Los Wiscaminantes: South (but still) America

Yes, it's been a while since the last post. But it was a really important post. One that I thought everyone should fully absorb before we moved along. After all, it is the largest man made canal in the world! Some people even call it the eighth man made wonder of the world! It's a pretty big deal.

So, our Central American experience is now over, and we have begun our tour of the Southern Americas. To start, we have decided upon a strategy that helps us to avoid winter down here just as we were able to avoid winter in the north! We flew into Argentina with the plan to visit the southernmost areas immediately, then move northward as autumn begins in this region of the world. Instead of flying to the Southern tip of Argentina immediately, we planned to stop in Buenos Aires, Argentina for a few days.

We arrived at the airport after dark, got a cab to our hostel, and kept it chill for the first night, because the following day, we got to know the city just like we get to know every city, which is by foot. We ended up spending somewhere in the area of 8 hours just walking around the city and getting familiar with its layout. We saw several nice parks, government buildings and the biggest avenue I have ever seen in my life. It might be the biggest in the world. Seriously. Below, is a picture of this grand street that doesn't even do it justice. I just like the picture because it has a weird statue in it.

Anyway, this street has 18 lanes of traffic before you reach the other side of the street. It literally takes around two minutes to get to the other side, and you generally have to wait through two stop lights to get there. It's incredible. It has five to six lanes of traffic for each direction in the middle, while there is an extra sidestreet with another two to three lanes on the outside. Though it was scary, we managed to cross the street without getting ourselves killed. Bonus.

During our jaunt, we decided to take a walk to the well known Recoleta Cemetery. The buildings in these photos are, more or less, mini chapels for an entire family's deceased. You can see into some of them, and many of them have multiple levels built under ground with caskets upon caskets. A bit creepy.

In this cemetery is the burial site of Eva Paron, better known as Evita. As you can see, though deceased for a few decades now, her site is frequently visited and adorned with flowers by many.

The next picture offered me a bit of inspiration for how I would like to be remembered. This man has been immortalized as a statue sitting on a throne. But I would like to tweak his idea by combining the idea of another man's statue with this one to create my vision. This other man stands tall in a robe, looking extremely comfortable as well as important. So, to clarify, once I'm gone, I would like my likeness dressed in a robe, and sitting on a throne(not a toilet). Just want to get that out there on the record.

Another day, we stumbled upon a tango show in the middle of a pedestrian street, and took in a bit of the action. Tango is somewhat of a big deal here in Buenos Aires, as there are numerous shows you can attend and many places offer lessons.

It's been a while since we have been in a city that had a zoo, so we checked that out as well. It was actually a pretty sizable zoo. One of the stranger things about this zoo was that they offered animal food for sale in large buckets. For about 5 dollars, you get a huge bucket of pellets, and can toss them at just about any animal there. There were no animals that were off limits on this as long as you could get the food to them. Elephants, giraffes, camels, goats. They even had small fish you could buy to feed the seals. It was really quite remarkable. I wasn't quite sure if they're actually trying to encourage irresponsible behavior or just save some money on feeding the animals.

We really liked the white tiger, and he was rather playful the day we went. He was chewing on and tossing around a blue barrel. Good stuff. Other than that, we saw pretty much your basic zoo stuff. Monkeys, bears, flamingos.

Dead llamas. They're not really dead, but their style of relaxing is quite funny.

Another day, we ventured into the tourist trap of a neighborhood in Buenos Aires known as La Boca. In the neighborhood of La Boca, many of the buildings have painted their exteriors in bright colors in order to attract tourists. It seems to work.

It's really only about four square blocks or so of shops and restaurants that seem to just cater to tourists.

The best part of the neighborhood has to be the restaurants that grill up loads of meat. It smelled and looked so good.

After walking through the busiest street filled with restaurants and sidewalk seating, we finally ended up sitting down to enjoy some grilled delicacies. To please the tourists while they wait, each restaurant has a small stage set up where they provide a "free" tango show, as well as some sort of traditional goucho show. I don't really know why they were billing the show as free before you sat down, though, because once you were eating, the artists were walking around with a hat for tips. Not that big of a deal, but we witnessed one such artist berate the table next to us because they gave them a coin and not a bill as a tip. Add that to the fact that you are charged extra for the bread that they put on the table, and you have a disgruntled Tim.

But you know what? The meat was delicious.

Just look at it. Yummmmm.

Another day, we discovered what we think is one of the best parks to sit in. Retiro park is shady, quiet, and has a hill with excellent grass to lay down in.

Here is Laura imitating a blooming flower, like the metal flower in the background.

On a Sunday, we visited the San Telmo Market, which reminded us a bit of the farmer's market back in Madison. There wasn't really much we were into in regards to the artisan items available, but we did happen upon a nice surprise.

We were getting hungry and looking for cheap food. Then we saw this. During the week this tiny lot exists to provide parking. But on Sundays, it is transformed into the most wonderful grill around. They offered steak or pork sandwiches as well as beer and wine.

The steaks were huge.

And the beer was cold. Great combination.

Here, I begin what ends up taking about a half an hour to devour the whole thing. I also included this photo to pay homage to the last picture we have of my Brewers hat. A day or two later, it was misplaced/lost in the great abyss which is Buenos Aires.
It was a good and loyal hat. Go Crew.

Above is a picture of a ceramic penguin that can be found at our new favorite restaurant in Buenos Aires, called Cumana. We randomly found this restaurant on one of our marathon walks around the city, and discovered excellent food at an extremely reasonable price. Plus, the penguins are filled with wine!!!

Sometimes, I got a little carried away with my love for the penguin.

One of my personal favorite things that we did was go to the horse races one day. Entrance was free, but we put a couple $1 bets down on a select few caballos (horses). Unfortunately, on one race we didn't bet on, but picked a horse to cheer for, he won. All others, not so much.