Barrio Chino, Teatro Colon and Peanut Butter

Hola,

Last weekend was full of splendour, so I have decided to share it with you.

Up nice and early (10am) and we are off to Maria de Bambi cafe, a nice little bar a few blocks down Ayacucho between Livante Lopez and Guido. The streets are abandoned at this time on a Saturday, it might as well be 7am. This cafe shares its name, and ownership, with the famous Maria de Bambi restaurant on Arenales that has been operated by the Bambi family for 3 generations - we should add that to the list of places to go. It is beautifully set out, tiny and has plenty to scrummy cakes and slice on display. So, this breakfast was my first experience with Mate (pronounced mar-té), and seriously, this is not your average herbal tea. Of course I have seen mate around a lot (this is Argentina after all), guys in the street are always drinking it to defend against the morning Argentine chill. I see them chatting and passing the funny little gourd around with the silver straw, I see the odd pile of disposed mate on the pavement and there is always friends gathering on the grass on the weekend to share a cup of mate and chill out, quite literally, because it's freezing.

So I say 'Deme mate con scone, por favor' (give me mate with scone please) in the seemingly rude but perfectly acceptable way to order breakfast. I sense a tingle of surprise and maybe a hint of respect as the elderly waiter diverts his attention to Heather who promptly demands un chocolate caliente. I see, my scones are to be shared are they?! A short wait and I am handed 2 scones con mermelada, and Heather a cup of what looked, and tasted like, liquid chocolate (amazing). Then I am delivered a tray with a mate, a full thermos (this is supposed to be shared remember) and a single serve bag of mate. Great, looks excellent, but what do I do now? Luckily Heather was trained at work in the Art of mate preparation and she was able to recall and relay the procedure which goes something like this.

1. Pour all of the mate into the cup, the cup should be nearly full
2. Shake it until all the small particles reach the bottom of the cup
3. Place your hand on top of the cup and flip it over and back and retain the subsequent slope of mate in the cup - Heather immediately cracks some ridiculous joke about calculating the friction angle that only an engineer would understand
4. Pour the water from the thermos onto the lower end of the tea
5. Leave for 3 minutes to brew
6. Insert the straw (which has a filter on the end) into the very bottom of the cup
7. Enjoy and top up (on the low end!) as required and don't move the straw! It's so tempting to play around with it and stir it up

Taste.... Strong, unbelievably strong, but nice and very warming. I drank pretty much the whole thermos, you can top the thermos up and keep going with the same tea (remembering that it is supposed to be shared - my bad). Of course there is the option of mate bags for the fainted hearted, but then thats not really mate is it? I seems that it might be more about the social ritual than the drink itself, which has a relatively low caffeine content, but plenty of antioxidants.

Drinking Mate

Then we went off to Barrio Chino, the china town (one or two streets) of Buenos Aires, it is in Belgrano, so tenemos que tomar un colectivo (we need to take a bus). We walk past the cemetery and markets which are starting to crank up, but we will be back later, over the bridge we go to a large bus stop and.... there goes our bus :( Nevermind, we go find a geocache instead, a short walk down the highway and we have the cache clenched in our frozen little hands. 

You can see the iron stature it was concealed beneath right behind us

Then it was back to grab that bus to Barrio Chino in search of a tub of peanut butter. Barrio Chino is well know for a couple of shops where you can buy a huge range of imported goods that are otherwise completely unavailable in traditional super mercados around Buenos Aires

Here is Heather looking rather delighted to have found the peanut butter

Then we had a look around at all the little shops along the streets, it definitely felt like we had left Buenos Aires and gone to Asia for a bit, will have to return if we feel like eating out at an Asian restaurant.

Asian Restaurant in Barrio Chino

We got hungry after sourcing our much need peanut butter and a few other treats (red and green thai curry past and coconut milk) and crossed the street back to Argentina for un Choripan con papa fritas.

Eating

We took a few pics of the place before heading back to the shops for some lantern lights to put up in our bland looking bedroom and a super duper totally awesome black plastic ball bearing gun!!!

A rather large range of dried mushrooms

Large tori gate to welcome you to Barrio Chino

That was it for Barrio Chino, now was time to head to Palais de Glace to see the World Press Photo Exhibition. We were not sure if we were allowed to take photos here, but here's one anyway.

