We arrived in Buenos Aires around 4 AM and had to wait until 11 for Kirianne to arrive. Rather than take a separate taxi and get to our hostel before check-in time we opted to just sleep in the airport. We found a nice window box to pass the time in.
We spent two days and two nights in Buenos Aires at El Sol Hostel de Recoleta, a hostel which was in a cool old building that was probably built in the 1800s. We spent the first day walking around town buying bus tickets and looking for food. We found a fruit stand near our hostel with many nice summer fruits, like peaches! which I was very excited for, since we never get very good ones in Alaska. We also found a health food store (dietética) a few blocks away where we found brown rice cakes! and hummus, which we happily ate for lunch in a nearby park. We bought bus tickets for a 20 hour bus ride to Bariloche, one of the Southern Lakes District towns near the Chilean border. We decided to be fancy and get the "Cama" or bed bus, meaning the seats almost fully recline and are really wide and cushy like first class on an airplane, plus you get a leg rest, kind of like a lounge chair. So a 20 hour bus ride becomes not too bad, and then you don't have to pay for a night in a hotel, and you wake up your destination.
After much walking around we were pretty tired and decided to use the subway to get to our dinner location in the neighbor hood of Palermo. I had selected an all organic vegetarian restaurant named Bio. Even though none of us felt like making the effort of going out to dinner some place semi far from our hostel we were glad we did. The food was really good! I had a salad with veggie sushi (hand) rolls, Jeff had salad with a curried brown rice and Kirianne got tofu in a mustard sauce with rice.
On day two we decided to join a free walking tour, which apparently is a world wide movement called "free walking tours," in which you just pay the guide what you think the tour is worth. I don usually care for city tours, since I don't really care much for cities, but we all really enjoyed the tour and found it really interesting. The architecture in Buenos Aires is very mixed having buildings from just about every period, it can actually be quite an ugly mix in some places! What we enjoyed most of all were the green spaces and parks filled with beautiful old trees. Many of the trees were flowering while we were there with pink, yellow and purple flowers.
For dinner on our second and final night, we took the subway again out to Palermo and walked about 20 minutes to the house of a chef that can prepare vegan meals. The place is called Colectivo Felix, and is considered a "closed door" restaurant, which have become popular in Buenos Aires. They open Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday for dinner for 14 guests and its a 6 course gourmet meal! Needless to say it was pretty awesome. Dinner didn't start until 9:30 which is something we will need to get used to, as that is actually pretty early for most Argentinians!
On the third day in Buenos Aires we packed up and moved out of our hostel, but before heading for the bus station we went to check out one more vegan restaurant as a combination late breakfast early lunch. It is called Konu Vegan Bar (J.D. Peron 1319) and I found it using Happy Cow, a vegetarian restaurant finder. It was set up buffet style, you load up your plate and then they weigh the amount of food and pay by weight. We found it to be really cheap and delicious, so we got some to go for the bus ride!
Then we boarded the 20 hour bus ride to Bariloche (on January 23rd, May's birthday!)
I didn't take any pictures with my phone in Buenos Aires because my phone was dead, and not chargeable since we brought the wrong adapter for the type of electrical outlet they have here! Kirianne has some on her phone, but so far we haven't been successful at transferring them to my phone, so maybe later I will post some photos!
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