Being in Buenos Aires

Today we have a special appearance by guest, and first time, blogger.  Over to you, Heidi….

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So, we’ve been here a week now and, after the initial shock of being pickpocketed, we’re finally settling into a routine. Here are some of my observations this week:

• If you’re English, don’t go into any traditional BA restaurants or bars. You won’t get served.
• In the grocery stores, eggs are kept at room temperature.
• The wine is really, really good and really, really cheap.
• The beef is really, really good and really, really tender. In some restaurants, you are supplied with regular dinner knives, not steak knives.
• When the Argentines say they don’t eat dinner until 10pm, they mean it. You feel kind of stupid being the only ones in a restaurant at 8:45pm. At 9:15, a couple with a young child comes into the restaurant.
• The cooking temperature on an old gas stove is either hot or really, really hot. Forget about simmering anything.
• Your landlady shows you how to use the washer, but adds that you must wear rubber-soled shoes when you use it. You ask why. She shows you the electrical cord….the plug is not grounded. You find out the hard way that she was right.
• Wet clothes hanging in the kitchen (no dryer) will take days to dry if you don’t get a good cross breeze going between the two windows.
• Portenos (Buenos Aires residents) love their dogs. It’s 25C outside and just spitting rain. You don’t even have an umbrella up, but the dogs have on their raincoats.
• Only tourists wear shorts. (Poor Stuart…before we left home he said he couldn’t wait to put on a pair of shorts.)
• It’s odd to carry just cash in your purse (no credit cards, no ID), and small amounts at that. Larger bills in the interior zippered pocket and some bills in each of the two zippered compartments. A conversation from the first morning after S is pick pocketed:

H – How much money do you think I should take today?

S – Take 300 hundred pesos.

H – That much?

S – It’s only $30!

• BA city buses run red lights.

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