Hi all. Sorry, I am hopelessly behind on my blog. We met up with Douglas´s parents and a family friend of theirs for an amazing ten days in Buenos Aires and Iguazú. I´ve been having so much fun that I didn´t have a minute to write!

Summarizing Buenos Aires is difficult, but I will do my best. We arrived on Sunday and spent the afternoon at the San Telmo antique fair, a lovely market set up in the plaza of an old neighborhood filled with old houses and big trees. You could not imagine the things that they were selling there! There were pieces of junk, silver spoons from 1930s Germany, working pocket watches, colorful glass, old phones, paintings, jewelry, and more things for your house than I knew exisited. It was quite a site. Adding to the atmosphere, couples danced tango in mini demonstrations on nearly ever corner. It was a pleasant way to spend an afternoon.

The next day Douglas and I headed straight for El Ateneo, an old theatre that has been converted into a giant bookstore. Douglas, of course, was in heaven, and it really was a cool space. In the afternoon we checked out another theatre, Teatro Colon. Teatro Colon is an opera house built in the early 1900s, when the well-to-do of Argentina were doing everything in their power to be French. The results are stunning, and they say the theatre, as well as being beautiful, has some of the best acoustics in the world (sometimes to the chagrin of performers, who complain that even their smallest mistakes can be heard throughout the theatre).

Day three we took a city tour that introduced us in a whirlwind to some of the most interesting neighborhoods in Buenos Aires, including La Boca, which is a colorful immigrant community and the alleged birthplace of tango. We also saw the Cemetary in Recolecta (where Evita is buried), the plaza de mayo and the Casa Rosada, and where San Martin is buried!

In the afternoon we went to Tango y Tango for a private lesson. In an hour and a half we were feeling pleased with ourselves because we had a basic grasp on eight whole steps, and then our teachers floored us by doing a demonstration on their own. Not quite having had enough of tango, we went to a tango show that night, where we ate amazing steak and saw some seriously impressive dancing.

By day four it was time for a quick trip outside the city to an estancia (ranch, hacienda, etc) near the town of San Antonio de Areco, famous for its preservation of its gaucho (cowboy) culture. We went horseback riding, ate an amazing quanity of meat at a BBQ lunch, and saw a horse-whispering demonstration. In afternoon we went to see the town, which lived up to its reputation as a dusty outpost of the wild-west.

On Thursday we lunched at the famous Cafe Tortoni before heading to the Plaza de Mayo once more to see the mothers march in protest in the hopes of getting information about their sons and daughters lost in Argentina´s dirty war. It was a moving spectacle, especially now that most of the mothers are in their eighties, and you can´t help but imagine the despair that has brought them back week after week for more than 40 years. That night we went to Buenos Aires´s premiere steak joint, where I ate most of a cow and enjoyed it immensely.

Friday we decided that a border crossing was in order, and so we boarded the ferry to Colonia, Uruguay. We spent a pleasant day wandering its cobblestone streets, seeing the sites, and trying to figure out yet another currency.

Saturday, our last full day in the city, we went to Palermo, another fancy district, to shop and look around. We said goodbye to the city with dinner at a novo cuisine restaurant that is so hip it doesn´t have a sign outside- you just have to know where it is. It was a wonderful week in a wonderful city. I will definitely be back.