Dulce de Leche

The national addiction (besides coffee, wine, and empanadas) is milk caramel. This was a snack on the airplane.

On to Mendoza

We’re flying to Mendoza today–it’s the wine region, famous for Malbec. Good bye Buenos Aires (and hopefully rain).

View this a.m. from hotel room:

Tango is dead

Our driver last night said tango is for old people (like his father, who must be close to 80) and tourist shows…real tango is old fashioned and dead. We were looking for a milonga (the Argentine word for dance hall or dance event) to watch everyday people dance the tango, but only found a small one in a decrepit (but at one time grand) building that smelled like an old lady’s cat box…and it was full of white haired geezers like the driver promised.

We had seen an excellent tango show the night before–a professional operation compared to a broadway production in terms of quality…which made the pathetic turn out and quality of dancing (picture your grandma and grandpa trying to kick their feet up to their shoulders without it being the horrible result of a fall down stairs) at the milonga all the more sad.

People come here to live so they can learn the dance–there are travel books written about it, so I have to wonder…

Buenos Aires: is it really so dangerous?

Is it the 4-star hotel keeping its customers cacooned with the constant warnings, or is it really THAT likely one will be robbed while out and about? I want a plexi-glass travel suit like the pope-mobile if so! Since we never travel 4-star I wonder if this over protection is normal (ie commonly practiced whether or not it’s necessary)…I’ve been to some pretty rough places in comparison to Buenos Aires and have never experienced this sort of warnings…no like!

Morning view in the Retiro neighborhood (Buenos Aires)

Argentine sunrise

Beautiful show of nature from the plane’s window on the way here but on the ground it’s the end of winter…gray/white skies and occasional sun

Dallas airport bathroom signage

High winds? Torrential rain? Mud slides?

Poll: pre-airport stress

Is anyone ever in a good mood when heading off to the airport? We should be (we are going away, yay!) but there’s always last minute stress that takes about the entire ride to wear off

Aregentina bound!

Buenos Aires
Mendoza
Salta
Colome

Must. Finish. Packing. And. Errands!

Total Solar Bust

Others saw it (including passengers on the longer Costa cruise we opted to not take)…but our eclipse was clouded out. Woke up to lightening and rain in the morning and no matter how hard the captain tried to move out of the heavy cloud cover, the eclipse was buried under a blanket. Such a bummer! It did get super dark, which was quite ominous especially while at sea, but we didn’t see the blacked out Sun–-the entire reason for our journey to Asia. We got a glimpse of the partial eclipse in the hour before totality, but only for a fleeting moment under several layers of gray clouds.

Quite a bummer! I am so jealous of everyone else who got to see this eclipse, the longest for the entire century.