World Press Photo Exhibition at Palais de Glace

After viewing some amazingly beautiful and inspiring photographs it was time to cross the street and browse the wares of the huge Recoleta markets. After around an hour we had looked at roughly a quarter of the stalls, watched some street performers that were hilarious (to everybody except us), then headed home for a quick rest before our Saturday evening spanish lesson.

The next day (Sunday) was an exciting day! The previous Friday we dropped into the ticket office at Teatro Colón and picked up a couple of (FREE!) tickets to a performance. 10.30am and we are shivering waiting in line to enter the huge theatre.

The doors open and we climb up to piso 6 and take our seats in the second row back, the theatre is astonishingly beautiful, never seen anything like it. 

The view from level 6

Pretty high up!

HDR setting on the little Sony

Beautiful beautiful beautiful I can't comprehend it

The sound quality in this theatre really is amazing, there was only a microphone for when the guy was talking to the audience and even though we were 6 floors up we could hear the show perfectly as though we were sitting in the front row. The performance was the patagonian percussion ensemble, there was violin, flute, plenty of marimbas and drums. There was also a very strange performance where 5 of them sat around with different sized rings that they used as drums by tapping them together, on the floor, with brushes and on each other.

Patagonian Percussion Ensemble

Sitting on a geocache shivering

Outdside we found another geocache under a bench! Still shivering

Holding the geocache shivering

Then it was off to a shopping centre called Patio Bullrich that we had been meaning to go to for ages since we live nearby. It's the kind of shopping centre where you don't dare buy anything as you would have to spend the next month on the street if you did. The building is a converted warehouse which was originally used to auction-off cattle. The place has been completely overhauled into 3 or 4 levels with plenty of expensive looking shops and little is left of the history of the building apart from the building itself and some cow and horse heads you can see on the right of the picture below.

Patio Bullrich shopping centre

 We found this amazing cheese and meat shop where we got some delicious prosciutto, salami and gruyere rolls for lunch and promised to return with more pesos for some chorizo.

Deli in Patio Bullrich

After that we shivered home to get warm again and put Heather (sick again - this time with a nasty chest infection) to bed! Another great weekend in BA!

Hasta luego,
O

Yo tengo hambre

Hola,

H here.

So we figured we should do a post entirely about food seeing as that is Oscar's favourite thing. Not a day goes by when he doesn't say the words "yo tengo hambre". Argentinian food is, um, different and relatively expensive relative to average income (as is everything in BsAs - but that's an entirely different topic for another time).

Let's start with the staples: bife, dulce de leche y empanadas.

Bife.
Steak is cheap. And delicious. And juicy. And thick. Just to give you an idea, two big bife de chorizo steaks (that's 600-700gs of a decent cut) will set you back about the same as a small block of chocolate at the supermercado. Everyone knows that Argentina has the best steaks (completely different to Japanese Kobe beef so it's not even comparable) so I won't go on too much. Quiero bife de chorizo y papas fritas y cerveza, por favor!

Bife y papas fritas y ensalada! (home made)

Dulce de Leche.
Dulce de leche is by far the best thing ever invented (in my completely unbiased and not at all sweet-toothed opinion). Dulce de leche can be eaten slathered on bread for breakfast, for dessert in icecream or with cakes or in medialuas, as a filling in any other random food object or just straight from the pot to the mouth via a giant fingerload (my personal favourite). I seriously can't get enough of this stuff. For example, Oscar and I bought some churros from the supermercado. After one bite we immediately regretted it as they were very hard, crispy and tasted like they had been deep fried in whale blubber a month ago. However, a lightbulb moment led us to dipping them in dulce de leche, which immediately redeemed the churros and turned them into a delicious snack. How could you go wrong!? Oh, and if you're wondering what dulce de leche is? It's condensed milk that has been heated to make a very rich, sweet, caramel sort of deliciousness.

Would you like any flan casero with your dulce de leche?!

