Anyway, not a total disaster as we are well into our second round of drinks and are full of Lomitos (the local variety of steak sandwich, and they are awesome!) and the opening ceremony for the world cup is on the TV.
The plan after this is to head to a local bar and watch the opening match before we head to Rio and get amongst it tomorrow.
Since out last blog we have been a bit on the d-low. We rested up after the trek for a couple of quiet days in Lima, which is nice enough but we felt like we had enough time there. Checked out the Larco museum (apparently one of the best in South America for ancient history) and the fountain/light show park in the city-proper. Gosia recorded about 2 hours worth of footage of the light show, but mercifully she accidentally deleted it before anyone (including me) had to suffer through it.
We tried to get out of the tourist trap after the fountain show, so we headed to a diner-type thing that seemed to be full of locals - good sign.
What was a bad sign that we didn't see until too late is that this seemed to be the place where the more financially-astutue Peruvian tries to get the whole weeks' worth of food in for $5. Gosia's rice with chicken would have weighed about 3kg:
The bit missing on the left is as much as we could eat (together)
It's lucky that we didn't jump to the conclusion we didn't like Buenos Aires based on our less-than-ideal experience one day here last week. This time the place is AWESOME. We are staying in an apartment in a very much French-inspired district (Gosia says it is Paris try-hard - looks like Paris but without the delicious patisseries, style and sexy French language) called Recoleta that is right in the middle of town.
BA is a city that is great to just hang-out in.
We have been for a few runs around the parklands, ate our meals late every day & night and slept in. As best as we can tell the clock is shifted back 2-3 hours compared with home.
Every Sunday in the bohemian San Telmo district there is a massive closed-street market and so we where lucky enough to make it there (after Rafa won his 9th Rolland Garros title of course).
The market stretched out forever - we walked around all afternoon and didn't see it all. Music, dancing and street food everywhere.
In the same district a few days later we went on a food walking tour which was punctuated by great dishes and two very annoying Americans. Jorge (the local guide) took us to some of the oldest eating houses in BA and ordered us a great sample of the local tucker - potato tortilla, empanadas, chorizo, steaks, rolled stuffed beef and Russian Salad (???).
The next great highlight of the trip was our day trip to Iguazu Falls. We almost missed out because the waterfalls were flooded (I know.... how does a waterfall get flooded???) which is apparently very rare (Jorge was a tour guide there - he told us about the floods but had never heard of anything like it before). There is normally 1.5 million litres per second of water going over the falls, but with the El Nino rainfall spike it reached 13 million litres per second. The extra water made it unsafe and some of the walkways where closed (see below as to why) and in fact the Argentinean side of the national park was only opened during the day yesterday while we were there (another win for us!). The water was murky-brown rather than clear as it normally is, but it was spectacular regardless.
Gotta run now - need to find a place to watch this football!
We'll be in touch from Rio!
Ciao!
No comments:
Post a Comment