Arrived in Buenos Aires

Our flight from Houston was fairly uneventful. The plane was a little late arriving to Houston, so we left about half an hour late. 10 hours in the air isn’t so bad when it’s through the night and you sleep most of it away. And it was quite refreshing to make it into a destination during daylight hours when there is still time to see things and explore. We cleared through customs quickly, got our bags, and grabbed a cab for the 35km journey into Buenos Aires proper to our hotel in the Retiro district. Retiro is a business area so most things are closed being Sunday but it meant that we had more space to ourselves, like the nearby Plaza San Martin.

We stopped for a pizza and beer for lunch and kept wandering around. We went through the Plaza Libertad where we noticed many Porteños (people from Buenos Aires) were sunbathing (apparently a common practice). In the plaza there was a statue with an epic pose, and sometimes these need to be recreated.

We came across the Plaza de la Republica where an obelisk stands at the centre of an intersection of grid and diagonal streets.

It is fairly cool to be 10-15 blocks away and look up a street and see this obelisk towering in the distance. We kept walking and made it to the Plaza de Mayo and walked into the Catedral Metropolitana. It is a Roman Catholic cathedral on the original site of the first colonial church, and inside we found an icon more familiar to our Ukrainian  Catholic roots.

There were a couple of icons with a recognizable style showing some of the influence that Ukrainian immigrants have had. Also within the cathedral was the tomb of General Jose de San Martin, Argentina’s most revered hero of independence. He had military guards in royal dress guarding his tomb.

In addition to the original Spanish settlers, there were many Italians that came to Buenos Aires shortly after its founding, bringing with them some of their language (double Ls sound more of a zh than a y) and food (namely gelato). Dulche de leche is Argentina’s version of caramel and can be placed in any kind of dessert. Thus while wandering around, we had to stop for gelato and got 3 flavours: chocolate with dulche de leche, vanilla, and banana with duche de leche. It was amazing and flavourful.

Argentinians typically eat twice per day, a lunch between 1:00 and 3:00 in the afternoon and supper late at night (9:00 is early). So we are planning to go for some delicious Argentinian steak, but have to wait a while longer. Tomorrow we will meet up with our group leader and the rest of the tour group members before heading off into Patagonia early Tuesday morning.