example - was very bland. The tomato sauce was just that, tomato. No basil, no oregano, no garlic, not even a hint of that good red wine. Same for the crema blanca (white cream) sauce. Salad dressing is oil and vinegar, sometimes balsamic, sometimes not.

As long as the beef kept coming, who cares about the sauces?

Sunday, June 23, 2019 Back from Buenos Aires

I'm home from travels to Buenos Aires watching my grandson Kai play futsal. In spite of my passion for soccer, I'd never heard of futsal until recently, though apparently it's been around a while. I near as I can figure it started getting popular just about the time I left the mainland.

Futsal is another small-sided soccer derivative. It is played five-v-five, with one of the five from each team designated as goalkeeper. The game is played on a hard court slightly larger than a basketball court, indoors or out. It is fast, furious and develops great foot skills. I'd never seen skill like theses young kids - Kai is only nine - have.

It was a great experience for the kids. The first day they played against a local club called Ferro Carril.

After the games, Ferro Carril treated us to a bar-be-que, our first of many tastes of Argentine beef. Yum!

The next day all of us got to tour the facilities at Club Athletico Boca Jrs., one of the top, most  storied soccer clubs in South America. They also have futsal, basketball and volleyball. A bit about the tour first.

The facilities are absolutely top-notch as befits one of the top clubs. The stadium, called La Bombenera or "The Candy Dish," is incredible. It is said that on match days, the noise and stomping in the stadium can be felt in houses in near-by neighborhoods. Fans call it "a temple" and enter with reverence and bowed heads  To make sure the opposing players display the proper reverence, the visitors' entrance is low, forcing players to bow their heads (i.e., duck) as they enter.

The kids trained with the top coaches from Boca's first division futsal team. What an experience!

The next day was the complete opposite end of the spectrum, from one of the very top clubs to one of the very poorest neighborhoods in Buenos Aires at an organization called Pequeños Pasos (Small Steps). The organization started 10 years ago to help kids in the 'hood who weren't in school get there or to help those who were in school succeed. It has expanded to help adults as well with sewing, cooking and computer classes.

Their futsal court is several blocks away from the main facility. Fortunately for us and for the neighborhood kids, the court is covered. It rained quite hard while the kids were playing.

The other thing we did at Pequeños Pasos was to deliver shoes and other soccer gear that was donated by people in the states. The Pequeños Pasos kids were great - helpful, excited, enthusiastic, welcoming, but not at all deferential which I was very glad to see.

The other very cool place the kids got to play was at Estrella de Boedo. Boedo is a neighborhood in Buenos Aires. The Star (estrella - in Argentina the double LL is pronounced with a "ch" or sometimes soft "g" sound, so "es-tra-cha") is a futsal/basketball/handball (another strange hybrid game, not the game similar to squash; it looks to my totally untrained eye like a mash-up of soccer, basketball and rugby) facility built under a highway.

We all commented about what a great creative use of space this was - and that it could never never ever ever happen in the states!

Boedo is also the home of San Lorenzo club. We got to see their first division futsal team play twice, and the kids got to train with the first division coach and play against their youth teams.

Right outside the San Lorenzo facility is a restaurant we ate at the second time we saw them play, and two very cool murals.

A whole post about food is coming soon!