Empanadas.
Empanadas are sort of like a South American version of a party pie. Pastry filled with anything. As well as being delicious, they are a very convenient and cheap snack to take anywhere. And seriously, you can fill them with anything and they still taste good. Traditionally meat, cheese, corn, ham, onion, chicken, spinach etc. But as we quickly figured out, you can put anything edible in there. We've made them with leftover bolognaise, mashed potato and I have been considering trying dulce de leche.

Homemade empanadas!

Ok so now on to the others, everyone knows Argentina has great steak, dulce de leche and empanadas. The rest were somewhat unexpected..

Queso.
Cheese, cheese and more cheese. Our first night here in BsAs we ordered a pizza online for something safe and easy. What we did not expect was to get a box full of cheese with some pizza dough hidden underneath it somewhere (but more about the pizza later). There is cheese on, in and with everything here. There are whole shops dedicated to cheese, types of cheese that we had never even dreamed of and, best of all, it is totally normal to order a plate of melted cheese for dinner. More commonly known as Provoleta, a big slice of Provolone cheese with a few herbs sprinkled on top and melted on the grill is a perfectly balanced (and delicious) dinner.

Provoleta from Rodi Bar

Pizza.
Any expat here will tell you - Argie pizza is crap. I can concur. It is crap. Really crap. This is actually surprising considering the very large Italian influence in BsAs. Any pizza you find will have a thick, almost soggy base, will be covered drenched lathered piled with cheese (and/or onion) and will not have any more topping variety than maybe a few olives. Ok, I exaggerate slightly - upon a recommendation from some work mates, we gave Argie pizza one more chance and tried Romario's Pizza. Not too sure if it was the recent drought of edible pizza in our diets or if it was actually good, but Romario's was amazing (almost in the league of Antonio's Pizza in Rossmoyne)!

Typical Argentine pizza (pic stolen from the web as apparently I didn't think any of our bad experiences were worthy of taking a photo)

Romario's Pizza - Argentinians doing it right

Medialunas.
Medialunas are just small, delicious croissants. It is impossible to find a cooked breakfast here - or really anything other than medialunas for breakfast. Even McDonald's only serves medialunas and maybe a bagel or two (no hash browns!). You can't really complain about this though as Argentinians make great pastries! Cafe con leche y tres medialunas (cafe with milk and three medialunas) is the way to start the day.

Cafe con leche y croissants from Sasha in Recoleta (amazing!)

Milanesas.
Milanesas - aka schnitzels are definitely a main component of the typical Argentinian diet. Not bad but not anything too amazing either really.

Milanesa for two (or ten!)

Helado.
Aka gelato. Oh-emmm-geeee why did no one warn me Argentinian gelato is totes amazeballs? Our first experience with Helado was when visiting a cafe/heladeria called Freddo for desayuna (breakfast) and they served a single small scoop of Dulce de Leche Granizado Helado with it. The flavour totally amazing and unusual, it is actually salty, but in a way that totally brings out the flavour. Everyone who has met me will know that I'm an ice cream addict. We have multiple heladerias within 100 m of our apartment, all that offer dozens of different dulce de leche flavour varieties (not that you would even look at the other flavours). Oscar and I got a 2x1 coupon (that is, 2 litres for the price of 1) and I think we each put on 4 kg in the 20 minutes that it took us to polish it off. No, really we're not that disgusting, it took us at least a couple of hours. Anyway, if the reason I get fat in Argentina is because of dulce de leche helado then I really don't care, it's worth it.

Dulce de leche granizado helado (another photo stolen from google - we're too busy eating to take photos)

Frutas y Verduras.
Fruit and vegetables. So maybe you've noticed that everything up to this point is not so good for you? How do Argentinians stay thin, you ask? I wish I knew. On the odd occasion that we've decided to order ensalada (salad) with our bife instead of the regular papas fritas (potato chips) it is a rather miserable looking thing with a piece of lettuce, tomato and maybe some onion if you're lucky. Actually, after a week or so of Argentinian food we decided to try a cafe that is known to offer a 'lighter option'. I ordered a salad. My 'salad' was some lettuce, chicken, probably 90% w/w giant chunks of chedder cheese and a few croutons - all swimming in a litre of rich, creamy salad dressing. But before you get too worried, yes mum we have been scouring el supermercados for fresh fruit and vegetables and cooking at home most of the time (she says while scoffing her face with a freshly delivered burrito).

