Liz's big shopping day, she has been planning this since Colombia or perhaps even before. This emphasis made me feel a bit uncomfortable, whilst I was looking at treks in Patagonia Liz was planning a shop by shop itinerary of the final days of our trip.

Due to limited funds the shopping is going to be concentrated on finding the remaining presents for our closest friends. Palmero (an area of Beunos Aires) is touted as being 7th in the list of retail shopping areas in the world. It was also said to be cheap, bohemian and independant - making it sound ideal for the kind of presents we were looking for. Having done a fair amount of travel planning I knew that hype and reality can be wildly different.

The reality was Liz leading the way through every street containing shops with me in tow. We went into just a few shops, Liz could tell from the window that all contents would be unsuitable. With three days left and Beunos Aires being a big city I could see us doing an awful lot of tramping around.

Tensions were high, after the last street in Palermo was tramped the plan to just walk to the places we wanted to visit whilst checking out the shops was accepted.

We headed to the cemetery where Eva Peron was layed to rest, it was also supposed to be an interesting cemetary. The route would take us through a botanical garden, the reality here was that firstly; it wasn't interesting and secondly; you couldn't just walk through as there is only one guarded exit/entrance.

After this we walked past a huge mechanised flower that apparently closed it's petals at night. We couldn't be bothered to go through the only entrance just to retrace our steps, so it was a picture through the fence job.

We got to a stones throw off the cemetary, but a huge craft stall sucked Liz in. The first lap was to sus things out whilst the second lap was reserved for the kill.

All that took some time no one had remaining energy for the cemetary, we headed to a curry restaurant instead. I have been craving curry since South Africa (the last place we had any). The restaurant was nice: waiters, table cloths and all the other things we were not used to anymore. The cost was also resonable so we went it. The curries came in two strengths: mild and medium but with an option of spicier on request. There is no international spice measurement, a hot curry from one place can be a mild one in some other place. How hot is a medium curry in Argentina? I figured that all the curries I had outside the UK (Inc India) have been very mild. I wanted to feel some pain but not too much. As it was described as medium and being used to hot madras curries I asked the waiter if I could have it spicy. To make sure that he understood my s*** Spanish I did the open mouth hand wave international sign for hot.

The curry that came back was just that, mouth open trying to get some relief from the pain. Hicups soon followed, but it was so good having spicy food again.