Buenos Aires
We set off on the Subte for Belgrano and Chinatown. Belgrano is a leafy, green and obviously well to do suburb, it has lots of open parks, lovely buildings and huge sidewalks. A lot of people were out enjoying a Sunday morning breakfast. There are meant to be markets in Belgrano but not much had been set up in Plaza Belgrano, so we decided to head to Chinatown.
We didn’t have high hopes as throughout South America there were not many Chinese restaurants etc, but Scott wanted to order Chinese food in Spanish! We didn’t have a map of the area, and only a vague idea where they may be. Well it was absolutely brilliant, if anybody is here on a Sunday, this is the place to come. There were stalls, shops, restaurants and a whole street of Chinese fast food cooked before your eyes plus loads of vegetarian options. We were in seventh heaven and did many laps of the stalls, especially for the steamed dim sum which was a highlight, although the chilli sauce was very hot – even Scott thought it had a tang. We bought some sauces from the local chinese supermarket to bring home and finally dragged ourselves away happy and contented.
We headed to the overland train line to go to Retiro and walked to the Reserva Ecologica Costanero Sur which is meant to be a bird watchers paradise in the centre of Buenos Aires. Well we saw 3 and 2 of them were the same species, the rest of the birds were pigeons and they dent count. The marshlands were all dried up so there were no other species of turtles (meant to be loads of them according to the brochure) and lots of varieties of fish. We did the 2km walk and gave up.
We walked to Puerto Madero to take some photos of the docks, on the way we went through a lot of parilla stalls so Scott kept sniffing up his meat quota for the day. Puerto Madero is obviously the place to come for Sunday lunch as the restaurants actually had people in them, which is a first since we have been here. We had eaten our fill in Chinatown, so wandered around both sides of the docks.
We walked back to the apartment via Reconquista which today was a giant market all the way to San Telmo, so we bought a few souveniers and made our way through the huge crowds, which seem bigger than last week. On returning to the apartment Scott at a snooze and I ventured out myself or have a browse and bought a lovely Indian box I had been eyeing up since coming to Buenos Aries.
Tonight we tried out our locally made Limoncello which was awful, so that will go in the bin. So I wandered into Boca and bought some locally made icecream from the Heladeria as a treat. We are trying out all different flavours and the same with other food, if we haven’t had it yet, we have to try it, can be a good idea, but today Scott had a sausage made of fried polony type meat cooked in batter – yuk! We chilled out for the night listening to the radio. Here all the radio stations seem to play 80’s music, how good is that, I love it but Scott is a tad stressed and cant wait to get home and play some System of the Down.