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