Delivery.
There other great thing about Buenos Aires is that you can get anything delivered. You could call a restaurant and ask for a steak and chips, and if you asked the guy he was probably pick up a litre of cerveza from a kiosko on the way. There is an app on the iPhone called Pedidosya where you can make orders online for those who are afraid of trying to speak spanish on the phone i.e. us.

Now that's dedication! Waiting in the 1 hr (if we're lucky) queue for the supermercado check-out

And some things we're missing big time: peanut butter, milo, spicy food, sour cream and real orange juice. Apparently we can find all of this in Chinatown (!?) so will head there soon!

Ok that's a long post, next time we will tell you all about our new apartment!

Hasta luego,
H

P.S. Who even puts tomato and cream cheese in sushi!? (HR - I'm missing our inside-out prawn sushi big time!)

Palermo y Puerto Madero

Hola H here,

Apologies for the lack of blog posts, we've been very busy little gringos! After working all day, we've been taking Spanish classes in the evenings. We're having private classes with just the two of us in our teacher's apartment in Recoleta. The classes are very active - it feels like you're talking the whole time which is tiring but an effective way to learn. We're getting much better and definitely a lot more confident.

We've also been kept busy trying to find an apartment. We have to leave our beautiful AirBnB apartment this Friday. Trying to find an apartment here is a lot more difficult than one would think. If we were to get a normal rental apartment, we would need to sign a two year lease as well as furnishing the place - which is not ideal, and for that one of us needs a DNI and we would need a land owning guarantor located in Argentina. So we're left with trying to find a short-term 'vacation' rental. While these are in abundance here, they are very expensive - especially if you're paying in the local currency which we will be. But on the other hand we won't need to buy future or pay any power, gas or internet bills. Anyway, after looking at a couple of shoe-box apartments that would cost us more than half of my salary, we've decided on another option - house sharing. We've found an apartment to share with a young Argentinian doctor in which we will have our own private entrance, bedroom, small study/living room and bathroom but sharing a kitchen. Infact, it is actually the maids quarters we are renting, but we get an extra room for a bedroom :) Seems ideal to us as we can live in an amazing part of town (on the same block as Louis Vuitton, Hermes, the Alvear Palace Hotel etc.) for a very cheap price and also get to live with a local (hopefully will help to improve our spanish!).

Apart from all of the above, we've also been out and about exploring the city. We went on a walk around the nearby neighbourhood of Palermo. Palermo is the most 'happening' neighbourhood in BA with lots of shops, restaurants, nightlife etc where most of the expats and tourists live. It has lots of beautiful parks including an amazing Japanese Garden! We're living in Recoleta which is sandwiched between Palermo and Centro/San Nicolas (where I work) which is perfect for us to have easy access to both areas.

Before you get too confused, here is a map: San Nicolás is the downtown area.

BA Barrio Map

Floralis Generica - Giant steel flower sculpture that opens in the day and closes at night

One of the many beautiful buildings here

The Japanese Garden

Some Bonsai Trees (just for you, Pancho)

One of the many residents of the Japanese Gardens - loving the attention

Amazing burgers at the Burger Joint

Last weekend we went to explore Puerto Madero. Puerto Madero is an area on the riverfront that is known as the newest and most flashy part of Buenos Aires. It was constructed in the late 1800's as the port for Buenos Aires. After a new port was constructed, the area was neglected for 70 odd years until a recent regeneration project in the 1990's. It's now a very modern looking area full of very overpriced restaurants, offices, apartments and luxurious hotels. While it was nice to be able to walk without tripping over any broken footpaths, with nice modern buildings and no rubbish or graffiti, we both thought that the area was a bit 'fake' and didn't really feel like Buenos Aires. As we were sitting having lunch at a very overpriced Italian restaurant looking over the water, we were approached five minutes by homeless people carrying sick looking children and begging for money. It felt very strange and uncomfortable. While it's a nice area to visit, I'm not too sure I would want to live there, nor could I every hope to afford to.

Puerto Madero

Puerto Madero

Gorgeous starbucks in Puerto Madero

Anyway, we need to go get some cafe con leche y medialunas now. I promise the next blog post will be entirely about food!

Hasta Luego,

H